Ring the Hill

by Tom Cox

  My mum knows very well where I’m from, since she played a not insignificant part in making me from there, but I could see what she was prodding at. I have got around a bit, so maybe the truth is that I am from lots of places now. I am also not originally from a Place in the same way that my mum, a true northerner, is from a Place. Where I am from, if we are talking about the first two decades of my life, is an Almost Place: not the middle of the Middle, but the end of the Middle, not even conspicuous for its middleness. For people who live in southern Britain, the distinction might not be important; for me, or people from just north of where I’m from, it’s crucial. All my mum and dad had to do in 1975 was buy a house twenty miles farther up the country’s oesophagus, in an area that really didn’t look all that different to ours, with a similarly large quota of pebble-dash terraces, spoil heaps, chip shops and miners’ welfares, and it would all be so much more clear-cut. I don’t quite feel like a card-carrying Midlander but if I claimed to be a northerner to, say, my Sheffield friends, who live not much more than half an hour north of where I went to school, they’d laugh me out of the room. It’s the same place, but it’s also not. If you listen closely you can hear signs of it in my accent, such as the fact that it sounds like nails scraping on the walls of Yorkshire, asking to be let in. It’s been softened a lot, sanded down by years of living in East Anglia and the South West, years of living with and around southerners, but it’s still very much there. Posh people from anywhere south of Birmingham think I sound northern. Non-posh people from anywhere north of that think I don’t. It’s all part of the confusion of being from the End Of The Middle. It’s also an aspect of the larger complexity of life on a small island where, wonderfully, you can drive ten minutes up a road and hear voices that sound like they’re from a whole different biosphere. We joke about accents in Britain but they are a more heated topic than we admit. When we discuss them, we discover that we are essentially still the people we were two centuries ago, locked proudly into the culture of our own village and rarely leaving it.

  I know what I used to sound like. I can have a listen and remind myself if I want, since what I used to sound like is preserved on a VHS tape recorded when I was sixteen. There is nothing more illustrative of the softening of my accent to me than meeting up with the Nottingham friends I still know from that period, who back then ripped the piss because I sounded ‘Yorkshire’ and ‘like a farmer’ to their ears, and realising that in the two decades I’ve been away someone has flipped the picture: to me, they are now the ones with the coal and strong milky tea in their voices. But there is a difference: their accents are undiluted Nottingham; mine is North Nottinghamshire, made less gritty by my time away. It’s a disused colliery where grass and four or five trees have grown, masking the iron ore underneath. It also retains just the faintest hint of passive Merseyside, owing to the fact that it’s where most of my blood relatives – my mum’s side of the family – are from. My dad’s accent is stronger than mine but it’s a few miles more southern, more Nottingham, less North Nottinghamshire–Derbyshire border, more factory, less pit. Growing up, as he greeted me with phrases such as ‘ALL RIGHT, YOTH?’ and ‘AYE LET’S ’AVE A GLEG’, I was barely aware he had any accent at all. That’s what will happen when you live in the End Of The Middle, and manage to reach your nineteenth birthday without meeting an upper middle-class, university-educated person from southern England. To me, Nottingham was the refined southern accent in my immediate life, with the exception of perhaps Leicester, but Leicester didn’t really count, as it was way down south, over forty miles away, and you only went there on special occasions.

  By my mid-twenties, I was obviously still sounding comically common and upcountry to some of the privately educated newspaper editors I was working for. ‘’Ey up, Tum!’ one would say in a slightly off parody of a Nearly Northern accent when he answered the phone to me: a joke that, if only to his ears, never got old. Prior to nervously recording a segment for an arts show on the BBC, I was given an elocution lesson so listeners would find it easier to understand me. After the show was broadcast, I was told the presenter thought me a ‘new and different voice’. What he meant, I now realise, is that unlike most of the other people who appeared on the show, I sounded a bit working class and northern in a hard-to-pinpoint way. I have never consciously tried to alter my accent and it makes me a little sad to think that when I was younger and less sure of myself any of these experiences might have had any insidious impact on the way I spoke. Ultimately, I don’t feel that the old, missing parts of my accent have vanished; it’s more that they’re just napping. It usually only takes a couple of drinks, or time spent with people from my homeland, to wake them up.

  Even before I moved from Devon to the Peak District in December, 2017, I could already feel my accent rushing back, doing a happy jig in my larynx at the knowledge that it might soon be free again. I have no doubt that if I’d decided to stay in the Peak long term, it would have returned unabashed, perhaps even gaining a new overcoat in the process. I’d been in a year-long period of fixating on the Nearly North and its borderlands, coming up from Devon to see my mum and dad on the Nottinghamshire–Lincolnshire border, then driving an hour west, walking the dales and gritstone plateaus and twitchels and ginnels and jitties of Derbyshire, finding little old pieces of myself in them, turning the pieces over, staring at them with a gormless look on my face, then realising they fitted the gaps in a jigsaw I’d neglected. The places – Matlock, Wirksworth, Birchover, Nether Haddon – were like a pile of good thick cable-knit jumpers you thought you’d only dreamed were yours then woke up and, assisted by bright daylight, found at the bottom of an old box. I lingered in bookshops and cafes, bathing in the exchanges of strangers: sometimes the words, always the sounds. These places weren’t home. But where exactly was ‘home’? There’d been so many, now. The definition of the word had splintered. Home – by the ‘house where your parents live’ definition – was a wonderful place but it wasn’t a building where I’d ever been a resident. Home – by the ‘house where you lived for the longest period during your childhood’ definition – now had strangers living in it and some tyres and a rusty sink in the front garden. These north Derbyshire towns and villages I was passing through on my walking expeditions were not places where I’d ever lived, just places half an hour away from places I’d lived; places where I used to go with my family a lot. Yet the people who lived in them sounded like the people from my childhood. In fact, they sounded even more like them, as if ‘home’ had been turned up to eleven, so maybe that meant these places really were home. As you moved up the map, they were also the first towns and villages that could make the claim to being genuinely part of the North, so perhaps, I reasoned, that made me genuinely part of it too.

  Accents never wrestle you to the ground in the South; they flick their expensive paint on you very subtly, until finally you’re dappled with a thin spray of it. But a northern accent will openly smother you, pin you down and make you part of its cult. I can see now that the north Derbyshire accent was a big part of my move to the Peak District. I was sucked in and seduced by it, entirely comfortable about the prospect of it freely having its way with me. It was an extra current beneath the main impetus for my relocation, which was that I had got the curious, unshakeable idea into my head that the region could write my next book for me. The period when my parents and I did most of our walking in Derbyshire, the period when we crossed the unofficial threshold between The End Of The Middle and the Early North, every school holiday or bank holiday or weekend, was the point in my life when I was most obsessed with ghosts. Ghost stories – those I’d read, and those I made up – were the central way I kept myself amused on our walks. I associated rural Derbyshire – particularly the winter version, with its thick fogs, lonely barns and rain-lashed stone crosses – indelibly with the supernatural, could not look at its gritstone ruins and possibly imagine that there weren’t dead people moving silently within them. Now, writing my first collection of eerie
fiction, it seemed only correct that I should be in the same place, letting its ambience wash over me: nearly ghost stories from the Nearly North. Stories set in many more regions than just the Peak District, but which had the Peak District drizzled all over them, from winter’s highest height. I liked the idea that a place could infuse a work of art, be somehow preserved inside it forever. I thought of certain records I loved where, deep in the grooves, you could hear the actual buildings where they were made. I had no guarantee that I’d be able to achieve a similar effect in a book, or, even if I did, that anyone would notice, but I was determined to give it my best try. I would find a very north Derbyshire spot, a rugged and old and high place, where the distant, harsh past was touchable, take my pets and possessions there, and I would write, and see what happened. Not once did I let the financially damaging aspect of the move become a deterrent. Not once did I let myself become worried or nervous or calculating about it. I was excited, in a way you can only be when you are doing something you have wanted to do since you were seven.

  I’m old enough to remember a time when house hunting was a dark art: to find what you were looking for involved talking to real living strangers, making manual trips into the unknown, calling on indefinable earth magic. These days the Internet has changed all that, and you can tailor a house search to your precise specifications at the push of a couple of buttons. By using the special Plague Filter function on the popular RightMove site, for example, I was able to find a house to rent on the outer edge of Derbyshire’s most renowned plague village, Eyam, in the last miles of the White Peak before the Dark Peak takes over. The village was familiar to me from a couple of childhood weekends, but not so familiar that it would not feel like a new adventure. I knew a little of its dark history, but not a lot. In 1665, a box of infected clothes had arrived in Eyam from London. Within a year, four-fifths of the village’s population were dead. Famously, the village’s pastor, William Mompesson, gathered Eyam’s residents and kept them contained and isolated from the rest of the world, so as not to spread the disease to the surrounding north Derbyshire and south Yorkshire villages and towns. These villages and towns did not always display a fitting gratitude. Even as the seventeenth century breathed its last breaths, long after the plague had passed, people suspected of being from Eyam who visited Sheffield were frequently pelted with stones and rough sticks until they retreated beyond the city’s borders.

  Eyam is a tourist trap in the summer months, and could even be described as a little chocolate boxy, in a no-nonsense Derbyshire gritstone way, but in December it feels high and half-deserted and ice-scolded, swirling in cold clouds of its bedevilled past, harassed by sideways snow and sleet: a spectral place clinging fiercely to the side of Eyam Edge, the even more towering summit above it, as if in perpetual fear of being blown off. The village’s vertiginous fringes are zigzagged by treacherous frost-slick roads. The sounds as I walked the streets during a weekday afternoon would typically be nothing more than a lone slamming van door, the broken-toothed whistle of the Pennine wind, and – just to make me feel entirely, rather than just slightly, like I was in a low-budget horror film from 1974 – the shouts and songs of children from the primary school, which borders a churchyard of incongruous, metropolitan size. Here, legendarily, in a big hat, walks the ghost of Reverend Mompesson’s wife Catherine, who chose to stay with her husband through the plague period but, unlike him, did not manage to escape the deadly virus.

  There are monuments to seventeenth-century suffering all over the village, but on a midwinter’s day none speak more powerfully of Eyam’s hardship than the Riley Graves, the resting place of seven members of the Hancock family, out beyond a landslip on a hillside on the edge of town, near the out-of-use road to Grindleford. It was on this side of the hill, in the space of eight days in the Devil’s Year, 1666, that, without assistance, an Eyam resident named Elizabeth Hancock buried her husband and her six children. Any comprehensive book on Derbyshire’s history will speak of the overwhelming desolation and loneliness of the spot: the total lack of visible buildings, the solitary nearby ash tree, the huge and fierce view south beyond it, including the claustrophobic limestone wall of Middleton Dale and – on many days at this time of year – a daunting Satanic fog hanging over Curbar Edge. To offer a little perspective, the house I found was about 500 feet above that, in the less bustling bit of town. To the average visitor, the Riley Graves look like the corner of the hill at the End Of The Universe. To me, they would soon feel like the point where suburbia began.

  In my house hunting, I had not been looking for a soft place and did not baulk at the prospect of isolation, but timing played a large part in my decision to rent a house as outlying as the one I did. Another, smaller and more practical place I’d been heading to see the same day, a few miles south, on a slightly less fearsome hill, had been snapped up twenty minutes before my viewing. The day had been the last mild one of autumn. Prior to being shown my house I walked nine miles on the opposite side of the Derwent, stripping down to my t-shirt and more or less skipping up to the top of Froggatt Edge and Curbar Edge, observing the wind gently agitating the pools in the rocks. As somebody who had spent a lot of time here between the ages of zero and fifteen, I logically knew this place wasn’t Devon. It was more vast and vertiginous and there was no sea and it had a different smell: woodsmoky, like Devon, but tinged with manure and mournful old stone and a hint of Victorian industry. But, perhaps lulled by the cragginess and the unseasonably mellow weather and the similarities of the nearby River Derwent to the River Dart, and those Dartmooresque faerie pools in the rocks, some part of me believed I was about to bring more of Devon north with me than I feasibly could. It was a classic mover mistake: the blithe assumption that your new house would offer new benefits in addition to, rather than instead of, all the benefits you took for granted at your previous house. On that day, my head was full of the general scenery, the feeling that I was coming back to Almost Home, and the startling and pleasing revelation that Almost Home was quite a wild and rugged place. I gave comparatively little thought to the house itself. What I took in about the building was little more than the basic pluses that it had the gravitas of age (Victorian, late), light (the windows matched the scale of the scenery), character (once, it had been part of a farmhouse), a rent I could afford and was situated down a rutted track, a long way from anywhere. Clearly you couldn’t mess around when you found a place like this, around here. ‘I’ll take it!’ I said, six minutes after I walked through the front door. But I was still operating on Devon Rules, and one of the most important Devon Rules is Always Live Up A Hill So Your House Doesn’t Get Flooded. But in the Peak District, in winter, Up A Hill can be the difficult place to live. Up A Hill is where it snows. Particularly if you move Up A Hill during the cruellest winter for over a decade.

  If you pitched the events around my move to Derbyshire as the beginning of a horror film, it might be rejected for being overdone, too full of well-known haunted house tropes and rural life pitfalls. You have the central character, driving almost 300 miles through heavy snow, alone, in a fatigued and dented car, every possible inch of its interior stuffed with possessions and cats. He sniffs, and we see from the red around his eyes that he has a heavy cold. The car gives the impression of containing many hundreds of cats but in truth there are three and one is merely a kitten, more white than black, a recent addition and somewhat symbolic of the new start. Between Lickey End and Alvechurch, she vomits copiously. We cut back to a couple of weeks before the move, with the central character boasting about how impervious he is to fear in remote, unpopulated places, even at night. They’re not what really scares him, he tells friends. What really scares him is filling in forms, the prospect of losing a loved one, or the idea that he might have inadvertently said something that hurt someone’s feelings in a conversation seven years ago. Dark hills, smudgy figures on heathery bluffs, lonely forests with ice cracking in the branches above: he is not a victim of the terror more suburban humans find in
these things. By Tamworth, the snow is heavier, so he reroutes east to near Ollerton where his parents live, and where he and the cats, who are called Roscoe, Clifton (the kitten) and Ralph, opt to spend the night. ‘It was weird: last night I kept thinking I could hear someone crying “Help!” somewhere in the house,’ says his mum, the next morning. ‘That was Ralph, meowing his own name,’ he replies. ‘I WENT TO THE HARDWARE SHOP FOR A SCREWDRIVER THE OTHER DAY, AND THEY WERE SELLING SEX TOYS,’ his dad says. OK, we can actually cut the bit near Ollerton with his parents. It’s not integral to the plot. When the central character arrives in High Derbyshire the next day, a genuine blizzard is raging. He is lucky to get the car up the narrow lane to the top of the hill, above the village, which in Victorian guidebooks is known as ‘the mountain village’, even though the desolate plateau above it needs another 500 feet to fit the official UK government criteria for mountain status. From the top of the hill, the car slips and slides along the rutted track to the house, a looming, sooty-looking building with something of the tomb about it. The camera pans in on a row of wool strips caught on some barbed wire, being stretched taut by the wind, and, behind it, four cold sheep who appear to harbour secrets in their cheeks. The man steps out of the car and immediately slips on the ice, narrowly keeping his balance by holding on to the rear windscreen wiper of his car, which snaps. The camera zooms in on a freaky-looking owl sign, next to the house’s name. We see the man look at it and mouth the words ‘Holy shit.’