Salt

by Jeremy Page

  Goose had hidden Arthur Quail’s great map in the earthenware jar. Hidden it because it spoke of a man she’d found and lost in the space of a few brief months. She never intended that map to be found. She’d already told my mother, and anyone else who asked, that that man’s last known whereabouts was bailing the Pip in the middle of a storm, with Arthur Quail’s great map of the North Sea pinned to the splash deck. Goose would tell us about the cracks that yawned open in the rotten hull, how the gannets swept down to peck his head, push him under, tweak him by the nose - the rising water above the shin, above the waist, above the neck - the thin silent mouth sinking after the boat into the storm, into the dark, into the dogfish jaws, the lobster claws.

  But my mother had found that map in Lane End. And I think about Hands pulling the quilt off the washing line and hoisting it up on the mast of the Pip, and I wonder, why go to sea without a map?

  Did he sail home, or did he hear the screams of Goose’s labour coming from inside the house and was overwhelmed by such panic his dextrous fingers had tied themselves in knots? Thunderstruck with indecision, maybe he’d tried to block out the noise of the woman screaming his name by concentrating his mind on practical work. He sees the upturned hull of the Pip on the lawn next to the mudslide with the patches of repair-work he’s completed a few days before. He wonders whether the pitch has dried. Will it be buoyant? Will its passage through water be smooth? Will displacement levels be affected? The breeze buffets his cheek and he instantly gauges it on the Beaufort scale. Already the sounds of the birth are fading. The quilt stirs on the line. The quilt, the quilt is filling with the wind like a sail. No, surely not, this cumbersome patchwork nonsense, which has spread and spread though those long hard evenings, surely it can’t contain the wind? What is the breaking point of that twine I used? Did I double the thread? And he pulls the quilt along the line out of my grandmother’s restricted sight, pulling the fabric between his hands and examining the hems. His fingers begin to unknot. Just the briefest moment of regret for what he’s about to do: Jeder macht mal eine kleine Dummheit, he says to himself, and he knows he’s absolving all blame too. Then he’s watching the fine silk of the dug-up parachute gathering the air. Fabric like this is spun by the angels. Deutsche angels. When the quilt is hoisted up the mast of the Pip, Hands has lost himself in the beauty of his science. The boat bobs into the water like a cheeky duckling, giddy with life. Yes, just a quick spin into the Pit, it’ll focus my thoughts, get rid of the fallow. I’ll take a rope and practise my knots and then, when I return - just see - I’ll grab that umbilical cord and tie the greatest, tightest knot that’s ever been seen. A knot my child will carry for the rest of its life, and when that child is in the bath, on the beach, dressing for bed, whatever, he or she is going to look down and see that tidy little scar in the middle of their belly and put their finger in and marvel, yes marvel, at their father’s handiwork.

  The ridiculous lengths one can go to clear the family name. Was it the wind’s fault - suddenly picking up in a squall to capsize the boat and send his honourable intentions to the bottom of the sea? Were the fish to blame - did they bite through the hull before he could tack his return to the birth of his child?

  My earliest memory was seeing my mother’s belly-button. My first crawl was to get away from it. As a toddler I was really terrified, pulling my mother’s jumper down when she reached up for the top shelf. Dangling there, elephantine, the double and triple knots grown over with skin. Hands, I’ve no doubt, would have tied a beautiful knot; but what I’ve always seen was nothing more than a really magnificent granny-slip.

  Of that magical sail there is no remnant, no scrap of the scraps that it was made of, no thread of the threads that tied it together. There are no photographs. The only sail is the sail of my grandmother’s stories, much fabricated with the collected junk of the marsh and the sea until it resembled the landscape of North Norfolk: muddy, wooded, sparse in its emptiness, luxuriant in its detail. What became of Hands’s sail remains a mystery. Perhaps it sunk in the sea during the storm that swallowed the Pip. Perhaps Hands, weeping and lost already, dragged it from the mast and wrapped it round himself as the boat took on water in the final minutes, in the middle of the night. And perhaps - imagining all possibilities - that waterlogged man held fast to the wind for a day and a night, navigating by the stars and his own inner sense, tapping the strength of a well-fixed hull until he saw the low, unassuming coast on the other side of the sea, until he lugged the boat out on to the sandy shore. Did he pull the boat into the softly shifting beauty of foreign dunes, the dunes themselves seeming to him like the waves of the German Bight, slowly rolling inland over the years? The sound of the North Sea would gradually fall away, and Hands would wipe the sweat off his brow, as he makes out a lonely figure walking towards him. A small dog trotting with its nose to the ground by her side.

  He would drop the rope and sit, expectantly, on the battered prow of his little boat till the woman came closer, stopping before him. Hands would have gathered together a clump of flowering sea lavender from the dunes, the same plant that grows in the marshes of North Norfolk. He would give it to the woman. The dog would sniff his boots cautiously. He would smile and ask what country it was.

  Later that night, after a simple meal of smoked herring and pickles, Hands would remove his boots and place them neatly at the foot of the bed. He’d drag the salty quilt over the sheets, then turn to the woman and hold her tightly, the dog curled up at his feet.

  In the morning, when the woman would go to harvest the flowers in the polder, Hands would set to work in the house. New shingles for the roof, plane the doorjambs. He’d see another crooked chimney. He’d prise the solid teak splash deck off the Pip and fashion a new washboard for the kitchen; throw the dog’s fraying lead away, and in its place he’d plait a new, stronger tether from the boat’s painter; the rudder he’d make into a weathervane, which would gently steer an imaginary course through the sky, endlessly turning, endlessly restless, fixed in position, without a course to steer, without a hand to guide it, the centre of a new home.

  There are no answers, only questions. Questions and half-truths. The only thing we have is the quilt, living on, not across a bed or up a mast, but in the murk of my grandmother’s mind, extending, as her stories got ever longer, until it reached beyond the cottage door, across the untidy lawn, through the thicket hedges and across the marshes. Where Hands finished my grandmother continued, faithfully taking over the stitching of the quilt, adding pieces and patches, new clauses, new asides over the years until none of us who listened could find our way out. The quilt of her stories assumed monstrous proportions, unrealistic dimensions, until we were all lost at sea along with Hands. The bugger stretched for miles, across the dismal marshes and creeks until eventually it covered the Point and wove itself across the wide sand beach into the chilling froth of the North Sea, and all of us who listened realized that what Goose was talking about was not a quilt or a sail or a man who left her in the agonies of giving birth. She was talking about Norfolk itself.

  4

  The Rag Cloud

  Here they come - two beads of torchlight across the marsh. One held slightly higher than the other, both trained on a ground so thick with mud it seems to swallow the light before it’s fallen. A mother and daughter wearing four coats between them, leaving the cottage to cross the creeks. Goose has her large salt-and-pepper hair bundled up at the back of her head, a variety of pins and sticks to keep it in place. She sleeps in it like that. Her daughter has tied rags into her own hair, over night, so now she has deep brown ringlets that spring up and down as she walks. The ground stinks with damp and the air is knife-sharp with winter. Not much wind, but the marshes are full of quiet expectant rushes of sound. Molluscs and crabs bubble in the creeks, small animals dash for cover. They press onwards as the sky lightens, picking through the mud and crossing the creeks on planks so slick with damp it’s as if the earth is full of steam. And when they reach the place on t
he marsh my grandmother always calls the tuft, they sit down with their collars turned up, and face forward like Easter Island statues.

  There’s some cirrus up there. Feathery and vague, reaching across the whole sky like a heavenly harp. It catches my grandmother’s eye immediately. Breath of the angels, she says. This time of morning it’s poached-salmon pink, but soon it’ll glow as bright as a bridal veil. See that, Lil’, see that cirrus? That come from space, it do, got nothing to do with us. They gaze at the cloud several miles above them.

  Cirrus is not just the milky cataract it seems at first glance. At the right time, at the right angle, vast shapes are in there. No other cloud has the capacity to create such an entire inverted landscape mirroring our own, filled with the dunes, creeks, fields and seas of its own ghostly creation. Goose is clearly in awe of its mystery, its enormity and its completeness, but it is just too far away, too unconnected with the world. She prefers the lower clouds.

  Hair - she says - coo-mulus! And here they are. Her favourite clouds. Ain’t them fat as turkeys! Right char-ac-ters. Mind, got to be patient with clouds, Lil’, they ain’t going to give it away first look, ’specially them fluff balls. Changelings, thass what they is, right clumsy too, they come ’cross the marsh like bumble bees too fat to fly. Never got how they float, they shoun’t be up there. But like bumble bees, she added, you can trust ’em. They don’t tell no lies. Other clouds were far more sly. The strat-o-coo-mulus, said the Norfolk way, for one. Bruise it do, too easy, like bad fruit, an’ worse still, thass a cloud don’t know whether it want to fly high or low - often try both an’ pull apart an’ that serve it right. Al-toe-stratus, plain bad tempered - cover the rest like a carpet. Real bastard that one, ain’t got nothing to say an’ bent on spoilin’.

  She went on. Cap clouds, scared of wind, stratus-fratus as giddy as ducklings, bobbing this way an’ that an’ fannyin’ around, drove crazy by that storm what formed them. Spiss-attus, best seen in first light, alto-coo-mulus baked gold as a piecrust. She was getting excited, beginning to make it up now, had names for clouds others had never seen: trawler clouds, you should see ’em, gal, they pass over a ship out there an’ they turn porn-o-graphic on account of them bored trawlermen’s dirty thoughts. ‘Viking’ clouds, them come from the nor’-east with shallow bases an’ armoured sails, right bristlin’ with trouble. Marl clouds, good for the farmers, bad for the fish. ‘Gannets’ were rafters, fat-bellied an’ fast to fall, an’ then you got leaf-mould an’ beech-nut in autumn, then October onwards, you got you the fungi - flat caps, double ceps, agaric an’ blewit. Proud of all that, she is. I seen scale clouds fall out a mackerel sky, then lissen, ’cause you got all them tidal clouds too, such as the double anvils of high-ebb thunder, full o’ bad luck, and those mysterious low-drain feathers. You got your mash cloud, crumble, sprout, beet, lambchop, liver, steakside, plaiceback and gill.

  ‘OK, Lil’ Mardler?’

  So here comes a cloud, freeing itself from the tangle of trees, heather and gorse from the hill behind Blakeney. Fat, full with rain, a couple of hundred feet above the saltmarsh. Goose’s cloud eye is on it straight, her daughter silent and spellbound by her side. It’s an odd cloud, because - strictly speaking - it doesn’t exist. It’s been created purely for my grandmother’s eyes, and, according to the rules of meteorology, it shouldn’t actually float at all. It’s a small, boisterous fractonimbus known as a rag cloud. Rag clouds play a crucial part in my family’s story. There’s a rag cloud painted on the hull of a boat, and there’s a rag cloud in human form walking across a fen, dressed in heavy waterproofs. They’re always tricksters. This cloud is the savage last breath of a storm. It has broken away from the rest of the nimbus, whipping up the rearguard of a huge deluge, and can do any of a variety of things. While calmer rag clouds disappear, blowing themselves out, knowing when they’re beaten, others are more mischievous; rapidly growing in height and shape and - in true nebula form - they begin to spawn new storms and clouds of their own. This one’s definitely a loner trickster and has never had a storm to follow. It’s low and dark and dense and - to stir things up - is going against the direction of the wind.

  Now Goose knows someone somewhere is playing silly buggers.

  It falls lower till Goose is under its shadow and she can take a good look up its skirts. A single fractonimbus cloud like this can hide little from the canny woman’s eyes. She’s able to turn it inside out, pull it apart, shred it, mix it and send it packing, all in a few moments. But it has a few tricks up its sleeves. She begins with the shape. This one looks like a fishing cuddy at first glance - no, let’s make it a living thing - a goat. I’m tempted to make it the sperm whale, because I’d like to know whether she could have predicted the string of events that happened to me after I saw that shape in a cloud. But no - the legs of the goat are already there. A couple of horns, a stubborn look, a wispy beard. I know she likes goats, and my mother does too, so this is a welcome sight for them. But my grandmother doesn’t waste time admiring.

  This liar cloud has a dark, purplish heart to it and fine white extremities. It’s really cheating now. In the belly of the cloud she quickly sees what it’s hiding. This rag cloud’s chased down many other clouds in its brief, phantom life, and each cloud has left its trace. There’s a wrecked boat in there, a bull, some dough-like sculptures, a Saint painted in icon style. There are some lights also - what looks like a burning bush or a tree on fire, some fireworks against a winter’s sky. Now my grandmother is really scratching her head. I wonder what she might make of it all. I don’t think she’s ever seen a cloud quite like it, not even in the ones when her daughter was born.

  You know - I think she’s stumped.

  While this ugly rag cloud squats on top of her, a line of cumulus fractus rolls down towards her. The sky becomes masked with a fine, milky steam of cirrostratus. Some cumulonimbus, up they waft - giddy and rowdy, jostling to get down there too. Out at sea now, some of that North Sea water whips up into vapour plumes: Folkestone Pillars tower along the horizon like as many demonic chess pieces. Festoon clouds, caught up in the Holkham pines to the west. A thick, depressing winter layer of altostratus - inching eastwards from Cromer. There’s not much sky left! The poor woman and her child are starting to look very small indeed down there on the marsh. And it looks like they’re going to get wet.

  ‘Mum, Mum,’ Lil’ Mardler says, pulling her mother’s arm. The young girl’s getting scared, her eyes are darkening with fear. Tarred by the brush of having a weak mind and worried it might be her inheritance. ‘Mum, I don’t like it!’

  But Goose is doing her best, of course. Working fast. Assessing individual speed, height, internal movement, light, shape and texture. She’s listening to the clouds, hearing all these stories filling her head.

  As a final touch, let’s pull out the stops, man the pumps, check the gauges and pull a thick pea-souper sea-fret from over the Point and cover the whole marsh. Ha! Got you there. The two figures sink into darkness as the mist rolls round them. All those juicy clouds giving away secrets - and you can’t see a thing! There’s several million tons of meteorology up there now - all bristling with thunder as the rag cloud whips up a hell of a storm. Lightning forks viciously on to the marsh and the whole scene smells charged with iron and salt and while you two struggle home to the cottage against a terrible squall, here comes the rag cloud’s rain . . .

  The date when all this is happening - 31 January 1953, and the worst storm and coastal flood in living memory is about to be unleashed on North Norfolk. All the way from the Essex estuaries to the Wash, the North Sea is gathering to leap on the land. Goose and my mother have chucked off their coats and are running to the cottage while the sky takes on an eerie twilight and the sea begins to boil in the Pit behind them.

  When they get to the cottage Goose shouts at Lil’ through the teeth of the wind to go get sandbags and the young girl, not yet eight, runs up the lane and straight into the arms of a man clutching a storm lantern yelling into the w
ind and rain and only when he’s got her tightly in his grip does she see he’s tied to a rope and all round their feet is cold, icy North Sea water. Lil’ Mardler screams for her mother, she thrashes like a fish in his arms, he carries her to the church where the rest of the village are huddled like rags while the men pile sandbags against the doors.

  Goose slams the cottage door against the fury outside and runs straight to the window. Water is blowing vertically across the pane in trembling fingers, while each gust of wind brings with it a stinging shingle of rain. She imagines this is how it looks on a trawler as it pitches through boiling storms off the Dogger Bank, staring through the flat glass of the bridge’s windows while the sea breaks across the bows, windscreen wipers as fast as scissors but doing no good. Everything is dark, and when the lightning flashes there’s no marsh out there, just the angry foam of the North Sea leaping off the backs of waves. It feels like the cottage is already not part of the land any more, but has drifted far out to sea, listing, taking on water.

  Still she tries to read the clouds. Sheet-lightning makes the sky flash like an X-ray, letting her see deep into the storm. She marvels at it. Giant boulders and cliff faces and ice-capped summits tower above her. She thinks of all the storms she’s seen, tries to remember the shapes she saw, the sound she heard in her chimney each time, the smell they left in the air. Because like the clouds themselves, she believes each storm is unique and each storm has a name, a year when it last visited, and a full inventory of all the lost and drowned it has claimed. Goose believes these storms never blow themselves out, but instead drift into some eternal vortex of the North Sea, waiting to return one day. So the storm that hit North Norfolk a thousand years ago, drowning Vikings by the boatful, could return a few hundred years later to add herring fishermen and Dutch traders to its grisly cargo. In her time she claimed she’d heard shouts in Old Norse across the marsh, heard chainmail thrashing in the breakers, had listened to the sickening crack of wood as longboats hit the banks off Blakeney Point. Danish sailors crying like babies in the mist, and she’d smelled their last meal of herring and oats as the galley-pot tipped when the boat went down. She is familiar with all the storms, but as the waves stave in her front door, she’s never known a storm like this.