Salt

by Jeremy Page

  ‘You sleep?’ he says

  ‘Not sure.’

  ‘Hear the foxes? Going for it, weren’t they? Han’t heard foxes like that for ages.’

  Lil’ looks vaguely where she thought the foxes had been calling from, looks back, looks directly at Shrimp to gauge his mood.

  ‘Are we still in Norfolk?’

  Shrimp laughs at her and, because the sun’s rising higher now, he points out the Fens to her.

  ‘That’s Lincolnshire.’

  Below them, four small villages were lifting out of the soil, the sunlight slick on the wet tiles of the roofs.

  ‘The Saints them villages are called, Lil’. Wiggenhall St Germans, Wiggenhall St Mary the Virgin, Wiggenhall St Peter and Wiggenhall St Mary Magdalen. It’s called the Saints here, everyone knows it as the Saints. It’s all ours - and I don’t want to be called Shrimp no more. I was christened George, and so I’m George now.’

  ‘George,’ she whispers to buoy his spirits. She’d like to be called May, she wants to leave Lil’ behind, but she feels this is his moment to feel right about himself, so she says nothing.

  Armies of tractors are beginning to crawl into the fields, ploughing, pushing, dragging and sifting the soil as if obsessed with levelling the land.

  And Lil’ asks again, ‘But are we still in Norfolk?’

  George puts his arm round her, feels the dew in the blanket wrapped round her shoulders, and leads her inside.

  Yes, it was still Norfolk. Norfolk’s broad in the beam, full of soft fields and quite up to thwarting an escape. But they nearly made it.

  During that first morning the details of George Langore’s plan were outlined. Using some connection dug up in his great-uncle’s farming past, and his own reputation for understanding bloodstock of all kinds, a position of gamekeeper-cum-stockman had been created at the Stow Bardolph Estate, a mile away. With it came this tied farm-cottage, three small outbuildings, a pigsty, animal pen, hen loft and lawn, part of which was laid out as a vegetable patch. For the past seven years it had been tenanted by Harold Flott, gamekeeper, who’d been known as a lazy farmer. Lazy and filthy. Year on year the estate’s pheasant stock had dwindled, escaped, fought itself in pre-shooting battles and pecked mercilessly at Flott’s ankles so that when the call was raised and the beaters marched, only the occasional wild, startled, feather-ragged pheasant took wing. Flott had left the house with a cup of tea still made and ready to drink and the crumbs of his midday snack on the table.

  Lil’ listened to all this as she lay on a couch drifting in and out of sleep. George talked nervously about pheasant rearing, training, pen design and bloodstock heredity till her eyelids finally fell with accepted weariness. George, at last silenced by the deep breathing of his patient, tucked the blanket round her, and stepped out into the milky morning sunlight of the yard. He did what any man would do: went straight to the sheds to sort the machinery, stocks, junk and rubble, eyeing what was useful, what should be salvaged, repaired, sharpened, tied, folded, turned and burned.

  At midday a grey Ford truck drove into the yard and a tall man in his seventies climbed out. A suit of fine worsted wool, leather boots polished like conkers. His companion, a plump, friendly woman, stayed in the passenger seat, cleaning the inside of the windscreen with a small flowered handkerchief.

  George came out when he heard the car, and both men leaned against the warm brick wall of the pigsty. Occasionally one or the other dragged his foot in the dirt, picked at the grass and moss that grew in the mortar, or looked speculatively at the cottage, the other outbuildings and the fields beyond. All this while the woman stayed in the car, until the heat of the day made her wind the window down, and George’s new employer took his cue and got back in.

  A few hours later, a pickup arrived, and two men jumped down from the back and swung some groceries, milk and eggs, blankets, wood and a few laying hens into the yard. From inside the cab, one of the men pulled out a used Gallyon & Sons Purdey side by side 12-bore and put it in George’s outstretched hand, along with several boxes of cartridges. It was a heavy gun with a butt of English walnut and an etched insignia of pheasants and geese taking wing along the stock. George breached it several times, looked appreciatively down the polished files of its barrels, then, with a nod to the other men, went into the house and stood it against the sideboard in the breakfast room, where it would stay for the next eighteen years.

  Some time in the ashes of the afternoon Lil’ stirred, climbed off the couch and stumbled into the breakfast room, the imprint of a badly frayed cushion on her cheek. Perhaps she stubbed her toe on the gun leaning against the sideboard. Possibly the afternoon’s heat made her curious belly-button itch, and so she stood there, scratching it at the window, listening to the sounds of George moving rusty metal about in one of the sheds. The image of Lil’ standing by the grimy window rubbing her belly seems to fit with things I learned many years later about her. But all that is to come. She stands there, in her olive-coloured button-through shirt-waister dress, staring at four laying hens that had been left in a net in the yard, all of them with their beaks parted in the hot afternoon sun, and then beyond the hens she sees George, dirty George, with his shirt torn and grease down his arm and dust in his hair and a big grin on his face and two very dead and well-hung pheasants strung up and held in his right hand.

  It soothed her to rip the feathers off the birds. She plucked them at the kitchen table, listening to the feathers tearing from the skin like plasters from a wound. The down settled softly on to the tiles, and when she went for a bowl the room seemed to come alive as they stirred round her feet. She watched them settle again, then she crouched and blew delicately across the tiles. The feathers charged up in a rolling wave towards the yard and she kept them in the air, blowing and wafting them and with sudden dizziness she breathed life into that miserable house, sweeping the man’s dark smell into the attic, the under-stairs cupboard, the corners, replacing it with the warm roast of pheasant, the tang of apple sauce and a creamy mash of potatoes and swede. Silverfish were washed down the sink, out went the boxes of tinned vegetables and corned beef. Out went the empty bottles of beer, the rusty tin-opener, the broken-tipped bread knife, the countless mugs without handles. Stale tobacco leaves were bagged-up, the range de-greased and rubbed down. Kettle descaled. The tines were straightened on forks, the knives sharpened. Plates polished till their rims shone like smiles.

  They ate in the yard using their fingers rather than the former tenant’s cutlery, gazing at the traps with their rusty open jaws. We don’t want them looking at us. Bad omen, George says. Shall I chuck them? she asks, half putting the plate down to show she wants to help him, and he says best not to, you never know, and leaving the traps he turned to the rest of the junk and built a fire, turning all that misery into hot brilliant flames, powdery ash and thick smoke, which couldn’t tarnish the gorgeous cerulean blue of a late-summer sky.

  What a beautiful fire. The first of the fires - for there will be several more: boats set alight; an elm tree; a hen coop with all its secrets; the festivals of fire on the Norfolk marshes, which always conjured trouble; the fire Kipper Langore harnessed in his fireworks; and the smoke he used to cure his fish. My family’s story is of fire in one hand and smoke in the other. Fire to destroy and smoke to preserve.

  Often, inexplicably, Lil’ woke to find herself standing on the back lawn in the middle of the night, escaping some dark shadow of that house, or in the morning, when George had breezed off to the estate, she might find herself frozen at the kitchen sink, watching soap suds drip one by one from her hands. Sometimes she might catch her reflection in the newly polished curve of a soup spoon, and in it she’d see a life bent beyond recognition for her. As the autumn nights drew in, Lil’ rarely got out, whereas George had fallen into the new life at the estate with real gusto. Like the enthusiastic Hands in 1944, George had found plenty to fix and plenty of inclination to do it. Pheasant stock for the Boxing Day shoot had to be laid down. New pens to
be built, new feeding runs and fox traps staked out. Pig and cattle bloodstocks had been assessed, charted and examined. Ill or weak animals had been sent to the knacker’s yard at Downham Market. New animals had been bought at Lynn and a prize Red Poll bull purchased at Norwich.

  George became a success at the estate, sometimes coming home with his hat full to the brim with fresh eggs, or carrying a whole smoked leg of ham. There were tales: ’bout this pig he gets himself stuck in a fen-bog and we gets this rope on him but the only thing gets him out is seeing this sow eat carrots, boy he move. Or the business of digging a star-shaped trench round the roots of a tree and dragging it, leaves ’n’ all, into a new hole so now he gets a good view from his library, see? How they might still have to cut ice from a lake come winter; how so-and-so had turned up in an Austin Healey sports car; practical jokes played on a cook who hated touching fish and she scream and chase this lad he turn pale as a sheet ’cause of a knife she’s still got in her fist! Other jokes done on a lazy farmhand; how they’d caught a poacher in the Saints by marking some birds. Red-handed, Lil’, no two ways about it. It was a world which existed only in the evenings for her, listening while she passed a steaming plate of food to him - a man often too busy talking to eat - and it was a world from which she was totally excluded. She received no visitors, had no phone calls.

  ‘That’s the lot, I reckon,’ George says. He’s in a hide of wicker and branches and all around him is the smell of gunpowder. He pulls his earplugs out and grins at the old boy who’s breaching the gun. The stock is hot to the touch and the old man wears soft kid-leather gloves.

  ‘Mind if I take ’em?’ George says, ‘get ’em fixed up?’ And he vaults the hide screen and walks out into the decoy shoot. He doesn’t like walking out there, into the field, with all the dead bodies of the birds scattered across the earth. It’s like the air has turned poison and the guns might still be pointing at him. Around him the retriever runs in excited dashes across the furrows of the field, breathing heavily, sneezing with the dirt, rolling head over the bodies of the birds then gathering them softly in his jaws.

  ‘Gull,’ George says, encouraging the dog he’s just bought from a neighbouring farm not to embarrass him. A young dog. With age comes loyalty. Keep lifting those birds gently. That’s it. And while Gull brings the birds in, George picks up the ruined decoys.

  He put the decoys on the kitchen table. Painted drab brown and shot so often that parts of their bodies were missing, were burned, or were so peppered with lead bore their flanks had a dull metal shine. Painting those decoy birds occupied Lil’ through that first winter. Beaks might have blown away with the force of the blasts, and she’d gently carve a new replacement and glue it in place. Lead shot was picked from the wood with tweezers and she’d fill the holes with gesso, then sand the whole body. She gave the birds a general undercoat, then began to paint on the feathers, layer upon layer of acrylic, until they began to glow with colour. The purple blue of the mallard’s chest, the fiery red and gold of the pheasant’s neck.

  A week or so later, the birds would come back, riddled with shot, beaks shattered, heads blown away. It never upset her. She ran a field hospital, recarving pieces of wood and gluing them back. With a fine brush she’d repaint the feathers, going over paint she’d already applied and then adding more feathers till her new repairs joined up with the old and the bird was complete and ready to send to the shoot once more.

  No one saw her that winter. And six months after they’d arrived, Lil’ was admitted to the Quaker Cottage Hospital, Emneth Hungate. The hospital had a small capacity to treat paediatric, orthopaedic, maternity and geriatric patients in four wards, plus three rooms set aside for psychiatric rest, and it’s in one of these where they put her. Away from the unfriendly house and the long, isolating winter, to be laid out between the crisp white sheets of a cottage hospital bed. A bed close to the window, overlooking the barren void of the Lincolnshire Fen.

  Where that hospital was is now part of a large broad field growing rape in late spring, in Marshland Fen between Rands Drain and the Middle Level Main Drain. A row of slender poplars borders the field on two sides and a row of electricity pylons strikes across the sky at a diagonal. When the wind eases, it’s possible to hear the hum. The hospital vanished, and with it my mother’s stay there could so easily have been hushed up, had it not been for a loose comment made by Ethel Holbeach, whom we’re about to meet. I was eight at the time and Ethel and Lil’ were cutting delphiniums in front of Elsie and myself. Ethel mentioned Lil’’s illness and her voice tightened on the last syllable, trying to snip the thought along with the flower. But by then it was too late. She’d let the cat out of the bag. And Ethel Holbeach, whose starched white apron had marched down the hospital’s corridors that winter Lil’ was there, she knew it all.

  Sometimes, when I want to be with Lil’ again, when I want to return and have a few private moments with her, I conjure up the image of her in that hospital room. Alone, preoccupied, her head facing the window. The sound of the poplars shivering outside. She’s still sixteen. At night the bewildering smells of the fen drift in through the window, reminding her how far from home she is. The dark, decaying rot of cabbage leaves, woody scents of turnips and the sickly tones of beet, the sweetness of carrots. The close, watery smell of freshly cut soil. I regard this bleak, sterile hospital room as a special place, a place where I may always find her, those deep brown eyes wet and unreflective, an arm outstretched towards me - the child she was to love.

  About three weeks later George turned up in his car, and helped Lil’ into her seat. By the shape of her back as she climbs into the car I can tell her heart’s been broken. A son knows his mother’s back like no other. I imagine they drove home in a silence made by the unfamiliarity of being together again. And though the road was straight - relentlessly straight - George is there wishing there’s a quicker way to cross Marshland Fen. He’s staring too far ahead; she’s staring too close for comfort. As they pass Wiggenhall St Mary the Virgin, Lil’ sits low in her seat, hiding her face from the casual glances of people she’s never met.

  George makes a miserable cup of tea for her when they arrive back, the sense of real panic in his mind as he realizes he may not be able to cope with this woman in this house. Then the way he hangs his head when she approaches him, when she walks past him, dreamlike, with the hot mug of tea burning her hand, though she’d never notice, and going upstairs to the bedroom where she removes a blanket and makes a bed in the spare room for herself.

  That was Easter, 1962. The year left little trace, bar a photograph taken in October, of the same year. The date is written on the back. When I imagine that period in their lives, I see them always alone, moving about that strange little house like a couple of dispossessed spirits. And that’s why this photograph seems so odd, because, in fenland terms, it’s full of people.

  The photo is taken on the steep grass bank of the Great Ouse. To the left of the image the calm water stretches into the distance, and on the right, above the high flood bank of the river and looking like it’s sunk into the fen, is the dark tower of the church of Wiggenhall St Peter. It’s a sunny late afternoon and the group are all dressed up and dressed for warmth. Some lie in the long uncut grass like it’s a summer picnic, others stand, leaning against the steep slope. It looks like a curious fenland outing, but on closer inspection things don’t add up.

  Lil’ Mardler, right in the centre, holding a small posy of late-summer dahlias. Her hair’s pulled up in the beginnings of a beehive hairstyle. George, by her side, feels it’s right to stand though it looks like he may pitch into the river if he’s not too careful. He’s raising a flute of sparkling wine with the gesture of a man not used to such a delicate glass and he seems to be urging the others to raise theirs too. Behind him, his brother, Kipper, from Blakeney, looking impatient and wry at the same time. Not one for photographs. Next to George’s feet is Gull, younger looking than I ever remember, playfully chewing a slipper he’s eit
her found in the river or he’s brought from home. Behind them and further up the slope are other faces I remember from the Stow Bardolph Estate. Martha the cook, in a straw hat with pheasant’s feathers in the band, those skinny farm lads playing the fool. I look quickly for the other woman, but don’t see her young face and, anyway, she’s not on the scene yet. The only person obviously missing is Goose, and maybe it’s that that I see in Lil’’s eyes.

  Of the whole group, only Lil’ and Kipper look directly into the camera. All the others are caught up with the clumsy toast George seems to be organizing. It looks like the wine’s going to spill from his glass. Lil’ looks calmly into the lens, the corners of her mouth have a haunting, beautifully down-turned look, the angle of her head a resigned pose. She’s there in body alone. Behind her, Kipper Langore seems to have a similar look of distance. The look of a man already wanting to get on with other business. The clue is in her hands. In her right she has the posy, on the fourth finger of her left hand, a posy ring. This is George and Lil’’s wedding day, if you can call it that.

  A small occasion, held at the church of Wiggenhall St Peter a few feet behind the riverbank. As is traditional there, the bride arrives by boat. On this occasion it meant Lil’ had to clamber into a borrowed rowing boat at the sluice gate half a mile upriver and be rowed down to the church. I imagine she sat in the stern, watching the church looming up on her right behind the bank and the faces of people who if anything were nearly all George’s friends. Even in marriage she seems alone.

  After the picture was taken George lifts his newlywed wife through a cloud of confetti and stumbles precariously into the boat. With little ceremony and a lot of fuss he staggers about the little boat - now rocking in the water with the combined weight of the married couple - until he dumps his wife safely back in her seat and, still standing, begins to fumble with the rope. Someone shoves the boat out with a foot and George splashes around with the oars, spinning the boat and splashing Lil’ because it causes a laugh and the boat drifts off down the river and those on the shore hear a lot of muttering and giggling from the boat until eventually he gains control of the rowlocks and begins to row back past the church. More confetti’s thrown as they pass again and someone throws a half-full bottle of sparkling wine, which misses the boat and begins to drift off down to the Wash.