Wedding Ritual #3: Sarah Mooney

Sarah Mooney 

is an oral storyteller... and, she tells me, she has been 'at it for twenty years' - including as storyteller-in-residence for both the Roald Dahl Foundation, where she lived in the garden at Gypsy House, making up stories and re-telling them in schools and theatres; and for a decade on the S.S Great Britain (on which historic vessel Ricky Gervais declared her 'hilarious')

In 2015, she "took a break from being a working class single mum" and sailed across the Atlantic with a group of women - looking to the ocean for inspiration around myth, plastic pollution and community. Most pertinently of all for me, it was Sarah to whom I had the honour of passing the Bardic Chair of Ynys Witrin in 2016, when she won the contest to succeed me as the Bard of Glastonbury. She has now joined our ranks as an Elder Bard.

Here are Sarah's four ritual elements, in her own words:

Something Old

"The first story I wrote down. I have revisited it recently as I am toying with the idea of writing a graphic novel  about Grania O'Malley. She was a wonderful pirate."

'Tales of a Treasure Duster'

I am a treasure duster.

A woman from a world of beautiful buffing and dusting, when a cleaner was revered as a wonderful thing. We were trusted to be in charge. To touch priceless relics that were so sensitive they could crumble to dust in your hand. We were proud to be cleaners of treasure. We were treated with dignity and respect, not the way you treat scrubbers today.

I dusted the treasures of a great man, Commander Robert Hitchen. A ferocious pirate. Many argued about his exact identity but there were two things that everyone was in agreeance about. He had eyes of ice, and a gold tooth. It is said that he could cut a man in half with that tooth. And his eyes, if you could see them, they were so bright and blue that he could shatter glass with a glance...

For the whole romantic story of mermaid's hands and emerald halls, click here.

Something New

"The Prologue and Chapter One of my  first novel. I am on the second draft..."

Blow the Wind Down (working title)

Prologue

Cold and damp.

A side street. An alleyway in Victorian Liverpool. A woman lies in agony, white faced, groaning on the floor. 

She had just given birth.

No need to hide the lump or the puking any more.

She planned to leave the baby for dead, stagger up and get on with her life.

As the woman lay there, dazed, she could feel the lump that she had kept out of sight for nine months moving.

She did not touch it, she did not want to.

She wanted to drift into the fog of the laudanum she had taken for the pain.

The lump kept moving, up her body, a worm.

The woman in her fug of drugs and dreams allows the baby to pull on her drab dress.

Did she help her? No!... but ….. maybe.. How else could she have?

Then the baby was latched on drinking the milk that had been made for her. 

That was that.

'Una'... One. Her mum would say she called her 'Una' because it was shorter than 'Never Again' 

To read the first chapter of 'Blow the Wind Down' - and its fairytale-within-a-fairytale - in full, click here.

Something Borrowed

"I love the power of these womens' voices, they open me up on the inside."

Something Blue

"I recorded this when my grandmother was terribly ill, for all the granddaughters who learnt about love on their nan's lap."

For more of Sarah's wonderful work, get thee to sarahmooney.co.uk

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Wedding Ritual #4 will feature Dan Newman