With Aubrey I pretend to be someone else, someone unworried, balanced and loving. It feels like a rotten impersonation, but the little boy is so forgiving and encouraging. He counted to 100, and he played Snakes and Ladders beautifully, beating me with style and accuracy. Then he invented his own version, where you dodge around snakes and take running jumps at the ladders. I ran on the spot, my legs running away with me, sideways and back, while he laughed and clapped. Rebecca danced to Mariachi music in the kitchen, delighting him. We are no model family, but we have life. Winter suits this house, with the fire going, the clothes hanging on the drying rack, the door curtain pulled across and the key turned in the lock, a fractional attempt to stem the freezing draught from the keyhole.
Going up and down the valley today there were lovely, turning clouds in the blue, the high moor showing yellow, red and drained green under the sun. It looked like a plate from the Shell Guides, those visions of the British countryside rich in colour and nature. We lack much in West Yorkshire, but we do not quite lack that. It lifted me. The nights have been much more beautiful than the days for a while now. Beck-rush and moonlight, pale patinas of ghost cloud, and behind them the stars, tiny, red and blue and white.
1 FEBRUARY
The valley is a river of light before dawn, the super blue blood moon a silver-white portal, flooding the air with luminous cold. There is black ice on the road and the fields have a glow about them as daybreak to the south-east sends light like a tidal flow to meet the moon’s fading downpour.
2 FEBRUARY
Friday-evening trains from Manchester Victoria into the Pennines are a triumph of human spirit. We board the usual old thing, a tattered and achy sort of train which has had many owners, currently the German state railway company Deutsche Bahn, via Arriva, via Northern: a poor train for poor people, they all conclude. The passengers board it gently, careful with each other, sweetly polite. We bear slowly east into the dusk. Three girls are budgeting. They are Rochdalians.
‘We don’t have to have the fizzy drinks.’
‘How much would that bring it down to?’
‘Under twenty.’
‘How much under?’
‘How much did we spend already?’
‘Less than ten.’
‘There you are then. We don’t need it. I like water!’
The first speaker will be a doctor, I think; the way she watches the other two and sways them; her look is quick, her interventions light and decisive. The girls are Muslims, clear-eyed, respectful, their voices confident. You want to hug the parents of these children who understand the world so well.
Guidance for Muslims in winter is touching in its absolute practicality. Columnists from Islamic Help, citing hadiths, refer to the cold as ‘an enemy that enters quickly but leaves slowly’. Wear woollen layers (the Prophet Muhammad was a great fan of wool: ‘grazing livestock He has created for you, in them is warmth’, says the Koran), cover your head and wrap up, ‘even if going out to put the bins out perhaps, or to get something out of the car; a few moments of being exposed to the cold is enough to make a person ill’.
The mix of common sense and hyperbole makes a fine portrait of a practical faith; advice that comes down from the desert nights of the seventh century applies equally to the streets of Lancashire.
The season binds us across time and place. In illustrated manuscripts the calendar pages which preface psalters and books of hours show this. Near Bruges in February around 1500, men in hats and boots cut wood with billhooks while a woman in red gathers the sticks behind them. In France two centuries earlier, a man in a tunic, cloak and hood holds a wet shoe to dry near a blazing fire. The refrain for rich men was sitting as close to the fire as possible, eating as much as possible and having women bring food to the table, according to fourteenth-century manuscripts from Bruges and Ghent.
Earlier still, the Venerable Bede’s De temporum ratione, The Reckoning of Time, written in the eighth century, is our source for the pre-Roman calendar. Winter began in October, the month of Winterfylleth, the winter full moon. November, Blotmonath, was the month of blood sacrifice. Our sheep lying slaughtered in the field were killed on the cusp of this time. December, Aerra Geola, was the month before Yule, and January, Aefterra Geola, the month after. February was Solmonath, from sol, wet mud or sand. What the Romans saw as Mars’ time, the fighting season, the Anglo-Saxons named for a fertility goddess, Rheda, and April for Eostre, a goddess of the dawn and the equinox, whose name is a mother of Easter. As Bede reckoned time, so his time reckoned him: as an Anglo-Saxon your age was counted in winters.
Over the western plain the sky was clear; as we approached Manchester we came under a dark bar of cloud. Now, as we close with the fingers of the moors, the windows of the foothill towns are lighting and there is a peace in the gloaming valleys, a drawing-in as the earth turns us and night comes down from the wild tops as if drawn to the warmth of our settlements.
3 FEBRUARY
Saturday morning, hustings in Halifax, and Rebecca is going to vote. Aubrey and I will take her. It is a winter morning of cruel hostility, sleet falling, the sky grown grey and cold to overflowing. We drop Rebecca at Halifax Minster, a bony and beautiful fifteenth-century church which looks as though the cold and rain have charred it black. Its tower proclaims a certainty of God against all siege. (I have been to Halifax a dozen times and never seen the sun here.) Aubrey likes the sound of the Calderdale Industrial Museum.
‘We’re slightly overstaffed!’ says one volunteer, as two of them hand us our visitor badges, in case, she says, there is a fire.
They are wonderfully overstaffed. About thirty retirees garrison the rooms.
We are lectured on lathes and drills, on diesel and steam, on coal mines and looms, on sweet-wrapping machines and worsted.
The looms are astounding time machines of stretched thread.
‘You see that man in the photograph there?’ says a small, round man with an enormous voice. In a black-and-white picture, a loom like a series of houses of thread dwarfs the tiny figure who stands framed in it. ‘That was my dad! And he told me I were going to be a loom-tuner, and I was.’
We play I-spy as the hustings voters come in. Rebecca arrives; she has made friends and cast votes and we want to know who and for what and why. She is glowing with the engagement and the issues, the speeches and the battle. ‘One of them said they wanted to support mothers over education. What about fathers!’
Back through the rain and gloom we go, undaunted. There are winter days like this that seem to set out to break you, thick cloud and the horizons grime-grey, sludging into dirty brown, when windscreen spray and wipers have no effect on the view. You think the glass must be filthy, but no, a murky, heavy oppression lowers from the clouds, permeating the horizons. Instead we bobble and battle along. We take on the bedroom and the house, clearing, cleaning and sorting. Aubrey makes a tableau of dinosaurs eating farmers. It is extremely vivid.
7 FEBRUARY
It snowed almost tenderly all day yesterday, from first light until the afternoon began to wane into twilight. A few degrees warmer and we would have been in thick mist, not rain – snow crystals form from water in its gaseous, not its liquid state. There was a persistence and a stillness in the air, even as the flakes fell. The smell in the valley was a bare tang, exhilarating. The salt-gritter driver paused for a word, a man with a black hat and a ruddy round face, twinkling as if he played the lead in a salt-gritting film. ‘It’s all the time at the moment,’ he said. ‘You just can’t tell. Yorkshire!’
And then the snow stopped and the twilight was beautiful, all the valley’s contours, the earth, dimly sugared, foregrounding the woods. The trees’ tangle of cross-branches appeared especially bright, their verticals pale gold or faint purple. A blue tit launched the same three notes from the top of a hazel – the energy it must take for song from such a small body! And a pheasant crowed; they have been quiet for a while now, though this was the summer of the pheasants, crocking and
thrumming.
Today was the one shatteringly clear day so far. The sky glowed from pure, cold dark to a dim luminous lapis to a bright glaze-blue. Sunlight flared up the valley, catching the pines on the Buttress. Not a drop of moisture in the air anywhere, the land wonderfully clenched and clipped in the frost. At night the first tawny owl I have heard for weeks, a male, yipping. The gritting lorries patrol like battleships.
This diary is a refuge, a thing to do, something to put work and time into, a defence against the hopelessness. This depression is a terrible disabler. You cannot flow from one thing that needs to be done to the next; you constantly pause and doubt and disbelieve. When I do the shopping I make a list and stick to it, as if incapable of improvising.
‘Is this all?’ I ask Rebecca, before I go. ‘Is this really everything we need? I’m really struggling with cognitive functioning,’ I confess. ‘You must have noticed.’
‘Of course,’ she says, patiently.
Aubrey is going to think that all his father ever did or could do was the washing-up.
For lectures I find myself writing down every word I will deliver; in conversations I can hardly hear what the other person is saying, so busy is my brain in discarding possible responses, judging them all inadequate or inappropriate. Thank goodness for my students. They seem to sense my vulnerability, and my anxiety on their behalf. I am running a new course for them, in non-fiction, and they have taken to it in a wonderful, engaged way. Many suffer anxiety and depression and self-doubt, but they have not been asked to write about themselves before at university, and they are finding relief in it. They write with restraint and clarity and no self-pity at all about absent fathers, eating disorders, periods of homelessness, and about shame – shame produced by a belief that they will never make the money their parents did, and are therefore guilty of failing to justify the privileges of happy homes and good schools. Their writing is often heartbreaking to read. They write about routine bullying and humiliation at work: the way shoppers treat them as they stack shelves, make coffee, sell shoes – the relentless pressure from managers to sell more shoes, to persuade customers to ‘take advantage’ of special offers. The girls record sexual harassment, leering, groping. Some students, halfway or two-thirds of the way through their degrees, hugely in debt, seeing no future as writers or anything else, suffer breakdowns, withdrawals, depressions, relentless anxiety and sleep disorders. We refer them to student support, to counselling; a number of times I have walked someone to the counsellors, both of us knowing that they will not manage more than one appointment, that they do not believe their troubles can be fixed by talking. Without some shard of belief, without a degree of hope, there is no system that can help them. I recognise the condition. How dare anyone call them snowflakes – they are mighty. The pressures they face are unprecedented, their prospects of stimulating, rewarding, validating work seem tenuous at best: how will they compete against an automated future, in which the fortunate few will earn millions, and millions will be dismissed as unfortunate?
At the day’s end you long to unload the anger and indignation, but I cannot inflict myself on my friends. I pine for them. I wish I could go out and make my colleagues Jeff and Demelza laugh and hear their stories, and live life as it should be lived, in conversation and joy and interest, always in interest. But there is no way. If I open my mouth all that will come out will be glum blue guilt. No one should have to hear it.
9 FEBRUARY
Like the Great Gatsby in Rochdale, Gin Night came to the town hall. I had not drunk for two weeks, but we were committed – they were raising money for the Cricket Club, which is sacred, and Cousin Matthew’s birthday was coming: the clan gathered. And I wanted to see inside this famous building, which Rochdalians believe was beloved by Hitler and destined to be transported to Germany and rebuilt there in the event of Nazi victory. It is a thunderous mass of Gothic Revival, portly, stately and oddly elegant, with a clock tower that does look as though it hankers to be beside the Rhine.
Under a painting of the signing of the Magna Carta – King John looking a bit wispy under his golden crown, facing a baron dressed for a crusade – with carved black angels like ships’ figureheads flying above us, Rochdale society gathered to taste, wince or grin, laugh, taste again, comment and gossip. Lancashire came out to play, smart in wide belts, suits, bright ski jackets, short dresses. Every size and shape of body was in the room, the icy night magnificently disregarded. We were thin, we were lumpy-plump, we were buff, we were red-faced, we were elegant. The singer was flat-capped in tweeds and waistcoat. Two elderly couples took turns to dance the Charleston on the stage beneath the organ pipes. One of the men, ebulliently moustached, was particularly good. I congratulated him.
‘Tell the organisers!’ he cried. ‘They’ll book me again!’
Rebecca’s brother Chris, sister Emma, cousin Matthew and Auntie Jen were there. Matthew is the most powerful speaker. He fixes you from height with a dark eye and confides boomingly.
‘Me dad’s second marriage, and me mum’s second marriage, both in here. There’s a theme there. To us, Rochdale town centre was amazing when we were young. Where Asda is now? That was the Cricket before they moved it. Round behind Tesco was the Woolworths Working Men’s Club. The Club’s still there. The Regal Moon used to be a cinema. They’d have queues around the block on weekends. And I tell you what, it looks a lot better now than it has for years. The new council building has won awards – have you seen the way the river sweeps by it? Rochdale was wonderful to us, you know, before you get older and look around . . .’
The men’s voices are bass rolls, flattened and warmed with the Lancashire burr.
‘Coom on! Give uz a fiver! Coom on, fiver each!’ blasted a big, bluff man with a carrier bag full of raffle tickets. An elfin man in a smart suit joined us; he wore a sweet smile like a disguise.
‘Who is he?’ I asked, when he went to replenish his gin.
‘That’s Danny! Danny Callaghan.’
‘His mum is the most amazing woman I have ever met,’ Rebecca said.
‘She had seven of them,’ Emma put in. ‘Seven! And they all look just like Danny.’
‘They’re like Russian dolls,’ Auntie Jen giggled.
‘Oh she was so fierce!’ Rebecca said. ‘Absolutely ferocious.’
‘She had to be. They were properly naughty boys.’
‘She’s only about four feet high.’
‘And they’re all lovely.’
‘So tiny and so fierce! When one of them had his birthday she put huge banners out on the main road.’
The marble busts of Victorian Members of Parliament surveyed their descendants and inheritors as we flowed up and down the grand staircase, and back and forth under the fan vaulting of the vestibule. In the Great Hall, under the hammer beams, I thought of the Venerable Bede’s eighth-century report of the nature of existence as perceived and explained by a kinsman to the Christian King Eorpwald of East Anglia:
The present life of man upon earth, O King, seems to me in comparison with that time which is unknown to us like the swift flight of a sparrow through the mead-hall where you sit at supper in winter, with your Ealdormen and thanes, while the fire blazes in the midst and the hall is warmed, but the wintry storms of rain or snow are raging abroad. The sparrow, flying in at one door and immediately out at another, whilst he is within, is safe from the wintry tempest, but after a short space of fair weather, he immediately vanishes out of your sight, passing from winter to winter again. So this life of man appears for a little while, but of what is to follow or what went before we know nothing at all.
We are a great many mighty sparrows, chattering up the warm hall. We are managers in floral shirts, teachers with blue hair, distributors in conker leather (the North wears the best shoes in England), contractors in short skirts, rosy technicians who run marathons, traders neatly tucked in, retired academics in best grey woollen jackets, council officers in gleaming specs, logistics planners dressed as if for church, e
state agents with bustle, police officers invisibly uniformed. We are jacketed and high-heeled restaurateurs. We are smart and chattering, gaudy and bellowsome, big-boned and roving, quick-eyed and balding, fond of our food and fountains of drinking stories, raised on black peas, black pudding, black stone and ball games, car-proud, dog-loving, grit-grin-and-give-a-hug, say-it-as-we-see-it and who’s next to the bar? We are Rochdale on a mead-hall night.
It is not so much the philosophy in Bede’s account which speaks, as I mill with the crowd, but the account of Anglo-Saxon winter: tempest, rain and snow, and all at once, no doubt. The week has been hard; the weekend will bring sleet and more rain, and tempest tomorrow night, but, as Matthew said, the beams are beautiful, and lamps hanging from them are beautiful; under their tallow-yellow light the loyalty and solidarity in the room is a palpable thing.
Outside it was bitter. Youths yawed and reeled in front of the Regal Moon. The cheapest taxis in Britain queued outside, the drivers, Muslim and teetotal, readying themselves for the breath of their passengers. On the icy drive home a boy fell into the road in Todmorden. He was dragged off it by his friends, reeling and helpless. A police van lurked behind the supermarket; Rebecca spotted it and had me turn around.
‘We’d want someone to do it if it was Robin,’ she said.
Beside the driver, a tank of a man with a skull like a granite egg, his partner officer looked very young and scared. Todmorden must be a tough beat on a winter Friday; teenagers scattered along the tight pavements, wild between booze and cold.
Above the valley the stars were blue and green and white. The salt grit lay in pink mats on the roads. A single tawny owl called from the other side of the river then fell silent, listening as the valley listened.
The Light in the Dark Page 6