Invisible friends [1]

[1] These images are from the early stages of the collaborative project that Flora and I were working on before she became too ill to continue.

Telling Stories

Miss Richardson was Northumbrian born and bred, and had a great fund of old Northumbrian stories that she’d slip into our lessons as pointers to how the world worked. She knew we’d shut our ears to anything that smacked of preaching and so always told her stories accordingly. I still remember some of them. One was about the couple from Netherwitton who are asked to adopt the son of the king and queen of the fairies. The man is then blinded in one eye when he catches the king stealing. She had begun by asked what we thought of old stories about fairies. When we didn’t know how to respond to what seemed to us a silly question, she suggested that if people can’t criticize authority directly, they invent stories that allowed them to draw attention to the injustices they suffer.

The story I remember best was one she told us older children just before I left, about the treasure in Broomlee Lough. The treasure should have been recovered long ago, but a link in the specially forged chain needed to pull it up had broken. I can still feel the pleasure of the shock of her explaining that this was because the smith who had made it was not the seventh son in an unbroken line of smiths as his father claimed. It turned out his father had gone away to Willimoteswick to gamble with the drovers and, while he was away, a bold young tinker had visited the farm. Nine months later his wife had given birth to the boy who became the smith who made the link that broke. She said we shouldn’t allow ourselves to be impressed by people who claimed their family or birth made them special, because everyone has their faults.

Another story, which I appropriated and retold one evening in London when talking politics with Desideria, Giulia, Francesco, Mario and Simon, was ‘The Faa’s Revenge’. It’s about what happens to the people who forget that ‘their’ land is taken from the people who previously tended it; their wealth acquired at the expense of others’ labour. People who fail to respect the basic laws of human compassion. Being the amateur historian that she was, this tale was mixed in with information about Kirk Yetholm, for centuries the headquarters of the ‘Egyptians’ or Gypsies in Scotland. (We’d not then learned to call them Roma). Their king, John Faa, a contemporary of King James V, had been granted a letter under the Privy Seal that confirmed his authority over all his people in Scotland and required all sheriffs in the country to assist him in maintaining the laws of ‘Egypt’.

In my mind, I always link of this story to the old Border ballad I associate with John Faa’s people: which Child calls ‘The Raggle Taggle Gypsy’, but is also known as ‘The Raggle Taggle Gypsies O’, ‘The Gypsy Laddie’, ‘Black Jack Davy’ and ‘Seven Yellow Gypsies’, but I know next to nothing factual about Faa himself. There is, however, a story that presents a very different tale to that in the songs. Namely that Faa ran away with the Countess of Cassillis and that her husband followed them and caught them at a ford over the river Doon, still known as the Gypsies’ Steps. He then forced his wife to watch from an upstairs room while he had Faa and his followers hanged in front of the Castle Gate at Cassillis. She was then said to have been imprisoned for the rest of her life. While Faa’s role as king of ‘Little Egypt’ is historical fact, there is absolutely no evidence to support the story of John Faa and the Earl of Cassillis’ wife.

‘Jan. 1979’

Laura

Iain, even now I find writing about Laura difficult. The facts are straight forward enough. Laura was Hamish’s imaginary friend and, apparently, my ‘lost’ twin sister. (Just how or why she was lost I was never told, but she was supposed to have disappeared soon after we were born.) Literally speaking, then, Laura was simple a fiction. But, because of being a shared secret I never participated in first hand, because of things that happened and didn’t happen between Hamish and me later, and because she became all too real in my dreams, it’s all rather more complicated than that.

I can’t find the James Hillman quote in the first Debateable Lands book just now, but the gist of it has stayed with me. That we don’t die alone but join the ancestors, the little people, the whole multitude of compound souls who inhabit our nightworld; the various complexes we talk to, the invisible friends who pass through our lives, all with their gifts of desires, fears, regretful sighs, surprising ideas. The multitude who accompany us all along, both angelic and demonic figures. Both angelic and demonic accomplices who, like the beasts in Rilke’s first ‘Duino Elegy’, are aware that we’re not really at home in this interpreted world but, as with habits, liked us and lodged, never gave notice. I think many children, like the animals they often feel closest to, notice how literally, reductively, adults take the world. Literally, of course, in large part to avoid having to acknowledge the ancestors and accomplices who give the lie to our belief that we are self-contained, self-sufficient monads. All of which is a way of saying I’ve come to think differently about Hamish, so haunted by his feared father’s obsessive vocation, and by all the ghosts of dead priests and academics who created the family library going generations back. Haunted too, I suppose, if only for a while, by me, Laura’s supposed twin sister. But all this relates, strictly speaking, to the time when Laura had gone to ground after my arrival in the village.

Hamish had been a sickly, and an unhappy, child. His maternal grandmother cared for him much of the time when he was small because his father insisted his wife put parish business first. His grandmother had worked as a librarian at Edinburgh University until she married a Classics professor twenty years her senior. When the Professor died, she moved south to be near her only daughter. Mrs. Laidlow read Hamish fairytales and all manner of poetry, including Petrarch’s The Canzoniere, which is maybe where the name ‘Laura’ came from. She knew perfectly well that her son-in-law regarded fairytales as an irrelevance in a properly Christian culture, and thought secular poetry was produced by unbelievers and degenerates. I like to think that’s why she read them to Hamish.

Hamish never spoke to me about Laura and I never asked him about her. I think he must have been afraid I’d tease him or challenge his story. I know, however, that before I arrived, Laura was the great secret he shared with a select few: Patsy, Cat, and two other girls at school, Mary Bell and Barbara Dunne. She became the central figure in their imaginative lives until my arrival broke the spell.

This seems to be what happened, pieced together from what Cat and Patsy later told me. They all somehow missed the announcement that a little girl called Flora was to join them next term, all except Patsy, and she misheard it. In high excitement, she told the others that the teachers had said Laura was coming to join them at school next term. I don’t know what Hamish made of this, only that Laura’s imminent arrival ‘in the flesh’ caused some consternation.

Hamish had enthralled the four girls with stories of Laura’s adventures for several months. Although Cat always insisted she knew perfectly well they were ‘just make-up’, Patsy insisted they all wanted very badly to believe in Laura. At that time Hamish had that pale, slightly unreal, aura of someone recovering from serious illness, so it no doubt it seemed entirely possible to them that he’d know about a mysterious girl who lived alone in the moss. Someone adults mistook, if she appeared in their peripheral vision, for a vixen, a roe doe, or a brilliant dragonfly.

Laura lived in Lady Moss and the surrounding woodland.

Later, when I learned ‘Long Lankin’, I used to imagine Laura and Long Lankin sharing a shelter there, with her listening to his muttering about the wrongs done to him and the terrible revenge he’d take. But Hamish was talking about our moss, one of the rare places that, as primary school children, we were expected to stay away from. Not, as far as I remember, forbidden because adults thought it was particularly dangerous (it wasn’t), but because it was simply somewhere they’d rather we didn’t go.

This, of course, made our going there essential if we wanted to earn the respect of our peers. There was, however, a ritual to be observed when making such a visit. You always told a friend you were going to the moss, you went alone, and you marked your visit by adding a little stripe of fabric with your first name written on it to the old tree right in the heart of the moss. Judging by the amount of old, decaying cloth there when I was a child, this ritual had been observed for a long time. Whether the moss was originally home to a ‘clootie’ tree I simply don’t know, but its name suggests it might in some way have been connected to either the Virgin Mary or to the Queen of Elphame.

Located between a big Sitka spruce plantation on one side and a string of small upland fields, our wooded moss lay just to the north of a flat, meandering section of Black Burn. With its dim light, numerous moths, tangle of stunted birch roots, dark pools, and sense of almost uncanny stillness, the moss was a perfect place in which to imagine Laura.

Patsy later told me that, after I turned up, Hamish quickly explained me away by saying the grownups had made a mistake. I wasn’t Laura but her very ordinary twin sister, and that I didn’t know a thing about her because she’d been stolen away.

When I was a girl, I tended to assume that Hamish was just naturally quiet, since that’s how he usually was when we were together. Later I wondered whether his silences weren’t the result of his being deeply preoccupied, working out how to locate me in relation to Laura, his first and perhaps deepest, all-be-it imagined, love. Did he really see me as her twin, or as her pale shadow or, later, perhaps as her uncanny, uncertain double; perhaps even as a dubious, ultimately illusory, seductress sent to make him forget her? Our imaginal life works in such odd ways any of these seems possible.

Quite some while after we split up, a figure I just knew was Laura started haunting my dreams, my ominous darker-haired, sharper-faced doppelganger. Her persistent presence eventually became frightening and, in the end, I had to exorcise her by making a ‘Laura’ mask for a little ritual where I ‘became’ Laura. (Why this took the form of a stylized fox’s head I don’t remember, but no doubt it was suggested by the dreams.) I got a friend to photograph me wearing it, to evidence the fact that I had finally ‘become’ Hamish’s Laura. But still, occasionally, there’s this young girl’s voice in my head that tells me I’m just imaginary, an invisible part of someone else’s kith!

I have wondered about Laura and her animal forms since I learned of the widespread folk beliefs that a person’s spirit can take possession of an animal, often to help the living in some way. You’ll remember our discussing the idea that children have a sense of themselves as emerging out of a field of forces and materials too big for them to grasp, only some of which are captured in their current, human, form? I suspect Hamish was just such a child, somebody who was troubled with illness and an unhappy home life and didn’t make the conventional absolute distinction between humans and the animals and insects he saw around him on an almost daily basis. So, Laura could also be a fox, a roe doe, a dragonfly, as well as a girl. Just as like so many girls in old songs who take animal form and then, as often as not, are killed accidently by their lovers.

I’ve also linked all this to A.’s comment in your book that he was all for permeability, which he linked to explorations of various figures from old folk cultures: the Mistress of the Animals, the Women from Outside, Artemis, Richelle, the Mistress of the Game, Oriente, and the Queen of Elphame. All these powerful figures who could move between the visible and invisible, the worlds of humans, animals and the dead. After his beloved and awe-inspiring Nana’s death, maybe the poetic figures she’d evoked leaked into Hamish’s world, a compound that took the form of Laura?

Sarah Aitcheson wearing the Flora / Faun / Laura mask.

Many Selves

I can quite easily name some of my day-world selves. There’s the practical and pragmatic ‘countrywoman’ who is intermeshed with Lizzy’s local and regional worlds. Then there is her intellectual sister, the somewhat brittle ‘cosmopolitan’ or ‘European’ who learned her politics (and no doubt her tendency towards disdain) in London. Then off a bit to one side of them, and always slightly detached, there’s the ‘Mender and Maker’, on whom we’re all economically dependent. Back from these three there’s the ‘Listener /Respondent’ who first contacted you and who, I suppose, is the dominant voice in all this writing. She hovers uncertainly between my day-world and the night-world selves, who I’m far less certain about.

Maybe because we only find each other on the edge of reverie, catch each other’s eye at twilight, ‘between the dog and the wolf’, and then whisper to each other while playing games of hide-and-seek in dreams. There’s certainly a girl like the thin, uncertain schoolchild who loved Cat and Kate so fiercely. But then there’s her brother (?), a strange boy who might be the double of Dad’s uncertain little daughter as she was on the cusp of puberty. There’s a gaunt, older, woman who sometimes wakes me at night, whose yearning for a helpmate and bedfellow still unsettles me. And there are many others, odder and more elusive. For example, a woman dressed all in green, young or old is hard to say, someone I once tried to paint. In my painting she was thin-lipped, angry, righteous, and pale as death. For reasons I no longer remember, I called her Our Lady of the Roadkill. There are also numerous other, shadowy, beings (human and otherwise), many of whom have stalked me since childhood and, maybe, before. The shadowy revenants and composites, including a person who’s somewhere between Mike and Hamish, and various doppelgangers of friends like Richard and yourself.

All I can be certain of is that all these figures are somehow part of myself and none of them quite what they seem. They’re one reason why I’m writing all this.

Familiar animals

I sometimes wonder which animals would act as familiars if I were the ‘skinny little witch’ Lizzy once named me during a schoolyard quarrel? I imagine there would be at least three.

The first is called Finn by his owner. He’s a large white dog belonging to an ex-soldier who I greet regularly as he passes me on his bicycle. He and Finn live in a homestead made up of small sheds and a caravan, all set back from the path through the lower pasture beside Home Burn. Finn has the shed nearest the path but only barks if you go too close. He and his master appear disinterested, self-sufficient, uncomplaining. Both seem beings of considerable intelligence. I recently watched Finn as, untethered, he hunted rabbits across the low meadow and among the broom bushes that fringe it. He’s a swift and terrible killer. Mostly, however, he watches over the valley floor, its guardian and familiar.

The second is the large black cat who lives with Barbara Graham, a young widow, and her two boys in the end-of-terrace cottage next to the graveyard. The small steep fields above and below the terrace are his fiefdom, although occasionally I glimpse him much further away. (I assume from his swagger that he’s male.) I often notice him at dawn or around sunset, those in-between times. Then he haunts my peripheral vision, a lithe black presence suddenly animating some otherwise taken-for granted corner of land. He’s a mercurial figure, happy to mediate between my day and night worlds, moving purposefully or idly as suits him, out there at the edge of the human order and, sometimes, vast, shadowy yet soaked in moonlight, through my most private dreams.

I don’t know this cat’s name. He watches me speculatively when I past him, as if calculating something. Once he came slowly down the top of a wall and invited me to rub his head and under his chin before moving on. The quality of his purr was astonishing, a skin drum full of bees. He too is a skillful hunter and extraordinarily strong. I’ve seen him jump from the roadside to the top of a dry-stone wall with the corpse of a fully-grown rabbit in his jaws. I think he knows he has my greatest respect for this and his other qualities.

During our single face-to-face encounter, I was struck by the rough, luxurious density of his fur. He appears at a distance to be black but, in sunlight and close to, is a dark chocolate brown that shifts in intensity as he moves. The density and luxuriousness of his fur reminded me somehow of pubic hair. (I hear Kate say questioningly: ‘really, pet’, followed by her pirate’s dirty chuckle). That’s to say of the time when, a little girl of maybe five, I walked in unannounced on Aunty Claire to say I couldn’t sleep. She was standing with her back to me, quite naked, in front of the full-length mirror. Everything was dimly lit and smelled lovely and, in the mirror, I saw this thick luxurious dark triangle under her belly where I had only my little pale purse.

When I asked about it she quickly covered herself with a towel and laughed in that way adults do when they’re about to lie to children. She said: ‘Mummy will tell you all about it when you’re older’. But, of course, Mummy didn’t because by then she was dead. Ironically, it was Aunty Claire that Dad asked to explain the ‘facts of life’ to me. I’d known them for some time by then however, mostly thanks to Kate, but pretended I didn’t so as not to disappoint her.

There’s something uncanny about this cat with his dense black fur, something that differentiates him from solidly literal Finn in the meadows below. There is absolutely nothing uncanny or liminal about Finn. What you see is what you get. The cat, however, while he is preternaturally present and so invites me to be the same, is equally familiar in the shadowed between-spaces that link day and night, insidious memory and lucid dream, together; as much a carrier of sleeping souls as of dead rabbits over seemingly insuperable obstacles.

There is a third familiar, one I find myself strangely reluctant to write about because I feel its silent presence as being close to the void of death. I identify ‘it’, (I cannot provide a gender) and, indeed, there may be a pair, with the great ‘white lands’ of the high hills, the bleached expanses of Molinia and other rough grasses up there where the hares dance and have their forms. Unlike the other two familiars, I see it in a space now almost entirely outside the realm of current everyday human concern, a creature of the night wind and half clouded moon.

It’s a great white barn owl that hunts among the tumbled walls and collapsing sheds either side of the top road. I usually see it gliding somewhere along the stretch of road that runs up under the long gray outcrop before it climbs the last ridge and takes you over into the next valley. I suspect this spectral bird nests in the last of the old quarry sheds left standing. I’ve seen it no more than a dozen times in almost as many years, although I drive that way at night at least once a fortnight during nine months of the year. But I always sense its presence there, wondering if the headlights will catch its feathered bulk in silent flight out over the night landscape.

[This the seventh of forty-nine narrative sections that make up Convergences: Debatable Lands Volume 3, the concluding work of my Debatable Lands deep mapping project. The complete work is now available on request as a pdf. If you would like a copy, please contact me at: iain19biggs@gmail.com].

The respondent

Iain, I kept a copy of all my responses to you from our exchanges about the first ‘Debatable Lands’ book. You’ve probably long since forgotten them, but I think there are a few that still seem pertinent to what I’ve been struggling with in writing this. They are as follows.

 1]. You identified A. as a personification of questions about the world in which you earned your living. That identification was obviously central. You also called him a constant companion, which to my mind makes him equivalent to an invisible friend who accompanied you as you moved on from the world you conjured up in ‘Between Carterhaugh and Tamshiel Rig’. But it’s his role as the voice addressing the circumstances of your inability to reconcile your daughter’s long-term illness with the Apollonian attitudes of the medical world and, increasingly, of the academic research world in which you were enmeshed, that seems to me central to what’s been going on right across your work all these years.

This relates, it seems to me, to a powerful point of contact between the two of us. There are I think parallels between the, sometimes tense, role that A. played in your writing and the tensions between my ‘cosmopolitan’ self and the ‘country woman’ self who, sometimes grudgingly, participates in Lizzy’s world as seen by the local community. (There’s another Lizzy who is troubled and fragile and altogether different to the one the community sees). I would need to give more thought to this parallel but wanted to put down as a marker for myself about our relationship.

My provisional view is that A. was an aspect of yourself, a separate, even quasi-independent, entity who has a degree of distance from a situation you sometimes found almost impossible to live with. And I now suspect that I’ve taken on something of that grumpy old bastard’s role.    

 2]. I think you’re at least partly right about the working people here in the past living in multiple interpenetrating worlds; as interacting with, as I think you wrote, the familiar earth of animals and plants, the celestial world of God’s heaven, the demonic world of Satan, and the preternatural world of the planets and the stars. That although officially God sat spider-like in the center and governed the whole, in practice people lived among a multitude of contending forces located in an uncertain relationship to Divine Law.

Also, that ritual action, prayer, and chant or song might be employed to magically affect the interplay of contending forces. I liked your reminder that magic had different forms: ceremonial or angelic, natural, artificial, or demonic, the first two often blended with spiritual disciplines and prayers indistinguishable from the rituals of popular Catholicism. Of course, (she says!) this was associated primarily with women as practitioners of a magical form of healing, conducted out of motives of neighborliness, paternalism, good housekeeping, Christian charity or simply self-help. I’m sure many villages did have their nurses and wise women well-versed in herb-lore and in secret brews and potions, so that their medicine often blended into white magic and, as you say, sometimes verged on black. I still know people who can assume a certain authority locally based on a (perhaps misplaced) sense of that tradition and all that had once underwrote it. After all, I’ve heard an old man in Ellingham say that it was only when the railway came that the fairies stopped dancing on the Fairy Hill!

Who else but women would take the time to attend to all this, then as now? …

3]. You can imagine my delight at reading what you wrote about women’s lives on the Western Marches between the Twelfth and Sixteenth Centuries. The part of me who revels in the distaff Borders heritage I shared with Kate whooped with delight that in 1327 women on the Western March took part in raiding like some of their Gaelic-speaking sisters in Ireland. How very practical to carry off the shorn wool and linen that the men disregarded! No wonder they were characterized as independent-minded, courageous, absolute mistresses of their own houses, and concerned to dress well by foreign observers in Protestant Edinburgh. I do wonder, however, what the authorities there thought? I suspect they saw them as, at best, badly behaved and, at worst, ‘whores’. I particularly like the Italian ambassador’s comment about they’re being bold and not distinguished for their chastity because they gave their kisses more readily than Italian women gave their hands. That’s perfect for Kate, somehow.

You write that we have no equivalent woman’s penitential testimony to match that of Geordie Burn. But the Kates of our world in their earlier incarnations would surely have matched him, hopefully not in murdering, but quite possibly in drinking, stealing, taking deep revenge for slight offences, and in sexual adventures. I think of them as the Borders contemporaries of the Nurse in ‘Romeo and Juliet’, Margaret in ‘Much Ado about Nothing’ and Audrey in ‘As you Like It’.  Anyway, on a practical level, Geordie Burn never have found about forty men’s wives to fornicate with if there’d been no wives willing to oblige him! So, where are their voices now?

I’m sure that the repertoire of Borders singers in early Stuart times would have consisted of far more than Riding ballads about feuds and raids. You’ve only to think of the diverse repertoire of the early Bluesmen like Robert Johnson, Charley Patton and Peetie Wheatstraw. They all had to earn a living and did it by singing what people wanted to hear.

Furthermore, why would James IV pay the Carlisle girl twenty-eight shillings (which must have been a fortune then) to sing ballads that dignified the very way of life he was campaigning so hard to end? It’s easy to forget that ballad collectors like Scott and Child had their own presuppositions based on class, propriety, and gender. I doubt they were any more tolerant of bawdy than the pious folk who condemned the Blues as the devil’s music and I’m sure their collections represent only a fraction of the songs known to someone like the ‘Carlisle girl’. (I say this knowing something of the repertoire of her modern equivalents, the singers among today’s Scots Travelers.) 

Woman working at the Tar Heel Mica Co. Inc., in Plumtree, North Carolina.

(photo. Elizabeth Turrell)

I was very moved by what you wrote about Cecil Sharp and Maud Karpeles meeting with Cis Jones. Lovely that she sang them versions of the old ballads: ‘Long Lankin’, ‘Barbara Allen’, ‘Lord Thomas and Fair Ellender’, ‘Lord Bateman’, ‘The Elfin Knight’, and ‘Little Musgrave and Lady Barnard’. Moving too that she was sometimes accompanied by her two daughters and her granddaughters. Good for Maud for seeing through Sharp’s claim that Cis was of sound English stock and for acknowledging that about one third of Appalachian songs were carried on Scottish and Irish (I’d guess Scots-Irish) melodies! Interesting too that the supposedly English singers were mostly of northern English, Welsh, Scottish, and Irish descent. So that Appalachian song culture, from the early C18^th on, must have involved constant cross-cultural exchange between different European migrant groups, Native Americans, Melungeons, and Afro-Americans.

I’m also interested that Cis Jones’ belonging to the Holy Rollers religious sect didn’t stop her singing ballads, given how often they intervened to prevent the collectors from hearing ‘love songs’. I’d give a good deal to know what was in Cis’ mind when she said she was sure Sharp and Karpeles would make no bad use of the ballads. It makes them sound like spells, part of the lore of ‘granny women’ and ‘yarb doctors’. Maybe the other singer Sharp and Karpeles were particularly interested in, Julie Boone, was rarely at home, and wandered all around the country bare-footed staying wherever she happened to be when it was dark, because she was out collecting ‘yarbs’? Anyway, you’ve given me an appetite to discover more about all this and, when I do, I’ll report back.[1]

Re-reading these old thoughts again today made me think about the many different persons that make me up. I’ll come back to this another time.

[1] Flora was true to her word on this and, among other things, obtained an extraordinary set of photographs taken at the Tar Heel Mica Co. Inc., of Plumtree, North Carolina by the ceramicist Elizabeth Turrell, (see colour image above). Flora wrote to me that she’d like to think of the women in them as the granddaughters of people like Cis Jones and Julie Boone, although she doubted they still shared their beliefs.

The two kitchens

Almost the first thing Mrs. Oliver did when she moved in with Lizzy and Sarah was to ask if she could hang an old photograph from Homehaugh on the kitchen wall. When it was up she’d regularly glance at it, fondly but reverentially, as a devout Russian Orthodox believer might at an old family icon.

In that photograph, she’s about fifteen and looks assertively out from the middle of a group of bell-ringers. A rather short, serious-looking girl in school uniform who is already becoming the woman I’ve known since I was eight. On her left a taller, thinner girl with glasses, Millie, identically dressed but for white ankle socks. She looks as if she’s about to giggle. There are eight older men and one younger, who wears an ill-fitting double-breasted jacket. Finally, there’s a schoolboy about the age of the girls. Everyone looks very serious except Millie and the younger man.

This photograph now hangs in Lizzy’s kitchen next to an old child’s blackboard where farm and household tasks are written and erased daily. It overlooks the big kitchen table with its dark green legs, draws for cutlery, and ridged and knotted pine top. The house revolves around this table, located as it is between the yard beyond the back door, the farm office and passage that leads to the sitting room, and a shabby utility room dominated by a big old washing machine that’s always busy. It’s the hub of a working world-without-end, now watched over by Mrs. Oliver’s bell ringers. They used to face the kitchen window at Homehaugh, the house where Lizzy and her sister Kate were born and grew up. There, from opposite the massive double sink, they looked out across the narrow back lane, the small home field and churchyard, towards the high hill above.

That photograph is also witness to a lifetime of Mrs. Oliver’s cooking. To thick yellow scones, large uneven loaves of brown bread, crusty meat pies, and the almost black rich fruit cake that always appeared in our bait-boxes on holiday trips, walks or rides out. To eat that cake again now is to return to childhood, to meals in the hidden river valley or the hills, the taste of many expeditions. And to drinking sweet tea out of chipped enamel mugs in the big shabby back room at Homehaugh itself on wet winter Sunday afternoons. The smell of cooking would waft in to where we all sprawled, us girls chatting with half an ear on the boys’ squabbling and to whatever music James was currently playing: Dylan, Them, The Animals, The Rolling Stones, The Grateful Dead, The Beatles, Jefferson Airplane, Leonard Cohen.

Mrs. Oliver cooks less now and Lizzy is reluctantly stepping into her shoes. Reluctantly because she’s so busy on the farm, but also because she knows she’ll never cook as well as her mother and has a competitive streak. Mrs. Oliver helps her cook weekdays and, at weekends, teaches her granddaughter Sarah. That, along with her regular glance towards the bell ringers, suggests she’s feeling her age. I see these things because I’m in and out of that kitchen all the time.

I learned from Lizzy that her mother met Elizabeth Aitcheson (then Elizabeth Reed) as a canteen manager in the WAAF. Lizzy is named after her and because of that friendship they moved to Homehaugh in 1954, shortly after old Mr Oliver died. Elizabeth Reed’s older brother, a bomber pilot, was killed late in the war and her younger brother, a soldier who became a Japanese prisoner-of-war, died in 1947. At that point, Elizabeth Reed left home. (The locals always assumed there was a man involved, something Mrs. Oliver dismissed as empty gossip.) Elizabeth only returned after a car accident that left her permanently lame. Her father, old Mr Reed, never recovered from losing the boys and wanted to make a male cousin his heir. There was a monumental family row of the kind we specialize in on the Borders and have done from time immemorial. In the end, a formidable great aunt of Lizzy’s brokered a compromise whereby the estate was put in trust, although this involved certain conditions that put Elizabeth under pressure to marry. She left home again when she could and only returned when her father was dying. (Her mother had died four years after her younger brother was born.) Then Elizabeth suddenly married Sir William Aitcheson. Handsome, titled, a decorated war hero, well-connected in both the business and political worlds, he was considered by the Reed clan to be ‘a very good catch’, not to mention ‘a remarkably good fellow’ for marrying an eccentric, if wealthy, cripple. It was clearly a marriage of convenience from the start, since they mostly lived apart. She up here, him in York or London. He got his big country estate and shooting parties each summer; she her sons and a loosening of the trust’s hold on the estate.

Lizzy’s parents were uneasy about Sir William from the start. They felt he took too much for granted and, while Mrs. Oliver wasn’t entirely immune to his considerable charm, she thought him untrustworthy. Mr. Oliver disliked him from the start as a smooth Public School man, a snob, and an ‘incomer’ (conveniently ignored the fact that the Armstrongs have always been a Name to reckon with in the Borders.)

Personally, I think Sir William was predictably true to type, but with the savvy to find new ways to underwrite his traditional presuppositions about family, class, and entitlement. But then Lizzy would say I’ve always been unnecessarily critical of our landowning class since I went to London.

[These are the fourth and fifth of forty-nine narrative sections that make up Convergences: Debatable Lands Volume 3, the concluding work of my Debatable Lands deep mapping project. The complete work is now available on request as a pdf. If you would like a copy, please contact me at: iain19biggs@gmail.com].

Fragments from genealogies

Richard Kerr

Richard had rented a cottage on the southern edge of our high moorland for several years before I discovered he was there.

When Dad and I first moved north, Richard was studying at university and often visited us in the summer. I didn’t see a lot of him then because he stayed in the old caravan in the garden, although he sometimes ate with us in the evening. But I often heard him, talking with Dad downstairs late into the night, or singing when he came in for a bath. I was rather shy of him because his occasional appearances at breakfast, still glowing from his bath and dressed only in shorts, gave me my first, somewhat bewildering, taste of the mysterious attraction of the male body. I do, however, have a very fond memory of us all playing tag out in the back garden early one morning the year we moved north. Me rushing around on the wet grass playing the fool, and the two men so bent up with laugher they’d no chance of catching me. It was the first time I remember Dad laughing properly after Mum died.

After Richard graduated we got snippets of news from Christmas cards. He got a First in Earth Sciences, did a Masters in Environmental Studies, and then a Ph.D. on something involving the Forestry Commission. He was overseas when we had Dad’s funeral and I lost touch with him after that. So, when I heard where he was living I got his number and rang him. We agreed to meet for lunch at a pub after I’d made a delivery, suggesting neutral territory in case, after all those years, we didn’t hit it off. As it turned out, we did.

He was a little late. He’d helped with a stray bullock hit by a lorry and then needed to clean up. We talked over a ploughman’s lunch and then went back at his cottage and continued over mugs of tea. We walked a big mongrel called Mike, who Richard shared with a neighbour. Then he made soup and we ate it together with bread, cheese, pickle and his own small sweet tomatoes, grown in a little ramshackle greenhouse behind the garage. We were still talking when I noticed it was almost midnight and that I needed to drive home.

Richard had worked full-time for the Forestry Commission as a ‘field scientist’ and then diversified. He studies, and occasionally culls, roe deer and acts as a consultant. He also records data for various long-term environmental projects on forestry for two different universities. The cottage is full of books, the garden of vegetables and bees that, like Mike, he shares with a neighbour because his work involves traveling. When he’s at home he also does odd jobs around the village, mostly gardening, walling and other handyman stuff. He says it’s to supplement ‘the pittance’ he gets for his work, but I suspect it’s just as much because he’s gregarious, likes to gossip, and enjoys the physical work.

Richard is tall, lean, with a weathered face and crow’s feet around his eyes. His hair is thick, cut close, flecked with grey, and starting to recede. He has powerful arms and big expressive hands – the hairs on their backs are ginger brown but go almost blond in summer – with which he gestures as he talks. His voice is no less deep, lively or edged with laughter than in my childhood memories. When he gave me a farewell kiss on the cheek he smelled slightly earthy, with a hint of wood smoke, well lived-in wool, a touch of sweat, and a hint of garlic from the soup. As I turned I felt a faint tug of desire and, for the time it took me to walk to the van, turn, and wave back to the figure in the doorway, I wondered what he would be like as a lover. A mistake. But I made a resolution to visit him when I could.

‘RK’

As it turns out there wasn’t that much time for visiting. I saw him twice that spring and maybe four or five times over the summer and into the autumn. In early November, a community forestry group on the Isle of Mull hired him as a consultant. He met Margaret there and sent an email announcing that they were engaged and he’d be moving to Mull. The significant bit read:

I’ve met someone called Margaret McDonald, a wonderful woman who lives here with her son Ben, a boy who sings like a lark and has given all their hens Gaelic names. (Ben’s father was drowned at sea when he was three.) Margaret is fifty per cent of the post office here. She also helps run an internet repair business for the north end of the island. A pillar of the local community in the best sense, who has helped negotiate me a part-time job here on a highlands and islands community forest initiate. Despite my advanced age, she has also graciously agreed to marry me. Wedding invitations will follow in due course and, as soon as I can sort myself out, I’ll move to Mull.

I was invited to the wedding but made my excuses. I sent them the little yew box I’d made him as next year’s Christmas present, along with a copy of an old photo of Dad with myself, aged about ten I suppose. I last saw him when he and Ben drove away with the remainder of his possessions. He had spent a week sorting out his lease, saying goodbye to friends, collecting up the last of his books, furniture and so on into his van and a horse trailer he’d borrowed from Margaret’s brother. Mike and the bees had already gone. Sarah Aitcheson helped me entertain Ben while Richard was busy. A thin, darkly beautiful boy who said little, but smiled his dazzling slow shy smile to make up for it.

Richard, Ben, Lizzy, Sarah and I squeezed around my kitchen table for supper the night before they left. We had a grand evening together and, despite my sadness, I enjoyed watching Sarah, then just turned sixteen, try out her already considerable charms on young master Ben. She was wearing her big black DMs, red tights, short sleeveless blue dress over a black tee shirt, with her long dark hair tied back and up. Very adult-looking but still also just a girl – that wonderful combination of not quite knowing what to do with her body, of ready smiles and open laughter, the odd blush, and those almost savage little surges of energy that ensure she’s never still for long. Ben, probably a year or two younger, was clearly smitten. Watching them flirt and laugh together I remembered her aunt Kate at Sarah’s age. When we said goodbye outside his cottage late in the morning the next day, I had the sinking feeling in my stomach I get now whenever someone who matters to me goes away.

After the goodbyes, Richard started the van and, opening the window, passed me the white glazed ceramic bottle he’d kept among assorted oddments on the old pantry shelf. I’d said, the last time I called in, that it was a little white sentinel, keeping watch on the home road. As he gave it me he smiled and gave a little nod. Then he reversed the trailer around the yard and headed down the lane. Sarah, who had come to help load but spent most of her time flirting with Ben, forgot about being grown-up and jumped up and down, waved wildly, until they disappeared.

I went straight back inside to shut windows and start locking up. I needed time alone to still my heart.