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Modern Fairies and Loathly Ladies second podcast series, episode three Fairies and Children.

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Hello, I'm Faye Heild. And I'm Caroline Larrington. There are so many stories about fairies and children in the folders given to artists.

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The idea that fairies might snatch away your child is a potent one.

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Just as they might take away your wife or more rarely, your husband.

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But there's also a fascinating story recorded in two different historical chronicles from the late 12th,

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early 13th century that really got Murray's imagination going.

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Yes. The tale of the green children is drawn from the two late 12th and early 13th century.

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Overlapping accounts by Ralph Cockshell and William of Newburgh.

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And it's a bit different in its structure from the familiar patterns of folk tales about fairy to bright green.

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Children appear at the edge of a wheat field one August, and they're found there by harvesters.

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And the two children have great difficulty in adjusting to the human way.

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They can't eat human food. They can't speak human language. And the boy looks as if he's pining and dying.

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But eventually they managed to signal that they can eat beans and that maintains their green colour.

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The boy still dies, but the girl manages to adapt and to get integrate into human society.

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And the mediaeval chroniclers tell us that the girl, when she could speak English,

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talks about simpleton's land is the place that she came from, an underground country where there's neither sun nor moon.

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And here the two children were hurt in their fall, the sheep. And they were drawn into this world by following the sound of church bells.

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So modern commentators have noted the ways in which these two accounts and the historical chronicles

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do seem to be in some ways assimilated to mediaeval traditions about fairy land for marry.

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This chimed with a poem that she knew by the American writer Jane Yolen on the same story, and she adapted it into this incredible song.

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Is the sky line. The cold stones, their arms and legs green, not the dark green.

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They know the rain. That and some not the deep greying of the sea.

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It's half the break. When they owe Panopto.

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And I spoke great language, which the.

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By the way, stay back.

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It's broad. I reached.

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Married. Whites and blacks.

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Why so see? Oh, gosh.

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She was so shy, so nervous.

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There's an animation to be drawn by Natalie Reid and animated by Mary Jane that goes along with the song.

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And it shows the boy and the girl in the different shades of green and white.

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You can see it on the Modern Fairies website. One of the things that fascinated Murray and Terry, along with some of the other artists,

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was the idea that the green girl married and had descendents maybe still living in Suffolk today.

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Terry wrote a monologue from the perspective of one of the descendants describing what it was like

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listening to his grandmother talking about her childhood and and this the history of this story.

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And, of course, it's completely made up, completely fictional.

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But Terry, with her magical powers as a writer, made it incredibly personal and believable.

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And we recorded that script read by Martin Carfi onto Wax Cylinder and played it at the same gathering's using a wax and then de player.

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And so the medium of sharing the story became part of the show as well.

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And that's been really interesting in all our. Well, for me and several of the artists, not everybody,

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but we were interested in the artefacts and the sources and the the formats in which these stories,

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the forms, the modes of transmission that these things come to us with.

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So we basically fabricated some authentic medium for artistic purposes.

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And I found that whole process really interesting.

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And to see audiences sense of belief or disbelief played with by providing an authentic wax cylinder,

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but obviously fictional and created in contemporary times.

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So let's hear some of the story of the green children's descendant and what he remembers about his grandmother.

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I say that I was too young when my grandmother died to remember her.

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I do. Could I ever forget her? My granny was not like anybody else.

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She was small and thin, bright eyed as a bird with a long white braid called on.

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I had white skin that never browned in the sun in a wild way about her that made people gossip and shake their heads.

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I say that she'd be strange as a child, and she remained a bit old till the end of her life.

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Sometimes she spoke in her own secret language, but only when she was speaking to me, said some of her seventh son.

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She told me the tale of a place where she came from, and now I'll turn it to you.

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She came from another country. She said she didn't know its name. It wasn't like here.

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It had no night and it had no day. Just a low, steady light.

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Never changed. And in that light, everything was green.

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She called that place the green country. So that's what I'll call it, too.

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She had a brother a little older than her. The two of them were inseparable.

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One day they were walking in the hills in low rolling hills like the ones we have here.

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And they found a cave. Or maybe she said it wasn't it was not a cave, but a hole in the hill.

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Inside is a beautiful night. And the children walk towards it.

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Hand in hand. They entered the cave. The light seemed to back on the moon.

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So they kept walking, entranced. They walked and they walked until the passageway turned and spit it back out on the hill.

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Then they stepped outside. Still following the light, I found everything had changed.

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The light was now a gold ball in the sky.

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They had never seen the sun before. I've never seen a sky so blue.

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I had never felt so cold on my skin or grass, so brittle under their feet.

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They knew suddenly that this was not their world and they turned around to go home again.

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The cave was gone. It had vanished completely. And they sat down under that alien sky,

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clutching each other in silence and fear until men returning home from the fields crossed over the hill and found.

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Now, my mother, she always insisted that grandma was a foreign girl from across the sea, from France maybe, or Germany.

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Well, that's not the story my grandmother told. I know which story is true.

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The man who took those children home, they knew exactly what they had found.

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Keri's. They found fares to while children of the otherworld, that boy and girl was.

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We knew that because was their skin.

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Eyes, teeth. The clothes they wore, the shoes on their feet.

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They were small and thin and green all over.

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I could not speak the king's plain English. They could not eat plain country food.

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They could only be cheese, which is just what the fairies eat, beans and milk.

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I saw that boy. He'd be my great uncle if he had lived.

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But he did not. He never learnt to eat our food. He pined inside and faded away.

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Tom and Apple grew to the day. They buried him at a crossroads.

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My gran. She took to human ways. She later porridge.

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She hates her brain and the green, her skin slowly faded to white.

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She learnt our language and ran with the other children.

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The village children laughing and bright. The vicar's wife took charge of her and she was christened on a bright summer's day.

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They call me Mary. They told her not to speak of the child that she wants me.

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They thought she'd for that. She never forgot.

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I know when I. Terri story then picked up on ideas about losing contact with where you came from.

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Ideas about losing your roots and then having children and eventually grandchildren in your new home.

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And you struggle to try and describe what the place you've lost was like and how you remember it.

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The pictures, your memories are fading. Barry wrote another song,

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this theme where the two green children become child migrants or the babes in the

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wood that lost little ones who have to take their chances in the harsh world.

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One of them makes it and the other doesn't. The girl is the tough one.

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The one who figures out how to survive and to compromise. Murray has recorded some version of this.

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But here's Brime mom reading the lyrics Green in My Growing Pains.

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The Swift and the crane carry full play.

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My brother and I, along a fly way, turtle doves led us.

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Even the stork knows its season. Fiery colours of the fall.

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Catch the flame, throw the ball from the hands of war.

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The hounds of war into the eye of a storm.

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My childhood songs in Borrowed Tongue say I am a child of a lesser God.

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Wait for friends to call on foreign shores. I am a child of a lesser God in safety now.

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I have found I never felt so weak, stood on firm ground.

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You turn me around and knock me off my feet.

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The Swift and the cranes sailed away. My brother died along the byway.

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Childhood songs in borrowed tongue say I'm a child of a lesser God.

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And I'm green in my growing pains. In the wake of moonless sway.

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So Murray and Terri and several of us were really interested in the old stories and representing the tales of her LA or the green children as stories,

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but we were also interested in how it resonated with contemporary news,

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contemporary issues and problems that we're facing in the contemporary society.

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And obviously, this idea that you could be displaced and have to navigate a new harsh world chimed hugely with ideas of immigration,

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immigration and refugees in contemporary society. As we were in the workshops that the camps at Calais were quite big news going on at the time.

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So there's an undercurrent of while we're talking about these songs and presenting them very much as folk tales.

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The process of engaging with them chimes with contemporary concerns and issues that we're all having to navigate.

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Even if you don't change the material to be a contemporary folk song,

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there's still a deep sense that these are contemporary stories and have contemporary resonance.

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I think that was really interesting for some of the the more familiar with working

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with folklore and traditional song artists that they don't feel outdated.

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They're not just rehashing traditional stories.

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They they do sense a very deep connexion with contemporary concern, even if they don't directly say that through the lyrics.

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And that was important, wasn't it? I think because the key parts of the project was making the fairies modern.

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And some people did that through transposing them into different modern settings.

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But some, like Mary here,

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reached down into the old story and brought it up into the light of these contemporary issues around child migration and child refugees,

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and that suddenly, somehow, without making it sound as if it's set in the contemporary world.

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Nevertheless, it does speak to those really timeless problems,

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timeless questions about what happens to the child who has to leave the place where it really belongs.

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And so then the audience is brought in because the audiences have to actually do a bit of work

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there to contextualise the art and to come to their own sense of reality with it as well.

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And I think maybe it's not just down to artists to make work.

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Modern audiences have to find their place for it as well. Really interested in that side of it, too.

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Another theme that was taken up by the artists was the Changeling theme.

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And that's one that really does speak to parents about their fears for and in some ways their fears of their children.

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And that was something that patients worked out.

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Patients was interested in how just at that key age, suddenly you start seeing developmental problems or deficits in your baby.

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And that child that is seemed quite normal that they used to smile and used to respond to suddenly

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doesn't seem to be there and looks as if it's being replaced by another baby all together.

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And that's very much what the changing story is all about. In traditional folk tale that your baby suddenly seems a complete stranger to you.

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It's in fact being taken away by the fairies who've left a fairy baby, a wizened language, less creature that doesn't thrive.

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And if you know how you can get your baby back again, if you don't get the changeling to admit it's a changeling.

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But that's not really how things work in the real world with babies like this.

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Patients wrote a poem double that's a spectacular a kind of mirror poem.

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Halfway through, there's a pivot. And then the lines from the first half are repeated.

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But working backwards towards the beginning. But now they take on a whole new meaning because of the events that have happened within the story.

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So here we've got patients reciting double accompanied by Ben and Barney at the Sage Gates at.

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Something's happened to my son. He's not the same child.

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I respect. He was healthy, haven't slept in three nights watching over his colleagues the signs of a change when his eyes click open.

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Like a China doll. He can't remember how to be Samuel.

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He looks at me as if I'm not his mother. His eyes and grey, green, they say baby's eyes change colour in the middle of the night.

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He used to call me mama. Now he only makes noises.

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I don't understand. I don't understand.

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Now Jodi makes noises. My mom used to call me in the middle of the night.

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They say baby's eyes change colour. His eyes are grey.

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Green. I not his mother.

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He looks at me as if he can't remember how to be Samuel when his eyes blink open like a China doll watching over his calls for signs of a change.

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I haven't slept in three nights. I respect he was healthy.

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He's not the same child. Something's happened to my son.

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Patients is writing something deeply personal here. Drawing on her own experience, but also speaking to the questions that frighten a. banks.

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And the issues faced by anyone who has to come to terms with the fact that the baby they

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thought they had is not the one that they'll have to live with and look after and love.

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The idea of loss is closely linked to the fairy world.

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The feeling that once there was a time when the magical was more real to us, more apparent, and you might see fairies dancing on the green.

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As the calling on song introduced in Episode one suggests those days have gone.

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Except where we can reach through to the fairy world through art and the imagination.

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In the next episode, we talk about one of the projects, really modern themes, fairies and the environment.

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Don't forget to take a look at the Modern Fairies website,

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where you can find more of our work with illustrations film of the performance at the stage in Gateshead.

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Lots of interesting blog posts from our.