A small pink geranium (listening to the dead)

 As I’m sure I’ve said, all this writing was originally meant to be a way of listening to the dead, to the ancestors of my life, and was vaguely conceived as a missive to both yourself and Sarah as representatives of my own and the next generation. But then I remembered that there are things it’s far better not to tell the young. After that you, and the ancestors themselves, became my addressees. Not ancestors in a literal sense, of course. What I’ve been trying to do, if I’ve understood our discussions correctly, is to interweave many of the voices that have ‘made up’ (in both senses of that phrase), ‘my’ narrative identity in a multiverse.

It’s almost a year since I wrote the little snippet below in my diary. Hard to believe now that I still hoped then that I might pass through all this illness and return to old habits, whereas now my entire previous life appears to have happened to someone else entirely.

“Mrs. Oliver very frail now, but her mind’s still good. The doctor told her yesterday she may have a few more winters in her yet. We sat quiet this evening, three generations together. I didn’t ask Sarah to sing. I’m still glad I taught her the ballads, even if she learned them largely to please me. Maybe she’ll value them in time. There’s two I’ve not taught her: ‘Lucy Wan’, (I’m still uneasy about Patsy and Michael), and ‘Bonny James Campbell’, (because of her mum and Peter). Time yet, maybe.”

Those thoughts seem rather maudlin and somewhat naïve now. But it’s hard to let go of my investment in the old songs because, in one sense, they’re more real than we are, sing us rather than the other way around. In that other world, only a year ago, Mrs. Oliver was still with us and Sarah going back to the farm for the odd weekend, not staying with herArvid in preference to coming to sing with me!

A pair of lapwings.

I think all this is coming to an end now.

We are, of course, all far more porous than we allow. I have written about different people I knew but each, in her or his way, is also a partial ancestor of the compound, loosely woven personage who writes this page. We’re all just shifting currents in the same sea, Po-souls who’ll sink back into the same earth.

The public Lizzy still goes confidently about the region, and all the other ones I’ve known or glimpsed over the years appear to have gone to ground, down into the dark. Those bright echoes of her mother’s youth and of the strangeness of Elizabeth Reed who, limping through life, did so much to set Lizzy on the path that led to Peter when she was still only a girl, somehow gone. (Or so it seems to me.) I hear Peter’s voice still. Not the poor drowned Peter who, if he’d lived, would now be indistinguishable from any number of other ruddy, thick-set and aging farmers, gathered in some corner of a cattle mart, each dressed in neat but faded tweeds, to debate the price of yearlings. Quite another Peter, both quick and dead who, as boy and young man, kept coming back for Lizzy, although whether to save her or himself I can’t know. Yes, I still occasionally hear him, like an undertone of uncertainty in the early morning song of a blackbird. I suppose there may be a corporeal James out there somewhere, his body now running to fat, maybe pontificating over the Financial Times at the nineteenth hole of some exclusive Home Counties golf course and so, finally, the perfect embodiment of his father, son and heir. But I keep another James alive so that, when the deals have been done and he’s back in the blank space of some airport executive lounge, for a moment he’s still the youth who sat silent with Lizzy and me one evening, watching stars fall and die. The boy who helped two young girls on the cusp of change connect with a clutch of strange old songs, gifted them in a discarded box, with a whole wide, vital and varied world of music-making. I will no longer distinguish the slurred, alcohol-roughened growl of the deeply troubled Mike we buried at Wooler from the young schoolyard hero who championed, and was loved by, his plump, confident little sister. I’ve let them both go to be themselves now, finally setting aside the purulent speculation I’d attached to Mike’s telling me that Patsy’s leopard freckles covered every inch of her body. As for Patsy, I can hear only the smiling girl child who, for a few brief years, sparkled within the protective aura of her brother’s reputation. I cannot, or cannot bring myself, to hear the burdened, haunted girl whose wellbeing caused Cat and Mike to take opposite sides in some struggle that will always remain unknown to me. Cat whose singing voice, like both her shallow breath sweetly brushing my neck as I fell asleep and her tragic death, I keep close to me now. All the shades who are both themselves and the lively ancestors of my present self, who whisper to me, along with my mother and father and the innumerable and glorious birds and beasts most clearly experienced in my childhood; the whole wide world of my kith and kin (and not only in dreams and memories.)

And, of course, there’s all the others too. The Kate with the wicked pirate’s laugh, bad fairy and mistress of dangerous secrets, whose other, adult voices are lost to me, drowned out by life in an antipodean world about which I know nothing. The mercurial Kate I loved, envied, and somewhat feared because she spurred me to override my fears and innate caution, somehow imbued me with the calculation necessary to challenge my own desperation, even if that led to my childish attempt to seduce Hamish. (I know now that childish self would have gone through with it if he’d wanted to, that sexually inquisitive girl/woman that Kate had birthed from her cocoon.) That momentarily brave girl/woman who knew in her heart that anything was better than to drift into being the distant, untouchable, disembodied, angelic, (and so sexless) muse of a secret poet and latent priest. Dear Hamish, so wounded and confused by his father’s frigid, angry dualisms, whose musings and troubled and tender silences, as much as his tentative explorations of my flesh, woke me to my own unruly desires. Bodily desires, yes, but also a sowing of other possibilities; of entry into a world of fully sensuous, deeply tactile, imaginings made flesh – the strange fruit, perhaps, of Tam Lin’self-queen’s ‘eyes of wood’. Kate and Hamish, earthy seductress and erstwhile saint, the twin yet incompatible anchors in the tug-of-war that forced me to reinvent myself through acts of imaginative making. And then Mario, unbidden friend and casual initiator of my European citizenship, the secret lover of no doubt beautiful boys I never knew; Mario star in a distant city who then fell and died alone.

Also, first among the living, my dear Sarah, the whole bright arc of her from helpless bairn, through flowering child, to the bright, brave young woman who, with warmth and care, is negotiating her way through the traps, rewards and tangles of a life of research and action. And my briefly beloved Andreas, golden one, the brightly burning gift of a kindly Fate, a wholly unexpected feast and refuge in my last real London days. Old now, with deep smile-lines around his eyes no doubt. But then, a softly furred, honey-coloured, spice-scented being, a mouth warm, wet and tasting of Nykteri; my post-coital purveyor of breakfasts of fresh figs, galaktoboureko, and sweet black coffee in the sanctuary of his tiny Highgate basement flat. Of late dinners: tirokafteri, tzatziki, or dakos, followed by kolokythoanthoi, spanakopita lamb, soutzoukia smyrneika, spanakorizo, or maybe tiropita; then grapes and melomakarona or maybe baklava to finish. Meals lovingly prepared and followed by the long slow walk up the twilight hill and back, before falling into the pleasures of the still unmade bed.

The Andreas who would leave me, exactly thirty-three days after we became lovers and just as he had told me he must. Left for the waiting penthouse in Houston and the marriage to Ariadna,to which his father had committed him at fourteen as the seal on the partnership of two families. Andreas who I allowed to become my first and only dealer and who, in less than ten years, turned Papadopoulos and Ioannou into the most respected gallery for makers and up-market crafts in Texas, perhaps the entire American South. The Andreas who is a loving husband and the doting paterfamilias of four girls and a boy; whose Christmas letters always overflow with their news and achievements, always radiate a simple pride, and never mention the vicissitudes of the business. And that other Andreas, the punctilious businessman who unfailingly pays me my annual artist’s retainer as agreed all those years ago, punctiliously calculating the proper percentage to be passed on to me for each sale. A man who has served my work so well I’ve never needed another dealer.

Iain, you may wonder why have I never bothered you with my maker’s life.

Initially, I think, because I had no wish to risk being labelled a ‘craftswoman’. Later, simply because it would have involved giving you a wholly predictable account of my craft – the making of two or three small wooden pieces a year in whatever spare time I had left over from my mending work; my small, highly intricate wall pieces like puzzles made for the delight of fitting together different woods chosen for their distinctive colour and grain. What could be less interesting that that production, or the business of shipping the outcome off for sale. Pleasurable and necessary respectively, of course, but still a set of entirely self-contained practices that had little to contribute to exchanges outside the small world of my art. My dear, I simply had better and more interesting things I wanted to explore with you.

And, of course, I have listened to you, all your various voices in our various exchanges. (We’ve written often enough of them and I’ll not bore you by going over that ground again.) So, here I am, waiting for the inevitable and, meanwhile, listening to these and all the other night-selves, ancestors, shades and kith who are good enough to visit or even stay with me.

I should have liked to be a braver soul, somebody about whom you could have said when she died, as the poet Robert Bly did of James Hillman, that: ‘Flora threw enormous parties for the spirits’. I know only too well that I’ve had neither the courage nor the necessary generosity, although I have on occasion made real efforts in that direction and tried at least to lend the spirits a sympathetic ear. For that, and for the many pleasures of our friendship, I hope you’ll remember me kindly, will continue to speak with me in your head and heart when my body’s gone.

Enough. There’s a small pink geranium in a pot on the shelf below my window here, second cousin maybe to the wild one you found surviving on the sea wall. I’m not supposed to have it but my kindly Nigerian nurse, Wanda-May, pretends not to notice it. She even surreptitiously waters it for me, since I can’t do that myself now. It has that squat, slightly hairy look that I find endearing about geraniums. Sometimes if the sun is out and a nurse comes in to close my curtains so I can sleep, he or she brushes against it. Then its distinctive smell drafts across to me here in bed. I can’t say I particularly like the smell, but I do like that sharing, a reminder that the geranium and I, like all living things, have a common need for light, air and water, and that something, in consequence, is always being exchanged between us all. I find that extraordinarily comforting just now!

Improvised drinking trough, Side Head.

I’m tired and can hear the nurses starting their evening rounds. Again, enough, enough.

With love, as always

Flora

 

Fly-tipped bath in Bristol suburban woodland.

 Postscript

 In analysis you work to turn the ghosts that haunt you into ancestors who accompany you.

Bruce Springsteen[1]

I see little purpose in writing anything more about Flora, other than including here a quotation from a book she recommended to me right at the end of her life, Octavio Paz’s Sor Juana. Flora was neither a poet nor a nun, but this passage seems to me to summarize something essential about her. Paz writes of Sor Juana that she was not ‘a simple person cut from whole cloth’, rather she was ‘a complex and dynamic being, in conflict with her world and herself.’ He adds:

The obstinacy with which she insisted on being herself, […] her fidelity to her inner voices, the secret and proud pertinacity that allowed her to bend without breaking, […] was (and is) an example of intelligence and will in the service of internal freedom.[2]

What follows here does not, then, directly concern Flora herself. It’s a very partial explanation of, and perhaps a summary of, the trajectory of a period of my work that began back in 1999, before the Debatable Landsproject, of which this is intended to be the final part. Work in which she played a vital part. In offering this account I am also coming clean about Flora’s claim to provide ‘heart work’ as a counter-point my ‘head work’. Less a post mortem as ‘conclusion’, then, than a setting out of certain concerns.

Those readers who do not feel the need for any such prosaic explanations may wish to stop reading at this point.

The main purpose of what became the Debatable Landsproject was to carry out a series of linked forays into unknown territory, forays that acknowledged, engaged with, and tried to interweave, the plural interests and energies of the porous, conflicted constellated self I found myself to be and its places in the world.

Those constituent concerns included those of a university lecturer trained as a visual artist who, while necessarily engaged in the professional activities of those two ‘worlds’, was also personally entangled in thinking that was marginal to the orthodoxies of both. Those entanglements included a long-standing preoccupation with the post-Jungian or Archetypal psychology associated with James Hillman; a powerful identification with the rural uplands of the North of England, the Scottish Borders and the Highlands and Islands; and a passionate curiosity about the power of certain forms of traditional and contemporary popular music. These concerns gradually generated resistant to what, following Crawford Brough Macpherson, might be termed‘the culture of possessive individualism’, a culture that artists and academics were increasingly expected to internalize if they wished to thrive. That resistance may have been partly due to temperament but, more centrally, it was a response to unusual and demanding family circumstances. The resulting dissonances generated the tensions that have framed the Debatable Landsproject.

By 2012 that project was losing direction because my energies had been diverted into generating a discourse around ‘deep mapping’ (hence Flora’s comment). Early versions of the present text appeared, in consequence, to belong to some quite other order of concern, and were written out of a period of considerable professional, family, and personal change. That period began with a diagnosis, in early 2013, of advanced bowel cancer. A major operation saved my life but had ongoing consequences; health issues arising from chemotherapy and the end of regular academic employment. As a family, we also needed to undertake the drawn-out process of finding, buying, and adapting a smaller house to our needs. All this impacted on, and gradually modified, my sense of place and the ‘deep mapping’ I’d been involved in since 1999. Only very slowly did I come to intuit that the amorphous text on which I was working, almost despite myself, might have some relationship to the Debatable Landsproject and, despite its apparently very different nature, provide its resolution.

This work is, then, a going through, a giving form to, a modification of (?), my senses of place as reconfiguring an ongoing project. One way to describe what I’ve attempted here would be to say that I have taken William Least-Heat Moon’s ‘PrairyErth (a deep map)’ as a starting-point but, rather than focus on an external, geographically defined, location, instead set out to map a composite internal set of place-based relationships. An indication as to why this work might provide an appropriate conclusion to the Debatable Landsproject, previously always closely aligned to the teaching I no longer regularly do, came on 23^rdJanuary 2017. I received an email from a friend of a friend who, three years earlier, I’d helped in a small way with her doctoral work. This communication resolved the indecision and doubt that, for some months, had prevented me finishing this text.

My correspondent had read Between Carterhaugh and Tamshiel Rig: a borderline episode, the first work in the series this book concludes, and wasusing it for a workshop on ‘landscapes of the imagination’ she was helping run. What had inspired her to do so was the chapter ‘Everyday magic: singing walking writing’. This, she told me, had enabled her to identify: “what is missing from my academic training”. Coincidentally, she had also become fascinated by stories of wolves in a region she was researching for a piece of creative writing she never seemed able to finish. She goes on: ‘Perhaps the wolves have become a symbol of my own imagination and its repression through academic training’!

Wolves, and human attitudes to them, play a central role in Between Carterhaugh and Tamshiel Rig, which begins as follows:

“For much of my childhood I suffered a recurrent nightmare. It began as I took the route of a familiar daytime walk – a muddy, flint-studded path that leads away from the house into a wood. I follow it through the well-thinned hazels and out onto the edge of the farmland beyond. I am alone. Arriving at the fringes of more established woodland, thick with young saplings between vast, smooth-trucked beech trees, the path takes me along the edge of a rough strip of grass between the wood and a large, L-shaped field. In the distance, there is an orphanage where, on daytime walks, I sometimes hear children laughing and playing together. Now there is only silence”.

“Where the path turns a corner towards the lane I pass an old wooden shed that is gradually disappearing under nettles and briars. When I reach the point where the path crosses the narrow lane a vast black wolf confronts me. It stands at least as tall as myself. It always appears as if out of the air, materialising at the edge of the shadows just where the lane runs in under overhanging trees. I know instantly that my only hope is to lie down on the road with my eyes closed, hold my breath, keep absolutely still. I must play dead, as I have done in this dream hundreds of times before. On each occasion, I wait to see what will happen next. Usually, after what seems like an eternity of the wolf sniffing around me, I wake in absolute terror just as it starts to eat me alive.”

What I did not say then was that this same wolf sometimes behaved very differently. For example, it once spoke with me at length (I don’t remember what about), while a great city burned in the distance behind it. In short, its place in my childhood was more ambiguous than the passage above suggested.[1]In one sense, then, Between Carterhaugh and Tamshiel Rigwas an extended ‘staying with’ just one aspect of that dream wolf by following its sense of uncanny violence via the history and geography of the former parish of Southdean just north of the English Scottish border. That process of ‘staying with’ the wolf,a process borrowed from James Hillman[2], provided the basis for an imaginative, image-based connectivity across time and space between a wide variety of topics; childhood sites, etymologies, histories around Borders place-names, the ethnography of an old song still sung today, scape-goating, land rights, otherness, and terrorism, for example. But it did not begin to exhaust my listening to the figures that appeared through that work.

The sense of returning to something still potent in my concern with the reanimated image of the wolf, revived by that email on January 23^rd, 2017, became linked to observations made by Octavio Paz. These concern the implicit ‘authorisations and prohibitions’ that, in any society, institution, or professional world, become the tacit basis for an automatic and unthinking obedience predicated on self-censorship. An obedience further guaranteed by all those figures whose institutional authority is ultimately dependent on perpetuating those authorizations and prohibitions. Paz suggests that a creative work may tell us something that can only be understood if we realize that, as an ‘utterance’, it is ‘surrounded by silence: the silence of the things that cannot be said’[3]precisely because its creator has internalized those prohibitions.

One of my primary concerns in Between Carterhaugh and Tamshiel Rig was to find a way to interweave scholarship and fieldwork with the types of testimonial imagination (in Richard Kearney’s sense) I felt were prohibited. Both by an academic training predicated on Modernist notions of rational, self-sustaining, and consequently reductive, disciplinarity, and by the hyper-criticality of the Postmodern. I wanted, in addition, to draw attention to a‘thing-that-could-not–be-acknowledged’, the wolf in imagination, while still working as a teacher/artist/researcher. This seemed to me to involve engaging with, and validating, the contemporary relevance of, traces of what I took to be a vital tradition of quasi-pagan vernacular animism alive and well within British culture; something articulated through our singing and listening to the ‘supernatural’ Borders ballads. Interwoven with all this there has been the issue of the repression of testimonial imagination by a culture obsessed with novelty.

The situation indicated above is not, of course, simply personal; rather it reflects a significant social phenomenon. The journalist Paul Mason, in a long article on the protest marches world-wide following the inauguration of President Trump, writes:

“So the challenge for the truly liberal section of the elite is – as in the 1930s – what to do. If you work for a bank, a law firm, an Ivy League university or a Silicon Valley giant, and your employer is systematically accommodating the new, post-factual reality, you are – even now, just weeks into the Trump era – living a double life.”[4]

While I largely agree with the substance of his article, I think the link between having to live a ‘double life’ and Trump’s arrival in the White House misrepresents a situation that has a much longer history.

It was clear before the turn of the twenty-first century that university employees were being required to live multiple and conflicted professional lives. As lecturers, we were expected to square educational values with the demands of an increasingly authoritarian management culture based on quite other values and imposed by diktat. The research activity that had animated our teaching and kept it current was no longer to be determined by our interests and expertise, but by instrumental institutional responses to a system of state audit predicated on economic control. To borrow from Hannah Arendt, our ability to actwas being reduced to a passive capacity for directed work. Not only that, but institutions were beginning to adopt quasi-totalitarian strategies; the endless reorganisation of departments and faculties, revisions and de-democratisation of committee structures, and so on, all of which increased the power of management.

I made ‘Between Carterhaugh and TamshielRig’ to articulate the convergence of a physical and psychic landscape. A convergence necessary to the multiple possibilities of creative work and able to sustain my engaging with, and teaching about, the constellation of memory, place and identity through testimonial imagination.It was then a response to an increasingly repressive and alienating educational context. The body of work around that book then mutated into the larger ‘Debatable Lands’project. By the time ‘Debatable Lands Vol 1’ was published in 2007, I was also heavily engaged in co-ordinating informal networks that created the space necessary for such imaginative work, collective or otherwise, to survive. The ‘Debatable Lands’project had, by then, taken on a more political inflection following the Border ballads, and the conflict of mentalities they helped illuminate, west across the water – first to the Ireland of the plantations and then to the USA. What I had understood, from reading Geraldine Finn, James Hillman, Felix Guattari and others, was that the psychic, the social, and the environmental must all be thought together, from a ‘place-between’ the contradictory life-worlds in which I was by then enmeshed. From the perspective of that place-between, Trump is simply a by-product of a crisis that has overwhelmed the academy, the dominant culture, and society at large. A crisis in no small part generated by the wholesale internalisation of possessive individualism. Trump is, after all, only a gross articulation of possessive individualism in its most extreme, monomaniacal, form.

By 2007 the Debatable Landsproject made it possible for me to articulate an ‘open’ deep mapping, one that attempted:

“[…]speaking from the space-betweenrepresentation and reality, language and life, category and experience: the space of the ethical encounter with others as the other and not more of the same – a space and an encounter that puts meinto question, which challenges and changes me, as well as the other (the otherness of the other) and the socius/the system that contains and sustains us.”[5]

The resulting preoccupation with academic discourse also began to cut me off from (Laura)/Flora/Faun as kith, as invisible friend. ‘She’ became the aspect of ‘placed-between’ I had increasingly neglected, its psychic dimensions personified, the constellation able to facilitate renewed conversations with multiple qualities and selves. Some sense of the ancestral roots of her persona can be evoked by listening to two thematically related songs: Alastair Roberts’ ‘I went hunting’from his Farewell Sorrow(2003) and The Handsome Family’s ‘Hunter Green’ from Last Days of Wonder (2006). Both reach back to the ancient folk supposition that there are men and women who are not constrained by their human form alone.[6]The supposition Hamish imaginatively realised in and through Laura.

Running through this work, then, is the tacit contention that we cannot properly engage with our current psycho-social-environmental situation until we learn to live with the cognitive dissonances attendant on acknowledging that we live, not by the reductive mentality implicit in the notion of a universe, but in the much greater complexity of a polyverse. In Roger Corless’ discussion of our many realities and selves, the voices of Helen Rhys-Jones, Cornelius Yang, Gregory Hinsdale and George-Michel de Saint-Hilaire allow him to conduct (in his own words), “an exercise in heteronomy, in allowing aspects of myself to emerge as semi-autonomous characters and act out a drama on the stage of my imagination”. He notes that these characters: “say what they wish” and that he exercises “no particular control over them”. While he identifies to a greater or less extent with them all, he does so most strongly with Professor George-Michel de Saint-Hilaire and “least of all with Helen”. He adds:

“Perhaps this is because I self-identify as an intellectual and am uncomfortable in the presence of persons who are strongly connected with their feelings. Never-the-less Helen exists, and she brings me back into my body when I get too professorial and lose my heart.”[7]

This returns me again to Flora and suggests that Hamish and Roger Corless may have had more in common than just a religious vocation. This postscript is, then, a brief exposition of Laura/Flora/Faun’s desire for a counterpoint to the scholarly plundering needed to create the other book works in the Debatable Lands series that, in turn, drew me into debates around deep mapping. This final piece is our‘heart work’, offered in the spiritof testimonial and empathetic imagination and as a small act of defiance in the face of their increasing repression.

At the edge of the old world (Orkney beach).

This book concludes with two images from the abandoned book on imaginary friends that Flora and I had just started to work on when she became terminally ill. I only have the photographs in which she arranged for Sarah Armitage to stand in for her younger self. She did not feel able to sit for a second series, which would have shown her wearing the same mask but as an adult.

 

[1]Quoted in John Lahr, ‘Greasers and Rah-Rah’, London Review of BooksVo. 39, No. 3 02.02. 2017 p. 29.

[2]Octavio Paz (1988) Sor Juana,Cambridge, Massachusetts, The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press pp. 296-297.

[1]My relationship with this dream wolf would eventually find a resolution in an extraordinarily vivid waking dream that occurred entirely unexpectedly during a session with a therapist. On a beach flanked by low, crumbling cliffs, I watched two wolves play in the space between me and the sea. This brief vision appeared to take place in a space just beyond the room in which we were sitting and had an air of tranquillity and peace.

[2]See James Hillman (1979) The Dream and the Underworld. New York: Harper & Row

[3]Octavio Paz (1988) Sor JuanaCambride, Mass., The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press p. 5.

[4]The Guardian(G2) 24.01.17

[5]Ibid. p. 176.

[6]An example of a male variant on the theme of transformation in the two songs referred to would be Mr Fox’s version of ‘The Gay Goshawk’ from Join Us in Our Game 2004. Record label.

[7]All quotations are taken from: Roger Corless: ‘Many Selves, Many Realities: The Implications of Hetronymy and the Plurality of Worlds Theory for Multiple Religious Belonging’, originally given on October 6^th, 2002 andreproduced at:  http://www.pcts.org/journal/corless2002a/many.selves.pdf

The Judgement

The whole village soon knew we’d been caught drinking and simply assumed, as I did, that that was it. What first got people asking questions was that the ‘innocent’ James had immediately been sent away to stay with Sir William’s sister in Brighton; supposedly to concentrate on his revision. There was also gossip about the ‘guilty’ Peter not been summonsed to the police station for an offical warning with the rest of us. That was largely put down to his father being a local JP and so was seriously resented in some quarters. Our parents collectively grounded us all for varying lengths of time and then either restricted our socialising together or, in Hamish and Peter’s case, banned it. Kate, when I saw her, kept resolutely silent about the whole event. All this was incomprehensible to me. But with Lizzie, Peter and Kate silent, I could only guess that perhaps something else had happened about which I knew nothing.

‘Shake hole’.

Contradictory rumours abounded. Then Mr. and Mrs. Oliver were not invitated to the pre-Christmas cocktails at the Big House, seen as a direct attempt at public ostracization that supported the rumour that Kate had led ‘young Master James’ astray. In mid-January it became public knowledge that Lady Aitcheson was divorcingSir William for adultery, followed by renewed gossip about his relationship withthe doctor’s wife, an excellent shot who had often joined the summer shooting parties. This seemed vindicated when the doctor and his wife sparated and moved away from the village. Sir William now spent most of his time in London. LadyAitcheson was increasingly staying in the family’s second home in York, where she was said to be consulting lawyers. Peter spent the summer holiday with his mother in York and did not come north. James came up for the shooting in August with his father but we didn’t see him to speak to. Cat and I started using the term ‘the Judgement’ for all this after a thunderous sermon from Hamish’s father on that topic which, in addition to drawing attention to the terrors of the last Judgement, contained a number of references to poor parenting and the dissolute behaviour of the young.

All this felt to me like a very painful, drawn-out ending to my childhood and a bitter withering-away of my sense of belonging. Our close-knit group simply evaporated. Kate left school early to study photography at a sixthform college in Newcastle, made new friends, and spent as little time as possible at home. Her absence led to new rumours, the most lurid being that she’d left because she was pregnant with James’s child. Lizzy, meanwhile was trying to get a place at Durham to read history and had her own worries. And I was starting to focus on my my interest in art, and all the practical problems trying to pursue that interest would throw up. At that time I knew very little about the larger consequences of the Judgement; that Mr. Oliver’s business declined due to a number of significant accounts, including those of the estate and most of its tenants, being switched elsewhere. Nor that Arthur Bell, a very capable man but now increasingly left in limbo by his absent employers, was heard to say that he felt like a man fighting with one hand tied behind his back. Since the estate is central to the village economy, everyone soon shared his anxiety.

‘Shake holes’.

I went on a short walking holiday organised by the parents of school friends down in the North Pennines that summer. One day we came across a series of big sink holes off to one side of the path. I was impressed by them and, weeks later, they came back to me in an extraordinary dream, an emblem of how things now were.

A last tryst

My last tryst with Hamish required lengthy and maticulous planning, but by that time I was desperate to keep his attention and prepared to go to any lengths. I had absolutely no understanding then of the contradictory causes of my desparation or that I was trying to ward off the inevitability of changes that, unconsciously, I think I probably longed for. And I had no sense of how confused Hamish and I were by our various conflicting desires. What I did intuit was that my relationship with Hamish was midwife to my trying to be an artist. Anyway, in the event I got Hamish spectacualary wrong.

I’d had great difficulty contacting him and making plans, but was encouraged by the fact that he did at least want us to meet. I forged a letter to get him off school early on the Friday. I engineered circumstances that required an early lift for myself and invented a good reason for a friend’s mother to drop me off before we got to the village. That enabled me to double back to my arranged meeting-place with Hamish, the old bus shelter at the little crossroads where he would naturally get off. All this so that we could spend about fourty minutes alone together before his expected arrival home. Above all, I had made sure to obtain the one personal item critical to my plan, (aquired with considerable difficulty and at substantial cost).

I thought we’d been very careful after our meeting, emerging onto the path from the little abandoned building on the edge of the wood some time apart. But because things had not gone as I’d hoped, we had argued and so were running late. He must have followed me sooner than he should. I don’t know who rang the vicar. (Although later it did occur to me that Mrs. Purvis’ kitchen window virtually overlooked the end of that path.)Nor do I understand why they rang the vicar and not Dad. I do know that when I went to change out of my school clothes, there were traces of dirt on the back of my skirt and blouse. In a village now alerted to the moral terpitude of the young, someone must have speculated on cause and effect. In the ten or so minutes it took Hamish to walk home that person rang his father. Weeks later Mike would tell me that what frightened Hamish the most was his father’s insistance that any further disobedience about seeing me would result in his damnation. It’s no wonder then that Hamish dumped me.

At the time I thought the business of him joining the church was just a lame excuse, but it turned out that he did, and even became something of a radical. I must assume his God really does move in mysterious ways, although I can’t help wonder whether it was damnation or my offering to have sex with him that scared him more. Anyway, when we parted I sensed deep down that my offer had been a last straw.

What astonishes me now is what I can and can’t recall from that day. I remember almost nothing of our meeting itself. Of course I know factually exactly what happened (or rather didn’t), but it feels unreal, stilted, like a scene caught in an old, hand-tinted photograph. Yet I can vividly recall my long wait for the bus, all of twenty odd minutes hunkered down among the fag-ends and litter behind the bus shelter. It felt like several lifetimes.

I can feel the rough wooden planking of the bus shelter against my lower vertibra as I shift my weight; there’s even a slight tenderness from my bra strap rubbing a patch beneath my left armpit. Under the smell of creasote from the shelter there’s the faint, sickly-sweet odour of rotting flesh that comes and goes with the breeze, probably a dead ewe in the next field. There’s a low hum of insects and the persistant trickling sound of water, making me wonder if I really need to pee or am just rediculously nervous, or both. Then there’s the sound of a solitary car going slowly along the top road, a sound that, as it fades, blends into the bird song. While I listen to all this I’m rubbing the little scars and scabs on my right knee where it sticks out beyond the hem of my skirt, trying to distract myself from my butterflies. I’ve now convinced myself that Hamish’s bus will never come or, if by some miracle it does, he won’t be on it.

At some point my nervous fingers find a little swollen bump on the inner side of my knee that’s tender and, adjusting my weight again, I begin to rub it harder. To my horror a long curved black shape then suddenly pushs its way up through my skin. For a second I think it’s some awful parasite, then take courage and gingerly tweezer it from my flesh. A fat drop of blood and milky pus wells from the exit point. It’s a big thorn. I then remember the thicket of brambles Dad and I’d cleared away the previous weekend.

It had been fun attacking the brambles and discovering the junk they’d been hiding for years. I’d had a bill hook and worn work gloves, Dad’s old leather jacket, and my thickest jeans. We worked all afternoon, clearing and burning the dense bramble patch threatening to take over the sunniest corner of the back garden. (Afterwards I watched the pale grey circle of ash from our fire darken and lighten each day in response to the changing weather). But all my precautions that day had been in vain. I found myself caught on a long, arching, thorn-encrusted caneand, half falling, it ripped a short but bloody gash through my jeans on the inner side of my right knee. I could see thorns embedded in this wealt and went into the house to remove them. I clearly missed one. That thin black arc rising inexorably from my flesh is almost as vivid now as when it happened. 

Cat

I had very little warning that Cat was leaving for France, a move her parents told her they’d been contemplating for a while. She and I wondered, of course, whether it was just another consequence of the Judgement. For a while after she left we wrote each other increasing stilted letters, each shorter than the last, until we finally agreed to stop. She had tried to give me the impression that all was well with her, but I could tell that everything had changed for the worse.

Cat was always a little in awe of her Mama, but on easy terms with her Papa. That didn’t stop her from belittling him to me for not standing up to his wife. Cat, like her relationship to her parents, was as lively as she was complicated. What I remember most often now is her singing, the quality of her voice. I also remember the girl with the long chestnut pigtails I first met, her big dark eyes flashing with excitement at some story or game. An excitement just held in check by the sense of personal dignity she’d absorbed from her Mama. Her ready excitement, her smile, and some of her physical gestures were her father’s, but in most other respects she took after her mother. This was most obvious in her neatness and sense of her own worth. So much comes back now from the period when we were close. Stuff I forgot, or maybe turned away from, for years.

When I first played Maddy Prior and June Tabor’s ‘Silly Sisters’, I burst into tears. It was so perfect, sounding just as I imagined, entirely unrealistically, that Cat and I would have done if we’d kept on singing together. Absurd. And then I discovered that there was a wholly other Cat, and another Michael and Patsy too, people I didn’t know as I’d thought I had then.

In the last months before Cat left our friendship had cooled and I saw less of her. I told myself this was because of the Judgement, which was partly true. But I was also increasingly preoccupied with Hamish and, after that finished, with my art homework and working out how on earth I was going to get to a Foundation Course. In any case, after the Judgement, her mother kept Cat away from us all, except Patsy and Mike. That exception was purely pragmatic. Cat was spending long hours practising her fiddle, and this was clearly better done in an empty barn of their aunt’s than in her bedroom at home. We were now mostly in different classes at school, and made no real attempt to find out how things were with each other. My curiosity about what had happened during those last days before she left for France only started many years later, after I bumped into Mike, down from Glasgow for an old school-friend’s silver wedding anniversary.

He’d changed almost beyond recognition and, when I asked after Patsy, he ducked the question and started a long rambling monologue about Cat. He seemed rather drunk and I suggested coffee. Eventually he told me that everything had become increasingly difficult for Patsy when his own hopes of becoming a trainee gamekeeper on the estate were abruptly ended. Sir William, who had initially been agreeable, simply announced that he didn’t want to see ‘that boy’ with the keepers again. Mike’s future evaporated in that moment but, a proud boy, he didn’t tell any of us what had happened. Instead he took his disappointment home with him.

 

He’d had enough practice driving to pick up an HGV license without too much difficulty and worked for a while as a driver for a local haulage firm. He admitted to me that his anger and frustration often boiled over, making life increasingly difficult for Patsy. He and Cat fell out when she persuaded Patsy to see the doctor, but he also seemed to blame her for going back on a promise. I couldn’t get any sense out of him about the connection between these two things. What I did discover was that, after Cat left and I’d gone to London, their aunt started going into the paddock at night to remonstrate with the unseen dead. Then she had a full-blown breakdown, went into a home, and the house, stables, dogs and ponies were sold off. Patsy went to live with a relative near Wooler, while Mike moved away to Glasgow. It was in Wooler that Patsy started to pick up again. I heard no more because at that point Mike insisted he had to leave for work.

A couple of years after that wedding I got a card care of the estate telling me Mike had died. There were only a handful of us at the funeral. Sarah Kirkwell, Mike’s second cousin and a former nurse, sat beside me, clearly pleased to be in contact with someone who’d known him as a boy. (Due to some protracted family quarrel, she’d seen almost nothing of him then.) All due rites observed, we went for a cup of tea together. She gave me a potted version of what she knew of Mike’s adult life, which had included a spell inside for possession of an unlicensed shotgun used to threaten another lorry-driver, years on the outer fringes of Glasgow’s trade in fenced goods, and increasingly serious alcohol abuse. Mike eventually inherited a relative’s house just outside Wooler and moved back east. By now he had liver trouble. She suspected he’d been borderline depressive for much of his adult life and had dealt with it by drinking.

I asked if she knew anything about his sister.

It appears that after Mike moved to Glasgow Patsy came off antidepressants and started working at a local hotel. She’d met and then married an Australian who’d had a temporary job there and gone back home with him. They had a boy and a girl. Michael had letters from her, all of which he’d burnt before he died, but would never talk about her. Sarah had asked him for a contact address when he was clearly terminally ill but he’d ignored her and she’d been unable to find one among his papers. There was no will. I told her what I knew about Michael, Patsy, and Cat, and my feeling he’d never told me the whole truth about what had happened between them. She was silent for a long time.

‘I think from things he said that maybe Michael and Patsy got a little too close and Cat’s getting involved triggered some kind of crisis between them. Mike once let slip that he’d never forgiven himself for what happened before they moved, something involving a friend. Maybe that was your friend Cat’?

Iain, that’s as much as I know. I told you way back how Cat’s life ended.

 

Land and Sky

I’ve always made Lizzy uncomfortable when I talk about the politics of land, particularly when it’s with Sarah. No doubt she feels I’m getting at her as a landowner. I don’t meaning it personally, but I can see that she might well take it that way. It’s caused a good deal of friction between us over the years.

I’ve been critical of the politics of the landowning elite since my London days. It was largely intuitive until I started learning from Mario’s friends, who were already debating things like the policies of the Natural Environmental Research Council in relation to Rachel Carson’s ‘Silent Spring’. (One of them would later became an eminent environmental historian). Later I read Marion Shoard’s ‘The Theft of the Countryside’and ‘This Land is our Land’, which confirmed my sense that our landowning elite were excessively influential in shaping national politics and perceptions. Only a British Tory Government could get away with a response to increased flooding by substantially cutting funding to the national Environment Agency and, simultaneously, massively increasing the subsidy to the very grouse moor owners whose management of land helps cause that flooding. My talk about this kind of thing upsets Lizzy because she feels I unfairly identify her with the small number of hugely wealthy individuals who’ve preserved an archaic and profoundly damaging model of land management. Yet she is intelligent enough to know that in many respects she’s complicit in perpetuating just that model. Intellectually, she knows perfectly well that the vision of rural countryside promoted by everyone from the National Trust to ‘Horse and Hound’is, at the very least, profoundly misleading, and that the public image she projects is virtually inseparable from that vision. Her defence against my politics is a paternalistic localism of the National Trust variety. It would go something like this.

North from the Cheviots

Yes, it’s true there was once a ‘Big House’ here, only it wasn’t that big and was one of a kind with Homehaugh, the vicarage, the doctor’s, and all the other larger local houses. It was really a large farm, a neat cluster of old stone buildings around a courtyard behind a long two-story house, all tucked away in its own little patchwork of land. A small lawn, stands of old trees, and a little meadow running down to the stream, all nestled strategically in the shelter of the hill and between the two big home farm fields. And yes, it was also the busy centre of a business based on a network of hill farms, an agricultural and sporting enterprise designed to provide its owners with both economic capital and social status – but that must be balanced against the fact that it provided much of the employment in the local community.

All of which, in it’s own strictly limited terms, is perfectly true. The 1867 map of the estate, taken from the former estate office and now framed and hanging in Lizzy’s downstairs corridor, embodies the ownership of an area of land that forms a roughly oval patchwork. The Big House, home farm, and the village are more or less at the centre; then various tenant farms around it, their land spaced a bit like the gaps between spokes of an irregular wheel. Today it would have to include several large, seemingly randomly placed, rectangular patches of forestry in what was then rough grazing land. This runs from the valley on either side to the high open fell up to the watershed and the edge of that map. When Dad and I arrived this all belonged outright to Sir William and Lady Aitcheson, although technically it was owned by a family trust. But to local people it was and still is the Reed Estate or, more usually, ‘Reed’s’ or simply ‘the estate’, as natural a phenomenon as the Cheviot itself.

Apart from the Sitka Spruce plantations, it’s still mostly agricultural or grazing land, with cattle or sheep on almost all of it at one time of year or another. For Sir William, it was primarily a breeding ground for the grouse and pheasants essential to his shooting parties. For almost everyone else employed here, it’s hill farming land with the husbandry of animals at its heart. As a child, I took what I knew of all this for granted. Only the sky was different, a constant source of wonder because so vast and changeable.

One late August evening when I was twelve or thirteen, some of us children were up on the ridge behind the village after long walk. Unusually, Lizzy and Peter argued. She wanted to stay out and watch for shooting stars. Peter insisted that we should get back at the agreed time. James sided with Lizzy, as he usually did on the rare occasions when Peter and Lizzy disagreed. Normally I’d have gone with Peter but, emboldened by Lizzy’s rare refusal to honour an agreement, I said I’d stay. I badly wanted to see shooting stars. In the end, we compromised. The others went on, with Peter promising to let Mrs. Oliver and Dad know we’d be late back. The three of us then sat in a huddle on someone’s jacket, our backs against a convenient boulder, James in the middle with an arm around each of us for warmth.

Abandoned track.

The last daylight slipped away and the whole panoply of stars started to appear. After a while the sky darkened and then, every so often, a little point of light would fall and be extinguished forever in front of our eyes. What stays with me, however, is not so much the awe they eclipse inspired in me as Lizzy’s uncharacteristic behaviour. I cannot recollect another occasion when she put her own desire before her sense of obligation to do whatever she had said she would do.

 The Oliver family

 Before I’d been in the valley a week Lizzy, prompted no doubt by her mother, started to treat me like a little sister. She was rather bossy, which I resented, but also practical, kind and, mostly, patient with my occasional petulence. She helped me to settle into school, to negotiate with Dad about clothes and getting my hair cut properly, taught me to sew and darn, and encouraged me to read, particularly the local and natural history she herself loved.

Today I find it hard to conjure up Lizzy as she was as a girl without the help of old photographs, where she’s either in school uniform, or else the jeans or short skirts of our teens. Day to day she usually now dresses like a 1940s Land Girl. (Not that she can’t scrub up and ‘do county’ if she must.) Like us all, Lizzy is several people. The Lizzy of my childhood, always polite and studious, is still in there somewhere, but you’d be hard put to find her most days. Now she has quite a reputation for not suffering fools gladly, a trait previously only visible when she had to deal with obdurate younger children like myself. Although it was often tempered by Kate, who always gave as good as she got.

I never really grasped the relationship between the sisters. It seemed to occilate between two poles: guarded but essentially loving mutual respect and undisguised exasperation. I think each privately had a grudging but genuine admiration for those elements in the other’s character that she herself did not possess; Lizzy for Kate’s restless experimentalism, and Kate for Lizzy’s dependable evenhandedness. They rarely quarrelled openly, at least in public, and their disagreement on any topic in our presence was signalled only by Lizzy studiously ignoring Kate, who for her part would give a wordless snort, roll her eyes, or dismissively shrug to signal her disagreement.

Lizzy regularly dropped in on Dad and me, often as a willing go-between for her mother. Kate, always less compliant with parental requests, we saw far less often at the cottage. She could be disarmingly friendly and open when she chose, but was equally capable of being abrupt or openly provocative with anyone she took against, a regular cause of friction with her parents and teachers. She often escaped the worst consequences of this however because, even as a young girl, she had a sensuous vitality that many people (particularlymen), found hard to resist. In her early teens this quality was enhanced by her developing what her mother called ‘a full figure’. She had fabulous, slighty wavy, ginger hair and a mobile face, dominated by blue-green eyes and a generous mouth, that could shift from a wicked grin, through good humoured but detached amusement, to a look of complete and somewhat unnerving attention, and back again, all in seconds. Dad had a soft spot for her, he once refered to her admiringly as ‘our buxom Kate’, perhaps because she tended to flirt with him. (She genuinely liked him, but she also did it to wind me up.) It was true that as a teenager her bust was everything mine was not and I remember his phrase precisely because, at the time, it cut me to the quick. I had a crush on Kate right from the start, and Dad’s observation pricked my somewhat shameful sense that maybe I loved her as I did because she was everthing I wanted to be and was not.

From the start Kate teased me, mostly in a friendly way, which I uncertainly took as a sign of affection. Then, when I was about ten, she started to take me into her confidence about personal things that I’m fairly sure she never shared with Lizzy. Perhaps that’s why she put up with the various irritations that flowed from my crush, at least for the most part, only occasionally getting sufficiently irritated to threaten me with ‘a right good slap’. (She never carried out her threat, but I absolutely believed she might). She also started sharing the ‘mucky’ jokes she loved and told me about her exploits with boys, which I only half believed. She gave me my first taste of alchohol, encouraged me to go skinny-dipping with the boys when, like Cat, I was too bashful to join in, and even allowed me to visit her sanctum in the old hayloft behind the house, where she’d hide whatever she didn’t want Lizzy or her parents to find.

My crush on Kate finally petered out in the summer of my fifteenth birthday. It had been waning anyway because of Hamish and when, out of the blue, she told me not to visit the hayloft, I flaired up at her peremptoriness. We had an angry exchange that ended with her telling me: ‘to just piss off and grow up’. The resulting coolness between us further fuelled my preoccupation with Hamish. My crush on Kate occasionally led me into various kinds of trouble, none of them particularly serious. I’m grateful to Lizzy for a lifelong friendship in much the way that a truculent younger sister might be. That is, somewhat coloured by the residue of childhood resentments, quarrels, and sulks. But I still feel deeply for Kate, despite her long absence from my life. It was she who recognised and encouraged my desire to draw and make things, urged me to do more and better. I relished and learned from her sensuous enjoyment of the world and I admired her ambivalence about our place in the world. She often said openly what I felt but would not allow myself to say.

Of us all it was Kate, followed at some distance by James, who was most openly critical of the narrow parocialism that coloured (and still colours) so much local life; who looked about her for what the wider world might offer. I remember a particular example of this from just before she moved to Newcastle. She came to collect some money Dad owed her for a set of photographs for the practice. She had wait and we got into a conversation about ‘Martinmas Time’, which I’d left playing while I made her a coffee. It stays with me because Kate asked me about the song and, when I told her I admired its heroine, she asked in a genuinely puzzled voice: ‘So what does she do next, this girl? She’s tricked them all and taken their money, so what? So she can marry some local farmer’s son, have six kids and die of the seventh at forty-five? What’s the use of her canniness if that’s all that happens in her life?’

As so often with Kate, her questions felt like a personal challenge.

Mr. and Mrs. Oliver were as different as their daughters. Mrs Oliver was kindness personified. She invited me to dinner and tea each weekend almost as soon as we arrived. In part simply because I was distantly related and so ‘family’ in the broad Borders sense, and in part to take me off Dad’s hands while he was busy establishing his new practice. Mrs. Oliver never said much particularly memorable to me, other than to encourage me to eat. If I occasionally protested out of politeness, she would exclaim about my being ‘all skin and bones’ and insisted I eat more of everything. (Despite this I remained thin as a rake.)

If the solid and welcoming Mrs. Oliver seemed the most straightforward of souls, her husband, tall and thin with longish chestnut brown hair brushed straight back, seemed rather the opposite. At first I thought I simply didn’t register with him, just another of his daughters’ coterie of friends. But later I realised that everyone registered with Mr. Oliver, the personification of a quiet watchfulness that then made me nervous. I rarely saw him except during mealtimes at Homehaugh but sometimes I heard his voice, urgent and firm, late in the evening at home, back from the pub with Dad for a final drink. I always liked that voice.

Early on Lizzy explained her father to me by paraphrasing something her mother must have said when the sisters were little. When her father was at home he took sanctuary in his study like a bear in his den, leaving it only to feed or sleep. The family didn’t disturb him there, because ‘with bears you don’t’. I assumed Lizzy was paraphrasing her mother when she said her father only came alive when he was at work.

I remember feeling patronised by what seemed to me Lizzy’s childish characterisation of her father, so I didn’t tell her she’d got quite the wrong animal. Mr. Oliver was not a bear, but a big, rangy, sly wolf. He sat quiet and attentive at the head of the table, a glint in his eye and the shadow of a grin lurking in the corners of his mouth. I would have sworn he took in everything, although he rarely joined any conversation for very long. I knew he heard every word because, when he said anything, it was always very much to the point. He would drop slyly into a converstaion to follow up some half-hidden thought or attitude. He was never sharp, although I’m sure he found James’s tendency to pontificate irritating. Occasionally he asked probing questions, usually addressed to the twins or his daughters, that made us all stop and think. When I once asked Dad what he talked about with Mr. Oliver late at night he gave me a dark smile. ‘Politics, pet, and history, and the ways of this strange old world. Oh, and about his charity work with his war-time Polish friends, people who can’t go home’.

It took me many years to realize that Homehaugh being so special had just as much to do with Mr. Oliver’s unjudgemental attitude as it did with his wife’s hospitality. He silently gave us permission to be more ourselves, more open, in a world where almost everyone else tended to focus on our need to conform. What really puzzles me to this day is how this apparently calm and reflective man could come so completely off the rails later.

The watershed

I’ve thought a lot about my late childhood and early teens, far too much perhaps. That started in ernest when Lizzy got so ill, after Peter died and Sarah was born, during one of the most difficult periods of my life. I spent long, desparate days helping Mrs Oliver with Sarah and trying to help Lizzy keep herself together, to keep us all sane.

Lizzy became ill just weeks after Sarah was born. She had a difficult delivery, was in deep shock over Peter’s death, and desperately worried about how she was going to keep the farm going. I now think she stayed ill for so long because she couldn’t get to grips either with all that led up to his death or her own misplaced guilt over what she saw as her failure to be honest with him about aspects of her own life. When she was ill Lizzy became seriously depressed and made matters worse for herself by insisting on reading all the old Reed estate records that she and Peter had unearthed when they cleared out the old farm office.

It began as a way of distracting herself but it had the opposite effect. She was shocked to the core by the deep-dyed stain of calousness and exploitation, the hidden face of our local lowland clearances referred to as ‘improvements’  that, as a trained historian, she read between the lines of those documents. That came to seem the inheritance the old Reeds and Peter’s father had bequeathed Peter and herself. Her sense of upset at what had been done in the name of ‘progress’ was fully justified. Ironically, however, it came at just the moment when her neighbours, the present representatives of the class responsible for that history, were rallying round. They did what they could to help Arthur Graham, her mother, and myself to keep Lizzy and Sarah’s livelihood from falling apart. Her newfound grasp of the traditional realpolitikof regional land management, which she’d ducked before, now gnawed at her until she couldn’t bare it. For releif shelost herself in listlessly rummaging through old course books or holding long, meandering telephone conversations with historians she knew through the genealogical research she’d taken on when Peter was alive, a hobby that kept her old academic interests alive and earned her some pin money.

To escape the weight of the Reed estate’s predatory dispossession of local cottars, she developed a string of strange and unconnected obsessions. These would usually flare up, last a few weeks, and then disappear without trace. But while she was in their grip she could think about nothing else. The only one I remember wasthe longest-lasting and most disturbing.  It had to do with the perceived immorality of her mother’s generation during the war. She would get sudden bursts of energy when she would read, make phone calls, then endlessly quote statistics at us. Eight point threemillion British infants delivered between 1939 and 1945, of which over a third were illegitimate. As many as one in five of all pregnancies during the period ended in abortion, and so on. She assumed all this to be proof absolute that her mother’s generation had treated the war as one long opportunity for illicit sex. This obsession also signalled a real and abiding change in Lizzy’s character. She lost her old liberalism and became increasingly reactionary. Suddenly all the immorality was the fault of the Americans, a claim she justified by quoting a 1943 Home Office study that showed ‘absolutely beyond doubt’ that American GIs were a major stimulus for the rising wave of wartime ‘sexual delinquency’. And so it went on, one quote or statistic piled upon another.

Only when I learned about Lizzy’s crisis when she was a student at Durham did I guess that the cause of that particular obsession was ‘reaction formation’, the obsessive reaction that allows someone to repress an earlier, now unbareable, preoccupation. I think Lizzy was masking the acting out of her student preoccupation with Kate and James. Whatever the case, her mental state after Peter’s death slowly deteriorated to the point where the doctor warned Mrs Oliver that, if it continued, Lizzy might have to be sectioned. We made renewed efforts to rally her through the spring of that year but without any very visible effect. Then overnight her mental state changed drastically for the better.

Mike and Patsy Scott

 Mike was the first boy who spoke to me when I arrived in the valley. I’d been nervously chatting to his sister Patsy while I waited for Dad outside the Post Office. Mike had joined us, a tall, handsome, thickset lad with pale skin and ginger hair who asked simple, direct questions. After that I’d often speak to him briefly, at school or when he was in the village running errands for their aunt. Initially Mike disconcerted me simply because I was thrown by being asked a direct question by a boy. This never bothered him. Perhaps the third or fourth time we spoke, the issue of freckles came up for some reason. He proceeded to tell me proudly he had far fewer than Patsy and that his didn’t cover him ‘absolutely everywhere’ like hers did. ‘Just like spots on a leopard’. As an only and rather sheltered child, I was shocked and fascinated by the fact that he knew his sister had freckles ‘absolutely everywhere’. This added to my being disconcerted around Mike but, like everyone else, I was impressed by him, something he simply took as his due.

Later I discovered from Patsy that he was notorious among the boys for stuff we girls weren’t supposed to know about. Like having the biggest ‘thing’ and being able to pee highest up the wall in the boys’ toilet. (The first I confirmed for myself when, much later, we all went skinny-dipping, along with the accuracy of Mike’s claim about the extent of Patsy’s freckles). Later Cat and I would try hard to pretend we despised boys like Mike because they intimidated us. But we liked Patsy and so, by default, rather admired Mike because he looked after her at school in a way other brothers simply didn’t bother to do.

Apart perhaps for the leopard freckles, there was nothing remotely feline about Patsy. Small, plump, and blond, with a pretty, almond-shaped face, she had a slightly impish air that sometimes got her into trouble for things she hadn’t actually done. When that happened she would blush furiously and start to stutter slightly, which she never normally did. As Mike’s little sister she escaped most of the teasing and horseplay inflicted on younger girls by the older primary boys. Nobody in their right mind would risk antagonising Patsy’s big brother. (Mike was in fact slow to anger but terrifying when roused.) Patsy’s immunity from these daily irritations could be irritating to those of us less fortunately connected, but we overlooked that because of Mike’s genial attitude to Patsy’s female friends. But looking back now, it’s perhaps little wonder Patsy’s emotional life turned out to be complicated, given that for years her identity was inseparable from her brother’s status as ‘dominant male’.

Mike and Patsy stayed on the edge of the group, partly because as orphans they were very close, partly because they lived with an aunt who ran stables and so got more chores to do than Cat, Hamish, or me. But they were still our good friends. Mike was essentially a gentle soul but, because he was never entirely comfortable indoors, seemed rougher than he was. He’d been taught early on how to handle a shotgun by a retired keeper and was a better shot than either Peter or James. Sir William had never bothered to teach the twins to shoot, offhandedly telling the keepers to give them lessons when they could. Inevitably these, when they happened, were

By the road to Langleeford.

somewhat perfunctory. When their father suddenly announced that the twins must now keep the pigeons and rabbits down in the fields near the Big House, it was Mike who helped them master the necessary skills. He encouraged them to borrow the clay pigeon trap and directing their practice. At one point, he even tried to teach us girls to shoot too. Lizzy hated guns, but he started the rest of us off trying to shoot cans off a wall with an air rifle. We were supposed to progress to spuggies but only Kate ever got the hang of the rifle and even she never hit a spuggy.

Initially, although I liked Patsy, I somehow assumed she was included in the group just because she tagged along with Mike. I was quite wrong. The older ones genuinely liked her, not because she was Mike’s sister, but because she was generous with her time and affection. Later she would patiently negotiate with her aunt so that Cat, Hamish, and I could sometimes borrow ponies to ride with the others in return for helping with stable chores.

Patsy and Mike had lost their parents when they were very young and were adopted by a somewhat eccentric aunt. She ensured they were clean and fed, but when Patsy was old enough expected her to take on much of the housekeeping. The aunt’s great passions in life were ponies and the beautiful brindled whippets she bred to show standards. Patsy took it upon herself to provide her older brother with something like maternal support. She was always genuinely concerned for his welfare and clearly took great pride in his various achievements. I came to see her as more grown-up than me in many ways and sometimes to wish I too had a brother to care for.

First car

 The other boys (Peter, James, and Hamish)

Oddly, and almost from the start, I felt I knew just where I was with Mike; but it took me a long time to feel I knew where I was with the other three boys, particularly James.

Only a boy, and probably only James, could have used the phrase: ‘hell is other peoples’ families’ (to response to something Hamish’s father had said or done). James smoked French cigarettes when he could and had obviously dipped into Sartre at some point. A good deal more extrovert than his twin, he set the benchmark for our musical tastes and could be relied on to pronounce on anything else cultural that appeared on our radar. He was younger than Peter by a bare five minutes and, perhaps because of this, was always anxious to demonstrate his superior knowledge of the wider world. He could be rather dogmatic and dismissive, particularly with us younger girls, but he was also strikingly good-looking and could be very charming when he chose to be. In all this he rather took after his father. But he also had an unexpectedly thoughtful, even sensitive, side that kept him from developing the untouchable self-confidence and sense of entitlement so obnoxiousin Sir William. Peter was physically and temperamentally more solid, quieter and plainer-mannered than his twin, less strikingly handsome, and with his mother’s darker complexion, high cheekbones, and rather disconcerting sense of humour. Normally serious, he would sometimes make deadpan but very funny observations when you least expected them. To begin with I had trouble telling whether he meant to be funny or not, since he always kept an absolutely straight face when he did this.

Apart from Kate, who once or twice quoted it sarcastically against him, we girls didn’t use James’s phrase. Personally, I felt that whatever hell was probably had more to do with the absence of families than their presence, and I knew Patsy would feel the same. But I wasn’t really sure what James intended by the phrase and I certainly wasn’t going to ask. Why risk feeling more stupid around him than I often did. I think it unsettled me because it appeared about the time the question of boysas boysreally came up for me, prompted in no small part by Cat’s kissing Mike. I felt I didn’t really know what proper families, made up of people like Hamish with a mother and father, were like. But I was starting to like Hamish, so I wondered about it. We’d always got on well enough, but now we started going in for affectionate pushing and shoving like the boys at school. I wouldn’t have dreamed of doing that with any of the others and, while I was wondering why, I found myself talking with Hamish on a regular basis.

Hamish was a little taller than me, thin (like me), usually quiet (unlike me), had blue-green eyes, and lots of lovely, fine black hair that flopped down over his narrow face. Because he’d been seriously ill when he was little he had to take pills regularly and was sometimes unwell for up to a week at a time. As a result he tended to be a bit on the edge of things. In the last year at primary I used to talk to him during break, about books we were reading or how things were at home. Although his mum was nice, we all disliked his father because of his sermons. Hamish told me one day that his father wasn’t kind to his mother. He looked at his shoes when he said it and I thought from his voice that maybe he was going to cry. Instead he swallowed and said he felt that he didn’t have a proper father. I said I didn’t have a mum, so maybe that made us similar. He seemed to agree and, despite our later going to separate schools, we kept talking. Hamish fascinated me because he loved reading and writing and spent hours with books his parents had inherited but has father had no time for. Peter, Lizzy and James were, in their different but conventional ways, quite ‘bookish’. Peter and Lizzy because they were interested in natural and human history, particularly in relation to our region, and James because he liked playing with ideas, which he treated like fireworks to entertain and dazzle. But Hamish’s bookishness was different.

I sensed he loved the sound of words and, while he admitted to me that he wrote stories and poems, he made me promise not to tell the others and would never let me read any of them. His fatherwas dismissive of ‘intellectuals’ and ‘arty’ people, but had inherited a considerable family library, later augmented by the more valueable first edition books in his father-in-law’s collection. I sense that he saw this library as both a tangable sign of his own authority and a vague threat to a properly Christian life. Hamish, hoever, secretly plundered this library and got drunk on its contents. When he talked about his secret raids to obtain reading matter, I felt I was listening to some brave and intreped explorer. I became intoxicated by proxy. Hamish dipped into everything from early Ninteenth Century theological tracts and the works of Sidney and Beatrice Webb, to Dickens andthe plays of George Bernard Shaw. His most treasured discovery, however, was: ‘Des Imagistes: An Anthology’, edited by Ezra Pound. There he had found poems by, if I remember right, people like Amy Lowell, William Carlos Williams, James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence and H. D.

I became caught up in Hamish’s intoxication by accident. He had found me in tears on the stairs at Homehaugh and asked if I was alright. Ashamed, I explain I’d just read Charles Hamilton Sorley’s ‘When you see millions of the mouthless dead’ for a school project. My tears over a poem led to his confiding in me. It was the first time I’d seen Hamish really animated about anything and had a powerful effect on me. Later, after he’d admitted that he wrote poems, he told me shyly that I was his muse. As often happened in conversations with Hamish, I wasn’t sure what the word meant and had to look it up later in the old encyclopedia at home. Along with the dry-as-dust definition there was a little faded picture of nine women, some with their breasts showing. I was puzzled, having no breasts to speak of at that point, but also obscurely flattered.

Hamish’s passion changed our friendship by initiating a tentative connection between a shared life of the mind and a desire for creative work. His passion gradually fire up my own creative interests. The contents of his enthusiasms, which often left me secretly struggling, mattered far less than the intensity with which this normally near-silent boy pursued them. Initially I found this disconcerting, but slowly I found my way to safer ground. I realized that there were other things about Hamish, his way of holding his head, his quiet determination, and his lovely black hair, that were hppily familiar. He reminded me of one of my beloved rooks. I increasingly found myself always on the lookout for him and, when he was there, wanting him to notice me too. Having listened to Kate and older girls at school, I adopted a word they used to name my own uncertain feelings. I decided that I ‘fancied’ Hamish. I then set about trying to ensure that, muse or not, he would fancy me. In short I was out of my depth and, understandably enough, traded the disturbing mystery of a shared interest in the informed creative life for the safer ground of a schoolgirl crush.

‘The tower struck by lightening’.

I became increasingly fascinated by Hamish. For example, although he and Mike were in many ways opposites, they got on really well. He was also disconcertingly perceptive. For example he noticed that, while Peter always acted older than he was and so appeared our natural if unofficial, leader, it was actually Lizzy who did most of the leading. Hamish said it was almost as if they had some kind of pact about it. When he’d pointed this out it seemed so obvious, but had never occurred to me before.

 

Locally everyone knew that Peter was ‘a steady lad’, and James wasn’t, having inherited his father’s temper along with his charm. Hamish and I agreed that people usually noticed James first and agreed that, although we admired him, we felt he was unpredictable and so a bit scary. We also noticed the way he would play up to Lizzy, deliberately siding with her in any small disagreement between her and Peter, who sometimes assumed too much just because he was older. But, as Cat and I soon discovered, while Peter might be predictable and we were never sure what James was thinking, that didn’t stop james from being unexpectedly thoughtful. One day he casually said that he’d heard from his mother that we liked folk music and he’d borrowed a half dozen LPs from a friend for us to listen to.

‘Singing.’

Learning the ballads

Cat and my learning the ballads had started earlier, when by chance we found a discarded box of records, ‘Border and other old Ballads’, with the lyrics printed in a scholarly grey booklet. It had been an unwanted Christmas gift from a business contact to Mr. Oliver. Cat, who loved singing, asked if we could play it. We were both puzzled and fascinated by the songs, and started to read the lyrics in the sober booklet. We got hooked and were granted use of Mr. Oliver’s record player in the sitting room, on the strict condition we were careful and kept the volume down. We then spent hours listening to, and then learning, ballads. After a few weeks, and whenever we could, we’d sing what we’d learned. Over time we learned ‘Martinmass Time’,‘The Elf Knight’, ‘WillieO’Winsbury’,‘Lucy Wan’, ‘The Broomfield Wager’, ‘The Wife of Usher’s Well’, ‘(When I Was No But) Sweet Sixteen’, ‘Long Lankin’, ‘The Duke of Athole’s Nurse’, ‘Tam Lin’, ‘Clerk Saunders’, ‘The Cruel Mother’, ‘Eppie Moray’and more. We sang them together quietly in the livingroom at Homehaugh and then, out and about, as we walked.[1]

However, we soon heard from Patsy there’d been comments in the Co-op to the effect that the songs we were singing might be traditional, but they weren’t proper in the mouths of young girls. Mrs. Oliver had tried, half-heartedly, to defend us by saying there was little harm since we wouldn’t understand half of what we were singing. Lizzy knew better. She suggested we should be more circumspect in future, adding that if word got back to Mrs. Douglasthere’d be no more ballad singing. Because we knew exactly what we were singing about, we did as she suggested. While we relished the fact that tradition licenced us to sing about illicit sex with plow boys, unprovoked violence, incest, sibling murder, pregancy, and attempted or actual rape, but we also knew that there were limits to local tolerance. The ballad tradition, something of which we’d been entirely ignorant, might inadvertantly have providing us with the means to express our own particular form of teenage revolt, but our rebellion would have to remain with strictly circumscribed limits.

At some point I think Mrs. Oliver must have said something to Lady Aitcheson. She certainly mentioned our singing in a letter to the twins. So, unbeknown to us but very much on our behalf, James borrowed a whole clutch of LPs from schoolfriends over a couple of holidays. As I remember (and I may well have this wrong), these included Ewan MacColl and Peggy Seeger’s ‘Traditional Songs and Ballads’,MacColl’s ‘Ballads: Murder, Intrigue, Love, Murder’, Joan Baez’s ‘Farewell, Angelina’,Fairport Convention’s ‘Liege & Lief’, Pentangle’s ‘Sweet Child’ and ‘Basket of Light’, Trees’ ‘On the Shore’, June Tabor’s ‘Ashes and Diamonds’, the Mr. Fox LP and Steeleye Span’s ‘Please To See The King’. We were stunned and then electrified by these records, June Tabor’s ‘Clerk Saunders’ still makes the roots of my hair prickle, as we were astonished by James’ going to so much trouble on our behalf. These records not only cemented our interest in the ballads, but also opened up a whole new world of folk music.

[1]Readers unfamiliar with the balladsFlora refers to may be interested in listening to the following, (not all of which are versions she would have heard). Anne Briggs: ‘The Bird in the Bush: Traditional Erotic Songs’: ‘Martinmas Time’; Phil Cooper, Margaret Nelson & Kate Early: ‘Hearts Return’: ‘Lucy Wan’; Shelagh Mcdonald: ‘Let No Man Steal Your Thyme’: ‘Dowie Dens of Yarrow’; Karine Polwart: ‘Fairest Floo’er’: ‘The Wife of Usher’s Well’; Fairport Convention: ‘Liege & Lief’: ‘Tam Lin’ & ‘Matty Groves’; Emily Portman: ‘The Glamoury’: ‘Long Lankin’;June Tabor: from ‘Ashes and Diamonds’: ‘Clerk Saunders’;from ‘An Echo of Hooves’: ‘Fair Margaret and Sweet William’, ‘Bonnie James Campbell and The Duke of Athol’s Nurse’;from ‘At the Wood’s Heart’: ‘The Broomfield Wager’;Ewan MacColl ‘Ballads: Murder, Intrigue, Love, Discord’: ‘Clyde’s Water’;Fotheringay: ‘Fotheringay 2’: ‘Eppie Morrie’; andfrom Alasdair Roberts ‘No earthly Man’: ‘The Cruel Mother’.

 

 

 

 

 

Sharing with Cat

It was difficult in those days for me to know where ‘we’, both human and non-human beings, each stopped and started, and to a degree that remains the case even now. Sometimes I seemed to overflow into other people or animals, and them into me. With Kate, Cat and, in a different way Hamish, in particular.

It is still hard to write about Cat, even now. It’s as if she crawled inside my skin when she died and, as a result, became so close as to be invisible. As girls we would tell each other everything: share gossip, dissect the grown-ups stupidity, discuss clothes we liked, food we didn’t, people in the village, the weather, songs we’d heard, everything that made up our world. We also fretted endlessly together about ‘what to do next’: about my skinniness and hair, about how I might deal with Mrs. Purvis,about our spots, Cat’s sweet tooth, and her Mama’s controlling strictness. All exhaustively andwithout restraint. Cat was less than three months older than me but started puberty well before me and, enjoying her advantage, kept me up to date with every detail. We had become friends soon after I arrived, then best friends, so I believed we had no secrets from each other.

Sometimes when we had a homework project to work on together, Cat’s papa – who had a trim black beard and was, so I firmly believed at twelve, the most handsome man in the world, would bring her over to stay on Friday night. After we’d been sent to bed and, having tried unsucessfully to gentle us into settling, dad would eventually put on his stern voice and call up:

‘Enough talking, put that light out now, please’.

Cat would slip quickly out of the the little truckle bed always Dad pulled out for her and turn out the light. Then she’d turn, pause, and whisper:

‘Faun, can I come in with you, please’?

And, happy at the trace of pleading in her voice, I always said:

‘Yes, of course’.

There was hardly room for the two of us in my little bed but somehow we fitted ourselves together like two spoons, usually with her hand over my heart. Once or twice this arrangement led to kissing and some chaste mutual touching, but it was nothing more than curiousity, not as I remember. Mostly I recall falling asleep to the slow rhythm of her breathing against my neck.

Later, whether through choice or carelessness, I forgot those nights close to Cat, something which seems inconceivable now. Then one evening staying with friends in London we had to lift little Freddy out of his bed and back into his old cot so I could userp his place. In the early hours I woke, balanced precariously on the edge of the bed, to find Freddy positioned like a car jack between me and the wall. After some gentle pulling and pushing we compromised and shared his bed fifty-fifty. His fat little stomach, impossibly hot against my back, must have triggered old memories and, a few days later, my nights shared with Cat rose back into consciousness.

When she was staying over and our school work was done, we’d spent hours in complicated worlds that spilled out of my room, across the landing, and either slipped sideways into the bathroom or else cascaded down the stairs. They grew from whatever was to hand. Chairs, a wooden dryer and blankets became a castle. A cardboard box, washing basket, and mop, a ship. A stool, pillows and old skipping-rope, a great white horse.

‘Faun, you be the great soldier who defends the castle and keeps all the women and children safe from the enemy.’ ‘Faun, you be the captain and guide us through the storm.’ ‘Faun, you be the prince and rescue me’. Somehow she always had me take on the traditionally male roles, although this never stopped her being in control or from coming up with the most violent interventions into whatever I was having us do. Maybe she just liked to maintain her new-found woman’s status.

As we started to get bored with such adventures, we spent more time locked in the bathroom while we strained to catch the wobbly music on my tiny transistor. We washed, dried, and combed out each other’s hair, swapped cloths and studied our changes, trying to make sense of their mysteries while speculating about becoming the kind of sexual beings we glimpsed elsewhere, mostly via magazines and Kate’s stories. All this in entirely unnecessary whispers. We acted as mirror images of each other, were inseparable until a month or so after Cat’s fourteenth birthday. Then, within the space of a few weeks, that entire world started to evaporate and our adolescence began in earnest.

The trigger was two quite different events. One was discovering the Borders ballads. We were mesmerised by their account of a great, raw, tragic, yet uncannily familiar world in which a lord’s wife picks up a beautiful boy outside the church and takes him home to bed. (So then they both get killed, but at least she tells her husband what she thinks of him first and, we told ourelves, had no regrets). Where the husband insists the murdered lovers are buried together, but with her on top because she was posh. Where a girl meets her dead boyfriend as a revenant, then follows and frees him so he can die properly. Where a young woman disobeys the people who tell her what she can and can’t do, runs across country to argue her property rights and gets a lover. A young woman who argues back, takes responsibility for her own fate, acts on her own choices. Who was just like we were going to be, except that maybe she turns out to be The Dame of the Fine Green Kirtle in the end, and not an ordinary girl at all.

‘Gordon Moss’.

A dangerous, very real if semi-magic world of wild rivers, vivid prophetic dreams, incest, bloody fights and murder; of canny girls who outsmart and outride soldiers, or win back their child’s father from the Elphen Queen. What, as an American said to me recently: ‘isn’t to like’ about such songs, particularly if you’re two teenage girls who need to rebel but don’t know how or against what.

Before we found the ballads we had had very little to help us imagine our way into the world where our bodies meet our particular places; no ‘young adult’ books, as Sarah had Janni Howker’s much loved Martin Farrell, a tale of the Reivers. We had no Anne Eliot, no ill-fated Bess Graham, to give us imaginative keys to the hardness and bodily hurt, the hills and black moss, the bloody world of (usually) men’s violence, the meeting of the natural and supernatural worlds in a pig’s heads or a swarm of flies. Beyond Kate’s stories (which Cat always wanted to discount), we had no way to intuit the fate of women, the particular gendered nuancing of sex, suffering, death and haunting that is the invisible marrow in the cold bone of our Borders. The ballads were our Songs of Experience by proxy.

Later we came to believe that Annie Briggs, Jacqui McShee, Maddy Prior, and Sandy Denny had bequeathed these songs specifically to us, not to boys caught up in the noisy posturings of rock music. Finding the ballads freed us from the uneasy hold of the fund of generic tales that all seemed to have been written for boys, or in which the girls’ job was to be a suffering sister or daughter. What we craved, and found in the old ballads, were stories which firmly put girls like us, brave and canny, at the heart of the story, and did so in our own familiar landscape.

The second, and initially far more unsettling, trigger was that Cat kissed Mike, shifting the whole shadowy issue of sex from theory to practice. There had previously been intense discussions after games of Doctor and Patient and, later, after we’d gone skinny-dipping with the boys. And there had always been Kate’s stories of her adventures. But this was different because it was Cat, not Kate, doing the kissing. What she told me was that she and Michael had found themselves hiding together in the big upstairs walk-in cupboard during Sunday’s game of sardines at Homehaugh. She’d whispered: ‘shove up, you’re squashing me,’ but he’d just shushed her. So she kissed him. She added, in an indigent voice: ‘to stop him shushing like that.’

When I questioned her she wouldn’t say if anything else had happened but, because she blushed furiously, I knew it had and pressed her to tell. Eventually she admitted there’d been some ‘touching’ but absolutely refused to go into detail. A refusal that, by excluding me from her experience, cut me to the quick. Our friendship never really recovered its former intensity after that. In a deliberate act of revenge I broke my promise to Cat and told Patsy everything. A couple of days later she reported that she’d asked Michael if what she had heard was true; that he’d touched Cat’s titties and she’d touched his thing. He’d stomped out of the room without answering.

Everything began to change. Cat and Michael had secret knowing that Patsy and I didn’t, bodily secrets that both fascinated and hurt us. The privilaged world Cat and I had built around ourselves began to fade. We remained good friends, but I knew we no longer mirrored each other. To make things more complicated, Patsy initially bombarded me with questions I couldn’t answer. Secrets between Michael and Cat made her quite uncharacteristically cross. That unsettled things further because for a while she obviously thought I was keeping secrets from her too. (It only came to me much later, when Michael was dead, that maybe she was jealous.) Although Cat and I remained close, our attention started running out in parallel towards our other friends, the world of the ballads, and the actualities of village life.

The day world

I think I always slightly resented that the twins’ parentsowned everything around us, with the result that they really belonged to quite another world to my own. Another world that, through Mrs. Oliver’s friendship with their mother, had always pretty much included Lizzy and Kate. As little children they’d all four gone to the same parties, played the same games long before I’d come to the village. I knew I should be grateful that I was now part of: ‘the Oliver girls’ menagerie’, as the vicar called us. (He had also been overheard to say that we: ‘let the side down’, although it was never clear to us what he meant). But sometimes my anxiety made any such graditude difficult. I also knew from Mrs. Purvis that Sir William didn’t like the Olivers, which suggested to me that ‘the menagerie’ was always somehow under threat.

I was also worried about my own status. I felt myself to be an outsider, a late-comer. As the last addition to the menagerie, I naturally became its most ardent devotee. That led me to ‘not seeing’ all manner of tensions, not least between Kate and Lizzy and between the twins. Only with The Judgement did I really begin to notice how much those tensions, many of them handed down from the adult world, simmered just beneath the surface of our childhood.

Dad and I weren’t ‘locals’ like Lizzy, Kate, Hamish, Mike and Patsy but nor, in my view at least, were we just ‘incomers’ like Cat’s parents and, in Mr. Oliver’s view, Sir William. We were, after all, distantly related to Mrs. Oliver. In my private but passionate view Peter and James were ‘inbetweens’ just like me. But then the Aitchesons were a Name, a sept of Clan Gordon, and Lady Aitcheson(née Reed) had been born here and, more importantly, was what Dad called ‘County’. At eight I simply didn’t understand these adult distinctions but, while the others, even Cat, seemed to accept them as given, I struggled to make sense of what I resented. All this was further complicated by school.

There were about thirty children in our little Victorian primary school and we did a great deal together, without any very obvious social distinction. Either as ‘the primary’ or, when necessary, as ‘the little ones’ or ‘the big ones’. Nature walks, day trips out together in the old bus, and school plays where almost everyone got to do something. All of this initiated by Miss Richardson and Mrs. Roberts but, I am certain, discretly supported by Lady Aitcheson. Not, I think, out of any desire whatsoever to promote social equality but paternalistically, because she saw all local children collectively as ‘Reeds estate children’. So I did not have to confront the mysteries of class head on until Lizzy approached eleven.

That year Lizzy went to a local private school as a weekly border where, in due course, Kate and later Cat and I, would join her. First, however, Cat and I had to sit scholarship exams. These were the final act in a mysterious process, initiated by LadyAitcheson,that involved letters to an educational charity and our having gone to church each Sunday. Nobody bothered explained the details to us, and we did not ask, but we knew our parents could never have afforded the fees and, once again, understood that we had acquired an unspoken debt of gratitude. At eleven Peter and James went away to their father’s old boarding school in Yorkshire, while Hamish, Mike and Patsy did the 18-mile round trip to the big comprehensive school, with Mary, Barbara, the two Maggies, Charlie, Eric andthe rest of our former classmates. Hamish, quick to learn if slow to speak, was happy enough. Michael, only truly at home with what he could do with his hands, was never much interested in school and indifferent to the new situation. Only Patsy really suffered. Diminished when transplanted into a bigger, less initate world, she became quieter, less assured. Once among the livliest at primary, she gradually came to dislike everything associated with school, leaving as soon as she could to help her aunt and, building on her Saturday work at the Co-op, to establsh herself in a proper part-time job.

During the holidays we initially simply reformed in our old group, walking, and occasionally riding, the woods and moorland together. We talked in an animated huddle well away from our elders and met for approved and illicit activities as before. But although there was never a clear-cut division, after a while Lizzy and Kate, the twins, Cat and I grew a little apart from Mike, Hamish and Patsy and, more radically, from our other former classmates. The sisters and twins remained the nucleus around which we all gravitated but, by the time I turned twelve, we were only occasionally nine. More often there were just the six of us.

We still met regularly in the shabby former playroom next to the kitchen at Homehaugh. That big greystone house – two spacious main floors, a small stone cellar, and three little attic rooms – stands back from the top of the village street behind a mossy lawn and neglected flowerbeds. The old, southfacing, walled vegetible garden running down the right side as you face it has, however, been renovated and a little home garth on the left is now grazed by a resident pony. The walled yard, stable block and hayloft that run along the lane at the back of the house remain unchanged to this day, as does the small home field beyond that. Built in the eighteenth century, it’s all of a piece with the church and the Big House, where Peter and James lived (located at the end of a long drive in a private domain of its own that I rarely visited).

Homehaugh was the center of our late childhood and early adolecence and the locus of the bleak, if sometimes beautiful, world into which we grew. A world of great whale-backed and seemingly bare hills; deep, twisting, hidden cleughs full of steep fast-flowing burns; rivers that carried a restless cargo of gravel and stone torn from their own banks and are bordered by green haughs. Running up from these were clusters of fields, which I later learned only appeared around eighteen hundred. Each field is defined within an irregular grid of lichen-covered dry stone dykesleading up towards the White Lands above. All this part of a larger lacework that includes the tracks, farms and other buildings, along with irregular patches of natural woodland ofoak, birch, alder and hazel, and the great dark, roughly rectangular plantations of managed forestry that, close to, remind me of the scary illustrations in a old and treasured book of folk tales in Russian belonging to my mother.

Abandoned forestry hide.

Dad passed it on to me at Christmas the year she died. (Although she never knew own her parents, my mother ‘Anna’ had actually been christened Anastasiya). The book, with a text neither she nor I could read, had beautiful, vividly coloured pictures of wolves, bears and strange beings like Baba Yaga, with her cabin on chicken legs but no windows or doors. A perfect match, somehow, for the hides to be found at the edge of any young Sitka spruce plantation.

At first this larger world seemed inpenetrable. I only began to feel differently when we walked or rode the ancient tracks and drove roads that cross the Cheviots. I learned that for centuries these had been busy routes, with drovers taking herds of cattle from the western Isles to southern markets, peddlers bringing goods and gossip, or beasts being hurried away after some raid. As I developed a sense of the histories that still haunt the region, as dense as they are invisible, I began to feel less displaced. But I remained divided between my love of the natural world that presented itself to me and the hidden world of adult power that seemed inseparable from it.

 Off the coast

 We rarely went to the sea when I was young and, perhaps for that reason, it always fascinated me. The second summer after I left London I badly needed both money and a change, so I got a summer job working in Oban. For three months, I cleaned and helped re-stock a variety of sailing boats hired out by the week. Towards the end of the season things went quiet and, when there was a sudden last-minute cancelation, my boss Ted decided to take a trip around Skye and Lewis with his wife, a young couple they’d befriended, and their two sons. He offered to take me with them as a galley hand and general crew. It was quite an adventure and, at one point on our return journey, we stopped in the mouth of a secluded sea loch so that Ted could gather scallops.

It took a while for me and one of the sons to row out from the boat, while Ted guided us to the scallop bed. Even when he’d found it we had trouble keeping the little dingy steady and in the right spot, given the constant tug of wind and swell.Ted, masked and wet-suited, then took his knife and basket and disappeared down into the weedy darkness.

Within moments they arrived, bobbing up to watch us with big, liquid eyes. The light was already starting to fade and, at intervals, a big black muscled head and shoulders would rise ghostly quiet out of the inky water, always disconcerting me because a seal would never appear in the same spot twice. To cut resistance to the wind we kept our bodies low and our heads down, listening to the slap of water on the side of the dingy and the dull swish of the kelp moving in the swell. The seals were so close and so curious that it was impossible to ignore them and, with the dingy sliding and twisting in the wind and tide, it became increasingly hard focus on holding the little craft in the right place. I started to feel an unexpected panic rising in my stomach.

The root of my panic was simple enough. An image in my mind had pulled me back to my childhood reading of Scottish folktales about the Selkie Folk. Then a question had risen and insinuated itself into my consciousness. How, in the gathering darkness, could I be sure that when the next great round head rose out of the sea and moved to climb over the gunnels and into our little dingy, that it was Ted coming aboard and not some vast water-black male Selkie?