Sal

by Mick Kitson

  They lived on land that was owned by lords and rich farmers, and the police used to come and harass them all the time. Sometimes they blocked off roads to stop them getting places and they were always arresting them for drugs or having bald tyres on their vans.

  Ingrid learned a lot of things living with the hippies. She learned to make fires without matches and how to weave baskets from willow, she learned about tapping pine for resin and how to dig clay and make pots you baked in a fire to make them waterproof. She bought all her clothes from charity shops and let her hair go long and wild and she wore feathers and flowers and ribbons in it.

  She learned all about mending a car from Matt who was a mechanic and he showed her how to hot-wire a car so you could start it without having the keys. She learned to change tyres and fix the brakes and once her and Matt even took the whole engine out of her VW van and fixed the gearbox.

  She loved Matt. He was big and he didn’t wash much and Ingrid used to make him jump in rivers if they were near one and she always boiled water and washed herself and her clothes because she didn’t like being smelly.

  Then after she had been with the hippies for about two years and they had been all over England to different festivals and living at different campsites they tried to get to Stonehenge for a festival on the summer solstice which was June 21st and is the longest day. Lots of vans and buses tried to drive to Stonehenge for the solstice but the police blocked all the roads and they held them all up and stopped them leaving and then they made lots of them drive into a field. It was a warm summer afternoon and the hippies got into a big crowd and tried to walk over to Stonehenge to try to have their festival.

  And then hundreds of polis with riots shields and batons attacked them.There were about seven hundred hippies and twice as many police who had come from all over Britain to beat them up.They charged into them with police horses and batons and smashed people’s heads and hit women and children and even pregnant women. Ingrid got punched in the face by a polis when she was trying to help a girl back into her bus. The polis surrounded all the hippie buses and smashed the windows and slashed the tyres and smashed them all up. Ingrid and Matt got arrested and Matt had his arm broken by two polis who kicked the shit out of him while he was lying on the ground. Ingrid fought two polis trying to take him away and she got kicked over and then handcuffed.

  Hundreds of the hippies got arrested and they were all taken to stations in towns nearby and held and charged with obstructing the polis and assault on the polis. It was the most people who had ever been arrested in one go in the history of England. Ingrid said the papers called it ‘The Battle of the Beanfield’ but Ingrid said it was more like a massacre.

  Then they let them all go, and Ingrid and Matt walked back to the field and found their van which had been smashed up and had all the windscreen broken. They eventually got their van going and they drove off and left the rest of the hippies. Matt had to go to hospital and have his arm put in plaster. Then they camped outside a small town for a few days and Matt got some bits and fixed the van up and they decided to go north.

  The government put fences up around Stonehenge and built a visitors’ centre and charged people money to go and look at the stones and no hippies were allowed to go there ever again.

  After that Ingrid got depressed again. She thought Britain was safe and the polis were nice here and didn’t attack people for no reason and didn’t put them in prison for nothing or force them to go where they didn’t want to. She thought that only happened in the GDR or in Germany when there were Nazis, but it was happening in Britain which was a democracy and which she thought was free and people were allowed to do what they liked.

  She got more and more depressed as they went north. They stayed in the Lake District for a few weeks in a layby and Matt got them some money by working in a garage fixing cars. Then some men from the council made them move and said they’d get arrested if they stayed in the layby.

  Ingrid said they headed for Scotland because there is a different law in Scotland and you can camp wherever you like and you can’t be moved on or arrested as long as you don’t make a mess or burn down trees.

  She was still depressed and they struggled to get money for food and petrol and it was coming on winter, but the country was beautiful. Much more beautiful than England and it had proper mountains and bigger lochs and moors. Ingrid said she had never been anywhere as beautiful and she liked Scottish people although she didn’t understand the way they spoke at first. They got all the way into the Highlands and found places to camp and stay in their van and they spent the first winter in a forest near Fort William and they could see Ben Nevis from their van window. It snowed and it was cold but they had a wood burner in their van and they got broo money after a while.

  Matt got a job working in the forest cutting logs and trees with a chainsaw and driving a big tree-cutting machine. Then they rented a wee cottage for a few months and they had more room and a proper bed and Ingrid made clothes and did basket weaving.

  In the spring they fixed the van up and went off again and drove all over Scotland and then got ferries to the Orkney Islands and went and saw all the standing stones and the 4,000-year-old houses and the burial chambers where old chiefs of tribes got buried with all their families.

  They stayed in Orkney for a winter in their van and Matt worked for a farmer and Ingrid made baskets and sometimes sold them in the town. But it rained all the time for the whole winter. Ingrid sometimes got depressed because the days were so short and Matt sometimes went into the town and went to the pub with lads he worked with on the farm. Ingrid didn’t go because she was older than all of them and she thought Matt should be with lads his own age.

  In the spring they came back onto the mainland and went south and west and back through the Highlands and then down through Argyll and they went to Mull for a few months where the sea was clear and green and the sun shone all day. They lived on a beach there and swam and collected Mussels and Clams and Crabs to eat. Matt went fishing and caught Mackerel and at night they had big driftwood fires on the beach. Once a fisherman gave them a huge bag of big Prawns he couldn’t sell and they cooked them on hot stones on the beach watching the sun go down over the sea. Ingrid said it was the best food she had ever eaten in her life.

  In the autumn they went south again and drove down through Ayrshire and into Galloway and went to the Isle of Whithorn which is the furthest south you can get in Scotland and you can see England, Ireland and the Isle of Man.

  Then they went back up into Galloway and drove into the Galloway forest.There were forestry roads you could use to get right into the forest and up and away from everyone and everything and they spent the first winter not far from where Ingrid’s camp is now.

  Ingrid worried about Matt because he was so young and she was getting near fifty and she knew he loved children and he wanted to have them. But he loved her and he was kind and funny and he looked after her and he was so strong he could lift their VW up at one end. She knew that one day he’d go and leave her and probably find another woman who was younger than her. And in a way she didn’t mind because it seemed like it was natural.

  They walked a lot round the forest and the moors and went to Magna Bra and they collected wood and snared rabbits and fished in the lochs. They sometimes went into the town and after a few months they started getting broo money. Ingrid read a lot of books she got from the library and second-hand book shops about medicine and science and she read about God and religion and she read stories as well. She liked a book called Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë and she liked books by Charles Dickens about orphans and people in the workhouse.

  In the spring when the leaves were all new and bright green Matt said he wanted to leave and go back to England. Ingrid wanted to stay in Scotland because they never got bothered by polis or the council in Scotland and she loved the forest and the hills they lived in. She told Matt it was okay for him to go and he cried and then he went.

  Ingrid s
tayed in the van on her own for a few weeks and then she went to the town and rented a little house by the river and decided she’d stay there for a few years. She got her rent paid by the council and she got broo money and she read a lot. After about two years there she decided she could become a doctor again and she wrote letters to a council that give doctors licences and she had to go to Glasgow for a year and do another course and work in a hospital and then she got her licence to be a doctor again.

  Then she heard that the old doctor in the town in Galloway had died and they needed a new one and she applied and got the job of being the doctor in a little surgery in the main street and she moved back, got a wee house to live in and became the doctor. She was fifty-three.

  She stayed being the doctor there for the next fourteen years. She stopped wearing hippie clothes and started looking normal and had her hair cut and wore proper coats and shoes, not boots. She made friends with people in the town and they all liked her. Most of the old people thought that because she had a funny accent she was English but they were still nice to her and she was a good doctor and she read about medicine all the time and went on courses to learn about new treatments. She didn’t get depressed as much and she almost never thought about when she was wee or the GDR or Max or defecting or the Battle of the Beanfield or Matt. By then the GDR had stopped being called the GDR and it was just all Germany and the Berlin Wall had been taken down and people didn’t have to defect. Ingrid decided she didn’t want to go back and see Berlin because she was happy being the doctor in the town and living in her wee house. She had a garden and grew vegetables and she made friends with an old man called Donald who lived near her and liked growing vegetables. His wife had died of cancer and he was lonely and he and Ingrid became a bit like boyfriend and girlfriend except they were old. Donald took her fishing with flies on the River Cree and she caught Salmon and he showed her how to tie fishing flies. She looked after him because he had a bad heart and couldn’t run or eat butter. They talked a lot and told each other about their lives and he had been in the army in Germany in the 1960s when they built the Berlin Wall and he could speak a bit of German and she taught him more. Donald had an old dog called Kipper and they walked him all over the place and sometimes went up into the forest and let Kipper chase rabbits.

  They listened to old hippie music from the 1960s and sometimes they danced in her wee house and Donald pretended he was playing guitar solos.

  Donald asked her to marry him but she said she was too old to get married and she liked being single anyway and Donald said people in the town gossiped about them and she said ‘I don’t care.’ She loved Donald in a different way to the way she loved Matt and Max, she loved him more like he was a nice dog you could cuddle.

  Ingrid taught herself to make bread and she bought a kiln and made pots in her shed on a potting wheel and painted them and then fired them in the kiln so they shone. She made Donald a model of Kipper with the same white and black fur and big floppy ears. Donald grew vegetables for them and on a Sunday they had a Sunday dinner of roast beef and all Donald’s vegetables and they used to set a place at the table for Kipper and let him have his dinner with them.

  Ingrid saw lots of people die being a doctor and she had to sign death certificates. It made her think about her mother whenever anyone died, especially if it was a woman. She didn’t even know if her mother did die or if she just ran off or got taken to Russia.

  When someone dies, the second when they stop being alive, all the energy in them goes up out of them. It is like a cloud you cannot see rising up above them. I saw it go out of Robert when he was bleeding and going ‘ock’ on my bed. Something that was there but not there went out of him and went up and he was dead. Then he was just meat bleeding.

  Ingrid said she saw this lots and lots of times and she said it was the soul going back to its mother. The soul is the thing that makes you alive and a person and Ingrid said that everything that is alive has a soul and even things that are not alive like rocks and earth have a soul. And souls are born from the Mother Goddess and they vibrate at different frequencies and have different amounts of light in them depending on how much they vibrate.What you see leaving a dead person is their vibration.You see and feel the vibration of them and you only know it is there when it is gone.

  Some souls vibrate so much they glow when they leave and some souls vibrate slow and dark and are like slugs leaving. Robert’s was like that. It oozed out of him.

  Some people have souls that vibrate so much they give off light when they are alive. Peppa is like that. Sometimes at night in the shelter when it is pitch dark I can feel her glow.

  If Robert’s soul went up to the Mother Goddess I hope she told it to fuck off.

  Ingrid was happy for quite a few years in the town with Donald and Kipper and then Kipper got ill and died and Donald was really depressed. And then one day Donald was pouring a cup of tea in Ingrid’s kitchen and he went all floppy and held onto his chest and fell off the kitchen chair and died. Ingrid watched his soul go up while she was banging his chest to get his heart going again.

  After that she got depressed again for a long time and thought a lot about when she was wee and about all the people she’d known. She got too old to be the doctor in the town and she got a pension and retired. She was lonely without Donald and Kipper and she started going into the forest a lot and sitting in the trees and thinking about the Goddess. She thought about when she’d been a hippie and about when she’d been wee in the cellar with Klausi and Hansi. She thought about the days looking for her mother in all the bombed streets in Berlin. She thought about Max leaving her and about the Stasi arresting him and executing him. She thought about immunology and all the things she knew how to do.

  Then she decided she was going to go and live in the forest. She had quite a lot of money in the bank and she could’ve bought a house but she didn’t want to. She wanted to live in the forest in a bender and trap food and walk and have fires at night under the stars. So she did. She sold all the things she owned and gave her car to her next-door neighbour. She gave most of her clothes to the charity shop and bought boots and a big waxed coat and some hats and a knife.Then she walked up into the forest and made a camp and lived there.

  And then she met us.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Skis

  Me and Peppa went up to the lochs with the fishing rod and some spinners and hooks. Ingrid was feeling tired and said her back ached because she had been stamping on sticks to break them to the right length to go on the drying rack.

  It was cold and the snow was thicker the higher we got and we skirted round the edge of the forest at the top and followed it to a ridge and from there you could see a chain of lochs going off along a valley that was all white and shiny.

  I sat on the ridge and watched it all through the monocular which magnifies things by a factor of four for every ten metres. There was an Eagle over the lochs hanging high up like it was still in the air. It had white tips on its wings and the wings had feathers that looked like long fingers coming out of a hand. In the monocular you could see the feathers vibrating in the air.

  Peppa ran on down the long slope to the first loch and kept jumping and sliding along on her bum on the snow. She looked like an Emperor Penguin in her black Helly Hansen whooshing along getting smaller and smaller as she went down. I watched her through the monocular and I could see she was grinning and shouting and laughing every time she started sliding. It made me glad I had killed Robert and it made me want to get Maw so she could see Peppa laughing in the snow.

  I went down after her and the loch was frozen over with grey furry ice that had big white bubbles in it. Peppa was walking out on it and I shouted her to be careful. The ice cracked and creaked when you stepped on it.You could walk on it alright if you stayed by the edge and I told Peppa not to go out any further than me. We slid along it. Sometimes white jagged cracks suddenly shot out from under our feet and there was a sound like metal hitting on metal. It was
no good for fishing but we slid along it all the way to the end and then Peppa got pebbles and skidded them out along onto it so they spun and shot right into the middle. It was shallow under the ice and you could see the grey and brown pebbles on the bottom, just a few inches below the surface.

  She knelt down on the ice and looked down to the bottom where you see pebbles and the water all clear through the ice. Then she sat and slid along on her bum. She spun herself round and round like the stones. Then she pointed across behind me and said ‘There’s a man.’

  I spun round and a man was coming towards us from the other side of the loch on skis. He was shuffling along and pushing through the snow on a flat bit coming straight up to us. I didn’t know what to do and I started feeling panicky. Peppa sat on the ice watching him squinting up into the sun.

  He got nearer and nearer and we saw he was young and had short blond hair and ski goggles. He was wearing a blue zipper and had white ski gloves and boots. He was puffing and blowing and sending big curls of white breath in front of him. He was grinning with the effort of pushing himself along.

  I didn’t know if we should run or not, but he was almost level with us and he had seen us and what was the point. Then he stopped and pulled the goggles up and let out a big long groan and shook his head so his hair flopped around.

  He was smiling and he shouted over ‘Whoa. Hard work! How are ya?’

  I didn’t say anything. I just stared. Peppa just sat on the ice.

  He nodded at the loch and he was starting to unclip his skis. ‘Frozen pretty solid eh?’ He glanced down at the rock where I’d left the fishing rod and said ‘Not much good for fishing is it?’