The Light in the Dark

by Horatio Clare

  Slept with a clench in my gut.

  17 FEBRUARY

  And then a new day, blue and hopeful. Frieda the dog and I set out for the obelisk on a bluff above the wood. A thin squirrel scratted up a beech tree and there were birds moving everywhere, blue tits, great tits, blackbirds, and, when we reached the top, a buzzard. A couple stood on the path, paused in the wood.

  ‘A lovely day at last!’ said he.

  They were an unusual pair: white-haired, jolly, not from around here, sharply assessing in their gazes. In my madder moments I would have them down as angels to my devil.

  ‘Yes! Do you think it’s still winter?’

  He took a breath and grinned. ‘Not today!’

  She laughed.

  ‘Enjoy your walk,’ he said, firmly.

  We are superstitious about the season’s turn. You might wish it early but you would not call it too soon. Conditions in the ‘Long Winter’ of 1962–3 were described by the Manchester Guardian in March 1963: ‘Troops relieved a farm on Dartmoor, which had been cut off by twenty-foot snowdrifts for sixty-six days.’

  The view from the obelisk swept across the treetops to Heptonstall, the church above the Buttress, and beyond that to Stoodley Pike, and the fields rising to the moor tops and the sky. A haze-like shaken dust filled the valleys, and the sunlight seemed old, as though it had fallen out of the leaves of a book. On the high fields the snow lay along the hedgerows, and there were horses in blankets grazing pale turf, and sun glinting off weekend cars, and the trees bare on all horizons, and light like silver webs on the near fretwork of the birches. The buzzard rose from below, rocking his wings up the unsteady air.

  This! This! I thought. How did I let myself fall so far from this? All I had to do was hold it in my heart, take it as love, and give it as love. It is not so hard.

  With my back against the obelisk, where the names of the war dead face the sun, I stood for a long, slow while. The Book of Common Prayer came to me unbidden. ‘I have sinned against you in thought and word and deed, through ignorance, through weakness, through my own deliberate fault. I am truly sorry and repent of all my sins.’

  You cycle around how honest is your repentance, how true your sorrow. Up there, in the tentative sun, I could hear no false note. I was as frightened as I had ever been. Sometimes it is like watching horror unfold across the sky in slow motion, while you stand paralysed in a dream.

  Rebecca and Aubrey came back, and Robin later, and we had a lovely night. There was ease in the house like grace. I made the boys laugh and we all talked at once. Aubrey showed us his kicks after supper. (He is a red-belted ninja tot, learning discipline, self-control, respect and self-defence at the behest of a booming Black Belt, Master Ogden, who combines a spiritual air of uprightness and clean living with a commanding roar.)

  If this winter gives me kindness and grace to give to them, then it will be a blessing.

  19 FEBRUARY

  Yesterday was a day of absolute grey stillness. In the afternoon Aubrey and I went walking. Under the cloud the world was perfect soft tranquillity. We held hands and talked of many things: our favourite animals; which dinosaurs we would be; Aubrey’s imaginary puppy – name of Ace, colour white – and his current interest in what we are going to be after we die. He selected a weaver bird, or maybe a ‘marine reptile’. In his mind these are bigger than plesiosaurs, of which he is also fond. I chose a whale. The valley was a fecund wreckage. You could almost see the nutrients scattered across the turf. The merest change in temperature now, the slightest spark of light, would fire the green fuses. The snowdrops were amazing, gorgeous white bells, fat as pearls in the moment of their perfection, hope incarnate.

  ‘Look, Aubrey!’ I said. ‘Snowdrops! Spring will come.’

  ‘Snowdrops!’ he said, delighted with the word. ‘What is spring, Daddy?’

  Wood pigeons leaped up from a field below us and we discussed the eyes on the sides of their heads and the positioning of eyes on antelopes and sheep, versus on humans and other carnivores. In town he pointed at the ducks. They had eyes on the side of their heads!

  Not winter and not spring, and warmer, and just now the tawny owl outside, a male: Whick! Whick!

  Today the snowdrops have begun to open their petals, slowly lifting white arms from their sides like ballerinas. The first honeybee appeared, flew into the attic and caught its foot on an old web. I helped it out; it went and came back. Midges dancing, but more cold prophesied. A huge bell of warm air has lifted off over the North Pole, altering the jet stream.

  Mum has had two old sheep die on the mountain; ‘I like it when they die at home,’ she said, ‘no fuss.’ One body was down to white bones in two days, the foxes, ravens, crows and buzzards banqueting.

  Frieda and I went up to the obelisk at sunset, a red flash under a soft lid of cloud. As I carried Aubrey on my shoulders later, he wondered how ducks sleep, where water comes from and why we can’t fly. A thrush called at twilight, the notes bringing the air to them so that the evening seemed to listen, and the thrush paused, listening to the quality of silence it had summoned to hear its song. Ducks flew up the valley in the gloaming, three together, flighting for the woodland pools.

  20 FEBRUARY

  A flying blue morning, England turned out in her winter best. Everything seems to rejoice under the sky and a sun warm for the first time. A Canada goose washes himself in the canal, plunging head and neck under, ruffling and splaying his wings, plunging again, vigorous with the cold, the light and the water. Two more pass over high up, giving their music to the valley. What wild sound is more wonderful than the turbulent, colloquial cries of geese? A ringing, chiming, honking clatter, it seems to hold such celebration and surprise, as though the world they fly over unrolls new and unsuspected beneath them. Magpies are busy everywhere. I think there is a trick in the old rhyme, ‘One for Sorrow’. You almost never see a solitary magpie, they are compulsively companionable. Single magpies are half-joys: you count them as such and wait for the second to appear. The crow family breed early, as close to winter’s teeth as they dare, feeding their young on the eggs and nestlings of the songbirds.

  The train for London from Leeds has all of this British winter aboard. It was threatened with cancellation because of a fatality on the line near Hitchin, a person under a train.

  Depressive thoughts must be most common in winter, but suicide peaks in the spring. It is not clear why – it is thought the surge in the light and temperature bringing hope to the world exacerbates the victim’s isolation. We run south on time towards the scene of the tragedy, the train manager making the most of the microphone. His managers have menaced him with the consequences of inadequate information, so he addresses us loudly every few minutes. ‘We are heading into uncertainty,’ he says, and reprimands seven individuals standing in vestibules: ‘Completely unnecessary,’ he stresses, there are 183 available seats.

  I wonder who it was at Hitchin. He or she walked onto the northbound track.

  The fields are cold-yellow, piebald horses stand together as if waiting for a signal. Sun glints on the trackside stones and I think of Patrick Kavanagh, the inexhaustible wonder of a gravel yard, and Larkin: ‘Where can we live but days?’ We live in overlaps, normally, between hopes and anticipations, and present business. Our minds filter and tint the past, turning it so it catches the light; most involuntary memories are happy ones, most of the time, and so we are granted forwardness and direction. Depression, seasonal and otherwise, turns all this upside down: the past is a guilty place, the future a hanging threat, the present a humiliation. Stop it, you want to shout. Just stop it. Let me be.

  Beyond the windows the light holds promises, hints of hope. The silver birches sing light back to the sun. Coots, tufted duck and mute swan bob on the lake wash of an east wind, bullrushes behind them flexing gold and feathered. On a fifty-acre field a hundred rooks feed and forage, walking into the wind. A joy of magpies rush a buzzard, all three of them low, hedge-height under the air. A solar-p
anel farm gazes darkly at the clouds, its feet in water. In a hundred flat miles in the middle of half-term there is not a child outside; a man talks to two Labradors at a field’s turn, lecturing them, as they raise their noses and wag their sympathy. Pylons march into a westering afternoon as a swan beats his wings, stretching tall in a sugar-beet field, as if fanning four companions, snowdrop-white. Starlings! A hundred, no murmuration but a trace, a skipping wisp of a flock over the field’s brow.

  The settlements of the south-east, bald-brick and close-drawn, seem encircled in the wide land. Grantham’s spire gives way to Grantham’s Asda and Jewson and Tesco and Dunelm, High-Street Britain’s bass beat. A raw, boorish day now, the grass greying under a thickening sky. Here are dream-green nitrogen fields, here umber tones in soil turning black as we southern. Dog-walkers pass under wind turbines and sillion glimmers in thick plough.

  ‘We are approaching the area that has caused the delay,’ the train manager says, ‘the area of disruption.’ Earlier he caught himself on the point of saying ‘fatality’ and changed it to the approved ‘railway operating incident’. The deceased is purged from the account – a person, then a fatality, now an incident.

  We pause at Hitchin, as if paying respect, then drift southwards, trains roaring by frantic for the North. Somewhere here, somewhere near the low roofs, in this outskirt town, someone crossed the little fields north of Stevenage – somewhere here. There is a lone magpie, rain spots on the carriage windows.

  Outwardly we pay the world no mind, the winter no mind, and in the carriage a man sneezes and says, ‘Bless me’ in a tired way. And the fields dip and undulate now; to the south-west a yellow lightening and clouds heading up as if for sea, the edge of the lid, London.

  On the way back the train rocks into Leeds, late.

  ‘Better than the way down,’ a man says.

  ‘Delayed?’ asks a woman’s voice.

  ‘Suicide,’ he says. ‘I was on the ten fifteen. It was cancelled. I don’t know why people do it.’

  ‘All sorts of reasons,’ the lady replies, anxiously.

  ‘Horrible way to go. Horrible for the driver,’ he says. Then, with a bitter laugh, ‘The tickets were really cheap so the compensation will be tiny!’

  She says nothing.

  ‘I’m so tired,’ he says.

  You can hear the tearing disintegration of sympathy for the victim, and the exhaustion, the money worry. It is a miniature of a country hardening to cold. The news has no relief for the North: we all know Brexit is going to bring us low. And yet – in Mytholmroyd at twenty-four minutes past eleven, on an over-lit and ghastly train, a tall young man gives two middle-aged women such a sweet smile, a one-corner-of-the-mouth lift of amusement and solidarity, as he makes way for them, and one notices me noticing and grins at me, and you think maybe, just maybe, some deep kindness among us will keep us together.

  22 FEBRUARY

  The cold has come back, a hard gripping. Lyndon, our neighbour, has set up an emergency feeding station, a dish balanced on the wall over the road. The birds are wary but the squirrels keen. At nightfall he is out, running his hand over the cars, checking for frost. ‘Minus one, minus two,’ he says, with satisfaction. ‘I’ve got thermometers inside and out.’

  There is an energising spirit in the frigid night, something perceived by a sense beyond the five, like a sparkle running through the bones. The tawny owls are busy, three at least, conversing.

  Now the power cuts. I dash out to see if it is just us – but it is the world, the world transformed, released into darkness, moonlight, stars and frost. It is the first time I have ever seen our valley as it is in itself at night. Under a half-moon, with the hills’ backs prickled with stars, its character has entirely changed. The dark no longer hunches around the few street lights. It is dimly luminous, stretching and languid, the moonlight a soft sweeping, rounding and gentling the ridges. The constriction of the valley is gone, the silvered fields wide under the mantling moon.

  Candles, you think, and husband the heat, and go to bed before it gets colder. The winter of an older time, suddenly. And the power returns, and you thank goodness, though outside the lights are aggressively bright and the night’s expansive soul has fled, bolting back into the past.

  23 FEBRUARY

  A pale-orange dawn and very cold, the birds slow to sing, their first calls tiny peepings. In hoar frost and sun the valley was motionless, breath held in the wide, pure smell of the freeze. Up into the wood we went, Aubrey poking the runnels, delighted by trapped air bubbles and white-starred ice. He was tremendous this half-term morning, climbing rocks, telling stories about sea planes and snow troopers, whipping through his letters. ‘Which hand is the M in?’ he demanded, hiding two behind his back.

  Later the day hardened, the sun retired behind yellow-tinted clouds I associate with the coming of snow, and the trees stood motionless. The smell of the cold is fierce and distinct, local to each part of the valley. Here it holds hoar-frost grass, rigid moss, sheep fields, cold bark and that emptiness: the olfactory receptors in the nose retreat, leaving the icy flare of absence which is the smell of winter.

  25 FEBRUARY

  The light was astonishing today, the air whitening the sunlight, the cold burnishing the blue, the light like the absence of smell in the air, both bright and bleaching. There seemed to be no dapple, no interplay of shadow and light. In the sun there was a glittering, blintering blaze with a stark radiance in it. Out of the sun the shadows were scoops of cold, like darkness left lying in broad daylight.

  Sometimes I feel as though I am coming back; the will is there, and the hope. Only the ability lags behind them. This ghastly ball of negativity, clamped to my ankle by a chain of self-loathing, follows me around. It is like being stalked by a ghoul. Turn your gaze outwards, I keep telling myself. You do not matter; other people matter, the land matters, the sky and the world. If only you would get out of the way of your own view!

  The landscape has changed again; the snowdrops have paused, the shoots hesitate, the trees stand as if shocked – there is no ebullience in them: they give off a kind of introverted rigidity. They are working at a cellular level, dead cells freezing while the membranes of living cells soften, allowing water to pass into the spaces between them. In lower temperatures the liquid in living cells becomes glassy and viscous, preventing it from crystallising, preserving the cell in a suspended animation. In deep cold the trees become cellular jigsaws of frozen dead and liquid living. Perhaps this nuance of life and death in interplay explains the feeling in these winter woods.

  The country is excited and alarmed, following the weather forecasters who speak slowly, tracing the path of a claw of cold reaching down from Scandinavia, spinning amulets of snow and ice on its wrists.

  Contemporary winter has a distinct and speeding rhythm to it, thanks to advances in forecasting and the accelerating infotainment cycle. Sailors, the keenest weather-watchers, trust a three-day forecast and keep an eye on five to seven days. But a five-to-seven-day forecast is now given with more confidence than caveats: a three-day forecast today is more accurate than a forecast for tomorrow made in the 1980s, and seven-day predictions are now more accurate than five-day forecasts then. Forty years ago, NASA’s computers analysed weather data at a million calculations a second. Its computations now run four billion times faster. The vertical structure of the atmosphere can be measured top to bottom, allowing analysts to read a complete temperature profile, which helps with the hardest prediction: the line between rain and snowfall, dependent on a line of freezing which may be on or far above the ground, which will rise or fall with local conditions.

  When tomorrow’s snow was forecast five days ago the news websites were the first to react, with radio, TV and then the papers following. The system was named ‘The Beast from the East’, and predictions of snow burial and catastrophe were made in the conditional tense. Two days before the first flake the NHS warned of the danger to the elderly, and the Society for Acute Medicine of
the danger to the NHS. Now train companies warn of cancellations, the Highways Agency of poor driving conditions; the nation is told to ‘check ahead’, keep homes at eighteen degrees or more, wrap up, watch for ice. When the snow finally falls, commuters in London are urged to be home by 6 p.m. The media now solicit pictures and stories of the snow, cold and disruption which can be fed back into the narrative.

  The spiral from fact (it will snow) to hysteria (flee for your homes!), from the hopelessly obvious (keep warm) to exaggeration (the beast), from genuine care (the elderly) and quotidian alarm (the trains – again!) to anticipation (yellow alert, amber alert), to crisis (temperatures plummet!) makes a whirling, see-sawing narrative.

  Wallace Stevens saw that ‘One must have a mind of winter’, being nothing oneself, to behold ‘Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is’. The poet offers the idea of winter as nourishment, as stimulus, as a valued time, as part of a sacred cycle in a post-sacred world. To behold it for what it is, to read nothing reflective in it, to hold oneself both part of the cycle and apart from it seems an act of everyday genius (according to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s definition, of holding two opposed ideas in mind and still being able to function) which modernity now imparts and demands.

  The wonderful thing about savage weather is the relief, in nuance, in which it is depicted and discussed. With the world whirling faster towards all its brinks, if you believe the news, there is an honesty, clarity and proportion about the coming of hard weather. There is no schism in it, no enemy behind it, no trick to it, no fault in it.

  As darkness falls, figures in hats and coats make for the Trades Club, where The Vagina Monologues is being staged for one night only. Queues of women, twenty to every man, line up the stairs. Something between a reunion, a demonstration and a carnival comprises the atmosphere; women are hugging, holding hands, laughing, watching and sipping drinks. The auditorium is a curving womb tonight, red-lit, decorated with paintings and designs of the narrow cave, the source of life, and ballooned, and soon warm. Rebecca is performing, shimmering in sequins and stage fright. The first speakers give their lines and immediately voices at the back demand they give them louder. And now they come, the stories of American women of twenty years ago in Yorkshire accent and form. Rebecca is brilliant. She draws the audience to her and has them shouting, reclaiming cunt, or ‘coont’, as she pronounces it, wonderfully. With whoops and applause, with gusts of laughter and standing ovations, with hisses and boos at the villains, with appalled silence at the worst of the descriptions, the hall and the performers become one body. There is no English reserve here, or male self-consciousness. This is something exhilarating, pagan and stormy, the feeling of a time in its tipping. It has been a winter of upheaval, as if a fierce, uproaring force is shattering upwards through rotten concrete. The wit and strength of the performers floods towards the audience, is met and answered. When the performance ends there is dancing, and shapes of women, men and spirits, people who are both and neither, no other thing than themselves, turn and twist under the lights.