To Rebecca, with love and gratitude
PROLOGUE: SUMMER’S END
The last days of August were beautiful and the nights ethereal, glowing long after sunset. In Wales, on a glittering morning of dew and high whisks of cloud, the sun hot, Mum and I walked in the meadow by the stream, Apollo running circles and barking as if he were still young.
‘The Russian proverb goes, “Life is not a walk across an open field”,’ I said. ‘But it is sometimes.’
My mother, hugely smiling, repeated, ‘It is sometimes!’
We looked at the hill, our mountain, rearing over the valley. ‘The bracken is on the turn,’ she said. Pale ribs like shadows ran under the green ridges.
We agreed we loved this change of season. The swifts went weeks ago. I saw them on an afternoon that was steamy with rain, hunting over the valley, twenty, thirty, and I knew they were going. Swifts come and go like spells. I watched them keenly, lucky to witness them just before they went. It is not the same with swallows: all over Europe and Eurasia watchers look up one day, or pause in thought, and realise that the swallows have gone. We all know what it means.
It is early September now, back in West Yorkshire, where I live with Rebecca and the boys (our son Aubrey, five, and Robin, his brother, sixteen), and I am looking for the swallows. I have seen them go as late as October in Wales, but here in the North of England I have never marked the moment. Two days ago I thought they must have gone; Rebecca has seen none either. Then yesterday, coming back from the seaside – the coast of Lancashire, a-dive with kites and aglow with sunburn – I saw some from the train, two or three over a stubble field, and cheered.
The train was old and packed. We could have been in Bulgaria, with the heat and the flushed faces and the children crammed between us; but at any time and in any country it was unmistakably one of the last trains on the last weekend of the summer.
This week the schools go back and the new year, the working year, begins. September is easy to love. I feel alive in the weather, in the light and the colour. Aubrey and I looked at the leaves this morning. On the Buttress, the wooded hump of hill which fills the view from this little house, the solid green is gone. Now there are many greens, all of them riching or fading.
‘Soon they will be yellow and red and orange and brown and gold,’ I said. ‘And then the leaves will fall.’
The first blew off the trees last weekend. If it were followed by spring or summer, I would love autumn unreservedly. Even the absence of the swallows and swifts and martins would be fine: they will come back, and they must go if the world is still to turn. But for all its gilding, I shrink slightly at autumn, as if I too lose leaves and thin, because I have come to fear winter.
Now it is after midnight on September 5th, my birthday. There are tiny black midges biting me in the attic; they are doing very well still and it is too muggy to keep the windows closed. It was a day as hot as July, yellowing greens like moulding broccoli and vapour greys, a wonderful thick, warm atmosphere, and I am thinking about winter. I loved the winter, with its miracles and Christmas colours, for years. Through school, through university, through first jobs, proper jobs, through years abroad and in Britain again, I relished it as I did all the seasons. Only in the last three or four years, here in the North, have I begun to admit that winter is tough. There is the weather: the black rains make you feel you are living in a tunnel under the sea, the roof leaking downpours; there is the enclosure of the moors, turning you in on yourself, shrinking the scale of life to a few small rooms, the dank and the dirty trains. There is the absence of light and the feeling of living in an ugly country, streaming roofs, weeping windows, dank inside and out. All over the North we experience these sensations which gather and spread like damp. In Wales the skies set in, ‘crows-on-posts weather’ my mother calls it. Commuting in London is weeks, months, of grease-water running down the steps of tube stations, and buses like Louis MacNeice’s ‘Charon’:
. . . at each request
Stop there was a crowd of aggressively vacant
Faces, we just jogged on . . .
Last winter I thought I would go mad with depression. I was mad, but aware-mad, at least. Sometimes I hung out of my attic window, staring at the Buttress and the sky at the end of the valley with incredulity, waiting for the awareness to go and leave me raving.
It was nothing inexplicable: depression brings fear, entrapment, fault and failure wherever you look. The book I was writing seemed awful and I could see no hope: if I cannot write, I cannot support my family, cannot be the father my son deserves – so the narrative goes. It is not fair to blame the winter, but it does set the stage so well, with its clamped-down rains, its settled and introverted darkness, its mean ration of light, its repetitions.
But this year will be different, it must be different. This book is to be a torch raised against it. I will take it down in notes and diaries. I will embrace this winter like a summer. I will try to see this little shard of the North as I would an unknown country. I will pay attention. Depression kills your power of vision, turning you fatally towards yourself, but I will practise looking and looking outwards like an exercise, as though I am training for an expedition. Mountains make sense in any weather. The voices of a wood always speak consolation: the trick is to resist the psychological deafness, that bung of jeering voices clogging the inner ear. Beware that glaze which creeps over the inner eye, blinding you to the brightness of moss in rain. I will not lose touch with nature. This is vital. I believe in immanence, in the oneness of living things. Maintaining that faith will carry you through the hardest times. Or such is the hope, this midnight. I start my birthday with many wishes, and this is one.
16 OCTOBER
Last week I saw two swallows, halfway down Wales, fine-tailed birds flicking against the wind, hunting. Late-breeding adults, they will have raised two broods. On their way now and travelling, they will not really stop anywhere long. In a month or so from now they will be around the Congo and Cameroon, twinning the world, linking every raised head and every eye that sees them. Today was astounding, courtesy of ex-Hurricane Ophelia. There was a pink Chinese silk balloon sun in a mustard sky. It looked like a portent, if not the apocalypse. And I saw a hobby! They should be gone, but she seemed large and fit, slicing over the town. If you can catch swifts in level flight you can catch anything, and there was plenty around. A sparrowhawk was up there too; it mock-attacked a pigeon which burst out of its tree in a fluster. All the birds seemed to be up, riding the currents. Later the sky cleared; there was sun and tremendous wind in a blue rush over the moors. It was a pale-white whirl of light over the plain towards Manchester and Liverpool and Wales. I turned my face to hot sun-wind (we had sun-rain a few days ago, when it seemed to be raining light) and watched jackdaws in storms over the high woods, rolling in black sparks on the breakers of the sky.
I take down these moments in the middle of driving, commuting or ferrying the family, consciously sealing them into the visual memory. ‘Look hard! Take a picture with your mind,’ I say to Aubrey as we practise his letters. It works.
17 OCTOBER
The first sniff of winter! There was a hardness about the white dust in the lines of the road-stones, and there was that smell, a coldness. Winter colours came suddenly, in slightly slanted light. I shivered. It was warmer later, but for the first time in months I chose thicker socks.
20 OCTOBER
On Wednesday afternoon in Liverpool the Anglican cathedral seemed to float, to lean back, to descend. I teach Creative Writing in the city, two days a week in university term time. I love to teach, and I have colleagues I adore. The trudge to work and back is vicious: over two hours each way on trains, but when the weather is kind you arrive in Liverpoo
l’s clear air to sea light and gull cries. Now the colours were pure winter. Grey as glumness. Kerb-coloured sky, and about the buildings a hard pallor. There were three tiny luminous figures like money spiders on the cathedral tower. ‘It’s like a climbing centre,’ my friend Jeff Young said.
You rarely meet a man as beloved as Jeff. A playwright, screenwriter, essayist, performance artist and gentleman of letters, Jeff is tall and very thin, mercurial and gentle. He believes in love and magic, in always learning. He says things like, ‘I never had a job until I was sixty,’ and he reads generously, constantly, always looking for the good in a work. His heart is huge: he carries all of us in the department, staff and students, because he lives the example of what an artist is and what a good man is – intensely kind, aware, curious and paying attention. Jeff has a rebel’s sense of justice and injustice, history and change. He believes in and practises the artist’s role in disruption and radical engagement. He is almost physically appalled by bullshit of any kind, which makes his relationship with the managerial jargon and culture of the university machine entertaining to witness. ‘I’ve been sent this email, right,’ he will begin, incredulously, and then his eyes will meet yours over the tops of his glasses and you will both start laughing. Thank God for Jeff Young.
Jeff, like me, is seasonally sensitive. He loathes Christmas as much as he loves his family and being with them. They are going to Prague this year. Movement and change are good remedies.
Studies have found Seasonal Affective Disorder affects around 6 per cent of the population of the United States, with another 14 per cent experiencing a dip into winter blues. It varies with latitude, of course, so in Oslo rates are much higher, approaching 15 per cent. Victims sleep for an average of two and a half hours longer than they do in summer, and they struggle to get up. They eat more, particularly sweet and starchy foods. They have difficulty concentrating and withdraw from family and friends.
An expert in the field, Norman Rosenthal, pins the condition to lack of light. People with a genetic predisposition, he found, may experience the same symptoms at any time of year if they work in basements or windowless offices. The building where Jeff and I work might have been designed to induce it: gloomy, crushing architecture, with windows that seem to repel light rather than attract it, where the available food is a combination of starch and sugar. We loathe it, the students loathe it; when we discovered that it stands on the site of the Liverpool workhouse, we decided the psychogeography of the place must have something to do with its miserable atmosphere, as if the desperation of old souls seeps up through the floors.
22 OCTOBER
It is early hours of Sunday morning, rocked and thumped by Hurricane Brian. Why do they goad the winds with these comical names?
For the last three days there has been wind strong enough to snap thick branches and the leaves are falling in armies. I worry it is going too fast, this high autumn. Alarming bareness strings through the trees, between all the leaves of couple-colour. The raptors have been up; everything has been up. Pigeons riding the gales like fat darts; buzzards, kestrels, jackdaws of course, missile-tip starlings and gulls, gulls, gulls.
The drive down through Wales in the teeth of Storm Brian was wonderful today. Flags and sails of cloud that should have been horizontal blew diagonally, filled like spinnakers, and they were all colours: mauve and torn grey, scratched pale blue and wuthering white. It was as though the wind was the souls of the dead, from Shelley to machine-gunned Liverpool Pals to Leonard Cohen, ganging up like rowdies, commandeering taxis, racing through the air.
25 – 30 OCTOBER
The end of October flicked from joy to horror as quickly as you turn a page. The 25th was a luminous day. I was coming to the end of teaching on a writing course at Ty Newydd, near Llanystumdwy. My co-tutor, Jon Gower, has the rosy face of a young wizard who will one day be impossibly old. You have never seen eyes brighter or more mobile. His voice is the most beautiful Welsh instrument. It says things like, ‘I know of a woman who was the last person in Montgomeryshire to hear fairy music.’
In a trade in which extreme productivity is only slightly unusual, Jon is a constant forge of books, articles, poems, short stories, fiction, essays and monographs. We spark and light each other. We go at the teaching all-out, and our students are a treat; it is one of those miraculous courses where the experience and the curiosity in the room are dizzying, where humour and openness rule the week, where the whole group flies forward into reading and understanding and writing.
In convoy we drive to the end of the Llŷn peninsula, where the cliffs scoop down to the sea. Bardsey, the isle of saints, seems to float on the seven currents which beset it.
We get the writers to describe Bardsey, to paint in large strokes. We have them study the starred colours of the hedges and render the minute world in detail. We watch choughs and ravens, gulls and rock pigeons. The light is almost indescribable, a great flaring silver-gold kindled between the sky and the sea, a singing, blinding beauty.
‘If you want to find God,’ Jon says, ‘you just have to come here and look, don’t you?’
We return, our spirits lit bright by the day.
I feel joy and hope, and love for Jon, and deep gratitude for these days, these days of life. This is the happy time, I tell myself. I am superstitious about happiness. I worry that too much celebration of immanence, of God-goodness and life force, invites its opposite. Some pagan part of me believes that too much light draws darkness.
After dinner, the whole party of us in celebratory mood, I open a message from a friend, Dai Morris, with whom I was at primary school in Wales.
Please pass on my apologies to your mum. I saw her this morning and had to pass on some bad news regarding her sheep which had been attacked by a dog (presumably). As I drove by there were two maybe three dead ones and a few very badly injured. It was a horrific scene and one that I really feel for her having to deal with. It wasn’t the time to have a chat so please pass on my sympathy. All the best, Dai
There comes a nauseous thump in the gut, and the sudden, hard drum of the heart as the world narrows, my vision tunnelling. I call home. My mother’s voice normally is full of intelligence, curiosity, life and playfulness. Now she sounds twenty years aged, a wavering old lady adrift in confusion.
‘Badger-baiters,’ she says. ‘They set the dogs on them. The vet’s been, she put three down. We think they killed Sorrel with a fence post.’
‘I’m coming,’ I say, ‘I’m coming. I’m on my way. I will be there very soon.’
‘Drive carefully,’ she says, ‘please drive slowly.’
At first, I do drive very slowly. Think clearly, I tell myself, be calm. You must be very calm. No accidents, no mistakes.
Carefully, numbly, I drive to Criccieth, to Porthmadog, to Dolgellau. It is a still and misty night and cold, as if autumn is out there in the dark woods, whispering with winter. At Dolgellau the roads empty. It seems just me and the car, crossing a deserted Wales. Somewhere in the twisting passes between Newtown and Llandrindod a rage bursts in the pit of me, a howling, violent thing exploding, and the furies come screaming out, and I roar in the car.
My mother is in bed shaking, in shock. I pile on more covers and try to be very calm, very soothing. She had been on a course in the morning, so the two dead sheep and the three savaged and dying animals were not discovered until Dai saw them and found her. She called the vet before going to the field. All the ewes had torn throats, some also had broken legs. Two dogs at least had been used. Just behind the trees of the fence line the badger setts had been dug, three fresh holes – a deal of work, and, if each gave up a badger, lucrative.
This is the season when the sows have cubs: they will fight anything now. A badger sow is worth a thousand pounds to the diggers, who will run the fight in some barn, some shed or quarry. Dogs will be set on her and bets taken. Some clans of these diggers call themselves terrier men, and are associated with hunts. They send a terrier with a tracker on its colla
r into the setts to corner a badger. Following the signal, they dig straight down and lift the animal out.
‘When I went around them last night I noticed one ewe looking at the hedge,’ Mum says, ‘but the leaves are still on and I couldn’t see what she was looking at. That’s where they were, just there. They must have been watching.’
Four years ago she ran a group of baiters off our land. They hurried away, concealing their faces, leaving behind a terrier with a tracker on its collar. Mum took the dog home and called the police. The police made enquiries and told her the men wanted the terrier and the tracker back. They said these were frightening men. They advised her to have nothing to do with them.
The police have been here again today. One, a male constable, did not want to climb over the fence into the field. He was worried about tearing his trousers. The other, a woman officer, managed to cross the fence – my mother, in her late seventies, crosses it every day – and she took pictures. The police told my mother that they had not kept records of the men with the terrier and the tracker. It seems likely they do know the perpetrators: the baiters use certain dogs, pit-bulls crossed with lurchers, which must be hard to miss.
For four years the badger-baiters bided their time, then struck, confident in their impunity. The message is for my mother, first, but for the whole valley, too.
‘It was the way the ewes looked at me,’ Mum says, ‘they’d been waiting so long for me to help them. I will never forget the way they looked at me. The vet put three of them down.’
She has something like a fit while we are talking, a fit of shakes and gasping. I soothe her and talk to her; eventually she calms.
The Light in the Dark Page 1
