Excerpt from The Burry Man’s Day

Constable & Robinson, 2006.
ISBN 978 -1-84529-592-9

The crowds grew thicker as we made our way along beneath another terrace, past the bank and the butchers, towards the town hall, where quite a hundred people were gathered laughing together and humming with interest. It was mostly women, old men and children - since all others were at work - and quite a few of the elders were bent double exhorting their young charges to bravery.

‘What are you to say, Isa?’ asked one young woman whose daughter was wiping her grubby face against her mother’s pinny and threatening to weep.

‘I don’t like it,’ said Isa, pushing out her lip

‘Och wheesht,’ her mother replied. ‘If you’re a good girl and say it I’ll give you a ha’penny to fling in his bucket and bring you luck.’

‘I don’t like it,’ said Isa again stoutly.

‘They’re always feart the first time,’ said an old man. He eased himself back against the wall between Isa’s mother and me and spat expressively then, taking a closer look at my party and regretting the spitting, I suppose, he made up for it by wiping his mouth politely on his sleeve and touching his cap brim.

Just then, the clock on the Town Hall tower struck nine and the door swung open. Two men emerged, coats and collars off, hats on the backs of their heads. They turned back to the dark doorway holding out their hands and slowly the Burry Man emerged. Little Isa screamed, I heard Cadwallader say ‘Good God!’ and a cry went up from the crowd:

‘Hip, hip, hooray!
Hip, hip, hooray!
Hip, hip, hooray,
It’s the Burry Man’s Day!’

I do not know what I had been expecting, and I felt foolish for being surprised. After all, I had known that the Burry Man was a man covered in burrs and here was a man covered in burrs, but the effect was staggering. Perhaps I had not imagined it to be so utterly complete. Not only were his body, arms and legs encased, so that his limbs looked like prize-winning stalks of Brussels sprouts, but his whole face and head were covered too, with just the slightest shadows showing where one or two burrs had been missed to let him breathe and peer out. He must have had on some kind of very stout under-garment too, for as Daisy had said, burdock seeds were torturous little things, and so his outline was bulbous, a huge lollipop head and the monstrously thick green body underneath, making one think of galls on tree trunks and lichen on barnacled rocks. Mouldy, encrusted, vegetative and obscene, when he walked it was the stuff of nightmares.

On the other hand, he wore a garland of flowers on his head over the burrs, and strange little nosegays sprouted from each shoulder and hip as though he were a prickly green teddy bear stuffed with flowers and they had burst out at the pressure points on his seams. Also, around his waist was a folded flag showing the head of the lion rampant, and more flowers poked out from the top of this.
His two chums guided him down the steps to the street, holding a hand each and steadying him with a grip under each arm as he swung his legs around stiffly and lumbered down, tread by tread. Isa continued to howl.

At last, arrived at street level and steadied between his helpers, he opened his hands - I saw with a shudder that his hands were bare and somehow this evidence that there really was a man in there was the chillingest of all - and into his grasp were thrust two huge bunches of flowers, staves of flowers really, like ski-ing poles. For a few minutes, as the crowd continued variously to chant or to snivel, he stood leaning on these staves waiting for his helpers to put their coats on and take up two buckets into which the gathered townspeople immediately began to throw pennies and sixpences. Then slowly, painfully slowly, the strange ensemble moved off, the Burry Man gripping the flower staves and swinging his stiff legs, the men holding him tight under one arm each and rattling the buckets in their other hands. Children broke free of their mothers and followed along, still chanting. Even Isa, brave now that she could no longer see him and not wanting to miss out on the fun, managed a tiny ‘Hup, hup, hooray’ and toddled off after them.

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