{"id":13123,"date":"2025-12-19T14:51:20","date_gmt":"2025-12-19T13:51:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=13123"},"modified":"2025-12-20T12:56:58","modified_gmt":"2025-12-20T11:56:58","slug":"the-curse","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=13123","title":{"rendered":"The Curse"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Image: \u00a9 Courtesy of Manchester City Galleries<\/span><\/p>\n

[Content warning: descriptions of illness, blood]<\/p>\n

I had been bleeding for twelve days when I picked up the scent of the Ally Pally Witch. This time she was lurking in an audio clip from the Open University\u2019s digital archives[i]<\/a>. Robert Rowland, a former head of production at the OU\u2019s first home in Alexandra Palace, was alluding to the witch\u2019s legendary Curse, the one responsible for the fires: first in 1873, when the palace burned down just days after opening, and then again in 1980. Some say the curse evoked three fires; the third and final still to come. Some say the intention was more generic, that nothing manmade would ever prosper in this place.<\/em><\/p>\n

The curse is wheeled out from time to time to explain financial malaise or bad luck at the darts or any number of incidents or accidents that trip or strike, erupt or gush or throttle or collide around the palace and its grounds. In Rowland\u2019s account, the witch is just a hazy sketch: an old woman living alone on a hill. But sometimes she is the keeper of a desecrated sacred well, sometimes a gypsy queen, evicted to make way for the new Pleasure Park. In one Victorian version, she is the self-appointed champion of two exploited noble orphans, intent on avenging the trespass to restore the inheritance system to its rightful glory[ii]<\/a>. Sometimes she\u2019s just a cantankerous old hag.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

The blood is sort of like a period and sort of not. Stringy clots rappel towards the toilet bowl, a smell I recall from my post-partum pads, not foul or fishy or even metallic like menstrual blood can be, but earthy with a meaty edge. It turns the bath the colour of a wishing well. There is no rhythm to it and no dissipation. I hate my periods, but my cycle has at least been regular; heavier since pregnancy, but steady and predictable. Perhaps this new bleeding is perimenopause. Perhaps it\u2019s just stress. I\u2019m at that stage where pressures coalesce, heaped like in that plastic bucking donkey game, when any sudden movement or unexpected load (a hamster, for example) might trigger the spring.<\/p>\n

My mother said her periods just stopped one day with no dramatics, like a curtain drop. My mother-in-law said her periods never stopped. Even in her 70s she still needed pads for that time of the month. She said this like a humble brag, her head slightly cocked, the trace of a smile suppressed in the furrows of her ice-pink lips.<\/p>\n

I lie in the copper-tinted bath, inspecting the swell which seems to mark the source of the bleeding. I haven\u2019t been this menstrually aware since the pandemic. Through waves and peaks, infection rates and deaths, time slid into a sluggish sort of jet-lag; work, school, holidays oozing together. My cycle became for once a steadfast ally and not a duplicitous traitor: periods as punctuation, rather than flow. I measured time through my dwindling stock of tampons and pads, dreading the day I\u2019d have to use the Mooncup gifted years before by my sister and now gathering dust and no doubt toxic-shock-syndrome at the back of my pants drawer. Our world puddled into our four-person household in our two-point-five bedroom flat, occasionally spilling into Ally Pally park and whoever\u2019s homes were on the other end of Zoom. With distances beyond our bubble levelled, my in-laws in Canada seemed suddenly closer. The children followed the progress of their grandfather\u2019s vegetables and their grandmother\u2019s clandestine quests for hairdressers to stem the creep of her natural roots.<\/p>\n

When lockdown eased we drove up to Scotland and on the way back, detoured through Knaresborough to visit England\u2019s first ever tourist attraction: Old Mother Shipton\u2019s Cave and Petrifying Well. There\u2019s a photo of the children looking underwhelmed beside the well; calcified toys, utensils and umbrellas strung along the mossy rock. Out of shot was a rotten log with coins hammered in it to bring you luck, and round the back, a cave where the witch once lived, telling fortunes and forecasting the end of days. The gift shop stocked potions and tacky charms alongside rows and rows of petrified teddies. Displayed behind the counter was a creepy sort of rabbit doll. \u201cA genuine Hennow Hare,\u201d the shopkeeper told us. \u201cHand-carved by Wise Women from Cedar of Lebanon, the ceremonial wood of the Babylonians, to restore order in Troubled Times.\u201d<\/p>\n

Everything those days was about restoring order, resuming the flow. We seemed to have forgotten the volatility of the \u2018Old Normal\u2019. One day, in the future, we\u2019d look back at lockdown, our family bubble, like a magic circle in a glade in the woods.<\/p>\n

My father-in-law died unexpectedly, not during lockdown, but in that first New Normal. It wasn\u2019t COVID, but because of COVID my husband was unable to get to Canada for several months to hug his mother. She had her daughter, his sister, who did what she could. But for long stretches she lived alone, an elderly lady in a house on a hill.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

The thing about witches, is their ugliness (sometimes disguised by necromantic beauty). The thing about witches is their decrepitude, their vitriolic envy of the young. The thing about witches is their affirmation of us non-witches. There are countless photos of me and my little sister dressing up. I am always the princess in some billowing gown and a makeshift tiara, while she with her toddler\u2019s belly and a pointed hat, makes me all the more princesy by contrast. \u2018Real\u2019 mothers become more virtuous when set against the evilness of stepmothers or mothers-in-law. In The Feminine in Fairy Tales<\/em> , Marie-Louise von Franz traces the original villain in stories like Snow White<\/em> to the biological mother, but shows how these tales evolved over time to shift the wickedness on to a proxy figure. Her Jungian interpretation links this literary split to a psychological split in children: they cannot bear to see their mother as loving and punishing all at once.<\/p>\n

My mother, a psychoanalyst, leant into the figure of the witch, adopting the persona when she came to teach drama at our primary school and embracing her flashes of rage as part of Winnicott\u2019s \u2018good enough\u2019 parenting. But fortunately for my developing psyche, there were other, more authentic witches in my childhood, like ancient Mrs Munroe who monitored our communal gardens from her top-floor flat, screeching down about the noise or the damaged grass. Then there was the 9-Mile-Burn-Pub-Witch. Tall and slender, long black hair, eyes heavy with kohl. She was always there, beside the fireplace, a sultry smile or maybe a sneer. I stared and stared. My dad called her a hippy. Even at my tender age, I knew she carried some sexual potency, so different from my own mother whose curves and large breasts felt dowdy and safe.<\/p>\n

My mother-in-law was slim and flat-chested. She worked in a ladies clothing store, went daily to the gym, performed elaborate dietary rituals and spoke of The Old like she was clearing her throat. My mother called her glamorous. She took this as a compliment, but I knew it was code for lacking in intellect. My mother-in-law didn\u2019t like me. I was too foreign, too focused on my work, not feminine enough, too Jewish. When my daughter was a baby, my mother-in-law referred to me as \u2018old milk bags\u2019, until my husband told her to stop. She\u2019s just acting out the feeling of maternal displacement<\/em>, I told myself in my mother\u2019s voice. But it was more than that, a sort of repulsion, fear even. Ten years later, on the cusp of puberty, my daughter regarded my body in a similar way. Her own breasts were budding and she was, for a while, engulfed in a violent self-loathing, horror at the \u2018fat\u2019 deforming her chest, the slow spidering creep of hair.<\/p>\n

In her controversial book Hags[iii]<\/strong><\/a><\/em>, Victoria Smith observes that while the female body, like any truly progressive politics, must embrace change, the social construction of femininity pushes women to resist change. I tried to respond to my daughter\u2019s panic by modelling acceptance of my own aging body. I stopped shaving, let my hair grey and my saggy breasts hang free. And yet, I hid my hairy legs in public, and in the privacy of my mind, harboured shameful fantasies about a non-aggressive cancer that might result in legitimate mammoplasty.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

I am still bleeding – 14 days now. My GP won\u2019t see me until I\u2019ve had some blood-tests, but the NHS is in crisis and the next available test slot is the end of the week. By then I will be drained, I think, shrivelled-two-dimensional like parchment. I speak to a friend who has passed through the ether into Menopause. She tells me that she bled non-stop for over a month. A month?! I\u2019m horrified. The internet confirms. Forums are rampant with stories of relentless \u2018flooding\u2019 for weeks, months, years even. HOW? I shout at the internet. WHERE DOES IT ALL COME FROM? Does the womb lining keep regenerating, like some insatiable magic porridge pot? The internet lobs me some charts and a diagram of The Female Reproductive System, which looks a bit like a cow\u2019s head \u2013 fallopian tubes as ears, a lolling vaginal tongue. I squint at the data, then try to explain the impact of hormonal stimulation on the endometrium to my daughter, who hasn\u2019t exactly asked, and I realise how little I know about our bodies.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m on firmer ground with etymology. Period<\/em> means circuit or orbit, mensis<\/em> means month, from mene<\/em> meaning moon. A regular interval of time. Regularity is important, if only as a benchmark for irregularity. The missed period. The Change. And yet, menstruation itself (and the female body by association) has been branded a deviation from the benchmark of Man.<\/p>\n

In early-modern Europe, the widespread, antisemitic belief in male menstruation was used to emasculate Jewish men. Menstrual blood signified both weakness and evil \u2013 the dual afflictions of penitent suffering and corruption that underpinned \u2018The Curse of Eve\u2019. According to the ancient Roman naturalist Pliny The Elder, menstrual blood was \u2018poisonous\u2019, capable of killing bees, ruining crops and dulling the shine of mirrors[iv]<\/a> and as recently at 1878, the British Medical Journal<\/em> advised that women on their period should not cure meat for fear of spoiling it, nor touch wine, which could turn to vinegar[v]<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Similar taboos have been recorded from around the world[vi]<\/a> while in some cultures, women are isolated in \u2018menstrual huts\u2019 for the duration of their periods. The Hebrew word for menstruation, Niddah<\/em>, has its roots in ndd<\/em>, \u2018to make distant\u2019, referring to social exclusion due to ritual impurity[vii]<\/a>. The word \u2018curse\u2019 also has its roots in exile, likely deriving from the Latin cursus<\/em>, which extended the Christian use of course<\/em> as a set of daily liturgical prayers to the various offenses of the Gret Curs, entailing the \u201cutmost excommunication of the offender\u201d[viii]<\/a>. A curse, then, is at once flow (the order of prayer) and interruption (expulsion from the order).<\/p>\n

A curse like a river, the Moselle stream at the foot of Ally Pally, which once \u201cmeandered in devious fashion,\u201d[ix]<\/a> until it was culverted, driven underground and straightened to run along the train tracks, but still makes its presence known from time to time through floods and rising damp.<\/p>\n

A curse like writing, the cursive script my daughter was told would help with her dyslexia, muscle memory disciplining spelling, the proper order of letters. Yet in the fluency, a loss of the agency of words, their witchy ability to fragment, reform, evolve, surprise. Words reduced to tools, rather than encounter. Maggie O\u2019Farrell has spoken of navigating conversation with a stammer \u201clike rocks in the rapids\u201d[x]<\/a>. To anticipate, deflect, reroute is hard, thinking work. And yet, it is vital.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

Alone in her house, all stutter and no flow, stripped of her status as wife, and severed from routine (the clothing store, the gym, the hairdressers) my mother-in-law deteriorated. Some of the pain was deemed medical. A hip was replaced, the surgery successful but the pain persisted long past recovery, spreading from hip to bowels and pelvic region. \u201cIt\u2019s cancer,\u201d she said. \u201cI\u2019m sure of it.\u201d Yet a long stream of tests revealed nothing untoward. The doctors settled on a diagnosis of unexplained chronic pain. She tried medication, but any relief was slight and short-term and the higher doses made her dizzy.<\/p>\n

\u201cI just want rid of it\u201d she said, and I wondered how much it<\/em> was physical and not an expression of ugly-raw grief, the loneliness of COVID, distance from her family, the loss and uncertainty and fear that comes with aging. Ever suspicious of therapy, we tricked her into a phone consultation with a counsellor who was prepared to offer ad hoc sessions. It didn\u2019t last long.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere\u2019s no point\u201d she said. \u201cShe has nothing to suggest.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cPerhaps there are ways to manage the pain, perhaps you can learn to tolerate it?\u201d I offered in my mother\u2019s voice, thinking of Winnicott\u2019s distinction between cure and care, but her care team seemed invested in finding a solution, resetting her \u2018to normal\u2019. With counselling off the cards, we peddled alternative therapies \u2013 massage, crystals, needles. I thought perhaps just being touched might help. It did, at the time, but then heightened the subsequent sensory deprivation. Cannabis oil brought a fleeting thrill, which quickly dulled with routine use. My sister-in-law who had studied nutrition developed concoctions, white magic potions to revert the body to a state of youth. But nothing lasted and any distraction \u2013 the hospital trips, the pampering sessions, the costly company of a private support worker, splintered into agony as soon as she was left alone.<\/p>\n

\u201cI just want to feel myself again\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

Do you mean yourself as a newly widowed woman pushing eighty, I wondered in a less sympathetic moment, but we had a visit planned and tried to keep her spirits up with talk of outings and grandmother-granddaughter shopping sprees.<\/p>\n

\u201cI just hope the tickets are refundable\u201d she\u2019d say. \u201cI doubt I\u2019ll be around by then.\u201d<\/p>\n

She was, as it happened, and that first night we took her to her favourite Italian restaurant. There are photos of her beaming, flushed from wine, flanked by grandchildren, food intolerances temporarily forgotten. But in the car on the way home, her eyes glazed, locked on the middle distance.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s just so short, your visit\u201d she said. \u201cIt\u2019s like a goodbye.\u201d<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

At fifteen days of bleeding I start to feel faint and am finally granted a walk-in hospital appointment. I wait four hours for blood tests and am rewarded with a prescription for Norethisterone, a heavy-duty progesterone.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt should stop the bleeding,\u201d the consultant says. \u201cTake it for 10 days or so.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cAnd then?\u201d I ask.<\/p>\n

\u201cAnd then you\u2019ll experience a period-like bleed.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cBut what if that bleed doesn\u2019t end either?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cDon\u2019t worry, it\u2019s not abnormal at your stage of life. We\u2019ll book you an ultrasound just to be safe.\u201d<\/p>\n

In the days before my ultrasound the bleeding sort of stops, morphing into a brownish discharge. I start to feel that same galling pressure, the headaches and insomnia I had on the pill – I guess this is my normal now, I think glumly, resigning myself to years of irritable bleeding. Then I\u2019m chastened by a cousin who has been through a lot.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe main thing is there\u2019s nothing sinister\u201d she says.<\/p>\n

And suddenly I\u2019m sure I have cancer. I head through Ally Pally to the woods, morbid but resigned, in search of the witch. There\u2019s been a downpour, vilde chaya<\/em> wild child skies and pummelling rain to match my mood. Yet when I reach the woods, the sun has broken through; branches, bark and foliage all mockingly iridescent. I stomp through the resplendence to the deepest, darkest thickets, grasping at any trace of her: hydra-headed Hornbeams, sinewy and gnarled; fleshy fungi the colour of an organ; a tree full of crows; knotty clusters in the canopy, a syndrome known as \u2018witches broom\u2019 (which makes me think, involuntarily, of my mother\u2019s pubic hair). Contrary to the broomstick myth, Jewish witches were linked to the earth. The Talmud recounts that Rabbi Simeon ben Shetah defeated a coven of eighty by bringing eighty men before them, each of whom lifted a witch from the ground, thereby robbing them of their power. The violence of this story strikes a nerve. I wonder if the real trick was separation of each individual from her coven as much as the rupture of coven from land.<\/p>\n

I walk past stick huts stacked like witches hats, skeletal and empty. Perhaps the witches are convening somewhere else, doubling and troubling en masse. Feminist scholars have researched the appropriation of exclusionary spaces like the menstrual hut and mikveh<\/em> bath, where Jewish women purify themselves post-menstruation. Gossip is shared, advice is given, plots are hatched.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

Increasingly immobile, my mother-in-law was persuaded to move to a retirement home, a luxury lakeside facility worthy of Richard Osman. There were independent units with on-site support, a half-board option with a dedicated restaurant, fitness rooms, a hairdresser, abundant activities, the prospect of friends.<\/p>\n

\u201cBut everyone\u2019s so old!\u201d she told us, mortified.<\/p>\n

She hated the food which did not cater at a sufficient standard to her dietary issues. Her pain grew worse, the escalating doses made her woozy and numb. By now even the doctors had cottoned on to her poor mental health. They smuggled antidepressants into her prescriptions and soon she was an addict, watching the clock, badgering the nurses for an extra pill.<\/p>\n

We clung to the fact that in spite of the food, she still got dressed-up to go down to dinner. This was the best time to call. Half an hour before the sitting, with her outfit selected, make-up adjusted, her hair brushed and styled. Then it was her who would have to go, not us.<\/p>\n

There were brief forays into bowling and even some talk of a gentleman caller, but any advance seemed to hold a mirror to her age, admonishing her failure to stay herself. Most of the time, she just sat on a chair in the middle of her room, doing nothing. She had no interest in books or music or even TV, though she kept the screen on, set to a sports channel, crowd-sounds filling the empty space.<\/p>\n

I found myself angered by her apathy. \u201cThis is your time,\u201d I told her. \u201cAll those things you\u2019ve ever wanted to do. You could take an online course in fashion or nutrition. Or learn to paint. Or go on a cruise. Or even write your novel!\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat\u2019s the point?\u201d she said. \u201cSociety is broken, climate change, war\u2026 It\u2019s only going to get worse. I\u2019m just glad that I won\u2019t be here to see it.\u201d She spoke increasingly of stepping off her balcony or weighing down her pockets and walking to the lake.<\/p>\n

\u201cBut what about your grandkids?\u201d Her self-centred refusal to engage enraged me. \u201cAren\u2019t you worried for them? Don\u2019t you want to see them grow up?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThey\u2019re on the other side of the world,\u201d she said. \u201cEveryone has their own lives and nobody will notice when I\u2019m gone.\u201d<\/p>\n

Eventually she stopped even going down for dinner.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

The ultrasound waiting room is in the Early Pregnancy Diagnostic Unit. I vaguely remember sitting here a decade ago, after bleeding at the start of my second pregnancy. They found the healthy heartbeat of my son and the empty yolk sac of his twin, the type of miscarriage most parents are never aware of. My mother-in-law lost both of her twins, a stillbirth near full-term. She told me in a rare moment of connection. We sat together quietly \u2013 she let me hold her hand.<\/p>\n

Now the room is packed with mainly younger women and their dutiful partners. It is humid and cramped but the atmosphere is skittish. A nurse asks all the partners to leave to make space for the patients. One of the men returns from the toilet and takes the last vacated seat. Nobody tells him about the announcement, but everyone death-stares him, Englishly.<\/p>\n

\u00a0I also feel some guilt about being here. I\u2019m almost 47. In the grand scheme of things, I have fulfilled my biological function, my issues are residual. When my name is called after barely any wait, I feel the surge of resentment rise from the room. Who\u2019s that old woman? Can she possibly be pregnant, selfish git.<\/em><\/p>\n

The ultrasound is fine. There is nothing sinister but it seems I have a condition called \u2018adenomyosis\u2019: tissue from the uterine lining grows into the muscular wall of the uterus, causing heavy or prolonged bleeding. It\u2019s very common, nothing to worry about, I\u2019m told. It\u2019s likely to end with menopause. I look it up as soon as I\u2019m safely past the hospital doors. There are forums, of course. More talk of flooding. Hysterectomies. I\u2019m shamed to see that many of the women are much younger, facing decades of debilitation, impossible choices affecting fertility. There\u2019s frequent mention of excessive bloating known as \u2018adeno belly\u2019 and this, of course, is the symptom that my daughter fixates on when I report back.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou\u2019re going to look fat. People will think you\u2019re pregnant.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cMaybe I am pregnant\u201d I say, bitchily, because I know that even ten years after her brother\u2019s birth, she is still processing the trauma, and I want her to feel a jolt of anxiety.<\/p>\n

\u201cHa\u201d she says, unfazed, indulging me.<\/p>\n

Now, two years into secondary school, my daughter is starting to ease into her body. But that first year, once she\u2019d rolled her first skirt, was skincare, filters, slimming aps and meltdowns. I found myself disproportionately anxious \u2013 less about the prospect of eating disorders, self-harm, sex and drugs than by the trigger of my own highschool days, the frantic need to belong, to offset the glare of my Jewish-South African heritage (popping garishly against the negative space of White Presbyterian Scotland) with the equalising currency of my sexualising body.<\/p>\n

\u201cI just want to be like everyone else,\u201d my daughter had wailed, plucking at the thick, black hair that stood out on her Ashkenazi skin. After months of resisting I bought her a razor.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

My daughter\u2019s first period began on the day of her grandmother\u2019s funeral: my mother-in-law. We sprinkled her ashes by her husband\u2019s; a communal plot in the wildest part of the Canadian cemetery, marked by an American Red Oak. There were no individual headstones, but two rough-cut granite slabs displayed neat rows of unassuming name plaques. I counted 159 and it surprised me that this modest affair is what she would have chosen. Her plaque contained her name, her birth and death dates and a simple epitaph: Beloved Grandmother.<\/em><\/p>\n

The most profound of all Jewish curses is yemakh shemo v’zikhro<\/em>: may his name and memory be erased. The Jewish dictionary tells us this is a serious imprecation, reserved for truly horrific villains. To matter is to exist beyond your material self. But I wonder at the truth of an autonomous self, preserved in a name. Great white men of science and the arts, immortalised in publications and Wikipedia entries, with non-whites, non-men urged to catch up. But surely our essence is less easily contained. Surely we are slippery, relational creatures, made and remade in our interactions and through the stories of others, long after we\u2019re gone.<\/p>\n

I had forgotten that periods are irregular at the start of their lifespan as well as at the end. My daughter seemed to be bleeding every week or two, for varying lengths of time. This bothered her less than it bothered me. Far from my anxious forecasting, she seemed to exist in the close present tense. I took her to the GP for a vaccination, and when the nurse asked her the date of her last period, she shrugged, unconcerned. The nurse suggested she download an app.<\/p>\n

\u201cI can put it on my phone if you\u2019d rather not have it on yours\u201d I said, automatically.<\/p>\n

The nurse side-eyed me and asked my daughter evenly \u201cWhy wouldn\u2019t you want to have it on your own phone?\u201d My daughter side-eyed me and answered, also evenly \u201cI\u2019m fine with it on my own phone. I<\/em> don\u2019t have a problem with that.\u201d An understanding flickered between them, laced not with judgement, I realised, but pity. I died a bit inside, my sense of self as a modern, empowered woman crumbling.<\/p>\n

On my daughter\u2019s thirteenth birthday, I concocted an elaborate ceremony to induct her into the family coven. There were blindfolds, chanting, candles and incense, photos of our witchy ancestors and AI-generated documentation. My mother didn\u2019t join but her approval at my creative endeavours hovered above us, whilst in the shadows, something less comforting prowled just out of reach.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

I am bleeding again but it\u2019s not yet prolonged. I climb the hill to Alexandra Palace, scars of the fires etched into mismatched masonry, modern infill in the older brickwork. I think of the mismatched skin above my pubis, the infill of my caesarean scar, still numb in places. I think of the cramps and tugs, the probes and incisions, the stretches and tears that mark our bodies as women, whether cis or otherwise. I think of my mother-in-law. Could we have saved her? Should we have done more? If it was my own mother, I think, I would harness the winds to care for her (but the witch in the shadows sees the all-consuming neediness, the guilt-trips, rage, attention-seeking hypochondria, the leeching of my precious time, and isn\u2019t so sure.)<\/p>\n

I follow the path, which curves down to The Grove. This is where The Witch was said to have lived, the ancient woodland on the ridge of Muswell Hill, before it was a dairy run by Augustinian nuns, before it was sold off as a private estate, before it was bought as a \u2018Park for the People\u2019 with a bandstand for concerts and a Japanese village, (imported from Vienna) with Japanese villagers and Japanese merch. Now there is a cafe and soft-play and a car park and visitors centre. But a wooded copse remains with two ancient yews and a whiff of the witch.<\/p>\n

I stand in the space between the two yews. I come here often and think of them as mother and daughter. The younger, adolescent tree is complex, twisted, knotty, whorled. The older tree is thick and straight with tough red bark around a softer exposed inner strip. This tree, I\u2019m told, is actually male, but that is no matter as yew trees have been known to change their sex, to keep growing even as they decay, to reach their branches to the ground where they can take root, re-forming infant trunks. A single yew can, over centuries, expand into a grove.<\/p>\n

There is something in this in-between space, a rush of all the ages, all the women. But far from harmonious, for this is The Witch\u2019s domain, hectic with tension. The Witch has no interest in the politics of Everyone, Let\u2019s Just Be Nice to Eachother, hers is the currency of power-play and ploy, and into her cauldron go the perky tits and glossy hair, the sleek skin, affluent-able bodies, the drag and catwalks, Miss competitions, foot-binding, waxing, dieting, whitening, burkas and bikinis, rape and deepfakes, sex-work, porn, Sluts, Prudes, Dykes, Trannies, Girl Power, single-sex spaces and gender-neutral toilets and data bias in medicine and gender verification in sports, the hormones and reproductive organs, natural births or intervention, formula or breast, Tradwives, Trophy Wives, Cougars, Gold Diggers, Ladies who Lunch, Working Mums, Single Mums, Jewish Mothers, Aunties, Girl-Bosses, Battle-axes, Karens, housework, care-work, Emotional Labour, period tax, gender pay-gaps, pension inequality, Botox, HRT, TERFs, Trans-activists, care homes, spinsters, grannies as childcare, grannies as a comic trope, grannies as burden, Dignity in Dying. Someone\u2019s sense of womenness eclipsing some else. Someone\u2019s rights as someone else\u2019s violation. I have the urge to run, yet there\u2019s a wavering energy here like a radio dial striving to pick up a station beyond the white noise.<\/p>\n

So I hold myself still in the space of The Curse, this transient, non-space of perimenopause, where conflict can be borne enough to see past the divide and rule: bodies as commodities; cure as more commercial than care; equality as individual entitlements. Far easier, after all to bring out a range of Barbie CEOs than to tempt the manliest, most middle-class men into care-work. Far easier to pretend we all have equal choice.<\/p>\n

And gradually I\u2019m conscious of my pricking thumbs, alert to the signs of the third and final fire. The cracking earth, the arid grass, the blighted white-streaked crows. Omens of our future and my own decaying body.<\/p>\n

I fold myself into the intricate roots of the larger tree, feeling my flow match the pulse of her sap, and through it, maybe, a collective embrace of the violent transformations that might unite us as women, our essence not in status or stasis but in a verb, womening<\/em>, a present particle demanding ongoing acceptance and ongoing care, that might just grant us the strength to grow together like yews or a coven, around our rotting hollows.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

[i]<\/a> https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/library\/digital-archive\/clip\/clip:ap_aclip4<\/a><\/p>\n

[ii]<\/a> \u2018Muswell Hill Accursed\u2019, The Evening News and Post<\/em>, 22.08.1889.<\/p>\n

[iii]<\/a> Victoria Smith, Hags: The demonisation of middle-aged women<\/em>. London: Fleet, 2023<\/p>\n

[iv]<\/a> \u00a0https:\/\/www.loebclassics.com\/view\/pliny_elder-natural_history\/1938\/pb_LCL352.549.xml?readMode=recto<\/a><\/p>\n

[v]<\/a> Briffault, R. (1927). The Mothers: A Study of the Origins of Sentiments and Institutions<\/em>. Vol. 2. New York: The Macmillan Company: p.389<\/p>\n

[vi]<\/a> See, for example, Bobel, C. et al. (2020). The Palgrave Handbook of Critical Menstruation Studies<\/em>, Singapore: Palgrave Macmillan, which brings together research from 134 international contributors to examine the disgust that menstrual blood produces in some societies and related stigma (e.g. Bobel, 2010, 2015; Esteban, 2001; Fahs, 2016; Gottlieb, 2020; Kissling, 2006; Laws, 1990; Martin, 1987), as well as different forms of activism that challenge that disgust.<\/p>\n

[vii]<\/a> https:\/\/jwa.org\/encyclopedia\/article\/female-purity-niddah<\/a><\/p>\n

[viii]<\/a> Middle English Dictionary \u2013 see also https:\/\/blog.oup.com\/2016\/11\/curse-etymology\/<\/p>\n

[ix]<\/a> Thorne, J. (1876), Handbook to the Environs of London<\/em> (facsimile edition: Bath, Adams & Dart, 1970): pp.363-4<\/p>\n

[x]<\/a> https:\/\/www.sundaypost.com\/fp\/maggie-ofarrell\/<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Vashti Katz<\/strong> is a local historian with an interest in activism, migration and social housing. She was a London Library Emerging Writer (2024-2025) and has been developing essays on the politics of aspiration, aging and inheritance as well as on the complex nature of community. Vashti has lived and worked across Africa, Asia and Europe but is now based in North London, where she lives in the shadows of The People\u2019s Palace with her husband, kids and six befriended magpies. Vashti is represented by James Spackman at The bks Agency.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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