10 FEBRUARY
A vile, violently cold day with nothing in the world to recommend it, I thought, having woken before dawn and gone up to the attic, watching the sky turn from dark to indigo to wet slate as sleet fell on the skylights, filling them slowly.
We breakfasted on porridge, as have the people of Europe since the Paleolithic, according to researchers in Italy, who analysed a nomad’s grinding stone from 32,000 years ago and found oats, though our ancestors would have struggled to boil it until the invention of pottery in the late Pleistocene 12,000 years ago. Their wild oats, heated, ground and cooked with hot water, would not have tasted so different from our winter diet. Porridge has been a staple around the world ever since, the sweet, esculent smell of it and the green and gold syrup tins an unchanged link between the kitchens of parents and children now.
‘Stodgy,’ Aubrey declared.
‘But with lashings of honey!’ I countered.
Afterwards he drew a huge green man being struck by lightning, then rehearsed his letters, writing his name. We curled on the sofa and read old books, for the comfort and the spelling, and did jigsaws and discussed what would happen if half the house was under water and there was a killer whale downstairs. He loves killer whales. In the evening Rebecca went out and Aubrey requested the Labours of Heracles. His favourites are the Augean stables, the slaying of the Hydra and Heracles tricking Atlas into taking back the sky. When it is time to sleep he rolls over and I send him off, sometimes with another reading, given as a soft drone. He was gone before I had done two lines of Jan Morris on Venice, which is my winter city.
Rebecca and I came to know Venice very well in the years we lived in Verona, but the first time I saw the city my brother and I were young enough to share a room with our mother, who decided we should take advantage of a windfall and a Christmas package at the Hotel Ala: three stars and breakfast included.
‘We’ll fill up on breakfast and we’ll eat supper somewhere cheap,’ she declared, and so we went. There were very few tourists. I recognised the same couples crossing the bridges and the same faces in the squares. Filling up on breakfast was sweet work: croissants they called cornetti stuffed with apricot jam, fuel for expeditions to the churches and galleries. At nightfall we returned to the same restaurant, which asked few lire, less when they knew us, for polenta and liver. I was old enough to be turned loose to range along the canals and quays, becoming lost for hours. On Christmas Eve we went to midnight Mass in St Mark’s, a great gold Byzantine barn, dim-shadowed, gilded, towering, a planet filled to the base of the columns with Venetians.
Rambling families, the grandparents in furs and the babies in hats, made a tide of the city’s people which filled the naves, spilled into the transepts and lapped up against the pillars. Adults talked and children ate snacks as the Italian and Latin and incense drifted over us. I had never seen religion so informal and so inhabited. In this God’s house you could eat and talk as the Patriarch led the prayers, conducting a service to which you brought rugs for your knees, in a cavern like a heaven, with the angels, the saints and the evangelists shimmering over you in glass gold tesserae. It seemed the point was not to follow the words but to be present at their incantation. As I gazed into the apses and arches the whole basilica turned upside down. We hung suspended over deep, gleaming pools where the figures of the archangels, St John the Baptist, St Peter, St Isadore and St Mark himself shone in mosaics of shadow, gold-glint and holy dark.
Venice in winter! Furious bursts of sleet scour out the alleys, driving you wet-footed into cafés, tight and warm as the cells of a beehive. The fog makes a second sea over the lagoon where the vaporetti, the water buses, manoeuvre like baleens, feeling through the murk by sound and echo. Winter thins down the visitor tide. The rumble of suitcase wheels diminishes. In the Frari, Titian’s Virgin ascends in scarlet and sunfire to the solo of a lone chorister. Bitter dawns bring seagulls to dispute with cats over the rubbish sacks as the boatmen blow into their scarves and chafe. Winter makes the ochres and yellows of the Riva degli Schiavoni a pastel scale running up to the flourish of the Doge’s Palace, pink as seashell, white-boned and fluted, its feet in the water come acqua-alta, the flood tide.
The first time Rebecca saw the city she burst into tears at the beauty of it. We went often, taking cheap train rides from Verona, and walked it in the hours and days most visitors shun. In winter the play of light and cold gives a hardness and precision to the city’s shades and suggestions. Joseph Brodsky caught it wonderfully in Watermark, his meditation on the city in winter. He was so fond of Venice in this season that he vowed never to visit in summer: ‘In the morning this light breasts your windowpane and, having pried your eye open like a shell, runs ahead of you, strumming its lengthy rays – like a hot-footed schoolboy running his stick along the iron grate of a park or garden – along arcades, colonnades, red-brick chimneys, saints, and lions.’ ‘The espresso at your cup’s bottom is the only small black dot in, you feel, a miles-long radius,’ he wrote.
Venice froze repeatedly in the eighteenth century, in 1709, 1789 and 1791. In the first, Europe’s worst winter for 500 years, a Venetian senator, Pietro Garzoni, described all the canals and the lagoon as ‘petrified by cold’. Boats transporting food and wood were cut through the ice by workmen from the city’s fortress, the Arsenale, with pickaxes. The Duchess of Orléans, shivering in front of a fire at Versailles despite being wrapped in furs, reported wine freezing in bottles and informed her correspondent that she struggled to hold her pen. Church bells shattered, trees fractured and it was possible to walk across the Baltic from Denmark to Sweden. A Swedish attack on Russia during the Great Northern War collapsed when 2,000 troops died of cold in a single night.
Descriptions from 1789 are even more vivid, thanks to the diaries of Giuseppe Gennari: ‘Sudden ice crusts form on the running stream, and the water bears on its surface iron-bound wheels – once welcoming ships, but now to broad wagons! Everywhere brass splits, clothes freeze on the back, and they cleave with axes the liquid wine; whole lakes turn into a solid mass, and the rough icicle hardens on the unkempt beard.’
Gennari sounds excited and energised by the cold and drama. Goodness knows what he would have made of the North of England. Here rain falls, tyres slush and mould grows in bathrooms. The other side of living with nature, which blesses us so much in the summer, is its bullying ever-presence now. It is different in the South. Living in London, working in Broadcasting House, dashing from office to home, or office to bar or restaurant or theatre or cinema and home, I barely noticed the weather. Darkness outside the office windows before four o’clock: so what? Water running down the steps at the entrance to Oxford Circus, so what? Nature in the city was a mere inconvenience: umbrellas, tubes delayed by flooding, buses packed with steaming shoulders. I saw ten London winters in and out. None of them had a tenth of the power of a Pennine week in January.
11 FEBRUARY
A ferocious day of sleet and snow, flickers of sun, then hail, sleet and more snow. We have done a winter shop for half-term, laying in supplies. The kitchen is a pile of stores. Robin, keen to take advantage of his holiday, lies in bed, repelling our attempts to shift him to productivity. Peeling potatoes, washing-up, washing and drying, putting out the compost, making the beds, writing practice and alphabet jigsaws with Aubrey: the scene here is not unlike a winter day in 1834 at the Parsonage at Haworth, just over the moor. A famous account is signed by Emily and Anne Brontë, then sixteen and fourteen, but written by Emily. It is cherished for its insight into the extraordinary life of the Parsonage, which is now a museum:
I fed Rainbow, Diamond Snowflake Jasper pheasant (alias) this morning Branwell went down to Mr Driver’s and brought news that Sir Robert Peel was going to be invited to stand for Leeds Anne and I have been peeling apples for Charlotte to make us an apple pudding and for Aunt nuts and apples Charlotte said she made puddings perfectly and she was of a quick but limited intellect. Taby said just now Come Anne pilloputate (i.e. pil
l a potato) Aunt has come into the kitchen just now and said where are your feet Anne Anne answered On the floor Aunt papa opened the parlour door and gave Branwell a letter saying here Branwell read this and show it to your Aunt and Charlotte – The Gondals are discovering the interior of Gaaldine Sally Mosley is washing in the back kitchen
It is past Twelve o’clock Anne and I have not tidied ourselves, done our bedwork or done our lessons and we want to go out to play we are going to have for Dinner Boiled Beef, Turnips, potatoes and applepudding. The Kitchin is in a very untidy state Anne and I have not done our music exercise which consists of b major Taby said on my putting a pen in her face Ya pitter pottering there instead of pilling a potate I answered O Dear, O Dear, O dear I will directly with that I get up, take a knife and begin pilling (finished) pilling the potatoes papa going to walk Mr Sunderland expected.
Our equivalent of Gondal, the imaginary country created by Emily and Anne, is the continent where live Aubrey’s dinosaurs, venomous snakes, killer whales and storm troopers. Josh Fenton-Glynn, the Labour candidate who won the hustings, is our Robert Peel. Robin and I have had the ‘ya pitter pottering (on the internet) instead of helping’ conversation many times.
The intermingling of many lives in restricted space is one of the wonders of the Parsonage. The dining room, where the sisters wrote, is exquisite. It was their habit to pace around the table, discussing their stories. They must have moved like dancers, feet falling precisely in measured steps as they debated. Our house is a narrow vessel, anchored in this inlet in the moors. The front room can be paced, but the rest is small, full, wooden and creaky. I give thanks for it, daily. I dreamed of bailiffs last night, chasing me through barns.
12 FEBRUARY
Aubrey’s first day at his new school! He is starting mid-term, but he was hungry to make the change. His kindergarten has run its time, we all felt.
‘I am so bored of going on walks,’ he had announced. ‘I want to go to reading school.’ This accords with Rebecca’s philosophy of reading when readiness strikes, and suddenly he has a school uniform, a book bag, a class and two teachers, Miss Hannan and Mrs Beevers, both of whom seem excellent: Miss Hannan is pale from winter and work; Mrs Beevers has an indestructible look. Aubrey has friends there already, and the school is accustomed to taking children in transition from Steiner.
There was thick snow this morning as we set off. The children looked magnificent, boys pelting snowballs, girls marching to their classes, the Headmistress buttering toast (the person who normally feeds the breakfast club had not made it) and little Aubrey feeling all our nerves. He was so stalwart! He looked glad we were going, actually; let me get on with it, his face said. When we collected him at three he appeared, poking his tongue out, and dashed gleefully around the playground with Robin. He ate every mouthful of his supper without any prompting. He seemed quite transformed.
This winter is taking a lot out of us, as a family. We are living tightly, Rebecca swaying between unbelievable patience and sudden tempers, me trapped between self-imprisoned fear, disbelieving self-disgust and tentative moments of optimism, and both of us trying not to let the boys be affected by our troubles. But we are gathering, too. Tonight we played cards in front of the fire, and Robin managed to leave his phone alone, and we laughed, and it was truly lovely. Progress! Hope! Robin said it was ‘just like old times’. In Rochdale before we emigrated, in Italy and on our travels we have always played cards and laughed. Robin was a brilliant child who has turned into a sweet young man. He’s a right bugger to get out of bed in the mornings, of course, but we have come to an unspoken agreement for the period between his waking and his train to school. We say very little and try to be civil.
‘Morning Rob.’
‘Morning Horace.’
‘Got everything?’
‘Yep.’
‘Let’s go . . .’
15 FEBRUARY
Wake in the early hours to spats of hail-rain on the skylight and an ominous thump from the mattress beside me. And another: a leak in the roof. Oh hell, oh hell. Now what? We’ve only had it break through once before, during the Boxing Day floods, when the volume of water coming down was diabolical. Fold towel, catch drips, go back to sleep. No sleep. Slowly dawn comes, hovering back, the frost so hard the ground looks creamy. Slowly comes the blue, a longing, soaring blue, crisp as glass. The sheep in the meadow by the stream are frosted into place. Their trick is not to move at all, to let the crystals cover them, and so they blanket themselves to the earth.
My mornings follow a pattern, beginning around three or four, when I jolt awake, absolutely alert, suddenly. I put the pillow over my head and try to return to sleep, but it will not have me. I turn and turn over worry and grim visions as if on a slow spit. At six or seven when the alarm goes I surface, guilty and exhausted. I dress, wash, go downstairs, forget things – I forget things all the time – go back up, change clothes (I cannot make decisions, have no confidence in any choice), go down again. If I do not smoke I will be hopping with self-loathing and irritation. I will be short with Aubrey when he delays breaking away from his Lego, or refuses to eat his breakfast or resists doing his teeth. To drain the irritation I smoke, and the guilt of smoking floods in with the relief of the nicotine. I resolve not to smoke again, and simultaneously despise myself for the emptiness of the resolution, stand in the rain and roar with incredulity that this is my existence, and with fury at myself, for it is only my fault.
16 FEBRUARY
Last night was deep winter, freezing starlight over the valley and Rebecca warming the whole house as she banked up the fire. I looked at her and loved her and felt I had let her down so utterly, not saving enough, not planning enough, not loving and cherishing enough, worrying too much, changing too little, being away too much.
It is hard to describe someone you know so well, as hard as attempting a vivid travel piece about your home town. I thought I must write a book about Rebecca as I came to know her, a portrait of the girl she described and how she became the woman who seemed made to be the heroine of a story, whom I met when I walked into one of the worst hotels in Marrakech and took the only free seat in the lobby.
Opposite was a laughing, tall, beautiful figure with what I thought in that moment were auburn hair and green eyes. Actually, her eyes are deep bright blue and her hair brown.
Moments earlier she had been asked by her friend what sort of man she wished to meet – she was separated from her husband – and said, ‘Someone who finds that Christmas decoration up there as funny as I do.’ (The scrumple of tinsel was in a far corner of the ceiling, in a Muslim hotel, in March.) A writer, she said, or a South African sailor.
I was on my way from South Africa to Wales, writing about following swallows.
But how to describe Rebecca . . .
She is deeply, naturally, faithful, but she seems to inspire feelings as strong as jealousy. One of her ex-boyfriends cut all her clothes in half, scissoring a line through the middle of them as they hung in a wardrobe. Another burned her clothes and chopped up the wardrobe in which she kept them – a lovely wardrobe, she said, that had belonged to her granny. She dumped another – they are still friends – after he presented her with a list of everything she spent and what it went on. She had punched him for making a pass at her sister.
‘In the middle of the face, as hard as you can,’ she says is the way to punch a man, because you may only get one chance. She is a pacifist, or at least violently anti-war.
She walks and sits with a very straight back, a legacy of following a love of Tai Chi to Taiwan where her instructor was an elderly lady Tai Chi Master.
‘I wanted to learn the sword, but she said, “You cannot learn the sword if you are pregnant.” I didn’t know I was.’
‘She’s so . . . righteous!’ my friend Nathan exclaimed, after meeting her. She is certainly highly moral. You rarely meet anyone so unfamiliar with grey areas or compromise.
She loves widely, hugely; it is how she lives. Li
fe-changer, life-enhancer. She is slightly somehow other . . . my nicknames for her include Fairy, Elf and Goblin, in tribute to a pagan spirituality which seems to attend her, as if naturally, unsolicited, and to a sense of difference about her, as though she is of a slightly variant species.
She has high, Slavic cheek bones, her eyes set now in tiny curving laughter lines. It was thought there was something wrong with her when she was a baby, when those eyes seemed not to focus.
‘She didn’t say anything for years,’ her father said. ‘Then one day she sort of shook herself, opened her mouth and started talking. She hasn’t stopped since.’
‘I was away with the fairies,’ she says.
One of her great-grandmothers was known as The Witch. Her father sometimes calls her that, laughing.
In the middle of the night she sleeps on her back, her arms flung out, and she seems to go somewhere utterly far away, out across a wide deep sea. It is as if some home, some otherwhere, is reclaiming her. For the boys and me she is our captain, our heroine, our champion, our audience and greatest friend.
The rain came gently this morning, not hard enough to penetrate the roof, thank goodness. I have no solution to the leak but prayer and pushing the slates back. Two of them went a little way in; we’ll see. The wall at the top of the garden has collapsed. Mighty hewed blocks of millstone grit, they must have taken three strong men each, over a century ago. Winter of wreckage! If the Revenue declares me bankrupt, if the bailiffs come, if we have to sell the house . . . On the table was Aubrey’s certificate from his first assembly: he was Star of the Week, honoured for settling in so beautifully.
The Light in the Dark Page 7