Across glittering waters

"Our first ascent in Lakeland, our first sight of mountains in tumultuous array, our awakening to beauty" – Alfred Wainwright in The Outlying Fells of Lakeland

 When you’re at the top of this hill, you can see for miles.

I love being here, especially when I’m alone.  It’s me and the hills and the sky and the wind.  It’s true lovely at this time of the year when everything is coming in to bud and the mist is rising from the ground.  It mingles with the winter wood fires that are still smoking from the chimneys.  The mist always clears my mind.  Grandda always says the sun is new in March, but I’m not sure.

When I was a little boy, the height of the hills used to scare me.  Mammy and Da and Grandda and Nanna would all pull me to the top and I’d cry a like a bab’e.  We’d sit on the stones and we’d take out our picnic and I felt all warm and happy in their love.  It’s funny now that Mammy and Nanna are gone that I remember those times the most.  It’s when we were a proper family and we’ll never get it back.

When Nanna got the cancer, Mammy cried and cried and at school, I drew them both a picture of us on a boat on the lake to try to cheer them up.  Grandda was quiet for weeks.  When we moved into their house by the woodyard, he’d leave the women and me in Nanna’s bedroom.  Nanna would smile and try to talk to me, but you could see she was hurting.  Towards the end, she said there was a black dog in the corner of the room by the dressing table, but there wasn’t.  It was only the chair.

Nanna was buried in Hawkshead when she died.  We all climbed up the path to her grave and everyone cried, but I thought it was so beautiful there.  The daffodils and crocuses were out together and the ground was spread all yellow and purple.  The earth was piled high on top of her coffin and I hoped she didn’t feel too frightened.  As we were leaving to go home, Grandda came to stand beside me.  “There’s a grave waiting for you here, boy”, he said and he smiled.

That night, I cried and Mammy tucked me up in bed.  I remember she stroked my hair and she called me her little man.  “Go to sleep, little man.  I’ll never leave you.  Hush,” she said, “Hush.”

But a few weeks later, Mammy did leave me.  She was to come to my school to see our Easter parade and I waited, but she didn’t come.  Da collected me that day and said Mammy had to go away and would come home soon.  But she didn’t.

One Saturday, when Da and Grandda were home for dinner from the woodyard, I heard them talking at the back door.  They didn’t know I was listening and Da didn’t say much, but when I peeked through the kitchen door crack, he looked sad.  Grandda was taking off his boots and he peered up at Da, sneering, “What did you expect, you weak fool?  She’s gone back to Appleby.  You can’t expect to keep a gypsy bitch in a house.”  I ran and hid in the front room and pretended to watch TV when I saw Da put his hands to his face.

So we got a dog.  Da brought him home from a man in the pub and Grandda shrugged.  He was a tiny bit and so soft and warm in my arms.  I think Da hoped he’d give me the love Mammy had done, that he himself didn’t have the strength to give me and that Grandda didn’t want to give. The dog couldn’t do that, but I loved him for what he was.  I called him Fen and he’s been with me ever since.  When I was sixteen and I went to work with Da and Grandda in the woodyard, he was already getting older; but if a dog could smile, he did every time I put my saw down to eat my sandwiches on the old log by where he’d sleep.

In the woodyard, we had our routine.  Everything had its purpose, we worked with industry and this comforted me.  The smell of the cut timber is always so deep and old and the wood words made me happy.  Cut, saw, plane, buzz, drone.  The saw makes its own music.

When Cassie from the shop asked me to go for a drink with her, I was surprised and pleased.  I’d never been asked out before and never asked anyone and Cassie was lovely with her red hair and big smile.  It had been a chill winter and when I’d taken the van into the town to fetch what we needed, she stopped me by the grocers.  I’d known her from school a few years back and she always gave me her time.  “Little Stephen from the wood yard in the woods”, she said.  “When are you going back to your wood cutter’s cottage?”  But she only teased gently and when she suggested a drink, I arranged to meet her the following night at the bottom of the path that led up to our cottage and the woodyard.

I walked back to the van with a kind of lightness and looked with a new eye at Windermere, the town I’d known all my life.  It was companionable and solid, still huddled up against the late winter.

After work the next day, I told Da about going out with Cassie.  He looked happy for me, but I noticed his expression change when Grandda walked in.  He pushed past Da and seemed to fill the room, standing tall over me.  “Cassie Sanders.  No, not that whore.  I’m not losing another boy of mine to the gypsies.  I’ll never allow you to see her.  You’ll be out of the yard and out of the house if I catch you so much as sniffing round her.”

So, I ran upstairs and grabbed Da’s money from the drawer where he kept it.  I ran all the way to the town without looking back at the house and Grandda and Da.  I noticed nothing other than Cassie not being at the bottom of the path and the flashing red colour in front of my eyes.  I went in the pub I’d never been in and I sat and I drank and I drank and I drank.  I stayed all night until late and I don’t remember getting home, but I remember the feeling of cold, hill air on my face.

As I walked in the house, I could feel the warmth of the woodstove in the kitchen.  Grandda was there on the floor with Cassie underneath him.  I could see the red of her hair in the fireglow and the movement of Grandda’s hips.  He was whispering to her.  “Go to sleep, little girl.  Hush,” he said, “Hush.”

Da was on the settle and I think he was watching, Fen at his feet.  They hadn’t seen me and I stayed behind the door looking at what there was to look at.  I know I needed to be sick with the drink, with the heat, with the sight.  I stumbled up the stairs and heard Grandda speak.  “It’s the skin that does it, always the skin.  Look at it as a type of devotion, son.”  I remember the bare patches on my bedroom carpet as I fell into bed.

The next morning, I woke late and no-one was in the house.  The night before seemed not real and there was nothing to make me think anything was real.  I went to the woodyard and worked alongside Grandda and Da because that’s all I could do.  As the sun broke through the clouds mid-morning, the teeth of Grandda’s saw gleamed and I stopped what I was doing for a moment.  He looked up at me without a break in his regular, easy motion.  “Keep on sawing, boy”, he said, and the sawdust rained like ashes.

They were both still at work the next lunchtime when I’d gone home and the local paper came.  It was there on the front page.  Cassie Sanders was missing.  I went into my bedroom and got the shoe box with my all my special things in out of the wardrobe.  No-one knew it was there, but it contained all the things from when Nanna and Mammy were with me.  All the things we can never give away.  All the things we can never lose.  I reached for the name tag I’d written for my school peg when I was six.  Mammy had said I was a clever little man when I brought it home at the end of the year.  I’d drawn a tree on it so I knew it was mine and underneath it, I’d written my name.  I am Stephen.  I am Stephen.  I am Stephen.

Its reality confirmed mine and so I didn’t go back to the woodyard for the afternoon.  I couldn’t have settled and I wanted to walk in the sunshine.  The sun filtered through the copse at the bottom of the hill and close by, I could hear the endless hum of the saws.  Fen was rooting round in the warming earth, guarding this, his part of the wood.  I saw him begin to dig under the big tree where the path begins to twist upwards.  He dug intently and with purpose.  I got closer and I saw what he was digging up.  Primroses and fingers in the bracken.  I walked back to the house, went to the outhouse and I got the axe.

So, now I’m at the top of the hill, my Orrest Head.  It’s a clear day and I can see for miles.  I name the fells to help me concentrate.  Carrs, Lingmoor, Brim Fell, Great How, Crinkle Crags, Cold Pike.  And always the water, dark and limitless.  I notice the lone figure walking up the path and I know it’s Grandda by the strength of his stride.  As he gets closer, I can hear his breathing and then he’s with me.  “It’s a long way up that hill, boy”, he says, “It’s a long way up that hill”.