‘You can call me Paul,’ he tells me.
‘No, Subhadassi’s cool,’ I say, rather naffly, though already I’m anticipating a rendezvous with my dad later in the day, and wondering just how cool he will be when I introduce him to someone from Yorkshire who isn’t called Fred or Jim.
*
After winding its way down the valley side, intricately navigating various cobbled pathways, meandering through private gardens and in front of mullioned windows, the Pennine Way crosses the A646, the Rochdale Canal, the River Calder and the Halifax–Manchester railway line just west of Charlestown, then zigzags through Callis Woods and around Lodge Hill until Stoodley Pike Monument appears in the distance. From several miles away the Pike looks, well, monumental, a proud and flawless sculpture, obsidian black even in bright sunlight, like something out of ancient Egypt. Up close, though, it’s a disappointment, the colossal stone blocks weathered and soot-stained, the tower a four-cornered obelisk rather than the smoothly formed cone it appeared to be from further away, the internal staircase urine-scented and uninviting, so much so that I don’t bother to climb it. It was originally built to commemorate the defeat of Napoleon, then collapsed due to lightning damage, has been restored twice, and now appears to commemorate many a local vandal, several courting couples and an ardent supporter of Manchester City, the scratched and spray-painted graffiti speaking far louder than the letter-carved plaque. But it isn’t necessary to climb the tower to enjoy the view, which is pretty much panoramic, or to find somewhere to picnic, after which I suggest we press on – the wind’s getting up and we’re not even halfway.
Along the banks of Warland Reservoir Subhadassi tells me he thinks I’m doing a modern-day Poly-Olbion, Michael Drayton’s seventeenth-century topographical poem, being a ‘CHOROGRAPHICALL DESCRIPTION OF ALL THE TRACTS, RIVERS, MOUNTAINS, FORESTS, and other Parts of this Renowned Isle of GREAT BRITAIN, with intermixture of the most Remarkeable Stories, Antiquities, Wonders, Rarities, Pleasures, and Commodities of the same.’ Just as he’s describing Drayton’s all-encompassing, versified gazetteer of the British Isles with its woodland nymphs and sprites of the streams, the hills over his right shoulder open like curtains, and Greater Manchester comes steaming into view, from Rochdale just below us to Stockport in the south to Bolton in the north, a great urban bay, and the first city I’ve seen for the best part of three weeks. The further we walk the more immense it becomes, until it isn’t just part or even most of the view, but pretty much all of it. It seems implausible, incongruous, even anachronistic, and yet inevitable, something that couldn’t be held off or ignored any longer. All this time I’ve been walking down the middle of a remote wilderness with wide buffer zones of unpopulated hills and uninhabitable moor to either side, but this hulking municipal mass means that I’m getting closer to the edge, and nearer to the end. I pull my cap down diagonally so the peak acts as a one-sided blinker, and keep my eyes to the floor. The next time I look up it’s because there’s a little old man standing in front of me, blocking the path, his arm extended, wanting to shake me by the hand.
‘Are you Simon Armitage?’
‘Yes.’
‘Ha! I don’t believe it!’ he says. ‘That’s two of you now. I met Seamus Heaney last week!’
‘He’s not doing the Pennine Way, is he?’
‘He was in a pub,’ he says, then, ‘Unbelievable!’ Then he spins on his heel and disappears, leaving me with the thought of walking into the Old Nag’s Head in Edale in a couple of days’ time only to find Heaney sitting at the bar having got there first, Amundsen to my Scott, the story already told, the book already written.
*
Whichever pub Heaney was in he isn’t at the White House, where the Pennine Way crosses the A58, but my dad is.
‘Who’s the other feller?’ he whispers.
‘Subhadassi.’
‘Who?’
‘Subhadassi.’
‘Shirley Bassey?’
‘Pack it in, Dad.’
‘Sub-a-bloody-dassi? Where’s he from?’
‘Huddersfield.’
‘Aye, it’s a good old Yorkshire name is that. What’s he do?’
‘He’s a poet.’
‘Well that explains it. Has he got a proper job?’
This sketch carries on until Subhadassi has unlaced his boots in the porch, shaken my dad by the hand and offered to buy him a drink. ‘Seems like a decent bloke, any road,’ my dad concedes, still scratching his chin but having ordered a pint of bitter.
After a personnel exchange – my mum substituted for my daughter, who has pointed out that ‘it wouldn’t be fair to let Grandad drive home on his own’ – we cross the main road and scramble up towards Blackstone Edge, via the allegedly Roman Road and the curious Aiggin Stone, a crudely cut and cryptically coded waymarker. Chamfered towards the bottom, the stone is prone to occasional swooning fits; having fallen over on at least two occasions during the 1970s it was returned to the vertical by concerned parties, and currently stands at an angle of about eighty degrees.
The person responsible for giving Blackstone Edge its name could never be accused of hyperbole, it being one of the bleakest and most barren features on the whole of the Pennine Way, and I don’t say this as a mean-spirited Yorkshireman scoring a cheap point simply because the path has veered momentarily into Lancashire. And perhaps it’s just the contrast with the structured and glowing limestone of Malham Cove, but geology appears to have crash-landed here, with dark and broken stone lying dumped and abandoned in unlovely heaps and piles. The scars and exposed rocks on the lower hillside are all the product of human quarrying, but up here the weather is the excavator, scalping the turf then scouring and sculpting the stone beneath. The actual path disappears for a while, having been blown away or fallen down one of the crevices, then rematerialises a few hundred yards later on the boulder-littered plateau, requiring some smart footwork to negotiate. The view, I admit, is incredible, stretching way beyond the sprawling conurbation of Greater Manchester as far as the west coast and the Welsh mountains and the Great Orme. With the spinnaker of its high white dish standing tall and proud, Jodrell Bank radio telescope looks like an enormous yacht sailing across the Cheshire plain. But there’s only so much sharp, cold light the eyeballs can take up here, and there are dark clouds ganging up to the south.
Like the A66 all those days ago, the M62, when we reach it, seems absurd, with uncountable vehicles travelling at insane speeds across an otherwise empty and unconquered moor. Away to the east lies Scott Hall Farm; urban myth says that the farmer refused to budge when the motorway was being built, but revised opinion suggests that the carriageways had to divide in any event, due to the lie of the land. Still a working farm decades later, it’s also the most famous central reservation in Britain, with cows passing through a subway en route to the milking shed each evening. I once met a man in Colne who sold a prize ram to the owner of Scott Hall Farm, a real beauty, apparently, with the perfect Roman nose, handsome face and exquisitely formed horns, and the ram was doing well up there at the side of the motorway until somebody pulled over one night and hacked off its head for a trophy. Subhadassi also has an M62 anecdote. Waiting on the bridge above it with his mother and a big crowd of people in 1971 to witness the official opening of that stretch of the motorway, he was peeing through the railings just as the Queen’s Rolls-Royce came around the corner and passed underneath.
‘What did your mother say?’
‘She wasn’t happy.’
I think it’s fair to say that my own mother isn’t very happy either at present, approaching the footbridge that spans the six lanes as if it were something made from creepers and vines slung across a jungle ravine. She’s never been comfortable on anything higher than the bottom rung of a stepladder, and I watch her steeling herself for the crossing, then taking a centre line over the arched walkway, as far away from the edge as possible, elbows in, fists clenched. Somewhere near the middle, where the bridge sways slightly in the wind that
funnels through the cutting below, in that sweet spot where the concrete vibrates and the metalwork quivers and sings as it reaches its resonant frequency, she closes her eyes.
The trig point of White Hill comes and goes. This degraded area of moorland is a Pennine Way black spot as far as bogs and peaty quagmires are concerned, but apart from a few problems at a place marked on the map as ‘Fords’, solved by a combination of stepping-stone construction, triple-jumping technique and a piggy-back rota, we all stay dry. Or at least until those black clouds finally arrive, and rain begins to fall, coinciding exactly with the first view of Marsden off to the left. Sixteen days ago I set off from Scotland, with the specific ambition of walking the whole of the Pennine Way, but with the more sentimental objective of making it back to the village I grew up in, to that part of the country which has such a strong claim on my identity, such an influence on my writing and such a pull on my life. There would be no shame in failing to reach Edale; I’m forty-seven years old, I spend a lot of time in a chair and I’d done little or no training. But after making such a palaver about the whole project, the idea of not making it to Marsden was mortifying, unthinkable. In fact the potential humiliation of falling short of that target was a built-in incentive, and to that end I’d anticipated an emotional and spiritual reunion of some kind, or at least some sense of perspective on the theme of ‘home’ having slogged halfway across the country to get here. But seeing the village coming into focus, the honest truth is that I feel very ordinary, even a little bit lost. I keep looking at the place names on the map then peering down the valley to my left, then checking my reaction, but there’s nothing either high or low to report, neither the elation of re-entry nor the bump of coming back down to earth. I have walked home, so where is the thrill, or the sense of achievement, or the glow of pride?
As we plod towards the Dinner Stone and Thieves Clough I push forward on my own. To the rest of the group it probably looks like I’m being propelled along the final straight by a surge of adrenalin, or as if this moving homecoming is something I need to experience alone. But I’m simply embarrassed about my lack of reaction and want to keep it to myself. Or I need to understand it, and with the familiar bald head of Pule Hill just half a mile away now the only explanation I can think of is this: that I’m a creature of habit. Yes I like journeys, an excursion every now and again, the occasional expedition and even an odd adventure once in a while, but at the end of the day I’m very happy with the way things are, or rather where things are. Which is why, presumably, I’m still living three miles from the hospital I was born in. And why I wanted to tackle the Pennine Way, which would return me to my front door, and why I wanted to do it the wrong way round – to get back to all that is comfortable and familiar, everything I call home. But over the past fortnight, my habitat has become the journey itself and my new habit is to walk. That’s what I do now: I lace up my boots and head into the hills, then do the same again the next day, and the day after that, and the day after that. Where do I live at the moment? On the move. It’s a routine, a rhythm, the norm. I walk therefore I am. And now that I’ve got used to it, I feel too lazy to stop.
I can see my dad’s car in the car park, where we’ve arranged to meet, and pipe smoke drifting out of the open window. The rain begins to pour, and I turn around just in time to see my mum pulling a plastic recycling sack out of her bag and pulling it over her head.
Marsden to Crowden
12 MILES
OS Explorer OL1 West Sheet
Sunday 25 July
However, after a night in my own house and in my own bed, and after taking a bath in my own bath and washing my hair with my own shampoo, I’ve remembered which habits I’m really a creature of, so it’s with extreme reluctance, both mental and physical, that I make my way back to Standedge and pull down my hood against the raging wind. Martyn Sharp, Pennine Way Ranger, Peak District National Park, might have been just as reluctant to give up his Sunday and nursemaid a poet across his place of work, but if he was, he’s good enough not to say so. We hang around for ten minutes or so, waiting for three strangers who had threatened to walk with me but who fail to show up, then set off up the slabbed section of path that bisects Black Moss and Swellands Reservoirs then arcs left into Wessenden Valley. To say that I know this area like the back of my hand is probably an overstatement (not to mention a cliché, although presented with the backs of several hands to choose from, would I really be able to pick out my own? I once saw the back of my hand on a ‘visualiser’, a high-power projector which throws an image of the magnified object onto a big screen, and it didn’t look like a writer’s hand at all but the hand of some rough, filthy cave-dweller), but I know it well enough, having wandered across these moors on hundreds of occasions, sometimes nature-watching or on sponsored walks, sometimes with family and friends having a bit of a ramble, but mainly alone with no special reason or specific purpose. Right from being a boy I was quite happy strolling around on the hills, and quite happy if someone came with me, though I preferred it when they didn’t. It’s what my dad had done as a child, and his descriptions of the moors as endless, empty and ungoverned places where a person could go wherever they wanted and not see a soul all day made me want to follow suit. In the years before more organised and packaged forms of recreation, he even brought us up here on holiday. It was a trip of no more than two miles from our front door and a vacation with no actual focus or plan of action other than to be here, and after pitching a heavy canvas tent at the side of some shallow lake or stream then firing up the little Calor Gas stove and breaking open a tin of soup, we’d stroll around looking for entertainment and action, largely in the form of water or stones. Good times.
When I started to think about this walk I had an image in my mind of my dad coming with me today, walking back across the hills where he’d roamed as a youngster, accompanying me to the village boundary and seeing me over the horizon. My mother walking me in, my father walking me out. But he’s more comfortable in the driving seat of a car these days, with New Orleans jazz pumping through the speakers and his pipe in his mouth, and tends to reserve his energy for the bowling green, either playing on it (a game he once dismissed as ‘old men’s marbles’ but now seems addicted to) or cutting it, following the petrol-driven mower up and down then back and across, striping the surface into a jade-coloured tartan. I look down to where the bowling green is a lush oasis among many square miles of drab grasses, but he isn’t there. Still in bed, probably, thinking about getting up and peeling the potatoes before Mum gets back from church. Or he’ll have gone for the Sunday papers, a journey of about three hundred yards, or two minutes in the car.
Situated at the head of a valley and no stranger to rainfall, one of Marsden’s primary functions over the centuries has been to gather water; to service the region’s industries, to slake the thirst of its population, and to top up the canals. Consequently, most true Marsdeners are word-perfect when it comes to reeling off the names of those reservoirs and lakes lying in elevated isolation somewhere above their heads. If they forget, they can always pop into the Riverhead Brewery, whose hand-pumped beers are christened in honour of those reservoirs, and order a pint of Butterley or Red Brook or March Haig. (That said, since the pub found itself to be an integral part of a railway-based ‘ale trail’, shuttling between Dewsbury on one side of the Pennines to the public bar on Stalybridge Station on the other, they might have to run the gauntlet of large groups of amiably pissed middle-aged men carrying well-thumbed copies of the Good Beer Guide and wearing grass skirts.) Butterley is fed by Blakeley Reservoir, which is fed by Wessenden, which is fed by Wessenden Head. The Pennine Way, which rises through the valley alongside them, is a vehicle track as far as the deer farm at Wessenden Lodge, and a rough path thereafter, or a ‘pitched path’ as Martyn calls it, where large stones are set into the ground on end, so the part we walk on is just the tip of the iceberg, as it were. I notice yellow-and-black snails, like old-fashioned humbugs, clinging to the underside
of fern leaves, and it’s going to be strange walking anywhere ever again without meadow pipits springing up from underfoot. A thick, woolly caterpillar writhes and rolls on the face of a flat, warm stone, and a few yards later, an even thicker, woollier one throws the same moves.
As Saddleworth Moor opens up to the right, conversation turns to the Hindley and Brady murders, and to the unrecovered body of Keith Bennett, still said to be buried in a shallow grave somewhere in that bleak expanse of open ground. Martyn remembers a zip fastener being found in a peat bog some years ago, and a solitary policeman having to stand guard over it all night until a forensics team arrived in the morning. I can’t think of many worse places, or worse circumstances, in which to be alone in the dark, and the story strikes me as the sinister obverse of Adrian’s anecdote about the round-the-clock protection of the lady’s slipper orchid near Malham Tarn. The moor is bisected by the exposed and precarious A635, known locally as the Isle of Skye road because of the legendary Isle of Skye public house which once stood at the eastern end of the crossing. Black Hill looms up ahead, with a shimmering line of damp paving stones stretching towards it, like a sacred pathway leading to a Mayan temple or some site where slaughter and sacrifice might have taken place. The slabs are reclaimed from the floors of Lancashire mills and helicoptered in three or four at a time, then levered into position by hardy volunteers or by Martyn, who once got a ride in the chopper but didn’t get to play with the controls. Many of the slabs still bear the scars of their former industry, such as the grooves, bolts, hinges and anchor points which held the machines of the cotton trade in place, and the rough undersides are usually turned face up, to give traction to the boots of those who now walk on them. The slabs are put in place at considerable expense and as a most welcome courtesy, and those who oppose their presence should relax and take a longer, evolutionary perspective on the subject, because the moor will swallow the paving stones eventually, just as it absorbs and digests everything else that attempts to stake a position here.
Walking Home: A Poet's Journey Page 20
