‘I saw it at Bath Spa,’ she said, ‘students and staff. I’m having to cut down. So many patients. And now I’m interested in doctors. They are under pressure you would not believe. Some of them are cracking up and the rest are just holding on. They need help.’
The sky is a longing blue, clear in the evening, fresh as a broken chalk, streaked with soft light. The snow still lies, and it will not be gone in the morning, but you can feel the turn in the air.
16 MARCH
Winter will not surrender to spring; this is an inbetween season, sun following snow in a glance. Return home filled with hope after an hilarious journey, our overexcited guard calling cancellations, re-routings, tentative plans, until none of us know where the train is going or where it will stop. The house is happy and gentle. Aubrey has a certificate of merit. Rebecca is going out. ‘Why do you look so beautiful?’ Aubrey asks her. Outside the temperature plummets. Bath and bed and reading – Meet at the Ark at Eight by Ulrich Hub. Aubrey loves the three penguins kicking each other, smuggling one of their number aboard the ship and discussing the existence of God. He has become suddenly Christian, singing songs about Jesus on his donkey going to ‘Jerusa’. He sleeps sweetly. Lines of snow slide down the skylights.
17 MARCH
Sticky goose feathers, tiny hard powder and blurting blown snow, it is a connoisseur’s winter day. The flash and change of the sky is quite extraordinary; in bursts it is spring for ten minutes, with birdsong and buds, then the light yellows, seems to age and harden, and the silver snow comes again, driving sideways, upwards, in helixes and vortices, dissident tribes of flakes pursuing their own migrations. A buzzard tumbles and rags through twisting winds. There are whitened clouds flying across whitened blue. In the tops of the beech trees jackdaws are actually shivering, their tails trembling in the wind. Silver light, pewter light now, with trees purpling behind the blizzard.
Walking Frieda, we are both spittled with a strange form of fall, lighter than hail but heavier than snow, white as mint, its weight all velocity. Later Frieda’s humans dash for Lidl in Todmorden through a snowstorm like boiling steam. The shop is a small warehouse, overseen by a laconic and amused cashier. Ahead of us someone is having six bottles of beer and crabsticks for supper; a small, greying man in grey ahead of him is buying nuts. Just nuts. Back and bank up the fire. The snow comes beautifully and mightily now, tiny flakes all-conquering, sublime.
My Norwegian friend Reidun, a geologist, sends me a list of terms for snow. The valley is working through an entire Norwegian dictionary of different snows. We have had korn av hagl – hailstones – but what found Frieda and I earlier was eiter – small hailstones. It felt like eiter. Snoflukse we had at daybreak, large snowflakes, but currently the flying silence is made of fjukr – light falling snow. The steam on the way to Todmorden was snofnugg, snow dust.
More snow is forecast, but this must be one of the last winter twilights of the year. The trees stand solitary, individual, outlined against the white; when the temperature climbs next week they will thicken, their colours shared and spreading. A bitter night falls, snow blowing thinly, the temperature freezing, and the sky with a distant hardness in it, a withdrawn, cold mulling.
18 MARCH
Glittering sun on the snow still lying, and the air blue and dashing. The beck shimmers in the sun and the birds are singing, the clear air magnifying their calls. I go to Stockton in the evening, to talk to schools all day tomorrow. The North East is a huge heave of housing and massive roads. It has been a hard winter here, Cath says, as she drives us between schools the next day. She is a librarian, a tremendous small woman (‘I’m only diddy!’ she says) who has raised her children, supported her husband, Chris, and now zips in and out of schools and libraries, bringing zest, books, laughter. ‘My granddaughter said the mini-beast from the east is coming! The mini-beast! I had to tell her it wasn’t a real animal . . .’ We talk about the region’s feelings, this winter. ‘If they ran the vote again it would still be for Brexit up here. If you had a job at Nissan, and you were on twenty-four thousand, then you worked somewhere else and came back, they’d only offer you sixteen. That’s because all the workers are Poles. That’s it, you see. It’s never going to change unless they offer us a better deal. But politicians tell their own stories, don’t they?’
The schools are excellent; you can feel it as you walk into each. In one the library is a hut in the playground; in another, Cath says, it is a stretch of corridor. In a third it went from a room to a cupboard. But in the hut the children pour out their questions, their enthusiasms, their favourite books, the animals they love and notice, the birds they see, their ideas for stories. The class sizes are large, the skies are settled grey, there is no air in some of the buildings, daylight is shut out by blinds, the classrooms sealed and ill-ventilated, and yet here is the renewal of the world. Here is the spring, their raised hands like new shoots, their eyes as clear as hope.
20 MARCH
It is the first day of spring, according to the calendar, but by the time I reach Hebden the temperature is below freezing. Snow lies, blotching the woods with ghosts. The house is lovely, Aubrey still awake, chatting about rabbits and fish and what’s that animal with long legs that hangs onto fish?
It does not feel as though the winter has gone, yet. The salt still lies thick on the road. The roof is holding, though the slates have yet to be tested by real rain. We are all well, and Aubrey and Robin are flourishing at their schools. Rebecca is running often, preparing for an ultra-marathon in June. She has been offered work she loves, teaching philosophy. Mum is relieved at the retreat of the cold, and sad that she is not lambing. She misses her annual battle.
I am coming through. In the margins of this journal I have been struggling to eat, to sleep, to work. With the return of the light I can feel this changing. With counselling, with the admission – the first time I have made it – that I do need help, has come change and hope. This diary has been a lifeline, a place to put the days so that none was wasted, a way to see and celebrate winter in all its shadows and lights. At the heart of this winter I have found a double spirit, a flame and a shadow. The shadow is fear; the flame, love. In many moments, these last months, the shadow has been stronger. I have not written down all the rows, the despairs, the heaviness of spirit; no reader could have enjoyed them. Memory culls them, anyway; I will remember Aubrey’s laughter, Rebecca’s grin and might, Robin’s gentleness and resilience. Of all the seasons, winter draws us together. Its legacy will not be the shadow, but the flame.
EPILOGUE
On March 29th, having been referred by a GP, I went to see a psychiatric nurse. I felt as though I was flipping a weighted coin. Three chances out of four, it’s heads and you are probably bipolar, and this is the beginning of a whole world of pills and ills. Tails, you just might not be. I was scared. I dressed and shaved meticulously, determined to present myself as sane. Because the upshot was unconventional, it is better not to name the centre or the nurse. The interview took place in a room like a basement. The nurse, an assessor, she said, of twenty years’ experience, was very bright and very thorough. I liked her immediately: her long practice did not seem to have blunted her curiosity at all. Over the course of ninety minutes she asked questions and recorded my answers on a laptop.
‘Have you ever heard voices?’
‘No.’
‘Have you thought of harming yourself or others?’
‘I’ve wanted not to exist, to be dead, but I haven’t seriously planned to kill myself.’
‘Do other members of your family suffer from depression?’
‘My sister and my father.’
‘Are you comfort-eating?’
‘I have been.’
‘Is it hard to get up in the morning, to function?’
‘It has been, really hard, but I’m doing it.’
And so on. We began with my childhood and upbringing, worked through relationships and career; we paused over moments of manic behaviour and de
pressions. By the end of it she had enough material for an accurate short biography.
‘So what have I got?’ I asked, when it was done.
‘You’re not clinically depressed. You’re not manic. You’re not bipolar. You are going to see a therapist, and taking exercise, so you’re doing the right things. You are cyclothymic – but we’re all cyclothymic to some degree – we all go up and down. Look, I’m not allowed to say this really, but omega threes, fish oil – take 900 milligrams a day. And St John’s Wort. Get some of that. And you’re worse when you don’t get sun. Take vitamin D and vitamin B complex. And look at this.’
She showed me an American website with a list of behaviours.
‘Perfectionism,’ she said.
I read the list.
‘That’s me. Every single one of those is me!’
‘Right. You might want to get the therapist to address that.’
I want to hug her. I thank her profusely.
‘How many of these do you have to do?’
‘Two a day,’ she says. ‘I’ve cut down.’
‘You worked so hard – thank you so much.’
‘Take care,’ she says. ‘Good luck. And if you need us, you know where to find us.’
Out into sun and straight to the health-food shop I go. Omega threes are on special offer. For the first time in months I buy without counting the cost. At the till I pay and break into the pill bottles.
‘Getting them down straight away?’ laughs a woman in the queue.
‘If they’re going to work, madam, let’s have them now!’
I neck fish oil and vitamin D and St John’s Wort. Come on, life. Let’s have you back.
On the way to the train I call Rebecca and tell her what has happened. ‘I’m not mad,’ I burble.
‘Of course not. I told you, didn’t I?’
‘You did. Yes, you did.’
The train curves through birch woods. The slender trunks of the trees are silver-white, and the sun flashes through them, bright-dark, bright-dark, bright-dark, too quickly for either to register before it becomes the other. Dazzle and shadow, dazzle and shadow, but it is the light that lingers in the carriage, not the shade. It is very late this year, but spring will come. It will come.
Horatio Clare, 2018
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This book springs from a conversation between Jennie Condell, who wanted someone to write about winter, and the great Benjamin Myers, who suggested I might do it. My huge thanks to them both. Jennie’s inspirational enthusiasm, support and attention make her a dream of a publisher. When I tried to hide behind generalisations, Jennie teased out a true and accurate book.
It has been an honour and a pleasure to work with Pippa Crane, most patient and diligent of editors: thank you, Pippa. The gorgeous cover in your hand was designed by Dan Mogford. If you heard about this book by word of mouth or from something online or in the press, that was probably the doing of the amazing Emma Finnigan: any author she promotes is blessed indeed.
For dauntless help, support, advice, friendship and professional brilliance, huge thanks to my agent Zoë Waldie and Miriam Tobin at Rogers, Coleridge and White.
My rocks through all times, hard and gentle, are Sally, John and Alexander Clare. Thank you, dear mother, dear Dad and dear brother.
Without the support and deep friendship of Jeff Young, Helen Tookey, Chris Kenyon, Roger Couhig, Doug Field, Ellie Hunt, Phil O’Farrell, Emma Back, Nathan McWhinnie, Niall Griffiths, Debs Jones, Robert Macfarlane, Kevin Bohnert, Marge Mather, Richard Coles, Alison Finch, Laura Barton, Merlin Hughes, Ben Hardiman, Mo Bakaya, Rob Ketteridge, Peter Florence, Becky Shaw and Jay Griffiths my winters wouldn’t have no springs. Thank you for so much, kindest friends.
As will be clear to the reader, this book is really an inadequate hymn of thanks and praise to Rebecca Shooter, Aubrey Shooter Clare, Robin Tetlow-Shooter and Jennifer, Emma, Christopher and Gerald Shooter. All my love and thanks to you. May your winters be beautiful, your springs bright, your summers unfading and your autumns rich and fair.
First published 2018 by
Elliott and Thompson Limited
27 John Street, London WC1N 2BX
www.eandtbooks.com
epub: 978-1-78396-405-5
MOBI: 978-1-78396-406-2
Copyright © Horatio Clare 2018
The Author has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this Work.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
Page 5: The lines from ‘Charon’ are from Collected Poems by Louis MacNeice (Faber & Faber), printed by permission of David Higham Associates Limited; Page 23: The line from ‘On Raglan Road’ by Patrick Kavanagh is quoted from Collected Poems, edited by Antoinette Quinn (Allen Lane, 2004), by kind permission of the Trustees of the Estate of the late Katherine B. Kavanagh, through the Jonathan Williams Literary Agency; Page 153: Philip Larkin, ‘Days’, from Whitsun Weddings (Faber & Faber, London, 1971); Page 164: Wallace Stevens, ‘The Snow Man’ from The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens (Vintage, London, 2015).
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Typesetting by Marie Doherty
Cover design by Dan Mogford
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