Dave White's Field

“Afterwards the `knowing people'” (just about everyone who lived in the lane), “sat on the wall together and were soon persuading each other that it was the banashee Mary Kate had heard the night before.

“And her neighbour, Maggie, with sixteen children and not a tooth in her head declared, `The glow that she saw from the bridge was surely the `Will o' the Wisp'!' They all nodded in certainty --- and that clinched the truth of the story.”

Auntie Mary pauses, and asks:

“Do you know what the `Will o' the Wisp' is?”

We shake our heads.

She takes a cigarette from her packet of ten Woodbines (her favourite) and grips it between her lips. She talks on with the cigarette now stuck to her bottom lip,

“It is a magical, flickering flame ...

She strikes up a red-tipped Swan Vesta match. The match, held well away from her, flares noisily, and we wait, taking in every detail, as she lights up and draws deeply on the cigarette. She inhales the blue-grey tobacco plume that we glimpse in her mouth for a moment; she holds it down for a few seconds, and exhales slowly the paler digested smoke. She continues,

“ ... a magical flickering flame, tinted blue, usually to be seen hovering over water; it goes out suddenly.”

Will o' the Wisp

Instantly, Auntie Mary snuffs out the dying flame of the match between her thumb and forefinger. She looks at us as if she has just pulled a rabbit out of a hat.

“The Will-o'-the-Wisp appears when somebody is about to die. It is another well-known warning of imminent death.”

Auntie Mary decides, at this point, to leave us with our imaginations working overtime; to let it all sink in. She takes a long sip of her tea, a puff on her cigarette and passes round her precious tin of tea-biscuits.

A buzz goes around us by the fire as we munch the dry biscuits. We scare ourselves silly, when someone points to the elusive `Will-o'-the-Wisp' dancing in the blue and yellow flashes hovering over the glowing coals in the fire; but we agree that we have never seen anything like that in our stretch of the river. But then who would want to?