I drive to the murder field. There is an absolute silence and blackness beyond its fence. I know the shed is piled with dead animals. There is a complete dark nothingness there, something utter and eerie, a nihilism, a nothing you should not be able to feel but cannot mistake. I patrol our other fields, and the valley, and the other setts. From my earliest days of childhood in Wales I remember Mum talking of badger-baiters as if they were bogeymen: cruel, warped people who might come on a winter night, whose torches might be seen bobbing through the bare trees, who sometimes left us intimidating messages – a glove hung up by the middle finger, a dead badger thrown into a shed.
I stand at the entrance to the shed, looking down on the still and staring eyes, the torn throats, the blood and the ripped and bloated bodies. I say a silent prayer, and the refrain of Patrick Kavanagh’s great lament for love which brings pain. It was love of the animals and love of the valley and love of the life of the open air which hurt us now, much more than any thug’s abuses.
. . . let grief be a fallen leaf at the dawning of the day.
Let grief be a fallen leaf, I think. There is much to do. And indeed, in the days that followed the winds blew, the leaves fell and winter’s occupation began.
4 NOVEMBER
As November stubs out the glow of autumn and the days tighten into shorter hours, we make decisions. We will not lamb this year. As a tribute to and a lament for our slaughtered animals, we decide not to put the rams to the ewes, to take a year off. Mum needs respite. We retrench and plan and it is still a desperate time. The horror of it haunts us.
‘I took on the farm because Amos who sold it us said you’ve got to have sheep, and here’s a flock, but if someone had told me they were as sensitive and empathetic as Labradors I would have thought twice, frankly,’ Mum says.
To come home to find a dog butchered and dying in the living room is perhaps the nearest a non-farmer can come to imagining her feelings. I go to church, partly to see my neighbours, and partly for something else.
‘As we forgive those who trespass against us,’ keeps running through my head. Do I forgive them? I think I understand them. These are people of the margins, clinging to a thrill which may have come down to them in many ways, from a time when the countryside was rich in animals and birds. If they are terrier men, associated with hunts, as investigators believe, then their pleasure is only a version of the kind that the fox-hunting fraternity have always enjoyed and wish to see reinstated. Their dogs, the pit-bull–lurcher crosses known as bull-lurchers, are terrifyingly indicative of their masters’ state. Awkward, bizarre creatures, muscled like bulldogs, swept and lifted like lurchers, mutant descendants of Cerberus, short only of two heads, they are for killing – and if you were the kind of person to own such a dog, wouldn’t you want to see it in action?
For you, winter would be a thrilling season. You would plan and plot, study the moon and the weather and the map. Loading the tools and the dogs, timing the run, finding the parking place in the right gateway: this is adventure. And the hunched hurry along the fence lines, and the hiding, and the watching, and seeing your victim come and go and miss you: this is defiance. You have slipped through; the world now belongs not to farmers and shepherds – it belongs to the outlaw, to you. And the digging and the fighting, and the trapping and the lifting, the imprisoning and the bagging-up, the squirms of your prey and the darkness all yours – what a night!
To top it all, to make this a bit special, to have something extra to confide to those who thrill to the gossip of what you do, who come to the fights, who laud you – why, you set the dogs on the old woman’s sheep, of course you do. You love it as much as the dogs do.
11 NOVEMBER
We keep going down at the weekends; Rebecca and Aubrey come too, to help sort sheep, to inject, treat and move them under Mum’s direction. Her recovery is astonishing and wonderful to watch. I come in one evening to find her in her dressing gown, her nightly whisky-and-milk in one hand, the phone in the other. She is issuing instructions and advice to a neighbour. She looks alive, decisive and vibrant, like a general.
Preparing for winter has its own rhythms, as old as our exchanges with the land. November 11th, St Martin’s day, was the time when medieval farmers assessed the balance of livestock and hay. Every animal over the number that could be fed was slaughtered and salted. Abbot Francis Gasquet’s close reading of the accounts of the priory of Grace Dieu in Leicestershire gives a glimpse of how the nuns prepared for winter. In early November salt was purchased, and tallow and mutton fat, ready for the visit of the candle-maker, whose rush-lights and cresset-lights would, as Gasquet put it, ‘have done hardly more than make visible the darkness of a winter evening’.
We move the sheep to the lower fields and haul feed to the shed on the mountain. Mum goes into long negotiations with repairmen over the wicks for the cooker. It is the heart of her house and very old, performing the same function as the fire in the calefactory, the common room, sometimes ‘warming place’, of a monastery. These were lit on the feast of All Saints, November 1st, and kept going every day until Easter.
Hill farming is mostly a battle, but in the winter the rules change. You are not worried about flies and maggots, now, and less fearful of disease; the cold brings that relief. (‘I saw C. V. Wedgwood lecture at Cambridge,’ Mum says. ‘She was a great expert on the Civil War. She said that the night after the Battle of Edgehill in October 1642 was bitterly cold, a really hard frost. It meant that the wounded soldiers didn’t get infected – the cold saved them. Casualties were much lower than they were in summer battles.’) With the leaves gone, the sheep are easily seen; they cannot slink off out of sight if they are ill or in trouble, which is their habit. They need feeding with hay, nuts and mineral blocks, and they need water. It is gruelling work, for even if he or she is ill or carrying an injury, a good farmer can never miss a day.
Growing up on a hill farm, the winters of my childhood were a jarring of cold gates, the frigid iron biting through your gloves, the cut of hay-bale string in your palms and the rock of frozen mud beneath your boots. My brother Alexander and I loathed the cold but relished the winter: in bad years snow cut us off for weeks, which was the greatest adventure for small boys. We hoped for snow as ardently as our mother dreaded it. There were amazing weeks in which the farm became a ship trapped in ice. We walked down the hill in the morning to the car, and then back up in the evening after school, our mother having done another up and another down in the interim, and fed the sheep. Following the lane through the wood was like a frigid safari. Here were the lopping tracks of rabbits, here the tiny trails of mice. Rooks roosted on the road in the leaf litter on very cold nights, leaping out, cawing purple as we approached.
My mother kept her coat on in the house. In the old days the animals were stabled beneath the farms’ sleeping quarters, their warmth rising through the floor. In Tibet I saw the same system still in use: Tibetan farms are like castles, with a high-walled forecourt where the pigs are fed, and wide planks forming the first floor with gaps between them only partially plugged with straw. You can look down and see the cattle moving below you. You smell them and hear them, as if every farm is Noah’s Ark.
18 NOVEMBER
Winter in the mountains is arresting in its drama, the light melting over the Brecon Beacons as though it carries cold in it, not heat. There are the lakes of mist, too, the sun riding high over the bracken-red ridges as they surface through pearlescent cloud, heaving up like whales. Winter by the sea is another kind of theatre, like standing in a great and empty auditorium. The first time I moved back to Wales from London as an adult, I had been living in a boat on the Regent’s Canal near Marylebone. The boat had no hot water: I took showers on the towpath until it became absurdly cold. Then I looked for a vacant holiday cottage, somewhere far away and as cheap as possible, where I might write.
I found it in Little Haven, West Wales, a village in a crook in the cliffs where a stream runs down to the beach. There is a stickle of houses, a co
ve and a promontory, all but deserted in winter. Only the path, a hip-high wall and the wedge-end of the cliffs separate the cottage from the furthest reach of the sea. Every wave, at high tide, slaps and shushes under the windows of Beach Cottage. After storms, sea slaters came in under the door; I did not know what they were, these giant sandy woodlice, but I laughed and talked to them as I ushered them out, being short of company. It was a strange and lovely place to live alone, a holiday cottage in off-season: the only other neighbours were ghosts and builders in dispute over the renovation of the pub next door. At low tide you could walk two bays north to the shop, oystercatchers your escorts along the strand, skittering and piping through the foamy unfurlings of the waves.
The winter sea seems to have little time or thought for land, as though its soul is elsewhere. It flattens and gathers, coldly preparing its storms, withdrawing its colour, leaving shades and tones, hiding its lustres and tints behind its grey back, showing them elsewhere, no doubt, on some blue-green shore. The sea does not call to us now, as it did and will again. Only the seal-silhouettes of the surfers go down to the water, black hoods bobbing in grey waves. The introspection of the sea is almost frightening in winter.
Small tankers and coasters taking refuge from the weather come to anchor in the bay, their arrivals and departures unseen, shuffled by mysterious callings. At night their lights and the noise of their generators come clearly across the water, seeming to speak of their isolation, the unknown ports of their voyages, as though their travels link obscure shores and shelters into a chain of unmapped littorals, countries existing only as marks on the fringe of maritime charts.
Great storms and downpours march in across the Irish Sea, and icy mornings, and there comes one extraordinary day when mist covers all the land but breaks in pastel ridges of pink and pearly valleys over the shore, so that the sea is clear and the coast an archipelago of blue vapour, floating above itself.
It was a striking winter: I was writing a book and recovering from shocks I did not understand. It took me a while to find names and shapes for them. One night, in the dim front room of Beach Cottage, I realised I had been in grief. A relationship had ended months before; only now did I understand how and what I had lost. I had gone through parting from the other person – that had been months of pain, borne together, and then apart – but not until that moment in the salt-damp house by the winter sea had I admitted and understood the loss of the third figure, the love between us.
The refusal to acknowledge pain seems very male now. It is bizarre that I could have gone so far into that winter, so far to the end of the land, without really knowing what it was that ran with me and inside me. Surely women are closer to themselves, more able to sense their own tides? And more self-aware men are, too, no doubt – though there is a gender gap in self-knowledge and admission. The realisation seemed to change everything. I exclaimed aloud. It was as though someone had sat me down and said: Listen, you have been heartbroken. That is what this is. The migration to the winter coast made sense, then. In turmoil we are drawn to water, to space, to the high places and the wider views. It must be a very simple reflex: a need for escape and perspective which weather and landscape fulfil. The sea has a power to draw out and rearrange our anxieties in simpler patterns; on the coast paths and the empty beaches I found a deep untangling. There is this in winter, too, in its reductions and parings, simplicity.
I moved to an empty house belonging to a friend in St David’s, the smallest city in Britain. In summer it is in permanent spate, flooded through with holidaymakers. For a few weeks in winter it transforms. Now a Welsh-speaking population rejoices in their own tongue; you hear the curling spells of the language in the mornings before the vagrant visitors arrive. Tapping with hammers down the twilight lanes, St David’s makes its way through the winter, preparing for the next season. The radio picks up Irish stations, as though we are not on the western fringe but instead an island, the hinterlands of Wales like a sea behind us. Before us, out there beyond the horizon, some Celtic mainland lives, speaking and singing in the accents of the oceanic West.
St David’s surrounds the cathedral, a most lively and animated marvel, with its showers of jackdaws, the mauve and purple tones of its tower and the motions of its anchorage. Hidden in a valley, it sits like a ship in harbour, the flexing waves of the ridge trees riding behind it in the wind.
Without visitors, unpeopled, the cliffs and headlands return to their creatures. At St Ann’s Head a buzzard surveys her planet from a fence post. What minor orders of life are all things under that small imperial gaze! Near Martin’s Haven the choughs tour their peninsula, unafraid and miraculous in glossy black plumage like dress uniform, joyfully paired with beaks and legs of clown-scarlet.
Sea mists like enchantments cover the land, stilling all sound, returning the nights to deep silence.
15 DECEMBER
In high pressure the air itself seems to recede, as though the cold fires of the stars and the moon draw further away, leaving a vast, deep bowl of freezing, exhilarating, space. The early mornings with their slow dawns are beautiful. There was a brush of frost, then two days later a white freezing. At daybreak the meadow below the lane was frosted, leaving a handsome dark border, unfrozen, running under the trees where the field reaches the beck. I was beginning a long journey and the taxi driver was delighted by the cold: ‘It’s minus two!’ he said, in the way we might exclaim, ‘Twenty-eight degrees!’ in summer.
‘Look! Winter!’ he said, pointing at our neighbours scraping their whitened car windows.
As the train crossed the viaduct above the roofs of Todmorden the whole town was steaming, the vapour from boilers and showers curling in perfect focus into the frigid air. There was much goose business abroad, gaggles gathering on the Rochdale Canal, and small skeins of the birds, Canada geese, flying over Smithy Bridge. I wondered if the cold was bringing flocks from further north down to join the locals, or if the first snap energises them the way it does us.
Further along the canal, heading for Manchester, with the light widening and tautening as it does just before the sun makes his entrance, three horses picked up their feet as they trotted along the towpath by a lock. Everything about them was alive, their movements skittish, palpable energy in their quick steps, as if the ground was tingling under their hooves. In Manchester’s Victoria Station a slightly haggard Santa selling The Big Issue did not look incongruous in the cold. He gave his ‘Ho-ho-ho!’ to commuters with genuine amusement. When the sun did come, it threw a blinding gold glare across the plain between Manchester and Liverpool. Small ponds and plashings were frozen coins.
There have been ominous sunsets like spilled fire under brooding cloud, and in daylight the bare trees reveal the country and its creatures in a clarity the other seasons deny. Cold winters do away with claustrophobia, and they are a gift to birdwatchers. We watched a great spotted woodpecker at work on a branch which frosty moss had made emerald. He looked immaculate in black and white, red cap feathers and his scarlet undertail coverts like flashy boxer shorts. In Welsh lore the dragons still thrive – they have merely taken the form of green woodpeckers. The whole woodpecker family have something dragonish about them. They may not have arrow-head tails, but they do have extremely long tongues, for scooping bugs out of holes in tree trunks.
It does not do to romanticise drizzle, rain on motorways, months of strip-lighting, office windows black at four o’clock, concrete skies, sock-damp, rain-prickle, mould-steam, deadbeaten fields, sodden livestock and the chilly tug like foot-sucking mud that winter can exert upon the spirit. But the cold does offer great compensations, like the subtle colours, the days as bright as a magpie’s cackle, and those stretched tones that bruise the blue of a cold sky in its fading.
17 DECEMBER
We make preparations for Christmas. Rebecca buys Aubrey a Lego advent calendar. Every morning is a lesson in numbers – he has to find the right date – and a joyful opening of windows, yielding small figures and machines
. ‘Look Dad, look!’ His joy infuses all of us. When will we get The Tree? When is Christmas? How many days? Is it tomorrow? What will we eat? What will Father Christmas bring? How will he get down the chimney?
Our season is hauling firewood, drying clothes, lining the radiators with washing, stuffing boots with newspaper, layering on jumpers, keeping track of Aubrey’s vests, celebrating different versions of Rebecca’s homity pie, ferrying Robin to and from the station, always in the dark. Robin is running the full gamut of the standard train chaos in his commute to school. One week, he says, not a single one ran right. I order a goose. We obtain and decorate the tree. I find I even enjoy Christmas shopping (I hate shopping, normally), buying presents without counting costs. I have made money this year, with radio work and articles and books and teaching. In the back of my mind is January’s tax bill, but I push it into a corner. I am a fool, a happy fool, putting off the days of reckoning. There is another side to the season, like a slow drum. Jenny, Rebecca’s mother, works at the food-bank in Rochdale. She says it is busier every week. The news keeps getting worse: child poverty, NHS crises, a dithering government, the prospect of an insane and disordered Brexit. There is a despairing feeling among my students, caught between anxiety in the present and fear for their futures. You can hold it all off and ‘crack on’, as Rebecca puts it, but to think about it at all is to confront an ominous gathering of bad signs. Cheerfulness and the responsibility to be joyful, especially for the children but for everyone you meet, seems on the one hand a quixotic duty, almost a wilful blindness, and on the other a vital celebration of the moment, of the now.
24 DECEMBER
On Christmas Eve Hebden Bridge gathers to sing carols in the square. It is Rebecca’s favourite night of the winter. We moved here, when we had to return from Italy, because we needed to be close to Rochdale, where her son Robin’s father lives, and because Hebden is beautiful in its way, and alternative: gay, cosmopolitan and left-leaning, with music and moors, woods and a Steiner kindergarten, which Rebecca wanted Aubrey to attend. They do Christmas unrestrainedly here: there are hay bales around the tree, a brass band in toppers, children on shoulders, and high up, like small, cold angels, pigeons on rooftops, gazing down.
The Light in the Dark Page 2