27 FEBRUARY
Yesterday was the strangest day, snow blowing out of clear blue air. The east wind carried small messenger flakes far from their clouds, sending them tipping and stumbling horizontally, widely spaced apart in broad currents. At evening they came faster out of the east, pouring towards the sinking sun.
The storm arrived in the night, huge sticky flakes reaching for each other, teeming down. Minus one, two, three, and freezing air came in through the keyholes. The schools were closed, Hebden deserted. We had a snow day, watching the falls, practising our letters and reading. No post, no recycling, barely a car passed; three runners with a dog plunged through a heavy fall. The small birds were silent, only a slew of jackdaws rose over the wood, soot-dark, turning like flakes, rising. In late afternoon a tawny owl called; it seemed to summon evening early. The stillness of night lay on the woods though the light had barely dimmed. The fall was heavy and wet, three or four inches. It relented in bursts and fell again with more vigour. By nightfall it was minus five and the house seemed to contract, the fire hunching.
The layer of snow on the roof makes for a warm night upstairs. I wake at four, and get no more sleep thereafter. I miss being able to function. The smallest tests – rising, showering, shaving, preparing for the day, choosing clothes, preparing Aubrey’s breakfast, doing the washing-up – come as monumental, exhausting waves. Each takes planning, takes resolution, is accomplished slowly through downpours of doubt and self-criticism. It is like a cruel and sardonic inversion of the idea of living in the moment, which is supposed to make you calm, or at least balanced. You live every moment as if it were a punishment.
I know I need to go to a doctor, but I am terrified of the consequences. They will tell me I am bipolar, and they will prescribe lithium, and I cannot, for all my searching, find evidence anywhere of a writer who made a life on the pills. Numerous accounts are of numbness, disconnection, endless tinkering with dosages, and suicides caused by people coming off it. Or perhaps it is only the fear itself that characterises this condition and these consequences in this way; I am not an objective judge of anything. I ricochet between fear of going to a doctor and guilt for not making an appointment. Hopeless.
1 MARCH
Ferocious snow, the road impassable, me in Liverpool, and all the weight on Rebecca. She loads Aubrey into the sledge and tows him to town. Our friend Andy, father of one of Aubrey’s school friends, looks after him, the school closed, and feeds Rebecca. She teaches, reclaims Aubrey and tows him back up the hill. She sounds alive with it all: ‘We’re fine, we’re fine!’ she laughs at my fret. ‘Got the fire going, got food, we’ve got fish and pasta.’
Aubrey is in sublime form on the phone.
‘Daddy, you know I bit Jonah?’
‘This was two years ago?’
‘I bit him and he punched me. When I was small.’
‘I do remember. Why did you bite him, do you remember?’
‘I was being rambunctious!’
‘Oh yes?’
‘Yes. I was being rambunctious for no reason!’
In Wales it is minus eight and Mum is snowed in. ‘Just like the winter of ’83,’ she says. ‘I got the stores in. I remembered powdered milk. Colin Brown moved the ewes down from the hill for me – I was worried about them for two days. I couldn’t have got to them up there. I was thinking, well, is it better to go quietly with hypothermia, or the abattoir? But they’re safe.’ A neighbour took hay bales to her rams. ‘If you look out of the window it’s snow like dust devils whirling around the garden,’ she says. ‘I went out to feed the birds but it was just terrible. My hands went blue. Just like that! I said to Apollo, that’s it, we’re staying in. When it drifts the sheep can shelter behind them, but this is blowing everywhere.’
She is right in the teeth of it, Storm Emma from the south meeting this eastern beast.
That mountain winter of ’83 we opened the front door to a perfect wall of snow; negatives of the planks, the door handle and the letter box were printed in a frozen wall. There were drifts in the attic, blown in under the eaves. The windows became opaque, obscured in a peculiar blue-white. Not far from the farm, exhausted after feeding the flock, Mum sat down to gather her strength. With a start she realised she had almost nodded off. She trudged her way back to the house. ‘Look, children!’ she said as she came in. ‘Icicles in my hair! I think I nearly died in the meadow . . .’ As the drifts rose up the walls, blocking the door and covering the lower windows, she calculated our supplies and listened to the radio. ‘They’re saying make an H in the snow if you want help – but who’s going to see us up here?’ Mervyn, a neighbour, rescued us, battling up through drifts. He used a stake to dig out the top of the door. He was a tough and whiskery man. I saw his face widen with a delighted grin as he cut through the snow and found us. He hauled us up into a world erased, the fences vanished, the gates gone, the meadows overflowing the hedges. The whole mountain was moving, stalking down through the storm from the heights, the drifts in marching gangs.
My brother and I were evacuated, first to Mervyn’s house, then to a friend’s in town. Buried in drifts, the sheep ate wool off each other’s backs. For a week Sally and Mervyn fought to dig them out and feed them. Not one was lost.
2 MARCH
The white deepening as you come into the Pennines is dramatic: three days’ snow humped and frozen, the trees stark, darkly shocked, the roads glazed with salt dust and slush-swish, and everything sheened with ice. The cars carry hoods of old snow and icicles. In the Co-op people are marvelling at the empty shelves. ‘I keep thinking if I walk by them again something will change,’ a woman says. No veg, no bread, no eggs. The shoppers look bemused, and much happier than I have ever seen them, stimulated by the denial of the usual choice, grinning as they improvise. The normal Friday heaviness is gone. Small knots form, discussing options, debating other shops which might be open, might be stocked.
Aubrey and I play Snap, then Go Fish with invisible cards.
They are asleep now; Rebecca will be far under. She laughed at my fuss.
‘We’re Northern,’ she says. ‘It’s just snow.’
The wind is busy outside, a hollow-sounding inrush, as though hard domes of air are pummelling the sky. The valley glowed blue-white at nightfall, the snow reluctant to give up its light. And the male tawny was back, he yickered twice, as if he had burned his feet.
I talk to my father about seeing a doctor. Last year I waited the blues out. This time they are worse. Something must change.
‘But it wouldn’t hurt, would it?’ he presses, gently. ‘They can’t make you take anything. Wouldn’t it be good to find out? Isn’t that what we do – we go and find out?’
He is right. Of course he is right.
3 MARCH
Icicles hung in choirs, slush lay in runnels and an ice mist drifted over the valley, the world poised between freeze and thaw. Towing Aubrey on a sledge through the woods, we were escorted by two robins, then a wren – tiny troglodyte with her up-flicked tail! They must have been hoping Aubrey’s charges through the undergrowth would expose some morsel, though spiders, beetles and worms surely went deep days ago. The colours are menacing, dark blue in grey in white, bands of suspended moisture, a sky washed with cold.
4 MARCH
Ice mist wisps up from snow on the valley floor and creeps down from the moors. A sinister silver darkness descends, ever so slowly, the mist thickening into night.
We have it relatively easy in Britain, even in winters as long and harsh as this one. In Krasnoyarsk, Siberia, my friend Mike waited forty-five minutes for a bus in minus thirty. When he first moved there he wrote of ice two inches thick on the insides of windows, and of being afraid to walk out of his father-in-law’s dacha because of the bear population. On his way to work last week, in the middle of the city, he saw a boy attacked by a pack of wild dogs, then saved by a passer-by.
5 MARCH
With Robin home we have a lovely supper. Aubrey takes charge, maki
ng us play card games with invisible cards. Rebecca and I grin at each other over the children’s heads, close in a way we have not been for a while. Robin is sweetly gentle with his brother.
In the night the roof starts leaking, not over my bed, for which I am prepared, but at the front, so that it pours straight down into the room where Rebecca and Aubrey sleep. The water is horrible, filtered through mould and soaked insulation wool. In the insulation space it is clear that all the battens and beams are rotten; the whole roof is surviving by habit. I get the tank from the bottom of the fridge and ease it into position. The water drops happily into it, in the torchlight, and stops running down to the room below.
6 MARCH
Sleet stalks about in the clouds but refuses to fall as I work on the roof. The local web is full of damage reports – boilers gone, leaks, burst pipes. The nearest roofers are booked up until September, they say. Lyndon lends me his ladder and foots it. There is a thin strip of daylight visible from inside; I think it must have been partly blocked by moss, now torn off by the thaw. With the slate pushed back the gap is much smaller and I am praying that other gaps have not opened up. Wait for rain. Thank goodness for this journal. To have somewhere to put this small story, something to do with it, is a salvation. It is one of the few places where I feel any kind of measure of control, in this diary and in the lectures and seminars at work, which are going well, according to the students, despite my fears. Thank goodness for work.
7 MARCH
A beautiful smell, suddenly, this morning, something with turf and green in it, a fresh, plucking smell, as if the ground has borne some spirit of life. The last snow is a patch in the wood opposite. The kestrel came to the tree below the house, a small male, and the second honeybee of the year appeared. How on earth did it survive?
Late that night the stars are sublime in an icy clear. I lie awake again, much of the night, listening for the rain. It does not come. Instead there is more snow, great sticky flakes. The snowdrops push up through it as it melts, white parachutes opening above cloud.
9 MARCH
The rain comes. I listen to constellations. Soft as children’s whispers at first, then tippling, then fatter taps. Aubrey’s friend Wilf is staying. In the bedroom their breathing is perfect peace, gentle as nightfall. And the roof holds – miracle. All night the rain visits in different moods and modes, but nothing comes through. No storm-blown test yet, but there is hope. I wonder if fixing the roof is a turning point. Last winter, when I was similarly frozen inside, and useless, the handle on the back door broke. The moment I realised I could fix it by inserting a certain piece of Aubrey’s Lego into the mechanism, something seemed to click in me, as in the lock. It sounds ludicrous, but I drew esteem from it: I am not utterly hopeless. I can cope! From then on things seemed to start to get better.
10 MARCH
Winter’s cloak trails mist over the Pennines. Three herons row through it, towing time. On the high roads the snow lies like bodies, drifts contracting. The sheep look filthy and triumphant, survivors. I am fighting dark fantasies of the future, of failing as a writer, of losing the house to banks and bailiffs, of dragging us all down.
Worst of all are my fears for Aubrey, let down by his father, trapped by the geography of poverty. I picture versions of him in some dark alternative of the years ahead, angry and denied, throwing my advice and my warnings back at me: Why should I listen to you? What did you ever do for us? But there, downstairs, is the real little boy, who is so full of love and wonder and marvel, who is so rich in affection for people and enthusiasm for life, and my fears are ridiculous, a double betrayal. How hideously fast and creative is my mind in its formation of horrors and guilts; how rapidly it assembles evidence – from the news, from the world, from books – and how capably it constructs morbid and doomed conclusions.
There is a comical aspect to despair, too. My search history is a hypochondriac’s encyclopaedia. I have a brain tumour, lung cancer, multiple sclerosis, chronic fatigue syndrome, motor neurone disease: Google does not know what to make of me, showing me ads for making wills one moment and retirement portfolios the next.
Rebecca endures and endures my monotonous negativity. We both know it will end, but I am damned if I can see how or when.
11 MARCH
Sun and blue, and the first breath of warmth in the air. Two grey wagtails hunt across the roof, flicking themselves in half-somersaults, a joyous canary-gold, picking among the mosses. We go up to the obelisk in the afternoon; it is still winter there, the wind ear-biting. There are snow lines lying against the hedges towards Heptonstall.
12 MARCH
A time to stop hiding. I make appointments with the doctor and a therapist.
‘We can’t breathe,’ Rebecca said. ‘Aubrey and I can’t breathe.’
My panic is suffocating us. I cannot afford it, but I must. It is a time to try anything.
A counsellor with a medical background is available. Ellen comes from Germany; she made her life in the North after studying at Leeds. She is a trim woman with a searchingly direct gaze. Her office in the town hall is quiet and absolutely comforting. You can see why people would pay just to be here.
‘I work for the NHS in Keighley four days a week,’ she says. ‘You have no idea of the things I see there. People with real, terrible problems. Yes, you have made mistakes. Yes, you have done bad things. So has everyone. Show me someone who has not. You have taken the first step by coming here. A bad person would not want to change. You want to change. You should be proud.’
I know she is almost bound to say these things, but you feel something inside you uncoiling, slightly, as she speaks. We talk; I pour out my guilt and desperation.
Ellen draws a chain comprised of NC – NC –
‘It’s a bit CBT,’ she says, ‘but negative cognition – negative cognition, that’s what you are doing. Look.’
She draws three lines, a horizontal, a wave and a jagged zigzag.
‘I don’t believe in a purely medical solution,’ she says. ‘I’m a psychotherapist, not a psychiatrist. I push you hard and you react – good. We make progress. Here are your moods. You have been on the jagged line. Perhaps you will never be on the straight one, but we can take you to this one, the wave, where you go up and down but not so much.’
‘Do you think a doctor will help? I have an appointment.’
‘Yes, you should go and find out. But you will be put on a waiting list, could be twelve weeks, could be twenty.’
It comes back to childhood, she believes. ‘This need to be loved. This need for approval. This feeling that you are responsible for everything, from childhood, for everyone’s feelings. You are so tied to these ideas. But a child should not be responsible for everything.’
‘But I’m forty-four!’ I protest. ‘I should have gone to therapy twenty years ago!’
She laughs as I beg her for an assessment of chances of success.
‘You are so scientific!’
‘I’m really not. Fifty-fifty?’
‘Better than fifty-fifty.’
13 MARCH
I travel to the Lake District, to talk at a festival in Keswick; the Pennines are dun-brown heaves, hessian-coloured. As we curve north there are snow lines, remnant bones in the angles of the high ground. Lambs run in the fields, which look drained and exhausted, as though all the life in the ground has jumped into the animals. At Keswick there is sun on the south flanks of Skiddaw and a fleeting warmth like cats’ paws over the lake. ‘It’s been a hard, hard winter,’ says John Lister-Kaye, a penfriend met for the first time. ‘Deep frost,’ he says.
At lunch I talk with Linda Blair, a psychologist. We discuss the rising tide of mental ill-health, the plague of the age. In Liverpool I see staff with depression trying to teach students with depression, both sides incredulous, somehow, that we are all here, doing this. And yet the effort is valiant: we all fight on. In Finland last winter a sailor said to me, ‘We’re all going to need sisu now.’ Sisu is a Finnish word m
eaning a dogged and bloody-minded refusal to be beaten. I had assumed that the anxiety tide, which is particularly present among my students, must be related to the situation in which they found themselves. Studying creative writing, which offers no guarantee of a job or livelihood, and which confronts you with a great deal of darkness and fear – stories being a mechanism for the working-out and working-through of the difficulties and trials of life – must make their anxiety worse, I had supposed. But Linda says it is everywhere.
The Light in the Dark Page 9