The Offing

by Benjamin Myers

  For as long as I had been able to listen, the inevitability of a lifelong career down in the dusty darkness had lurked like a spectre stalking the subconscious, casting a pall over everything. I had first feared the thought but more recently had grown to hate it to the point of stubborn dissension.

  My parents had never even entertained the idea that I might do anything else but join the pit. There were boys I had grown up with who had already done two or three years at the coalface, yet for one so infatuated with fresh air and solitude, the expectation that I would follow my father down the shafts as he had his father before him was the very reason I was walking the lanes of England now. It was an act of escapology and rebellion, yet the ties of the community were still pulled tight enough to make me wonder whether this was merely a short-term reprieve, a first and last hurrah before the dire prospect of knuckling down. I had to at least try to see another world before coal – or, worse, war – took me over entirely.

  Spring revealed itself around me. Many characters I met on the way in those warming weeks: tramps and trawlermen and several travellers of the road. Tinkers or tatters, they were called, who made their money patching up pots and pans, cutting and weaving willows, buying and selling. I once shared a fire with a family of seven who each night somehow crammed themselves into a bow-top vardo towed by a gentle old cob.

  The war’s aftermath was still proving to be kind to those who had skills in the arts of thriftiness and bricolage, though. I encountered land-bound sailors in no hurry to take to the sea again, fruit pickers anxiously awaiting the first flourish of bilberries or blackberries, hops pickers biding their time before heading south for full summer, and men who slapped the roads with huge brushes hoisted from great smoking vats of tarmac; I passed idle minutes with the lost and the shell-shocked, survivors one and all.

  The weather was the key to unlock these conversations with strangers, the English being a nation obsessed with it being too hot or too cold, or too wet, or just not wet enough. Rare it is to hear an Englishman remark upon the perfection of the meteorological conditions or the greenness of his grass, when he knows it is greener a county over. Weather talk is but a veiled code or a currency to exchange, a transaction as a means to moving things along to something more considered once reciprocal trust has been won. This I learned along the way, as circumstance and the practicalities of survival forced me to open my mouth more often than I was used to at home, where most of my interactions with adults simply involved obeying their orders via a series of bovine grunts and anatine honks. An initial sense of loneliness first loosened my tongue, though I soon learned that solitude in the wild was not to be feared; in fact, I experienced frequent and quite unexpected moments of exhilaration at the overwhelming sense of purposelessness that I now had. I go could anywhere, do anything. Be anyone.

  During these dialogues with strangers the war was barely mentioned; that beast stayed buried. It did not bear exhumation.

  In time I tired of the ditches and copses, and felt instead the lure of the sea, so I turned towards Europe, following the road signs that led down through villages that clung to Cleveland and North Yorkshire’s eastern edge.

  Skinningrove and Loftus.

  Staithes and Hinderwell.

  In each I found enough work to sustain me for a day or two before moving on.

  I went to Runswick Bay, Sandsend and then finally entered the town of Whitby with its whalebone archway and vinegar breeze, and across the bay I saw the skeleton of an old abbey perched in silhouette.

  Twice along this stretch of coast I passed planes that had been shot down from skies split by conflict, one a blackened abstraction of flame-twisted metal, its glass melted away in a howling fireball. The second I found sitting in a cornfield with one wing missing, but otherwise intact, its nose coming to rest in the fledgling wheat heads that grew around it now as if it had been idly parked there by picnicking day-trippers.

  Yet there on the tail and the remaining wing were the pernicious insignias of an empire of horror, and scattered around it the debris of death’s grim mission, not yet removed by local lads who had somehow missed this bounty: a contorted propeller blade as long as I was tall and a ragged piece of cloth that I did not dare to pick up. It felt as if the bomber had only come down minutes earlier in a spiralling descent over the irregular chequerboard fields of a foreign land, smoke trailing, death rising up to greet its hurriedly praying pilot, one more victim in the mad folly-dance of conflict. Another ghosted statistic.

  I did not linger here, and soon I peaked the hill of High Normanby and looked down across the grazing slopes of Fylingthorpe, and below it the bay, its waters a beautiful mosaic made from a shattered mirror of emerald and malachite.

  II

  As I passed through fields that ran to the sea, rust-coloured pollen clung to my trousers and created a pattern of motes, and when I brushed it with a thumb it streaked a smudge the colour of coralline, of a slow-setting sun.

  The houses I saw were stout and strong and built from pale Goathland stone. Moor-quarried, weather-worn and red-tiled, they were attractive dwellings, many set in their own patches of land, and quite unlike the soot-streaked houses squashed together into terraces in the tight-bricked villages of home.

  This was agricultural rather than industrial terrain – of the earth rather than stained by it.

  Hedges hemmed me in and I passed herds of cows with udders dangling like party balloons from last Christmas and the occasional horse too, tethered in lacklustre paddocks, ribs showing like the hulls of beached old boats, wide wet eyes searching the ground for something more than stubble. War’s grim legacy had not spared the animals, but so long as their hearts were beating there was hope for these half-starved creatures yet.

  There were also sheep scattered about the hillsides, and in one field was what appeared to be an absurd distortion of a sheep – a strange beast the size of a small horse, with an elongated neck and wool-covered legs, which I would later learn was an alpaca.

  Walking downhill into the gentle breeze that was blowing in from the sea provided sweet relief. The smell of a seasonal shifting was in the air: a fresh green sharpness of wild grasses, juice-filled shoots and rising sap that scented the winding lanes, the hedgerows creating the impression of being in a maze as I chose forks at will and let the great slopes take me.

  My soundtrack was the bleating March-born lambs, now sheep, soon to be shorn. Life was here, it was happening all around me, and in me, and through me in this new season of great growth and beautiful birth, this time of violent teeming.

  Down winding lanes I walked, the sea almost mirage-like in the mind of a young man whose only maritime experience had been a yawning childhood morning spent watching the choppy grey waters slapping at the stone docks of the shipyards of Sunderland.

  Even then my first impression of the sea had not been of the water itself, but that which fed off it and into it: a world of rivets and sparks, of fire and noise, and great grey monstrous structures like steel cathedrals stripped down and tipped sideways, hulking half-finished warships whose brute dimensions were almost beyond comprehension.

  The whisper of the waves had been drowned out by the screech of metal on metal, and the screech of the seagulls suspended high above.

  I remembered nothing of the water itself, only that it had skulked beyond, barely seen, behind the concrete of a dry dock and the shipyard’s metal fencing containing man’s industrious cacophony.

  My father had taken me there on a rare day off; fifteen miles and two long hours by a bus whose upper deck swirled thick with the blue smoke of Players and Capstans. We had pulled crabs from the drab water of the harbour using thick string lines weighted by six-inch nails and baited with fatty knuckles of ham saved from the butcher’s drain. The smell of petroleum and the crabs’ luminescent green shells had been enough to put us off eating them, and we’d tipped the bucketful back into the unctuous water.

  Yet here, only sixty or seventy miles further south, dow
n a coast which I had wandered for many weeks, the shipyards and the coke-blackened waters of Wearmouth were far behind me. The land flowed forward now in a grassy tessellation of fields farmed and grazed, and divided by dusty tracks and densely packed tree-covered glades. Through these shaded, sunken fissures ran tiny arterial waterways, as clear as glass and singing sweetly on their way to meet the lambent salt water of a North Sea that sparkled as if its surface were made entirely from a million-strong shoal of freshly spawned herring.

  There was a different coastal purpose here than in the dry docks and dumping wagons of home, where the sea served as production line to an industry that had profited from war, and the tired tides chipped away at the shortening cliff line with the dull repetition of a mason’s mallet.

  Here the ocean was a gateway, an open invitation, and I accepted it readily.

  I followed trails through whispering meadows and rutted thickets, vaulting stone walls, climbing stiles and passing through kissing gates whose top rungs were worn skull-smooth by the clammy palms of several centuries of passing land workers and hill wanderers.

  I took an even narrower lane that was not built for vehicles, then at a bend in the way the track dipped into a wooded pass and here I crossed a shallow ford by ancient stepping stones where time was once again imprinted by the hollowed curves of hobnailed feet on cold hewn rock. I couldn’t help but wonder if these stones would still be standing in another hundred years’ time, or whether the stream would be poisoned, the old cottages wrecked, the pastures overgrown like neglected cemeteries. Would, I wondered, another war consume it all?

  I was following an ancient network of paths, each a winding groove carved into the arid brickearth, a notching of time.

  Deep down in the cool dark throat of one such subterranean route I saw a badger sett burrowed into the dirt bankside and surrounded by mounded heaps of impacted soil. Dry, they rose to six or seven feet in height in places. These sculpted slopes led into winding chambers embellished with freshly scratched claw marks. Here were hieroglyphics, a wordless poetry of sorts, and close by clear patterns of tunnelling runs led away through hedge gaps and into the long grass of the surrounding pastures. The vast sett’s passages must have run for forty or fifty feet in any direction, pressing deep into the tenebrous domain that had been colonised by this enigmatic animal for generations. They were portals to the kingdom of these fascinating creatures.

  As the sun shone down in a series of shafts to the dry pressed earth and highlighted the claw-mark calligraphy, I paused for a moment, aware that I was more than likely close to a family, asleep down in their earthen bunkers, the outside world muted.

  I took a swig from my flask but found it empty.

  I noted the location, then crawled beneath a fence to cross an open field, trudging shin-deep in waxy grass, through which the incoming sea breeze gently whistled. Guided only by gravity’s pull of the downhill camber, I soon met another track, and then turned left off it.

  Something drew me down that lane even though it had the appearance of leading to a dead end. This was to become one of those moments when life presents a new path whose importance may only be fully understood in years to come.

  A hundred yards on, the lane narrowed and I came upon a cottage butting up against what had now turned into a rough track pitted with ruts and gouged-out ankle-turning hollows.

  The house was built of local stone and was covered by a Virginia creeper that clung to it like an octopus to a rock in a storm, its tangled vines reaching tentacle-like around corners. I came upon the house from the rear and traced the strangulating plant’s root as it rose from the ground to run around the side of the building, its leaves fluttering in succession when a light breeze ran across it.

  It appeared as if in a dream.

  The lane ended at the side of the cottage, beyond which was nothing but a jungle of scrubland. In front of the house I could see a garden that held a small terrace of cracked paving stones, a lawn and a vegetable patch trimmed with herbaceous borders, all contained by a crooked wooden fence whose bubbled white paintwork had been blistered, chipped and sanded away by the salty air.

  The garden was a small semi-colonised corner of a wild downhill-sloping meadow that directed the eye to the sea a mile or so away, hedges and trees on either side framing it in the manner of a Romantic painter’s viewfinder.

  Several bird tables were busy with a variety of tits and finches, robins, chiffchaffs and blackcaps, and I watched them for a moment, silent and unseen, until three circling crows descended, their shadows crossing the sun before they dispersed the feast with mercenary efficiency, and I noticed then that crafted beneath the overhanging eaves of a red-brick outbuilding that adjoined the house were two nests of clay and feather, the homes of wrens in residence, shaped like thrown bowls fresh from a potter’s wheel.

  It was then that I heard a snarling; a low growl like an engine turning over. The sound of phlegm and flesh. Throaty.

  I looked over my shoulder to see a large German shepherd poised like a sprinter awaiting the starter’s gun, its alert ears pinned back and tail pointed like a wireless antenna. His seeking eyes were fixed on the prize: my wrist. I did not move.

  This brutish-looking hound stared, the wet flesh of his top lip peeling back to show his elongated incisors and the brilliant pink-and-black marbling of his gums and palate. He growled again, a low curdle. Meaty thunder.

  ‘Butters,’ said a voice as a woman straightened to full length from the thick meadow scrub beyond the garden fence. She turned towards the dog, and then to me. ‘Oh, there you are.’

  The familiarity of her greeting, spoken as if I had just popped away to boil a pan of water, or twist some carrots from the ground, caught me off guard. I assumed either her eyesight was failing, and she had mistaken me for someone else, or that she was talking directly to the dog. Perhaps she hadn’t even seen me at all and any moment now her husband or son – a muscular countryman with arms like hams and an unhealthy suspicion of uninvited strangers – would emerge from an unseen potting shed to take out all his prejudices against hedge-mumpers and ditch-dwellers like me, a slight wandering lad from the ash-coloured coalfields.

  The lady was tall, edging six feet, her posture defiant and unapologetic, proud, which only made her appear taller, and stately too.

  Her face was angular and catlike, her cheekbones defined and her jaw strong. Her mouth appeared wide – almost too wide for her face – and also feline in its slight upturning at the edges. It suggested a smile suppressed.

  I could not accurately have guessed at her age for the young always judge anyone over forty to be old, but I could see the earlier version of her within immediately. It was there in her eyes, and in her movements too. Though her clothes seemed impossibly out of place – Victorian, perhaps – there was a lightness to the way she moved towards me, her gait nimble and seemingly untroubled by either the weight of ageing or the threat of a sweating stranger.

  ‘Get by, Butters,’ she said, and at this the dog lowered himself to the ground and rested his head on his paws, but with his eyes still trained on me. ‘He’s all mouth and no trousers,’ she continued. ‘He just likes to greet visitors in his own way.’

  I found my tongue fumbling for a response, but whatever it was I attempted to say came out as a dry, surprised croak. A parched rasp.

  ‘I call him Butler, for obvious reasons,’ she continued. ‘Butters for short – though of course “Butters” is, in fact, a longer word.’

  My thirst suddenly apparent, I swallowed and tried to summon saliva to lubricate the words that would not come. ‘I just came down the lane,’ I said by way of a clumsy explanation.

  ‘Yes, I expect you did,’ she said. ‘You would have had to – and from somewhere far beyond it, judging by your accent, which, if I’m not mistaken, has something of the pitmatic twang about it?’

  I did not then know that ‘pitmatic’ was the name given to the dialect of those who lived in the colliery villages of the Nort
h-East, nor that I even had an accent at all. As I tried to speak, though, I was aware that all of a sudden my tongue felt thick in my mouth. It was errant, and the muscles around my mouth felt beyond my control too. Nothing came.

  ‘Well, anyway,’ she continued, ‘you’re just in time for tea. Will you have some?’

  I managed to muster a reply. ‘Tea?’

  ‘Yes. A cup of. If not more.’

  If my accent was that of an outsider, then this lady’s was not one I was used to hearing either, and more like that of someone you might only ever hear on the wireless. It was a far cry from the clipped sing-song dialect of the coalfields I grew up hearing.

  ‘If it’s not any trouble.’

  She shrugged. ‘It’s no trouble for me so long as you fetch the nettles.’

  ‘Nettles?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘We’re having nettle tea. Do you take it?’

  I hesitated, then shook my head. ‘I always thought nettles were poisonous.’

  ‘Poisonous? Of course not. They might sting, but that comes only from the tiny hairs on the leaves and stems, which act like tiny needles. When boiled they soon become ineffective.’ She paused. ‘Your reticence is to be expected. Folklore has taught us to fear this weed; to me it is a friend. It began out of necessity, this nettle habit of mine, but I’ve found it’s as good a quencher as any, and you look like you’re spitting feathers.’

  ‘I am rather thirsty, missus.’

  ‘Well, then. But you’re not to call me “missus” if you’re going to linger.’ The woman stepped towards me and extended a gloved hand. ‘If you must call me anything, call me by my name: Dulcie. Dulcie Piper. This earthy formality is endearing but it’s not necessary.’

  After weeks of rough sleeping, I was suddenly aware of my appearance, which despite following my mother’s wishes was surely shabby. But if she noticed, Dulcie didn’t remark upon it.