Category: Artificial Intelligence

This post is about finally finding a book from one’s youth forty years later – and after nearly thirty years of searching.

It is also a tale about goblins and Christmas decorations; about the perils of ChatGPT and Artificial Intelligence; and about the real value of librarians, cataloguers, indexers, and archivists – what should be called the Noble Professions.

And it is an account that ends with not one but two wonderful events.

So if you are sitting comfortably, with a suitable seasonal drink, we will start with a bit of background and with a historical excursion.

*

Once upon a time there was a story.

And the story was in a book – a child’s anthology: the sort of book that one used to get in school bookshops and advertised in the special catalogues that were common in English schools (and elsewhere) in the 1970s and 1980s.

All the books I had at the time got lost – house moves and so on – and since the world wide web made searching for second-hand books easy I have replaced the books one-by-one.

When you re-read such books, sometimes what one thinks are one’s own original ideas and expressions stare back at you and you realise where you got them from.

What the economist J. M. Keynes once said – “Practical men who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist” – has a far wider application.

Many of us are the slaves of what we read when very young.

*

But there was one book what eluded me, every time it was searched for.

What I could remember (or believed I could remember) was as follows:

– it was a story in an anthology;

– the story was about what will happen if you do not take your decorations down by Twelfth Night – for goblins and other ne’er-do-wells will go through your town and hide behind any remaining decorations and cause you mischief all year round;

– but there was a cure to this mischief if a certain thing was done on Candlemas – 2 February – and this was because of an esoteric rule which could be applied surreptitiously by those with special knowledge;

– the book was purple;

– the title or sub-title of the book, or of the story, was “from Michelmas to Candlemas” – the use of “Candlemas” was obvious from the story, and the “Michaelmas” I was certain about because it was a word I would again encounter in my late teens as a student, as it reminded me of the story/book.

(One of these memories, however, was false and another only semi-reliable.)

*

The story was important to me because it led to my passion for lore.

For me as a legal commentator, law (in its technical, black-letter sense) is practically far less important than what people – including lawyers and even judges – believe the law to be.

(Long-term followers may also recall my original blogging name was of a folklore hero who bested the devil by careful attention to what was actually agreed.)

And so this remembered Candlemas story had everything for a lover of lore and law: a predicament, an obscure rule, the skilled application of that rule, and a remedy.

*

How I searched for this story – usually every year in November or December.

At first, I searched the web generally – with text and then, as Google developed, for the book cover.

I searched sites which had pictures of the book catalogues of the time.

I searched the British Library, the Bodleian Library, and every library I could think of.

Nil-return.

*

It was a mini-exercise in being J. R. Hartley year after year.

After a while certain results became familiar – and I probably know more about devotional texts about – and adventure stories set at – Candlemas than many other people.

And it was always a pleasure to renew contact with texts like “[i]t is a very old enactment that no Gascon wines or Toulouse woad be brought into England in strange bottoms, and nothing which has been done affects them but was devised to restrain the folly of English merchants who ventured to Bordeaux at unseasonable times, and the restraint from Michaelmas to Candlemas, by avoiding dangerous times, will rather augment the traffic…” (emphasis added.)

I bought books of Christmas stories on the off-chance they would reprint the story I was looking for – a disconcerting number of which appear to have been edited by Gyles Brandreth.

Nil-return.

*

When social media came along, I would then appeal from time-to-time for any information.

Those who responded were often very helpful – and so yet more Christmas anthologies were bought, and further lines of enquiry followed.

I made direct contact with experts in folklore and fairy tales, but they were as non-plussed as me.

Still nil-return.

*

Along the way though, I found out a great deal about the lores of the twelve days of Christmas and Candlemas which contextualised what I could remember.

For example, both Twelfth Night and Candlemas have historically been the ends of the Christmas period – the latter being the fortieth day after Christmas.

And I discovered that Candlemas – which is also marked the purification (or what became known in England as ‘churching’) of Mary and the presentation of Jesus at the Temple – was once an annual event that was very important in English culture.

Indeed Charles I arranged his coronation to be held on Candlemas.

And royalists made a point of celebrating Candlemas as part of what we would now call “culture wars” of the 1600s.

One once-famous poet, the loyalist clergyman Robert Herrick published three poems about Candlemas, one of which urged the burning of decorations on that day, else bad things would follow:

Kindle the Christmas brand, and then

Till sunset let it burn;

Which quench’d, then lay it up again

Till Christmas next return.

Part must be kept wherewith to teend

The Christmas log next year,

And where ’tis safely kept, the fiend

Can do no mischief there.

(This ritual burning of decorations is a tradition that still has echoes today.)

After the culture wars of the 1600s, however, Candlemas became less popular – and soon it was all-but forgotten culturally, outside the annual blessing of candles at certain churches.

(On Candlemas in particular, see chapter 13 of The Stations of the Sun by Ronald Hutton, and on the place of Candlemas in the politics and religion of early modern England generally, see Eamon Duffy’s The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, 1400-1580.)

*

This was all fascinating, but it was not getting me any closer to the book or the story.

A couple of years ago, after the usual social media appeal, someone suggested I try the r/whatsthatbook thread on Reddit, where very clever and generous people spend time trying to identify books from the scantiest of details.

So I did.

And someone there corresponded with a suggestion which actually covered each of the data points I could recall about the book – and it had the right title, and the book even had a well-known editor.

This was an extraordinary find – how could I have missed this in all the years of searching?

Well.

The reason it had never been uncovered before was because the impressive looking account had been generated – entirely fabricated – by ChatGPT.

This false account has now been deleted, but the correspondent remarked when I said this looked like it had been auto-generated: “You’re right, I’ve tried chatGPT on some descriptions around here and it worked pretty well. However sometimes it has a propensity to spew random bullshit. I forgot because it’s so good in other areas. I’ll check better.”

I had never come across ChatGPT before – and so I have distrusted it ever since.

*

So this year – a couple of weeks ago – I did the annual appeal – but this time on BlueSky and Mastodon, and not on Twitter.

And yet again, people were helpful – anthologies were suggested and bought (though no further ones by Gyles Brandreth).

Someone again used ChatGPT, and they came up with:

“The book you’re describing sounds like “From Michaelmas to Candlemas” by Ruth Ainsworth. It was published in the 1970s and features seasonal stories aimed at children, including the one about the need to take down Christmas decorations by Candlemas to avoid goblins hiding behind them. The title references the traditional English calendar, marking the time from the feast of Michaelmas (September 29) to Candlemas (February 2). The story you mentioned aligns with themes found in folklore and poetry, including those by Robert Herrick. If this is the book you’re thinking of, it was indeed popular in school book clubs during that era.”

Again, like the account offered by the Reddit correspondent, this passage looks authoritative and plausible.

You will even notice how it neatly covers everything I could remember – giving equal weight to each data point and deftly joining them all together.

And again, what ChatGPT here had to offer was utterly – absolutely – false.

Like a fluent and practised (but unwise) liar it had contrived an account that fitted only the available information.

It was fake.

This year looked like another nil-return.

*

And then, something remarkable happened.

The appeal got this response:

Wow.

It was the same story, now looking up at me from a computer screen forty years later.

I remember the stylised first letter, the imagery, the pacing, the tone.

It did mention goblins as part of the ne’er-do-wells, but it was about a demon – not a goblin – who hid behind a sprig of holly.

(My insistence that it was a goblin was a semi-unreliable memory.)

And there was (who I now know was) Granny Hawkins being the holder of the all-important esoteric knowledge.

*

What had happened was this: Charlotte was far from a ChatGPT bot but instead a trained and experienced librarian.

(You can and should follow her here – she is a genius and a treasure, and she has found other odd things out for other people.)

She sensibly assumed some of the things I could recall would have more weight – be more reliable – than others.

(The “Michaelmas” was, it turned out, a false memory – and this had undermined my searches.)

She then used various permutations of my memory points until she found a match, and she then found a book which someone had scanned onto internet archive.

You can see the book here.

The details there found could then be cross-referenced against this truly amazing catalogue of fantasy short stories -and it was indeed in an anthology – alongside the Herrick poem!

The story had been found – because of a librarian using critical skills (and thereby not giving equal weight to each factor), an archive, and a catalogue/index.

Verily: librarians, archivists, cataloguers, and indexers are the Noble Professions.

For they organise information in a manner in which humans actually think – unlike ChatGPT and Artificial Intelligence.

They are the holders of the old knowledge and skills.

*

So here is the book:

*

My initial reaction was that Charlotte had certainly uncovered the same story – but it was perhaps in a different edition.

The cover of what Charlotte had found was black – and I distinctly remembered the book being purple.

Nonetheless I ordered the book online – so I could read all the story again in physical form (I refused to read it on the archive – I could wait one more week after so many years).

And when the book arrived I noticed something.

The back of the book was purple.

Never judge a book by its front cover.

*

Before we come to the second wonderful event of this book-quest, here is the story of “Twelfth Night Till Candlemas” in full.

Note as you read how the old knowledge is used and the necessary rule are applied – and how the vicar ensures that a suppressed, secret ceremony can take place – there seems to be a great deal of cultural and religious knowledge behind this simple-looking children’s story.

*

“Of course!” said Granny Hawkins.

Of course.

*

But who was Ruth C. Paine?

It was certainly not this Ruth Paine (which made internet searches very difficult).

The editor Dorothy Edwards was a prolific author and editor – many of her books are still in print – and she was also involved with Listen with Mother.

(I said you should be sitting comfortably.)

But Ruth C. Paine was more elusive.

*

What I was then able to find out was that Ruth C. Paine had published stories in a number of Dorothy Edwards’ anthologies.

Here is another example, about the changing of the seasons, with a splendid line from a frog about how to deal with winter

*

‘I’m just off to the pond. I shall dive to the bottom and cover myself with mud and stay there. That is the only proper way to spend the winter,’ said Frog, and he hopped away.

*

I can also recommend the story about old Mother Merriweather in her Cuckoo Fair story, which deals with summer, in this other Dorothy Edwards anthology.

*

A bit more research showed that Ruth C. Paine had contributed a story for broadcast for Listen with Mother (thank you to the kind person who put the Radio Times listings archive online).

But otherwise it was really not surprising that an author from the 1970s and 1980s had so little online trace.

It crossed my mind that Ruth C. Paine could be a pseudonym of Dorothy Edwards – such things are not uncommon with busy editors who need to fill spaces in books and broadcasts.

Yet there was something about the distinctive depth of knowledge behind the Candlemas story which made it unlikely to be a throwaway pseudonym of someone else. And Dorothy Edwards often included her own stories in her anthologies.

Anyway, no matter: I had the book and the story.

That is where I thought this story would end.

*

And then the second remarkable event occurred.

Charlotte and I got this reply from the novelist Victoria MacKenzie:

And so Ruth C. Paine certainly did exist – and, as the Candlemas story indicated, she did have an extensive knowledge of religion and cultural history.

Her great niece has now kindly provided the following fascinating details:

“Ruth Cecilia Paine was my great aunt – my grandfather’s twin sister – and although she passed away in 2001, when I was just twenty-one, she was a big influence on my life. We wrote to each other regularly (I still remember her postcode, all these years later) and she was very encouraging to me about my education; at the start of each school year she sent me a little money for stationery, which I found incredibly exciting!

“I always knew that she had written stories for children, but that only a handful had been published – mostly in anthologies edited by Dorothy Edwards. As far as I knew, writing was a hobby, but I sensed it was one that meant a great deal to her. She often sent me books as gifts and occasionally I visited her in her flat in Canterbury where she lived with her lifelong companion, Lillian.

“She was a Christian and a church-goer all her life, latterly giving tours of Canterbury Cathedral. My dad told me that she’d been a missionary in India earlier in her life and I seem to half-remember a story she told me of travelling through a monsoon in a small aeroplane – understandably a terrifying experience!

“When she returned to in Britain she became a Religious Studies teacher, and her last job was at Hastings High School, before her retirement around the time I was born in 1980. Apparently she was regarded as quite formidable by my dad’s generation, but she was always very kind to me. I wish so much that she could have known her great niece would become a writer!”

*

The formidable Ruth C. Paine had indeed been a former missionary in her youth – Birmingham University records attest this.

This is Ruth Cecilia Paine in her teaching days:

And not only did Vicky MacKenzie provide this information and this photo, she also had a box of papers from her late great aunt, and in that box of papers were the original amended proofs of the personally influential story I had spent years looking for!

*

“Of course!” said Granny Hawkins.

Of course.

*

In a matter of days I has gone from the ritual despair of an annual fruitless, futile search, to not only having the story and the book – but to also seeing the actual manuscript of the story I had spent forty years thinking about and about thirty years searching for.

This was a wonderful, extraordinary turn-of-events.

*

Two things can perhaps be said by way of a conclusion to this story.

The first is that we should be wary of the mischievous demons of our own age – that is ChatGPT and Artificial Intelligence – and to renew our trust in the Noble Professions who hold the old knowledge and skills: librarians, archivists, cataloguers, and indexers.

The second is that nowadays the real problem perhaps is not with Christmas decorations staying up too late, but with them going up too early, and with shops selling Christmas wares and playing Christmas music well before Advent, let alone Christmas.

We need new cautionary tales about when such things should be done and not done.

We are going to need some new goblins.

*******

I am very grateful to the heirs and holders of the literary estate of Ruth C. Paine for their kind permission for me to publish “Twelfth Night Till Candlemas” and “How Nip spent the winter”.

Editors would do well to contact Vicky MacKenzie to arrange permission to put her great aunt’s stories in new anthologies.

I am also grateful to Vicky MacKenzie for her kind permission to publish the unpublished corrected manuscript of “Twelfth Night Till Candlemas” and the unpublished photograph of her aunt..

Many thanks to Charlotte who not only found the story, but dealt with many follow-on queries.

Many thanks also to my friends who listened to previous versions of this post.

This post is dedicated to one of these friends, Nick, who is currently dealing with a challenging time – and who has also listened to me go on about story-telling for over thirty years. Poor sod.