‘Right,’ I said, my face flushed.
‘Now is when you tell me your name.’
I forced an awkward smile and took her hand. The gardening glove felt as dry and coarse as my throat. ‘It’s Robert, miss—’
At this she tutted and wagged a long finger. ‘And what’s your family name, Robert?’
‘It’s Appleyard.’
‘Well, now. Listen, Robert, while I explain the simple procedure for the perfect brew of nettles. Simply take a generous fistful of this poor old Urtica dioica, the most maligned of all the indigenous weeds, and boil it in a pot of aqua vitae – and there is no water purer than that which gurgles up through the Yorkshire strata – then once mashed add either three squeezes or one thick slice of lemon until the tea turns a peony-pink in colour. Serve in a tin mess cup or fine Ming china, for it matters not.’
Embarrassment prevented me from admitting that I had neither seen nor tasted a lemon, and didn’t fully understand what she was on about, but perhaps recognising this the old woman spared me further explanation.
‘I know what you’re thinking: how does one acquire lemons in a land bereft? Let’s just say I have contacts. Connections. That impotent little Hun has destroyed many things but not this girl’s tea habit. No. There are alternatives to lemon too. Thyme, basil, myrtle and verbena could all be seen to replicate the flavour in some way, and of course there is lemon balm and lemongrass – though, unless you’re a botanist hotfooting across the continents, I very much doubt you would be able to get your hands on those any time soon. As for limes: forget it. They’re as rare as Hitler’s left gland if the playground songs are to be believed. Even I can’t get my hands on them. Limes, I mean.’
Wrong-footed by the scattergun thought process of this curious woman, I missed the joke entirely. ‘Why lemon?’ I asked cautiously.
‘Well, for colour and flavour. One needs a little colour in life, even if it is illusory. And life without flavour is death. Nettle tea is a rather dull drink made tolerable by lemon. One thing in its favour: you don’t need a coupon to purchase it. You just help yourself. The leaves are entirely free and anything free always tastes better. Wouldn’t you agree?’
‘I would,’ I said, nodding. ‘Yes, I would indeed. I’ve been living off the land myself a little of late.’
‘And good for you. They say it’s a panacea too, nettle tea. A boon for your skin, a tonic for your joints and an alarm clock for your movements. At my age you take all the help you can get. It eases the burden upon the meadow too, yanking it up.’
As she walked past me towards the house, the dog raised his head and the way in which he slowly unfolded his legs and rose to full height reminded me of the clothes horse on which my mother hung the starched household whites.
‘Don’t you get stung?’ I asked. ‘Picking it, I mean.’
She walked into the house and then appeared a moment later. ‘Not if you have the right technique. Use a finger and thumb to grasp the leaf with confidence and you’ll be alright. It’s the tentative pluckers that come off worst but the thing you really have to watch out for are the low-growing ones, for they’ll pepper your shins with welts given half a chance and then itch all night long. Worse things have happened at sea, but seeing as you don’t yet have the technique – ’
She took off the well-worn pair of gardening gloves and tossed them to me. ‘Try these. I’ll get the water on.’
I slipped on the gloves and felt a clammy warmth from this odd old lady’s palms that reminded me of cricket games on the rec back at home, and the one shared pair of batsman’s gloves, passed from boy to boy until they were nothing but threadbare shells of stale sweat and tattered rubber.
Dulcie returned carrying a tea tray that she placed on the table, and then she poured the steaming pink drink into cups. ‘I had a few leaves left over from the last batch,’ she said.
There was a plate of raisin biscuits too that she offered to me. I placed the gloves on the table and took one. I held it in my hand and turned it for a long moment, savouring its appearance as tiny sugar crystals seemed to hold within them the light of the sun, before taking a small and tentative bite.
‘Now then,’ she said, blowing on her cup. ‘A pot of tea for your story seems a fair trade. On your way down bay, are you?’
‘Yes, I think so.’
‘You don’t seem certain.’
‘No.’
I didn’t elaborate. I took a sip of tea and had my first ever taste of lemon: stringent but not unpleasant. I drank some more.
‘We live in a most shadowed present,’ said Dulcie. ‘These are uncertain times.’
‘I just decided to go for a wander. That was a few weeks back.’
She laughed into her tea at this, and a bit slopped out of her cup. ‘Oh, I like that. That shows spirit.’
We drank our tea looking out into the meadow beyond. I got a better look at the garden, a small area in otherwise wild surroundings, the meadow encroaching on this landscaped space in which Dulcie had built a small rockery and installed beds that were just starting to show the first shoots of flowers.
Only half an hour earlier I had been inspecting a badger sett, alone, overheated from the walk, looking for a fresh spring from which to fill my flask, yet here I was sitting at a table – something I had not done for weeks – having tea in the garden of a woman unlike any I knew back at home.
In the distance I could just make out the line of the North Sea, a faraway performance seen through binoculars in the Elysian afternoon haze.
‘No plan is a good plan,’ she said after some time had passed. ‘You never know what’s around the corner. A morning’s sunny spell can harbour an afternoon’s storm clouds. Life is long when you’re young and short when you’re old, but tenuous at any time.’
We fell silent for a moment, and the dog sighed.
‘Mind, they’re a rum bunch down there,’ she continued.
‘Who’s that?’
Dulcie put down her cup and nodded towards the sea. ‘That lot down bay. You have to watch them. Some are descended from smugglers. They’ve lived too long at sea. It has sent them funny. They’re as right as rain physically but their minds have turned to mush, you see. There’s a few laggards about the place.’
She took a sip and sniffed the air, then continued.
‘They’re not all bad, it’s just that the gene pool can be more like a rock pool at low tide, if you get what I mean.’
I didn’t. Instead I merely stared blankly back at her. I saw a woman in odd flowing clothes that were either extremely old-fashioned and of another era entirely, or the height of modern fashion; I was unequipped to judge either way. Even the swirling colours of the scarf she wore and her billowing trousers – trousers – seemed to be taken from a different palette. I noticed that her hands were long and mapped with thick veins, and though her nails were painted they also showed signs of having been plunged in the soil.
‘And some of the old sea dogs sup like fish. You should see them: bellies like ale barrels. It’s a wonder they can see anything when the garden needs watering.’
I nodded as Dulcie watched me sideways. When I realised what it was she meant I blushed and then smiled.
‘Still, no harm in them. No harm in them at all. No doubt some of them think I’m an ageing ungodly slattern or Satan himself, but heck, they can go whistle.’
‘Do you not believe in God, then – ’ Here once more my mouth faltered as I found myself unable to call her, an adult, by her first name: Dulcie.
She made a noise in response. ‘Hmmph. Buck and fugger to that. We’ve got more than our fair share of Bible-thumpers round here as it is. The old joyless fire-and-brimstone-and-two-fucks-a-lifetime Christian lot.’
I flinched at the word that even most of the miners I knew reserved only for certain all-male company, and which even then was frowned upon. Shocked by this confident and intimidating lady, I felt myself flailing. I was out of my conversational depth. She was quite unlike my
mother or most older women I knew, who certainly wouldn’t swear and blaspheme in the same sentence. I was used to a subdued and unquestioning reverence towards religion, especially from the elderly.
‘No,’ she continued, ‘I’m of the opinion that religion is nothing but end-of-the-pier hocus-pocus. You might as well spend an hour with Gypsy Rose Lee as sit through a dull Sunday-morning service.’
I was shocked to hear an opinion of which Dulcie seemed so certain that to dispute it might make me appear ignorant. A strange prickling ripple of tension crept across my scalp at the thought. Quite casually she was turning those theological teachings drummed into me during banal daily assemblies upside down and giving them a good shake.
‘Are you a believer?’ she asked.
‘I’m Church of England.’
‘And what does that mean, exactly?’
I thought about this for a moment. ‘Well, it means I went to a C of E school.’
Dulcie smiled. ‘And what does that mean?’
Again I thought about her question. I smiled back. ‘A lot of daydreaming.’
‘Daydreaming is good.’
‘The teachers didn’t think so.’
‘I’m sure they didn’t, but from the dreams of children come the great empires of the future. You strike me as someone who spent as much time looking out the window as you did at the textbook page.’
‘I was probably looking at the pit, where my dad works – and his dad before him.’
‘Ah, a coalman.’
‘Well, the coalman delivers. My dad works the seam. He’s a miner.’
‘Digging out the dusky diamonds, as they say. And what about you?’
‘What about me?’
‘Will you follow your forefathers underground?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said, though it was of course a question I had been forced by circumstance and expectation to contemplate for years. ‘I thought I’d take a wander first. The pits aren’t going anywhere. There’ll always be mining. There’ll always be coal.’
‘That’s certainly true. What else did you do at this school of yours?’
‘I sat through long assemblies and lots of tuneless hymns.’
‘That’s it?’
‘Harvest festival in September and Christmas carol services. That’s about it.’
‘Well, harvest worship is a pagan practice for starters and many of the Christmas traditions are pre-Christian and have been synchronised and co-opted, but that’s by the by. Children aren’t to know. None of this has a thing to do with faith or what some might call spirituality, which is something else entirely. Butler doesn’t much care for religion either.’
‘No?’
‘He bit the last vicar that tried to pat him. They said he should be put down but just let the bastards try.’
The sun stalked across the sky, lighting the meadow that once must have offered a clear vista of the open fields but which now felt like a barrier, an uncultivated plot to keep the sea partially concealed as the sun scattered silver triangles across its surface.
The drying sweat on my back and the stiff reek of my clothes – for weeks I had washed only from outdoor wells and under farmyard spouts – reminded me that the swim I had been planning for some time seemed close at hand, yet the sea was tantalisingly obscured from view behind that chaotic acre of grasses and hawthorns, weeds and thicket.
The nettle tea was refreshing, though, and the biscuits that Dulcie served were the first sweet food other than foraged berries and a flapjack in Guisborough that had passed my lips in a fortnight. I felt the sugar coursing through my blood.
We sat in silence for a few moments before she checked her watch and then spoke.
‘You should stay for tea. Proper tea, I mean.’
Mindful of my own body odour and a need to find somewhere to bed down for the night, I declined her invitation. ‘It’s very kind of you but this was more than enough. I should really push on.’
‘That’s your prerogative. But may I ask where it is you intend to push on to, exactly? Unless you think I’m prying.’
‘I thought I’d perhaps go down to the bay and then follow the coast south.’
The dog appeared by Dulcie’s side and she scratched behind his ears.
‘Le grand tour,’ she said. ‘You know, locals tend to simply say “down bay”. There are sights to be seen, for sure. Fossils and hermit crabs and creels and the sea chipping away at Britannia’s boundary. But there’s nothing that still won’t be there later. The tide will ebb and the tide will flow, the bladderwrack will rise and reach for the saffron stain of the sun and the seagulls will swoop for some poor sod’s chips. I’m doing lobster, not that I am attempting to keep you captive. Do you partake?’
I sat straight with my shirt stuck to my back and my back pressed against the chair. My hands felt self-conscious in my lap, grubby and without purpose. The nails chewed to the quick. I folded my fingers to hide the shame of them.
‘I’ve not had lobster before, no.’
Dulcie looked mock-aghast. ‘Never?’
‘My mam’s not big on fish.’
Sensing perhaps that my restricted diet was as much down to economics as availability, Dulcie was discreet. ‘Well, God knows this war has made us all tighten our belts,’ she said. ‘We might have our freedom but a tin of pilchards still seems like a luxury.’
‘It’s those Germans,’ I said quietly. ‘I’d like to give them what for.’
‘Would you?’
‘Yes, they should all rot for what they’ve done. You should see some of the men in the village. And that’s just the ones who made it back. I’d slit the throat of any Kraut, me. It would be my duty as an Englishman.’
Dulcie studied me for a moment.
‘I can understand your hatred completely,’ she said. ‘And your spirited Boy’s Own bravado is to be applauded. But, Robert, you should not be bitter or angry about it. War is war: it’s started by the few and fought by the many, and everyone loses in the end. There’s no glory in bloodshed and bullet holes. Not a bit of it. I also happen to know that Germany has been left in a terrible state too, and always remember that most of those young men – boys the same age as you are now, no doubt – did not want to be there either. It’s always the honest folk that have to do the bidding of the despots. And after all there are only a few things truly worth fighting for: freedom, of course, and all that it brings with it. Poetry, perhaps, and a good glass of wine. A nice meal. Nature. Love, if you’re lucky. And that’s about it. Don’t hate the Germans; many of them are just like you and me.’
Having read the morning newspaper reports and heard the evening wireless broadcasts, and endured the long fearful years of gas masks and air-raid drills, of rationing and dirt-dug shelters, and seen the men who made it back to the village – some limping, others trembling, all of them changed – I couldn’t see how this could possibly be true. I had grown from a boy to a young man knowing few certainties in life; that the Germans were surely a monstrous breed was one of them. I failed to see how they could possibly be like us. Dulcie saw me frowning.
‘You don’t agree?’
‘I just find that hard to believe.’
‘And who can blame you: all you have known is war’s long shadow, and all the trumpeting and chest-thumping that goes along with it. But I have seen other wars. Read about plenty more too. And what I’ve learned is that they’re all much the same: people are people. I speak this from experience. Some are brave and some are foolish, and almost all are scared. War is chaos, that’s all. German or British, Armenian, Dutch or Tongan – most people just want a quiet life. A nice meal, a little love. A late-night stroll. A lie-in on a Sunday. As I said before, don’t despise the Germans. All that really separates us is a different approach to bread-making and that.’
Here she pointed out towards the sea. ‘It’s only water that divides us, and even that came later on. Once, you could have walked from here all the way to Bremen or Leipzig or Hanover or wherever yo
ur feet happened to take you. Doggerland, they called it. One day the salty water simply washed over the last strip of land to sluice away the soil and – voilà – a new island was created. Think about that for a moment: once England was Germany and vice versa.’
I slowly nodded, chewing over this new fact.
‘We’re all just people, Robert. We’re all confused, lonely and flawed, but a fine fresh lobster lifted from the briny depths of Dogger is the definition of perfection, and seeing as this conversation has held us in the hinterland of the afternoon I am now going to insist that you stay on for an hour or so. Then, after you’re fed, you can sail to the Fatherland with a dagger between your teeth if you so wish. Besides, Butler here is a German shepherd and he’s the most loyal friend an old sturgeon like me could wish for. I must have a thing for Teutons.’
At this, the dog stepped forward and sniffed at my knuckles. I patted his warm noble head.
‘I think he’s readying himself to accept you.’
‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘Thank you, I will stay for tea.’
‘You can thank me by fetching a good clump of garlic from down the meadow. It’s the perfect garniture for just about everything that passes my lips; little wonder I live alone. Now, I’ll nip out and get the crustaceans.’ Dulcie stood and straightened her sun hat. ‘Butters will show you where to find it.’ She instructed the dog – ‘Butters, garlic’ – and then laughed at her own wordplay as he cocked his large head upwards.
Dulcie walked towards the side of the cottage, then paused.
‘The Germans call it Blasentang, you know.’
I was confused. ‘Garlic?’
‘No, bladderwrack. A good source of vitamins. And iodine too. I’ll get those lobsters.’
As I followed the dog beyond the garden fence and into the overgrown field I heard a voice calling to me. I turned and saw Dulcie waving a pair of secateurs.
She shouted something that I couldn’t make out.
‘What?’
‘Watch out for the spring,’ she said. She pointed with the metal blades. ‘The spring. The waterhole. Further down. Watch out for the sudden drop in the grass. Butters knows where it is.’
The Offing Page 3