*
I watch my wife and daughter waving from the back window of a small country bus as it trundles along the main road out of Middleton-in-Teesdale towards vanishing point, heading for the Langdon Beck Hotel. They have to leave now, go home to a world of work and school, promising to come and see me again sometime soon but without being able to say where or when. Feeling a bit sorry for myself I try to summon up interest in an ornate drinking fountain in the Horse Market, a leafy, cast-iron arrangement with columns and a domed black roof harbouring a white child sitting in a washbasin on a pedestal. From what I can gather, it seems to have been presented to one Chief Officer Bainbridge of the London Lead Company by his company employees, in what strikes me as a perverse or at least old-fashioned act of forelock-tugging. Then I wander across the road and take some photographs of an off-licence and general store by the name of Armitage, which, because that happens to be my name, is humorous. The business is up for sale, and Shane points out that if I were to buy it I would be spared the expense of a new sign. A few doors along there’s a double-fronted shop called J. E. & V. Winter selling fishing jackets, thermos flasks and all kinds of outdoor gear, and because I’m a walker I go in. It’s one of those shops with sheets of coloured gel at the window, giving everything inside a slight tinge of sepia and a slight sense of yesteryear. I poke around in a bucket of slippers and try on a hat, then see a stook of walking sticks propped in a corner with the umbrellas, some antiquated models with the heads of dogs and horses etc. carved into the handles, but also a range of lightweight, retractable aluminium poles.
‘I had a pair of these but I left them in Kielder Forest,’ I tell the lady in the shop, who has appeared from nowhere, down some steps perhaps or out of a back room, and is suddenly standing behind me.
‘What do you think of that one?’ she says.
‘Very nice,’ I tell her, putting my weight on it, then doing a rather ridiculous lap of the shop, then holding it out along my line of sight, as if inspecting a fishing rod or a hunting rifle.
‘Take it,’ she says.
‘What do you mean?’
‘Take it if you like it. You can have it.’
For all their stock, J. E. & V. Winter’s don’t exactly appear to be doing a roaring trade, and I can’t understand why I’m being given something for free. Then the lady says, ‘I know who you are and I know what you’re doing, and I think it’s great. So if you want it, it’s yours.’ And we stand there for a few moments, among the boxes of sensible shoes, the rotary display of woollen socks, the pigeon holes of carefully folded knitted cardigans and rails of fleeces and plastic cagoules, and the traffic goes past outside. All along this journey people have given me their time, their money, the benefit of their experience and the full range of their hospitality, but on every occasion it’s been part of an agreed barter, a trade, even if I’ve only given them a few words in exchange. But this is an act of pure kindness, unbidden, with nothing expected in return, and comes not from a position of affordable generosity but from a gentle heart in a quiet shop in an ordinary town.
‘Only if I can send you a book,’ I say, which I realise as soon as I’ve said it sounds horribly conditional and self-regarding, as if I’ll only take the stick if she agrees to read my poems. She smiles and shrugs, then comes to the door to see me off down the street, marching with a spring in my step past the selection of seasonal vegetables in the boxes outside Armitage’s and jabbing the pavement with the rubberised tip of my new pole.
*
It’s just me and Shane now, leaving the easy, downhill gradient of the Tees to go south across the grain of the valleys, to rise and fall through Lunedale then Baldersdale, the path like a tightrope between reservoirs and dams, the thighs burning and the heart pumping for the first time all day. When we’ve gained height we turn and look down on the hundreds of white farmhouses dotted across the landscape, luminous in the afternoon sun. All the properties belonging to a previous landowning Lord Barnard were painted that colour at his insistence, it is said, and there are several versions of a local anecdote to explain his reasoning, some involving a broken leg and a horse. Shane points out the many hay meadows, pastureland that dairy farmers have given over to native grasses and wild flowers though a combination of persuasive argument and financial incentive. Over the years the hay meadows have become a striking feature of this region, not just providing a haven for rare and endangered species of flora and a habitat for wildlife, but also lending colour and texture to the landscape. The meadows are still mown for winter fodder, and it’s even argued by some that the dolly mixture of mixed petals and leaves provides a healthier diet than the same acreage of your bog-standard green grass, or certainly a tastier one. We sit down in the middle of one of the meadows, with Melancholy Thistle and Yellow Rattle, also known as Poverty, forming a fringed and swaying horizon in front of our eyes, with the blank wall of Selset Reservoir beyond, and beyond that, the open wounds of new quarries and the closed sockets and half-healed scars of old ones. Before we reach Blackton, the end of today’s walk, we pass through Hannah’s Meadow, and even make a voluntary detour along a pontoon of duckboarding to Hannah’s Barn, a museum and exhibition space dedicated to the life and times of Hannah Hauxwell, the no-nonsense spinster made famous in the seventies through a series of TV documentaries depicting her unremittingly tough life on a northern hill farm. All I remember of the programmes are endless shots of Hannah with a bucket in her hand struggling against driving winds and lashing rain, or Hannah sitting in front of a meagre fire in a miserable-looking front room, and somewhere along the line I have confused or perhaps conflated an image of Hannah with an image of Mother Teresa. The barn, when we lift the latch and go inside, seems like the perfect shrine, inasmuch as it is completely empty.
Dark clouds are moving in as we arrive at Blackton Grange, once a youth hostel, now a ‘truly unique training and development centre’, and I’m just beginning to wonder if the chain of contacts has broken down when the silhouette of a serious-looking, Politburo-black 4x4 crosses the dam wall of Balderhead Reservoir, and behind tinted windows I’m voluntarily renditioned by Peter and Jane in an easterly direction, I think, judging by the sun, or maybe northwards. I don’t really know where I’m being taken and to be honest I don’t really care, because the seats are leather, the suspension smooth and the air conditioning is set at an unwavering twenty-two degrees. I’m not walking, I’m not outside, and the white lines down the middle of the road go past with a hypnotic regularity perhaps for an hour or so, till the gates of a large, modernised ranch-style property swing open, and upstairs, in the guest suite, the water is hot and the bath deep.
Peter was in pharmaceuticals and is now a farmer, albeit a very tidy and considerate one, and his estate is a veritable Southfork in comparison with many of the dilapidated and ramshackle farms I’ve been stealing through or walking around in the north Pennines. In a pair of Peter’s wellies I follow him across paddocks and orchards, making a tour of the acres and inspecting some of the animals, many of which have names. From one hillside he calls across to another, and several cattle emerge out of the shrubs and trees, followed eventually by a black bull, bringing up the rear and pawing the ground. ‘Come on then,’ Peter shouts, then, ‘Come on. Come on then,’ and they do come, slowly at first, then with more enthusiasm and momentum, until hopping over a wooden gate and admiring them from behind an electric fence seems the smart thing to do. The bull watches us from the top of a dusty mound, still snorting and shaking his head, undisputed king of the hill. Further along we look in on a family of pigs, ears over their eyes, snouts in the soil, rootling and foraging in a sectioned-off area under a stand of trees, kept in by white tape strung between metal posts, presumably carrying a mild electric current. Pigs have a reputation for eating anything and everything, from kitchen slops to car parts to dead bodies, and judging by an enclosure on the other side of the path where they were previously penned, it would appear that their status as the ultimate omnivore is
well deserved. Because what must have been a pleasant glade with decorative undergrowth until last month is now a scene of devastation, post-apocalyptic, nothing but dust and mud, the margins pockmarked with hoofprints, grubbing-holes and abandoned burrowings, the centre like a bombsite or crater flooded with a pool of dirty black water. Even the mud looks as if it has been bitten and chewed. There isn’t a blade of grass or a scrap of nourishment left. In fact the only living thing is a single, ferocious-looking bramble, about ten foot long and as thick as a wrist, studded with dagger-like thorns, and Peter says the pigs would have happily eaten that as well given time, beginning with the roots. In another field, an aloof ram prefers his own thoughts to our company. The great curled conches of his horns twist around his head and ears and across his face; we call him, but all he can hear in those enormous shells, I imagine, is the sea.
This little pre-dinner turn around the grounds, even after a day’s walk and even though I’m tired, is very welcome, partly because it’s an aimless ramble rather than an organised route march, drawing on a completely different set of muscles and requiring a much more relaxed mindset, and partly because it buys me time to think about the evening ahead. I’ve given readings in some very peculiar places, sometimes to some very peculiar people, and by my own admission I have given some very peculiar performances and read some very peculiar poems. But the audience tonight is just six people – Peter and Jane plus two other couples. Not a public event at all but a kind of evening’s entertainment provided by the houseguest. So after supper we file through to the living room, a long, high study in fact with a galleried library, and find places to sit among the chairs, settees and soft furnishings. Then I wait for a pause in the conversation before saying, ‘OK. Right. Well. Er . . .’
It’s fine. I’ve had three bottles of strong beer and three glasses of red wine, and that of course always makes things finer than they actually are. But it’s fine. A bit like a house-church meeting, with me leading the prayers, and apart from the booze a bit like an AA meeting: Hello, I’m Simon, and I’m a poet. But it’s fine. I avoid eye contact because I don’t want to look like a desperate raconteur in search of a response, and I don’t try to say anything funny in case no one laughs, and I don’t read anything sad in case someone takes it personally, and I finish with a question to the ‘audience’ so it’s more like a chat and less like THE END, which avoids the potential embarrassment of polite applause from six pairs of hands, or no applause at all, and I don’t hand the sock around because somehow I feel that the people in the room have already paid just by BEING HERE and going along with it. And it’s also fine because later on there’s just enough mobile-phone signal somewhere near the pillow of my wide and deeply sprung bed to call home, and the last thing I remember saying to my wife before I fall asleep, when she asks what it was like, is that it was fine, fine, even if it was the first reading I’ve ever given without wearing shoes.
Yellow Rattle Poverty
Hairless, leaves unstalked, toothed.
Two-lipped, lower lip decurved.
Calyx distended in fruit. Semi-parasite,
throws itself on the parish,
gets its hooks into good roots.
A beggar to shift
once it gains a toe-hold.
Bad-mouthed by farm-folk.
Goes among meadows, grassy places.
Hard times, one by the verge,
hunched, cap in hand,
shaking the poor-box, the husk
of its see-through purse
in its see-through fingers,
dry-voiced, whispering
spare any change, sir,
a penny for Fiddlecase,
a penny for Shacklebasket,
penny for old Hayshackle, sir,
help poor Pots ’n’ Pans,
a penny for Rattle Jack,
spare a few pence for old Pepperbox, sir,
a penny for Cockscomb,
a ha’penny for old Hen Penny, sir,
remember old Shepherd’s Coffin,
remember poor Snaffles,
a penny for Poverty, sir, most kindly,
when I brush past,
when I breeze through,
when I swish by.
Baldersdale to Keld
14 MILES
OS Explorer OL 31 East Sheet, OL 30 North
Sunday 18 July
Despite the fact that a mound of suppurating dirty clothes and several hundred coins of the realm have been taken off to Yorkshire by my family, the Tombstone is still supernaturally heavy. Even Peter and Jane’s all-terrain, all-weather, all-powerful vehicle seems to grunt and stoop under the weight when I clean-and-jerk it into the air then heave it into the boot. It must look like I’ve been stealing cutlery, or even furniture, or even large farm animals, but the real problem, as always, is books. In the next life, I’m coming back as a nanotechnologist.
Peter is walking with me, and so is Paul, who tells me he is a journalist, and has been parachuted into County Durham by a national newspaper to write a story about my journey. I’ve no idea if this is true (and no such piece ever appears in the paper, as far as I know) but telling a lie just to accompany a poet on a fourteen-mile slog across some of the wettest and bleakest moorland in the country would be like admitting to a crime you hadn’t committed. He’s done lots of travel reporting and is well kitted out, and so is Peter, with any number of electronic devices attached to his person for keeping tabs on our direction of travel and our rate of progress. In fact he’s so well equipped and willing to claim the role of navigator that I don’t even bother getting the map out, thinking I’ll just take the opportunity to enjoy the scenery for a change and let the responsibility and the blame fall elsewhere. And the scenery, once we’ve climbed to the top of Cotherstone Moor, hurdling the ditches, bogs and ‘sikes’ running laterally across the track, is something to behold. Not because of any dramatic features or breathtaking panoramic vista, but simply because after days and days and miles and miles of trudging across mountain, hill and moor, I’d expected some kind of easing of the terrain, a falling away towards lowlands and dales and eventually the big populations of the north. But up ahead there is only more of what there was behind. More moor, more hill, more empty upland, layer after layer, row after row, horizon after horizon. I try to count the summits and the valley systems, but there are too many, all blurring and blending, some hazy in morning sun, others darkened by cloud-shadow and rain, others hung with low cloud, just an unending sequence of elongated whalebacks and high ground for as far as the eye can see, for as far as I need to walk and probably further still. Yesterday I felt as if I was getting somewhere. From the top of Race Yate Rigg I feel as if I have barely begun.
‘One point eight miles,’ says Peter.
Then ‘One point nine,’ a tenth of a mile further on, by which time we’re heading downhill towards what we think might be the A66 but turns out to be a well-made vehicle track running alongside Deepdale Beck. There’s a shooting hut, with boarded-up windows at shooting height, and just enough fibrous vegetation to justify a game of Pooh-sticks from the bridge, Paul ‘the reporter’ being a clear winner with his streamlined stalk of grass, a veritable speedboat compared with my stringy twig of dead heather which becomes becalmed in a bay to one side of the main channel and which I finally scuttle with a large clod of earth. The next stretch is over another barren elevation, populated by small cairns at regular intervals, like relics of a primitive religion or ritualistic practice, their form and function not yet fully understood. There are dozens of them, and dozens of red grouse too, whose numbers on this moor seem absurd, even to the point where they explode out from under our feet every ten yards or so or waddle off in family groups of seven or eight led by the mother, so many in fact that it would probably be harder to miss a grouse with a shotgun, even when firing blind drunk, than to hit one. I’ve heard it said that to create a diversion and allow her young to escape the female grouse will sometimes feign injury by dragging a wing and flo
undering along the ground, but I’ve never seen it, even though on these overstocked acres some of these birds are almost within grabbing distance.
The main road, when we do arrive, is incomprehensible to the Pennine Wayfarer. Most days, the fastest thing I’ve seen is a pheasant, and they only go for about a hundred yards before running out of puff. Suddenly I’m looking at car after car, metallic and pearlescent colours flashing past at sixty, seventy, eighty miles an hour, and juggernauts thundering along, and screaming motorbikes and rattling caravans. It feels more like crossfire than traffic, with the three of us in no-man’s land stranded on the verge, contemplating a dash to the other side. But rather than force the switched-off, somnambulant hiker to run its gauntlet, the Pennine Way turns right then left into a purpose-built subway, another incongruous experience. Inside it, on the concrete wall, someone has drawn a vertical line with a black marker pen and written, ‘Congratulations on reaching the half way point on the PW – good luck.’ Underneath, someone has scratched the word ‘Suckers’.
Walking Home: A Poet's Journey Page 13
