Greig - The Strange Undoing of Prudencia Hart

Beginnings as she herself often says Find characters in medias res So this undoing story could begin at the moment Prudence realises the trouble shes in Or the moment with the burning water, Or the moment when the Devil caught her Or the moment when the clocks all stopped Or the moment when the midwife dropped The babe Prudencia into the arms of a mother Who obviously preferred her older brother And so she became the pet of a father Who faced with messy life would rather Photograph every football ground in Fife, Or alphabetise All paperbacks of a certain size And so Prus and her dads idea of a fun day Was to browse away an endless Sunday In second-hand bookshops making lists, Of nineteenth-century German philatelists Or on one occasion a journey of two whole days To photograph the guitar that played Purple Haze It came in a case complete with plectrum Nowadays wed say Mr Hart was autistic spectrum But back then he was just odd. And whatever he was whatever his spectra Prudencias complex was Electra. She loved her dad and he did protect her Which explains why she became ultimately herself a collector. A collector of folk music song in particular Ballads in fact. Her matricular Thesis was on Walter Scotts Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border But we digress lets keep things in order We wont begin with Prudencias birth, Or her use of objects to maintain self-worth, Or the moment of her fatal wooing Or even the moment of her undoing. NO.

In storytelling that most misused of all arts Horses absolutely must not go ahead of carts. A ballad starts where a ballad starts and This is the start of Prudencia Harts. Snow! Snow falls. Midwinter, 21st of December. And all across Scotland theres a great white falling down of the sky. A burial.

Did you ever see snow like it? Not for years. Not for years and years and years. Not since children wore caps and tacketty boots. It was as if history had gone into reverse and the past returned like a tide over a beach wiping out our footprints so that all the mess and ugliness of modern life was smoothed away and the world was once more full of old pure things like sledges and rosy cheeks and a genuine need for warming soups Thought Prudencia Hart Tides and blankness As she drove south through a great bleezing blinding blowing blizzard South into the Borders. This is exactly the sort of snow that if it were in a border ballad would poetically presage some kind of doom for an innocent heroine or an encounter on the moor with a sprite or villain or the losing of the heroines selfhood in the great white emptiness of the night She thought. But this is not a ballad She thought.

And so this is just snow. And she smiled All around her drivers pulled on to the hard shoulder Ambient temperatures were getting colder Travellers made for somewhere warm So why did Prudencia smile at the storm? Prudencia looked at the rest of the world as though it was quite absurd She was above the common herd These idiots unprepared, careless, unprotected Unready of forecast, uncollected Of thought not like Prudencia. Prudencia smiled. She had put snow tyres on her Ka. Prudencia Hart then was a prudent Twenty-eight-year-old postgraduate student. Her PhD was on the topography of Hell so When she was asked to go to Kelso To contribute a paper and join the plenary At a conference celebrating the sixteenth centenary Of the founding of the linguistics chair At the tiny university there A conference which was provisionally entitled And this annoyed her remember that, its vital On the linguistics and transmission of oral narratives And balladry open brackets (border ballads, neither border nor ballad question mark, close brackets) She went.