These daughters they walked by the river's brim
A hey ho and me bonny o
The eldest pushed the youngest in
The swans swim so bonny o

I’ve been thinking lately about murder ballads. I asked someone who knows the odd thing what their best guess was as to when they started, and they said 1570. Me, I think they must be some of the oldest songs in existence. A girl dies, and then people sing about it, girls are always dying and who would remember them if not in song. A girl dies, and a murder ballad is born, they change the names and the places but they keep the tune. I reckon this is so the ghost can recognise it on hearing and come crawling up out of a riverbed, a well, a gravel pit, a ditch, from under the floorboards, behind the wall, crowned in flowers like Ophelia, wet clothes heavy and staining the floor that she staggers across, keeping time with the thud of her long-dead feet.

For God our secret dealings soone did spy

And brought to light our shamefull villany

The Wexford Girl becomes the Oxford Girl, is the Knoxville Girl, is a girl who sat behind you in maths until one day she didn’t. There’s a hole in the centre of a murder ballad in the shape of a girl, the kind of void that admits the passage of no light whatsoever.

It was about three weeks afterwards
When that pretty fair maid were found
Come floating down by her own mother's door
On, near Oxford Town

They are deliciously lurid, in exactly the way that delights young girls who I imagine must have been amongst their most eager consumers. I think there is possibly some echo of this in the current popularity of true crime podcasts, but it’s my own girlhood here that I’m thinking of: the tatty paperbacks with shiny metallic raised script on the cover, the very best of which with a cut out oval through which a pale and staring girl face could be seen, passed from girl to girl at the back of school buses. Have you read this yet? It’s awful, what happens to her. Or how, behind the puffy cover of a binder with an orange kitten on the front (which I had promised myself I would definitely use this time, for real, carefully putting class notes and worksheets into it — guess how long this lasted) was a terrible poem which I had copied out from the one another girl had lent me and from which another girl would make her own copy in the rounded hand that in that time was called bubble writing, the one with a little circle above the letter i. This poem had this as its final couplet, more or less:

And on my grave please place a dove

to tell the world I died for love

and some girls even cried a bit on writing that part out, but the kind of crying that delights in itself, where you are standing beside yourself as you do it, watching.

She went to bed crying and lamenting
Lamenting for her own true love
She slept, she dream'd, she saw him by her
And cover'd o'er in a gore of blood.

I have been trying to work out just what the attraction was for us - there was an ancillary passion for the most ghastly horror movies which we watched at sleepovers (Evil Dead! where were our parents?) in which similar indignities and depredations on the bodies of young terrified women were graphically depicted. Perhaps, lacking any other experience, it was just the desire to be loved to the point of destruction; the more it hurt the realer it was. It’s true that by the next year most of us had boyfriends, and some found that love did hurt, but in a disappointing rather than dramatic kind of way, and all these childish fancies lost their glamour.

But why should I fear a nameless grave
When I've hopes for eternity

I can’t help but feel a certain tenderness for those girls who saw a chance to be special and remembered through these artifacts, but I grew to prefer being the writer rather than the written about.

I like to make my own endings.

I have quoted from several murder ballads throughout, feel free to google them, knock yourself out.