It is Saturday, market day in Saffron Walden, and several Rolls Royce and Bentleys are parked around the common. “The owners aren’t here for the market,” local resident Amy Fortescue tells me. “Or for our fine selection of artisan shops and cheeses. They’re here for the Saffronium.”
Amy is head of ARSE – Association of Residents against Saffronium Exploitation.
In 1530 Lady Audrey Bellman-End invented the Saffron Crocus as a yellow dye and condiment. Unfortunately, it also proved to be a powerful hallucinogen which became known as Saffronium. This expensive drug quickly became popular with the aristocracy.
For hundreds of years, an air trade in the drug ran from Audley End Airport. Stately homes and manor houses around England regularly received air drops of the drug. However, the production of Saffronium was intensive. It used underpaid peasants from surrounding towns and villages, and in 1986, the Great Essex Peasant Rebellion ended Saffronium production.
I walk with Amy into Walden’s bustling market. It looks like any other Saturday town market. Young couples, families, elderly folk and children. At a cheese stall, people are getting their mouths around the formidable Essex Knob, with its signature purple veins.
“There,” Amy suddenly says. I follow her gaze to Butcher Row, where a middle-aged couple wearing tweed stand awkwardly. “Aristocrats,” Amy says. We watch as they’re approached by a well-dressed woman in her mid-thirties. She wouldn’t look out of place in an over-priced farmer’s market. A discrete exchange is made. “That,” Amy tells me, “Is a classic Saffronium drug deal.”
“They will usually go back in their cars and drive home to take the drug,” she tells me. “Sometimes, though, we find them in the bushes on the Common or in Audley Park. It’s not a pretty sight.”
“Saffronium is taken anally,” Dr Pete Redish, a local GP, tells me. “The deeper the Saffronium is inserted into the anal cavity, the more intense the hallucinations.”
Traditionally a pole fashioned from West Indian Mahogany was used to push the Saffronium deeper into the user’s back passage. Sometimes, though, desperate users resort to other means.
“We’ve seen folks using thick oak branches snapped off the trees on the Common,” Dr Redish tells me. “We once had to rush a Lord to hospital after he used a branch so thick it became lodged in. A local resident found him in Swan Meadow car park, high as a kite and struggling to climb into his Bently.”
Dr Redish tells me that the Common was littered with used sticks and branches during the eight-day weekend this year.
Amy has called the police. “I want to report a Saffonium deal in the town,” she tells an operator. We discreetly follow the middle-aged couple as they walk through Rose and Crown Walk and to the Common car park, where they are intercepted by two police officers.
At the police station, the middle-aged couple and their dealer are processed. DC Rob Banks tells me that Walden has seen a surge in Saffronium production since the cost-of-living crisis began.
“We’re seeing middle-class families struggling to pay the bills growing vast quantities of the Saffron Crocus to make Saffronium. It takes 500 crocuses to make a single hit. Growing the Saffron Crocus isn’t illegal but making and selling Saffronium is.”
The 30-something dealer, we discover, is a mother of two. She and her husband, who works in the City, struggle to pay their mortgage. She tells me that a single hit of Saffronium brings in £1000, enough to pay for one dinner party and power a 62-inch TV and surround sound system for a month.
Charges are pressed against her. However, the middle-aged couple in tweed appear to have friends in high places and are let off without caution.
“There hasn’t been one conviction of a user,” Amy tells me as we return to the market. It is late afternoon, and the market is shutting down. “The aristocracy, they’re all at it. It’s inbred.”
As I return to my car in Swan Meadow car park, I see an elderly man dressed in tweed emerge from the tree line bordering Audley Park. I watch as he drags a long, thick branch into the back of a Landrover Defender, and I wonder. “Is that going to be used for firewood or Saffronium?”
Paige Turner
Journalist. Walden Times Newspaper
Read about the history of Saffronium in Issue 1 of The Walden: A Silly Zine About Saffron Walden
