It is as cold as it should be, and as the carols start the faces of this singular Pennine town rise, tilt and give voice. This is the only time you see them all. It feels as much like a solstice as a Christian festival. Here are farmers, whose tractors seem to keep the town honest, roaring in muddy splendour down the main street, and the mason-builders, like my friend Mike, whose handshake is a grip like warm stone. There are the locals, like Lyndon, our neighbour, God’s Yorkshireman, whose red MG is the emblem of our lane, and who seemed to take to me straight away because I arrived here from Italy in an old Fiat. Lyndon says ‘brass’ the way only a Yorkshireman can say it. He runs the beaters for the moor shoots, teases Rebecca about coming from ‘that dark place’ (Lancashire) and is the soul of the Blue Pig, the working men’s club in our valley, which looks like a Hobbit inn by the beck.
Here are the ‘offcomers’, crowds of us, who have migrated from the cities for the air, the moors and our children, for the beauty of the skies, for each other – Hebden is an island of Southerners in the Pennines – and the promise of working remotely. Here are the writers, the photographers, the teachers, the lecturers and the BBC crowd who commute to Salford.
And there is Frankie, soft-spoken and pale and watchful, who came from South Africa. ‘I was never safe before I came to Hebden,’ she said. She speaks very quietly. She fled bigotry, not crime. ‘This is my refuge. It’s the best place in the world.’ The town’s lesbian community is famous, and a decisive advantage. ‘Hebden’s full of project managers and alpha women!’ was one of the classic lines to come out of the devastating flood of Boxing Day 2015, when the town rescued itself in a surge of giving, volunteering, donating, organising and rebuilding.
Here is the Trades Club crowd, lined faces and pints and laughter, and here are the smart jackets and boots of the lawyers and bankers whose Jaguars (for the men) and Range Rovers (for the women) sigh them to work in Leeds and Manchester well before the light. ‘Good King Wenceslas looked out’, we sing, ‘on the feast of Stephen!’ And there are to my certain knowledge atheists, pagans, Buddhists, agnostics, theosophists, Catholics, Anglicans and at least one Sufi among us, flushed and loud and even.
Leading our section – which is Aubrey, our friend Dawn, her three children, Ember, Piper and Luna, and Little Frieda (our dog, a black Labrador compiled of love, greed and folly) and me – is Rebecca, her face lifted and lit with amusement and happiness. Rebecca is a tide-race of different currents: intensely community-spirited and also shy, friend and mother, teacher and partner, runner (ultra-runner), forward-directed to an amazing degree, slob and beauty, intensely moral, hesitant sometimes, ferociously qualified and learned. We are singing carols because she loves this ritual. She is a pagan, she says: the kind of pagan who will sing in a Catholic choir, for the fun of it.
Before Aubrey goes up I check that the chimney is ready for Father Christmas. The little boy is bouncing around, springy with thrill. What a privilege it is, later, to wrap presents and hang stockings. Rebecca and I go to bed as excited as the boy. I have caught myself saying, ‘I love Christmas!’ several times in recent days. Rebecca, Robin and Aubrey have given it back to me, after years during which I rather dreaded the downpour of commercial nonsense, and the logistics – Wales and Rochdale, and Robin divided between his father and us, and spare rooms and sofas, and getting back from Italy and then back to Italy on overstuffed trains and aeroplanes.
25 DECEMBER
Christmas Day is sleety and unpromising and no one cares: we have the tree and the lights and torn wrapping paper, toys and clothes and books. We drive over the moors to Rochdale, a mottle of sleets and rains falling.
Jenny, Rebecca’s mother, says she settles down with a book when the sun makes it warm enough to sit outside ‘about once a year’. The house is a sparkle of lights and tints, shining glass and polished cutlery. Christmas Day in Rochdale is a pressing-on of drinks, a turning-out of best clothes, a procession of traditional food – pâté and melba toast to start, always – and a constant, loving mockery.
We are a medley of voices, Rebecca’s soft Lancastrian, her family’s broader Rochdalian, Robin’s Mancunian, my RP and Aubrey’s Yorkshire. Aubrey and his school friends have developed their own dialect: light is ‘loit’, right is ‘roit’ – it is impossible to resist imitation.
The families of Rochdale are serried over the contours of the moors and the town; Jenny and Gerald and their children and grandchildren are sewn into a tapestry of near-family and friends. There is ‘the Cricket’ – the cricket and rugby club – and the schools (Jenny, a governor of the primary where she taught, can name generations of children and their parents), and Gerald’s golf, and the lives of their friends, the aunties and uncles and cousins. These are networks of deep understanding, knowledge and sympathy. Meals and gatherings here unwind over timeless hours of gossip, concern and cross-reference. Auntie Emma is teased about her nights out; Uncle Chris about his looks (he is saturnine, bearing little resemblance to his sisters), which leads to Jenny being teased. Rebecca is teased because she always has a rant about the NHS, through which we all try not to roll our eyes: Gerald was a hospital porter in Rochdale at one point, and Emma is high up in NHS management. I am teased for attempting to cut Aubrey’s hair – he came out of it looking like a tuft of sedge – and Gerald will never miss a chance to mock my Welshness. Robin is teased about his love life (he is devoted to his girlfriend), and then we go around again.
It is a long, gentle day of feasting. There is no tension, no argument. I feel a blissful love for this family, whose culture is so unlike the one I came from. My brother and I were formed on a mountain where our school friends were half an hour’s drive away, our cousins an hour and our father three or four. We were a mighty little army, the three of us, and the dogs and the cats and the mice behind the wallpaper, the sheep and the wild creatures, but we have been diffuse ever since I went to boarding school at eleven, my brother following two years later. Wales is for us a redoubt, a return, our hearts’ land and our mother; a place both memory and wish.
26 DECEMBER
On Boxing Day we drive south and west. The country is upside down to Northerners; they know North Wales better than I do, but the South is a long haul. I relish the drive, alert with the hope of taking Rebecca back into a landscape I have always loved and wanted her to love, and the happiness of bringing Aubrey to his other grandma, Grandma Sally. They have a deep and mischievous connection, and astonishingly similar looks and expressions.
It is not an easy drive for Rebecca because she and Sally have clashed in the past. They will be cordial and kind for as long as they can. At some point, over a mishearing, over politics (they are both left-wing), over education (Sally was a teacher, Rebecca is one), over child care (they are both indulgent and loving mothers), and probably towards the end of an evening towards the end of our stay they will flare. Winter and Christmas bring this trial on them both. They are valiant in their attempts to resist it.
‘Hello Sally! Happy Christmas!’
‘Hello Rebecca! Happy Christmas! Come in luvvie, come in, was it a very long drive?’
‘No-o, it was fine really . . .’
They are, at least, warmer to each other than they have ever been. In a rainstorm I watched them walk uphill together, close in conversation, and my mother put her arm around Rebecca, just briefly, and Rebecca swayed towards her, reciprocating.
‘How are you honeybun?’ Mum asks, her most affectionate appellation. Their joint endeavour to get on is wonderful to witness. Over Aubrey, they are as one.
‘Don’t give it to him now,’ I protest, as Mum produces a thick chocolate cookie after supper, ‘he’s just about to go to bed.’
‘Well I’m allowed to spoil him because I’m his grandma,’ she returns, with a wrinkled nose for me and a twinkle for the child, flourishing a fat fragment.
‘Thank you, Grandma Sally!’ he chirps.
‘Is that most delicious, Bug?’ his mother grins.
‘O
h let it be a child’s Christmas in Wales!’ I wish, and it comes true.
It is cold, properly cold; Rebecca and Aubrey take refuge in the bowed bed of the guest room, while I sleep on the sofa. We need electric blankets and blasting heaters to make the attic habitable the following night. Below the mountain we dream, and I am there again.
The mountain is a white whale and the lanes are lined with ice. The trees have stars in their branches and all the fields sparkle. The night seems to listen to the owls’ carols as the dogs growl in their sleep. The spirits are abroad. It is Christmas. Christmas! Was there ever such a magical word to a child? A word with a world in it, a word containing a silver moon and the crackle of burning twigs, flying things and kings led by stars, berries and gold and pheasant feathers. A word with the darkness of fir forests in it. As a child I knew the spirit world, shapes pushed into the corners most of the year that chased me upstairs, hung around in the dark by the door and lurked under the bed. There were dragons on our mountain and ogres behind the lowering clouds of winter. My mother, brother and I lived close to them all, high above the valley in an ancient farm – we had bats and rats, tame mice and huge spiders; goblins would have been no surprise. But only once in four seasons did the adult world stoop to enter the one we lived in, and what a cascade of marvels there was then.
‘Christmas is coming . . .’ our mother said. Everything was coming. Our father, whom we rarely saw, would come, and Father Christmas, whom we still had not seen, and food, feasts with puddings, which we never had, and presents. We would even, in our aunt’s house, see some television. Indiana Jones, Darth Vader and adverts! We loved adverts.
The advent calendar provided the drum roll and then it was upon us, and at last the grownups dropped their miserable obsessions with school and work and bills and turned to matters of true importance.
‘We’re going to get the tree today!’ our mother said, and we cheered. We lived in the coldest house in the world, but at least we had the biggest tree. It came from old Mr Berenbrock, who had been a German prisoner-of-war interned in Wales and had stayed. Somehow it seemed right that we should get the tree from him, as though peace had just come again and we were still playing football in no-man’s-land.
The tree had tremendous power – spiky and delicate, sticky with sap and that smell, like a strange relative who came to preside over the best day of the year. With the lanes too icy to drive on, we carried it up the hill and dragged it over the meadows. It was the first really green thing the sheep had seen for months and they piled in, ravenous.
‘Oh hell!’ our mother cried. ‘Lift it up, we’ll have to run.’
We dressed it like a god in lights and glass and tinsel. When it was done we turned off the other bulbs and contemplated it, bewitched by its colours and shadows, the infinite and tiny worlds in the baubles and the spaces between its branches.
‘Now for the holly,’ she said. ‘It should be good – as long as the fieldfares haven’t eaten all the berries.’ The coming of the northern thrushes was another sign, like the fire’s embers in the morning, that the great feast was near. Out we went again, to the copse where the fox lived and the pigeons roosted, to do battle with the spiny trees.
‘Why do we have holly?’ I asked, as the prickles jabbed and scratched us.
‘It’s supposed to be to do with the crown of thorns, like the Yule log has become the Christmas tree – Christmas comes from an ancient pagan celebration, a festival of light in the darkness, renewal and birth in the death of the year.’
We were natural pagans, my brother and I, we dreamed of feasting and fighting like Vikings and hoarding treasure (unwrapping presents was the climax of Christmas for us, the bit we knew we should not look forward to most of all but did, and with the stockings it came twice), and we loved the season’s stories. Christmas was a blizzard of stories, a world transformed by their power, and we made no distinction between the ancient and recent. Behind the bulging wallpaper in our bedrooms were Beatrix Potter’s mice, scrabbling and making nests with bits of thread. The back of the wardrobe in the freezing spare room had never been seen, hidden by our mother’s old clothes. Dresses and coats and flares queued in there, packed like bodies in the tube, costumes she never wore now that she was a farmer and single: ‘going out’ meant going out to the sheep. The wardrobe smelled faintly sweet, of unknown things brought closer by Christmas: London parties, her life before, as distant and romantic as frankincense and myrrh. No one could say that a lamp post in a snowy wood and a lion and witch did not exist behind them.
T. H. White’s wolves pressed their red eyes to the keyhole of the front door as the flying Snowman passed high overhead, towing Aled Jones through skies thronged with angels, guiding lights and sleighs; in the mornings there were hoof prints all over the snow – reindeer tracks among the sheep’s droppings.
At Christmas, after we had gone to bed, our mother said, all the animals could talk. The sheep would moan about the cold and the food, of course, because all sheep are always hungry, but I wondered what the old cat hissed at our dog. What a rattle of conversation there must be down there, as the mice compared notes on their ordeals in my trap, a cereal bowl propped on a pencil (I always let them go) and the cat asked the dogs for a quieter year, please, less midnight barking (it was eerie and terrifying when they did it for long, baying like wolves to the moon), and the dogs told wild stories about all the foxes they had nearly caught and the badgerbaiters they had seen off.
The badger-baiters, sheep-stealers, sundry weirdos and the spectral breed my mother called collectively ‘mad bombers’ could all be relied upon to stay indoors on the special night, so only kind spirits haunted our mountain. If the dogs barked on Christmas Eve it was a good sign, not a threat.
I thought of shepherds, even older than our neighbours, on another mountain, wondering what marauder troubled their flocks as the miracle approached. With no television to confuse us with pictures of what was actually happening in Manger Square, all time seemed to roll at once.
The streets of London would be silent, I imagined, except perhaps for one or two men whom my mother had watched, once, laughing and shouting because they had never seen snow. The shipping forecast was the last thing I heard. Out at sea somewhere, Tintin and Captain Haddock sat in the wheelhouse of a rusty freighter wearing paper crowns and sharing a bottle of grog.
The voices from the radio, our only regular visitors, would bring us familiar but honoured guests. Tomorrow, the Pope, speaking in seventy tongues, would wish us peace on earth. Tomorrow, the Queen would say, ‘and a very happy Christmas to you all’ in exactly the tone she was using now with Father Christmas, no doubt, as he laboured up and down her hundred chimneys, filling all her stockings with parcels.
There were two Father Christmases: our own, who was there when we were very young, and who came on Boxing Day after the divorce, and the crabby old man created by Raymond Briggs, who slithered down the chimney, cursing, blooming this, blooming that, no less real for his present-buying partnership with our mother. One year, when our father was still there, I woke in the dark before 6 a.m. and led my brother down to see if He had been. Yes! The lumpy, serpentine weight of stockings was proof that all the stories were true. Anything is made magical when wrapped in an old sock and a myth. The lights went on and our parents peered groggily from their bed as we extracted our treasures.
My brother, in a flurry of enthusiasm, tore into a pack of playing cards, ripping the box in two. ‘Careful!’ I squeaked, sanctimonious prig. ‘Remember the poor Africans.’
‘Oh shucks,’ our father groaned, ‘at least they can get some sleep.’
He cooked a goose that year with the head still on. The eyes turned into raisins and the beak looked like yellow crackling. My mother has not eaten one since.
In the following years, when he came on Boxing Day, our Christmas doubled while our mother’s was halved. He took us away in the evening for a miraculous annual week of shows and television and radiators and lights and
the countless Christmas trees of London, leaving her among the decorations and the torn wrapping paper. She never let us see how it must have felt. ‘I’ll be fine,’ she said bravely. ‘I’ll be just fine . . .’
In the middle of everything, though, between the stockings and the presents, was ‘the point of it all’, as my mother put it, which meant frenzied hair-brushing and a hunt for decent clothes to go with our new jumpers. Church became more engaging as we grew up. The village beauty would be there again, we reminded each other, and there was always a good sermon.
Our rector had something of a druid about him: sacred white hair, deep, bright eyes and the high Welsh voice of a poet. He welcomed us all very warmly, gently wry in acknowledgement of our influx. Sometimes he asked us to think about Light, but the best sermon was on the Word, the Word made flesh, the Word from which all things came. The Word that was God and with God and the same in the beginning: it was hard to follow. As a pantheist and pagan child who had not made up his mind about God, church meant carols and readings, cribs, the journey of the Magi if you were lucky, and Christingles, which were oranges with candles in them. I never expected, at the height of the Christian year, to be gripped or moved by faith, but one midnight Mass it happened.
As we sang and kneeled and prayed, in the third pew the rector’s wife sat or stood, out of time, helped and comforted by her children. Her face was bewildered, strained and confused. She was fast in the grip of Alzheimer’s. They had been battling it, but the fight was nearly lost. The rector loved her with all his heart, and his heart, we could see, was breaking. But he carried on, carrying her, carrying all of us with him, his thin voice wavering as he preached that year’s sermon. The subject, he said, was Joy. He spoke of joy to the world and the need to be joyful, the responsibility on this of all days to feel the joy the Christ child had brought, and the need to spread that joy around us. I do not think I have ever witnessed a man do something so difficult, so brave and so terrible. The rector and his faith were in the furnace before us. And though joy was not, and hope was not, and whether you believe it or not, God was there with him. Even a child could see it.
The Light in the Dark Page 3
