Once upon a time in a town far, far way, lived a miser and his browbeaten wife. The man was rich in every way, but the milk of human kindness. He lived The Word of God, which kept him and his wife shuttered behind closed doors and closed minds.

His town was small, but his ego was big and he ruled it with an iron hand. There was little joy in ‘Mudville’ in those days. But one day joy crept in the back door. The wife was pregnant. At last, at last, after nearly 30 years of marriage, a secret dream was about to come to true.

But the man didn’t believe that his wife was a virtuous woman. How could she be pregnant when he had prayed and prayed for his sinful wife to remain barren? She didn’t deserve a child. She was a bad wife and would be a bad mother. Sadly, she never got the chance to prove him wrong. She died in childbirth.

The man was angry, and his cold heart rejected the tiny girl child. But he was a man who knew his duty and so he hired a wet nurse and shut her and the child up in a separate wing of his large forbidding house. For ten years, the nurse and her charge lived alone and saw the man only for a moment at bedtime, when the growing girl child had to ‘perform’ her lessons for him, and recite the bible quotes she had learned that day. She never attended a conventional school. She never had the society of other children. She had only her nurse and her never ending lessons. She didn’t even know her birthday, as it was never celebrated, just as Christmas never was or any other holiday.

When she was ten, her nurse passed away in her sleep. By now the villagers had begun to talk and worry about the girl child. But the man buried his child’s nurse and took his little girl away on a long trip. They were gone for five years. When the girl came home she was no longer a child. She was a young woman with shadows in her eyes and a suppressed wildness about her that was plain to see. It reeked of desperation. The villagers tried to include her in their society, but the man shut his door in all their faces. Eventually, though everyone knew they lived in the big house on the edge of town, they stopped going there, and got on with their lives.

The years passed, and passed some more. One winter day the door of the big house opened and out walked the girl, now a woman of 40 years. The man was dead. The woman was free, and after the man was buried, the woman returned to the big house on the edge of town alone. Before the villagers could decide what to do, a fire broke out in the big house and the woman ran from it screaming and laughing all at the same time. She stood on the edge of the crowd and watched her life become reduced to charred rubble. And she smiled and nodded and lost her look of desperation.

The sister of the woman who had been the girl child’s nurse for so many years, took the now grown woman into her home and cared for her, and when she died she left her her house. Meg had finally joined society and was welcomed and cossetted and protected by the townspeople ever since the day her big house burned down.

You see, Megs years of living with and caring for her old and infirm father – he of the bible thumping anger only spiritually twisted minds can conjure, had left her a perpetual child in her mind. Her freedom from the yoke of God and Duty had released her need to embrace and act upon, every whim that occurred to her. She became eccentric and elusive and slightly mad. But she was part of the fabric of the town, and they would not give her over to any authority but their own.

Times have changed in the little town, far, far away. There are few left who remember Mad Meg’s father, or know all the details of Mad Meg’s history. But Meg had been taught by her nurse to read and write, and she wrote. Oh how she wrote! She kept her journals wrapped in oilcloth, hidden in an hollow of an ancient Maple tree on the edge of the back garden on her home. Her father never knew about them.

It has been my privilege to read some of these journals. I will read more of them.
I am writing a book about my town. I want to write a separate one and tell Meg’s story all on it’s own. It’s a modern Gothic tale that only small  isolated towns can produce.
It is a story of twisted spirituality, fear, repression, isolation, abuse and a quiet kind of madness arising out of guilt. But the story will be told with a fierce pride in the triumph of community dedicated to the preservation of it’s characters, and the specialness of their lives, as illustrated by Meg’s own uniqueness. I am privleged to be a part of this story.