27 DECEMBER
Now our child wakes and demands action. We surface slowly, reluctantly, but soon Rebecca is jumpy for exercise.
‘Come on Aubrey, boots on, Mummy needs her walk! It’s like living with a panther, isn’t it?’
‘Or a T-Rex!’
‘Let’s take our T-Rex out.’
We drive to Castell Dinas, a humped and almost perfectly conical hill that commands the pass into our valley. It is a fairy hill today, white, thickcrystalled and glittering. We climb slowly through banks of fortifications. At the top there are the low remains of a gateway, and then, below and before us, the whole of the valley and the mountains rising, the nearer ramparts running up into cloud. The course of a stream – marked only in ticks and scurries of black rock – descends out of the vapour, stitching the sky to the flanks of two huge ridges in a single stippled line. The valley runs south, the fields yellow-green below the snow line as the light reverberates between the hillsides. Aubrey bustles along the battlements, slaying foes. Rebecca’s legs are barely stretched but she has air and height around her, and she is laughing. Uncle Alexander stands and absorbs. Mum’s normal habit is to see and exclaim – the instinct to cry, ‘Look, children!’ has never left her. But sometimes she stops, still and alight with a view of the world, and shakes her head, speechless.
Our mountain forges through blue below higher cloud. It is astonishing, seen from here, frozen, swept-peaked and towering. In the distances below there seems no end-stop, no horizon, only the hills rolling down to far away, to the speckle of trees and farms and the fair lands of the lower Usk Valley, their hill fields shaded across in brightness where sluggish winter grass meets vaunting white.
The contours of this view and the snow’s power to change it are unaltered by time. From the Iron Age at least humans have stood here, felt the tiny surge of energy in the winter sun and faced eternity, as near as we can conceive it, in the lines of the mountains and the moving cloud.
You can feel our time on the summit in the snow as a scene hung in memory’s hall as it unfurls. Perhaps the transience of the snow lends it this quality, a needful, fragile, moment-tomoment beauty, and the five of us here, and all well, and happy. The summer of 1978 is under our feet, when we came up here for my fifth birthday, and there was a camping trip at the turn of the millennium when I slept up here, and there was an expedition in the 1980s with the girls from the farm down below, when we caught newts in the plashings between the ramparts. Each time is vivid. There is some power in this outcrop, some line through time. I bet anything Aubrey will remember it.
10 JANUARY
In the blue dark of the morning the sky is a luminous dim indigo. Schoolboys pick their way through white slush. A girl with no coat hurries to the station, dressed in skirt and tights. These are tough people. Thin wisps of birdsong come through the bare woods and I am aware of gathering every sign of life and nature, as though assembling charms and touchstones against a lowering threat. A crow mobs a heron over the valley field, and on the canal Canada geese seem to glow, their soft colours enriched by snow-light. The skies are capricious and restless, throwing down combinations of hail and sleet, raining slush. Under the trees the woods are patched green and white, the thickets and trunks feeble and bare, as though they cling to the earth on probation.
On the way to work, on the train to Liverpool, I watch a thin sun struggling low under the lid of cloud. Dear old Britain! Bits of it look superannuated, fit for abandonment or bulldozing. We pass housing intertwined with spoil heaps and rubble, rusted wire and litter, enduring under dirty skies.
We pass Rainhill. I was amazed by the names of the North when I first came here, the heavy, cold poetry of them, names with hard skies in them, flat and dully gleaming like broadswords. Brown Wardle and Rooley Moor Road; Hardcastle Crags, Blackstone Edge and Syke. The Cemetery Hotel waits for a novel to be written about it. Rainhill made its almost forgotten name long ago. A mile of the line here, which is perfectly flat, was the site of the Rainhill Trials in 1829, when Stephenson’s Rocket defeated all its competitors for the nascent Manchester to Liverpool Railway, co-fathering the Industrial Revolution. The Rocket hit a top speed of thirty miles an hour, faster than my commuter train seems to be able to sustain. It creeps between stations, pausing as if it forgets its mission every few minutes. I think of the great cities, of Shanghai and San Francisco, of Paris and Berlin. Compared to life in them this is medieval, as though we live in an eternal winter, a geriatric country, small and hunched inwards, talking irritably to itself. And yet there are stipples of buds on the ash trees, and more birds than you would ever see in Italy. We pass a primary school and the whole playground leaps and dances with children, hooded and gloved, bouncing like lambs.
The wide plain between Manchester and the coast has been combed bare by the cold, the bracken a dead, reddish tangle, the oaks gaunt. Small lines of sheep feed on a scattering of swedes. I remember my parents doing the same for our flock when I was very young, one of those absolutely clear memory flashes of childhood like a snatch of perfect footage in a bleached-out film. I can still smell the tubers; I can still hear the rattle of our neighbour’s tractor and feel the unforgiving ground. Edward Thomas, a man who knew well the torments of winter and depression, and the tearing pull between making a living and creating art (‘I dragged him out from under the heap of his own work in prose he was buried alive under,’ said Robert Frost, who was partly responsible for turning Thomas to poetry), saw the same work in the fields, and hymned it, in the winter of 1915.
SWEDES
They have taken the gable from the roof of clay
On the long swede pile. They have let in the sun
To the white and gold and purple of curled fronds
Unsunned. It is a sight more tender-gorgeous
At the wood-corner where Winter moans and drips
Than when, in the Valley of the Tombs of Kings,
A boy crawls down into a Pharaoh’s tomb
And, first of Christian men, beholds the mummy,
God and monkey, chariot and throne and vase,
Blue pottery, alabaster, and gold.
But dreamless long-dead Amen-hotep lies.
This is a dream of Winter, sweet as Spring.
Winter as a moaning, dripping spectre, a ghost untombed, unhoused, and the swedes as a treasure hoard, transfiguring winter’s spirit with an epiphany of colour, texture and accumulation: what attention, what strength of soul, to catch the uplifting moment. Thomas suffered terrible depressions. To follow his eye across the three winters of his poetic outpouring is to walk with a companion in constant negotiation with the ghoul that moans and drips at the wood-corner. It is so easy to feel for him and with him that it is hard to read him.
I am aware of an inner fighting, of a struggle not to lie down under the battering of these dim, thudding days. I am hiding in forced cheerfulness, and earlier bedtimes, and eating more sugar – pouring down muesli and honey on toast. The symptoms of seasonal depression are all there and I cannot shake them. I catch Rebecca’s assessing eye, and I can feel her strength, as if she spreads her shoulders, taking on more of the burden of lightening the house and making us all happy, as I retreat into obsessive washing-up and hear my voice starting sentences with ‘No’ and ‘Don’t’. The negative is taking up residence in me, like mould, like rot, like decay.
The Calder Valley, where we live, has a high suicide rate, ascribed to ‘Valley Bottom Fever’: the feeling that there is no way out, and that real life, life and laughter and excitement, is very far away. The reasons for living here are good, but in the darker time I seethe with the conviction that all life and my life is passing in the rain and I have no means of controlling it or changing it. There are many, many who feel this way all over the country, but the moors and the in-twisted geography of the valley do have a potent way of focusing it.
I am very bad in the mornings. We hold it together until we get Aubrey to school, then some glum comment from me, some hopele
ssness will spark between us, and Rebecca will flare. It is dreadful to live with the depressed, and astonishing to live with someone dealing with it as Rebecca does. Sometimes an argument will run until 09.29, when she will switch on the camera and microphone on her laptop and begin work – she is a senior teacher at an online high school, instructing students around the world in Classics and English. Her voice switches from battle mode to charming welcome in a second.
‘Good morning, everybody! Are we all in? Let’s go around – tell me the weather where you are today . . .’
I love listening to her teaching. Her immense capacity to love and support zigzags out across the ether, to Saudi Arabia, to Hong Kong, to Spain. Like the very best teachers, she changes lives with every lesson, through tireless assessment and understanding. She turned herself into a Classicist in between her job, the house, the family and marathons, retiring to bed with Aubrey and another black-covered Penguin translation of Homer, Ovid or Euripides. He can tell you all about Pegasus, Perseus, Medusa and the ‘Kwacken’.
18 JANUARY
It always snows on Aubrey’s birthday. This year we had hail in drifting swirls, then came eerie sleet, filling the valley and all the air with an army of ghost legs marching too close together. The snow fell later, and it was heavy and fast. By nightfall it was inches deep. Rebecca and the boys took an hour to cover the mile up the hill from town, the road being blocked with stuck cars and a gritter which slid into a wall. Action and incident are the best possible salves to depression: bring on the big snow! Bring on disruption, bring on change; bring on anything to take me out of my (increasingly self-loathed) self. I love weather like this, weather that overwhelms, subordinating all human plans. It lays white, thrilling drifts over the gloom. It forces you into the present, and reminds me of adventures, of battles on the farm and explorations in the Dolomites, when we lived near them, and of the greatest adventure of all, Aubrey’s birth. For his birthday we had a feast of duck legs and pasta and birthday cake. Aubrey’s face was all delight in the glow of his five candles as we sang him ‘Happy Birthday’. He is still distressingly taken with nuclear bombs and missiles (he spotted a gap in the market when he asked for a toy nuclear bomb) but, as my father says, it does not matter what you are interested in so long as you are interested in something.
Five years ago, Rebecca gave birth to Aubrey on a snowy night in Italy, in Negrar, a town in the foothills of the Dolomites. He was purple when he emerged, and yowling, and the most beautiful thing in creation if beauty is fragile and raw and mighty. Just as she was going to bed at quarter past ten Rebecca’s waters broke. At the hospital there seemed to be no one else in the maternity unit at all, just a midwife and her assistant. The midwife had a face of the most extraordinary beauty, the beauty of pure kindness, I thought, the beauty of absolute empathy. In Italy they register the name before the child is delivered. ‘Ow-bray?’ gave the midwife trouble and amusement, ‘O-bray?’.
We were taken to a room with two beds, both empty, where Rebecca rode the contractions, bending, breathing, breathing. Before she took up marathons she performed yoga daily. Now she seemed to rock and sway and bend and breathe through a mazy course of pressures and pains. I imagined them like tides, like the blown branches of a dense forest, forcing her to duck and bow to their surge.
We moved to the delivery room and an orange birthing pool, something between a jacuzzi and an altar. There was a back-lit ceiling decorated as a sky with cherry blossom. It seemed incongruous, afterwards, with slicks of blood swirled down the steps and across the room to the bed where Rebecca recovered.
They put a monitor on her to measure the strength of the contractions. Ten would have been a more severe cramp than most men have ever had. It went up to 120 three times. She seemed to see the size of the pain the second time; she shouted, this mighty woman who surrenders to nothing, she shouted, ‘God! No!’ and in a broken way that raked my heart, ‘No! Please!’
I had never seen a human in such pain. In impotence you stand there, feeling her agony through you like a slash when she screams, like a spear of distress for her so strong it is almost physical – but only almost. All your agonising equates to a bare iota of discomfort, and she screams. She squeezes your hand and you wish she could crush all the pain into you. I felt the awe of a heathen, an animist who has worshipped in woods, who walks into one of the great cathedrals. So this is the height and complexity of what it can be, of what giving life is, of what the burden is; this is pain and creation.
The third contraction came with a great groan and then she was gasping, and the midwife beckoned, ‘You can come and see him!’
I said, ‘I’ll stay with her a moment,’ because she was holding my hand tight and it felt wrong to rush to this new being while she was as she was. And then he was. An uncurling body almost out, and then out, making a furious noise, with his bright-blue umbilical which looked so patterned and strong and superb it seemed like some flawless artificial tubing from some sophisticated machine. I cut it, as Italian fathers do. It is a thin symbolism; from the moment Rebecca first held him they were more than two individuals, they were two parts of a third, a whole, a united being.
The stern swaddling nurse handed him to me and departed, and as she went she smiled at us, the only time her face shed its fierce cast, a radiant smile, as surprising as a blessing, Aubrey’s first. Rebecca held him to her, colour slowly returning to her face which was white, her eyes black-circled with blood loss. She put him to her breast and he slept. There was a rocking, hypnotic peace about them both.
No one came. We took him back to the room. He was yellow now, a touch of jaundice the Italians say is common in winter babies, and tiny, and so tired. He slept beside his mother. To hold him, so new, so small, made me feel like a tentative giant. The tiny, mole-like utterness of him, in his little clothes too big for him, and the feeling of a compliment greater than any you have imagined when he sleeps in your arms, and the sheer impossible vastness of everything ahead of him mantles your shoulders over him. You are all newborns together, you and him and the world, which seems quite changed by his arrival.
On this first morning of his life I went out to buy nappies, wipes and baby oil. Negrar stands on the side of a valley with vines and foothills all around. The horizons were patchworks of purplish and bare trees and snow; the church bell rang the hours and I had never seen a bleak daybreak so beautiful.
The feeling of life, of new life, of all our new lives rushed through me. I thought the man in the café must have seen men in my state before, newly hatched from the delivery room and silently beside themselves.
Beyond the window of our ward men laboured in an olive grove, paring the branches, puffed and shivering as they worked in the cold. It was as though the governing of the trees on one side of the glass and the nurturing of the children on the other were all one great goodness of humanity, tending and gardening.
Fathers were not supposed to stay in the hospital but they let me, that night and the next; I propped myself between the chair and the bed. Two days later we took him home.
Then and afterwards I came to know the small, tender conspiracy of smiles men permit themselves and each other in maternity wards, in corridors and waiting rooms. We were all perpetrators, it seemed; we had done this thing and the results were beyond our imaginings.
It became a blessed and blessing winter. Aubrey and Rebecca took long baths. We laid him on cushions and blankets in front of the wood stove; we were living on the top floor of a villa, which must have seemed huge to him when his eyes began to focus. I escorted his brother to school in the early dark on buses which were never delayed by snow.
Robin and I laughed at the surrealism of our lives, so much in darkness, so much in cold, and all in Italy, as though we tunnelled to school through a world of misted windows and boot-tread patterns of snow. In the short daylight the beauty of the frozen valleys was intense, ridges of white and mauve in a tinted chiaroscuro. High above Garda the great peak of Monte Baldo was a
white giant’s head, visored in ice and rock.
The cold scours out the Veneto, scrubbing Venice to the minimum of visitors and thickening the colours and lights of Verona. Winter here means sweet panettone and darkening fogs trapped between the mountains and the sea. It means the warmth of trains and the cold of platforms, and hard blue soaring days. It means winter tyres and winter kale, and downfalls of snow skidding under the street lights.
With Aubrey arrived, like a miniature immigrant from another planet, we saw the whole world anew. We talked to him all the time, describing common things as if we had never seen them before. Beyond the windows in the courtyard of the villa was a mighty cypress tree with a missing crown. I thought of it as a great green god, and I took him to see it often, hoping he would smell its dark sap. He lived in a world of pure expression, beyond the limits of language. His iterations of joy were absolute: lying on his back he whirred and gurgled, waving his arms and legs. Rebecca’s mothering of Aubrey was – is – a manifestation of love and selflessness like nothing I had ever seen. I knew she was a total, giving, mighty mother: Robin was just turning seven when I met them, and her devotion to him was absolute. There is no patience of which she is not capable, no battle she will not fight, no limit to what she will do for her child. But with this tiny, dependent and yet deeply individual little life attached to her, I saw something else. Sometimes in the middle of the night, for the third time, the baby would wake her and she would sit and feed and nurse him almost in her sleep. From the first moments of his life he can only ever have been certain that there was a warm, soft, comforting being, love made physical, with him, for him, always. She talks to him always, loves him always, is there for him always. In watching them, I saw the fundamental bond, belief and trust upon which all humanity must be founded.
The Light in the Dark Page 4