by Jeremy Page
He stopped halfway across the room, at a half-lean, focusing his gaze in the lethal manner a heron has by the water’s edge. His gun behind him as counterbalance. Then he turned and walked back to the door, his weight entirely on his toes. When he opened the door, the air inside the room shifted like it was one solid object. And as he did this, his murderous face changed to that of my grandmother. His shotgun, her walking stick.
‘What are you looking at?’ she said. ‘Get a jumper on.’
She threw me a dark blue gansey and led me outside. We crossed the marsh, my boots getting heavier with the mud, until we stopped at a small raised bank, which was covered with the scuff marks and litter of someone who spent much of their time there. The sky was vast and cold and luminous. This was the tuft, where she did her cloud watching.
Distantly, Blakeney’s flint walls looked featureless and grey. A few windows shone, and the headlights of a milk float swept calmly across the marsh towards us. A second later we heard its rising electric wail as it climbed the High Street.
Then, as I stared across the great flat shadow of the saltmarshes, there seemed to be ghostly disturbances in its stillness, and I realized two or three figures were walking out along the thick muddied paths. I heard the squelch of their waders and a muted rattle of tools carried in plastic buckets.
‘Luggers,’ Goose said, breaking the silence she and I had had since leaving the cottage. ‘Bait digging.’
As she said this I watched one of the men leave the path and wade straight into the Pit, like Ol’ Norse returning from his night-time prowl. The man’s walk slowed as the water lapped to his waist. The bucket became buoyant behind him and made a sleek fantail of ripples showing his path. After a couple of minutes the water shallowed, and he dragged himself out on to the other side of the channel and soon vanished in the further darkness of the Point’s dunes.
‘Voice out there, on the Point,’ my grandmother said, ‘in the dunes. Ain’t heard nothin’ like it. Ain’t male or female and ain’t a bird neither. There’s stuff out here would make you scream out loud though you ain’t never said nothin’. Every night in the creeks, armies of ’em diggin’ new channels. Creatures with shovels an’ bare backs, I tell you.’ And then she was watching the sky, staring at some wide translucent cirrus, glowing pink in the sunrise. Muttering and nodding like some sideshow fortune-teller as downdraughts pulled the clouds into the giant ribcage of an animal.
‘Stop staring at me,’ she said abruptly. ‘I ain’t crazy. You’re just like him, ain’t you? That one I found buried in the mud.’ She laughed, showing the quirky angled teeth of a madwoman. ‘Thass where the bugger was, up to his neck like a broken shrimp-rake,’ she said, pointing to a featureless strip of mud-bank and sandy shore by the Pit. Back inland I saw a car drive up to Lane End and a man get out. He knocked briefly at the door, cupped his face to the window and then immediately set across the marsh. A more upright walk than my father’s, a poise to it he’d never had, which suggested the likelihood of changing tack at any moment. It made him look untrustworthy.
‘Got an apprentice, Goose?’ He stopped a little way off, deliberately looking at the sky, out across the marsh, then at another lugger making his way through the Pit. ‘Yep. Rain coming.’
‘Juss out disturbin’ terns, Kipper Langore?’
‘Called him. About the lad.’
‘He answer?’
‘Said he weren’t surprised. Been looking all day but weren’t worried.’
‘That fits.’
Kipper gave me a sideways smile and bent down to my height. A crack from his knees. His hands smelled of smoke.
‘Is he comin’?’ she said.
‘No. That OK with you, Pip? Stay with your gran a while?’
Kipper had a thin dark jacket on with the collar turned up. Despite living on the marsh he always looked cold. This early in the morning Kipper’s skin had a pale hue, like the fish he smoked. His nose was sharp and pinched around the nostrils. A gleam across his cheekbones
‘Think I might visit him,’ he said. ‘Well, you know . . . don’t know what’s happening really since . . . I don’t know. Sounded odd. Think he’s giving up and I don’t know we’ll get answers out of this one.’
‘You got enough on your plate,’ she told him. ‘Luggers givin’ you the shoulder.’
‘Yeah, Goose,’ he said irritably, ‘called the hospital last night. They say the kid’s going to a specialist place. Burns and that.’
‘Missed a good meal of samphire.’
My uncle sniffed and looked across at Blakeney and at the chimney of his smokehouse beyond.
‘I’ll show ’em,’ he said, giving a short brittle laugh and looking down at me with a dark-eyed look of sleeplessness.
She never told me what the clouds revealed that first morning. But for the next few days she virtually lived out there, chewing mints and drinking from a flask. She seemed unconcerned with me, as if I’d been living there for years. Make do and be on with it. Hair’s your bed, get you some clothes, and will you stop that lookin’ at me! Just like with Hands as he fell into the same life two generations earlier. She was clearly an oddball. Still, she was my mother’s mother, and the same place and landscape that had formed Lil’ Mardler was now mine, and it felt like home, which was an unusual feeling in itself. But I’m hardly given the time to think, because I hear the sound of Goose’s large casserole pot clanking somewhere near and I know she’s walking out of Lane End with that heavy pot wrapped in her apron and I have to follow. She’s showing me the area and I can’t delay it any longer. I must mention the first time I saw the wreck of the Thistle Dew. And to think that the first time I saw it, I knew nothing of how I’d end up there. Don’t dawdle! she shouts. All right, all right. Yes, I see her quite clearly now, my grandmother, in the late-autumn twilight, a little woman on a long muddy path, boots too big, carrying that warm-smelling pot.
The Thistle Dew had once been a small boat, a cuddy at heart, but surprisingly broad in the beam, washed up on a tideline of briars and scrub no sea had reached since the great storm surge of 1953. Over the years it had been a hideaway, a storeroom and a cow shelter, and seemed to be caught mid-capsize. ‘Cain’t stop sinkin’,’ Goose said, highly amused. ‘That sunk in the Pit, now it keep sinkin’ in mud.’
Behind the wreck was a pile of driftwood, in places higher than the boat itself, giving the impression Bryn Pugh was living on the edge of a bonfire about to be lit. Bryn had left his rented flat in Blakeney to live there fulltime, to avoid rates and noise, and to have his own letterbox. He’d spent the summer laying out a shingle path to the wreck, erecting a bizarre bungalow’s porch, painted THISTLE DEW - pronounced the Norfolk way as This’ll Do - in small, neat letters below the gunwale, and supported the side with some heavy timber braces.
Inside, the lean felt stronger. His table, desk and bed were all propped on legs to compensate, but with one row of port-holes showing sky and the others showing mud you could still feel seasick in there. I’d never heard of Bryn Pugh before, but Goose’s evenings for several years had clearly been spent here; her smoking a pipe and him rolling tobacco, playing draughts and eating soups and stews and bowls of samphire.
He emerges from the piles of offcut wood, sketches, clothes, food, papers and books. His strong suntanned neck and his Clark Gable tache. His banded jersey like a French poet’s and the rope tied as a belt round his waist, giving him the look of a castaway. He pats a dog - a long-haired black-and-tan mongrel called Bramble - lying by the stove with a barrel-chest in the air. Mess surrounds them, and on it he puts his cup of tea. The metal sink’s at a useless angle with a permanent pool of water lapping at the plughole. Thin ply and Formica cover the surfaces and chintzy curtains hang at the windows, held with delicate, feminine bows. Remnants of the boat’s first owners and a woman’s touch long forgotten.
Bryn was working his way through the woodpile, turning a job-lot of oak into beer money at the local art galleries. He made most of his money ca
rving seals for the boat trippers visiting the colony beyond the Point. The money’s in seals, he said, on account of them being log-shaped to start with. Some trees got seals growin’ right out the trunk.
The logs he didn’t carve and the ones carved badly went in the stove, making a dense cosy fog of woodsmoke.
‘So, Goose, what’s in the pot?’
‘Herring gull,’ she says stiffly, ‘caught on the Point with a self-tight-en-in’ fish trace.’
Bryn’s face sinks. He’s partial to tern but the gull, even slow-roasted, is a bastard.
‘Poisoned flesh and a poisoned soul,’ he says. ‘Norfolk vulture.’
I knew she’d been asking around for a gannet, hard to get because it was a rafting bird which never set foot in Norfolk; but the fishermen she’d asked had come back with nothing, were unable to catch such a canny bird, or hadn’t bothered, thinking a witch’s task inappropriate business to take on a boat.
I hear Bryn asking Goose about the approaching firework display and I return to Thistle Dew to see my grandmother pull a large round firework from her string-bag. It’s like a cannonball, with a dull wax-black finish, roughly circular, but obviously handmade.
‘This I call the bollock,’ Goose says matter-of-factly, and the two of them burst out laughing. Bramble thumps the wood with his tail.
‘He’s a good dog that ’un,’ Bryn says, before breaking into song.
‘Shoo all ’er birds you be so black,
When I lay down to have a nap.
Shoo arlo birds.
Hi shoo all ’er birds!’
It goes quiet in the Thistle Dew, Bryn asks about Kipper, and Goose says there’s nothing new.
‘He’s got trouble up to his ears, all right,’ Goose says, ‘them fireworks are driving him half crazy and no one’s buyin’ his fish on account o’ that rubbish with the boy.’
‘It’ll clear up.’
‘Who knows what go on in that smokehouse. Ain’t right, a grown man calling himself Kipper. Been so long I can’t remember he got a real name or not.’
Kipper Langore. He smelled of smoke and fish and he made fireworks and people gossiped about him up and down the coast. Weren’t that smokehouse old Bower’s cattle shed? I ain’t going there as long as I live. That, and he had two faces - how could anyone look so cheerful and open one second, so devious and sharp-edged the next? Slippery as eels, Goose says to me. Mind that one. We’re on our way to Kipper’s house now, following a pool of torchlight trained on the ground, and the lane’s beginning to peter out where the track turns into his yard. A one-storey outhouse, that’s where he lives. A big lounge and a couple of bedrooms and not much else. Then across the scrub lawn there’s the chimney of the smokehouse itself, sticking out of the marsh like a dirty finger, built in old red brick with a thick barn door calloused in black tar and a veil of smoke clinging to its front. And behind the chimney on the other side of the smokehouse, the glass-fronted conservatory where he designs and builds his fireworks, known simply as the Lab.
Kipper Langore’s standing on the lawn in the dusk, bags loaded with fireworks by his feet. He’s dressed up in a suit and has his hair damped down with oil.
‘You ready?’ he says.
‘Drink first,’ she replies, walking past him into the house.
The house is dark and empty, with a long corridor which opens into the large sitting room. Goose goes straight to a decanter and pours herself something from it into a mug. Behind her, Kipper makes an annoyed hah sound and snaps on the light, then stands impatiently in the middle of the room, under its shade. He seems taller in there, under the tasselled shade of the light. A man who naturally stoops in inside spaces.
‘They ain’t happy you doin’ the display this yair,’ Goose says.
‘Like they’ve got a choice, right?’ he says back, grinning. The room seems endless in its shadows and corners, fragrant with the smell of fires and of the logs by the fireplace. There’s a hint of fish too, subtle and penetrating, easily brought in and hard to remove.
‘Why d’you want to wind people up all the time?’ Goose says, getting irritable with Kipper’s stiff presence in the middle of the room. He lets out a sigh and looks towards Goose, aware that he’s under the scrutiny of the light and she’s in the dark by the window.
‘You finished?’ he says.
Goose puts the mug down.
‘Then let’s go,’ he says.
I’d been there a couple of months, and this was Nor’ Sea Night, the most important date in their year. At Blakeney a crowd was collecting on the quayside, which was slightly darker than the marsh itself, a torch threading its way between the coats here and there. Behind them, on the car park, a boat had been filled with driftwood and was being set alight.
Kipper went ahead and we saw him moving fast round the blaze, closer to the flames than anyone else, his face reddened and waxy with excitement like a child’s. The shadow played tricks with his features as the firelight flicked across his face. Sometimes hollow-eyed and as long as a knife, sometimes wide and full with happiness - it seemed both of his faces were there, in the same instant, fighting a duel. The smoke began to bend and topple above the fire and then swing in a scything eddy across the ground. As the crowd ducked back, only my uncle braved it out, oblivious to it, before he emerged dragging a log, coughing and grey-faced, the smoke following him out as if it didn’t want to let him go. The smoke was trying to claim him, even then.
But for the moment this really was his fire. A man who lived in smoke, whose house stank with layers of fish and burning charcoal. This was his life, and this, as he sprang in and out of the flames, his element.
As I watched this shivering crowd I had a growing sense of the logics of the marsh and of those who lived along its soggy edge. In the main they were mistrustful of the saltflats and of anyone who spent their life on them - such as my grandmother and Kipper or Bryn Pugh in his wreck. The villagers had cars and travelled inland, listened to weather reports rather than studying the clouds, watched television with shuttered windows rather than noticing when the wind veered or backed, knew nothing of spirits or storm ghosts or mythical quilts. Realists, all of them. Practical, hardworking and friendly. They buttoned up their jackets and leaned into the winter weather and laughed in doorways when geese tried to lead their brood down the High Street in spring. Bryn had been one of them once, but he’d found the only real life for him was on the marsh. Likewise, my grandmother and Kipper and Lil’ Mardler - perhaps my whole family - belonged out there. Marsh people. They were connected with the landscape in a way the others would never be. Made by it and made a little crazy by it, and the villagers knew it all right. Every once in a while these two worlds would rub too closely against each other, and this had happened recently, in Kipper’s firework Lab, when a boy had put green powder where there should have been blue. A flash, a burned arm, and then the added slight that my uncle didn’t seem to care. Kipper had been banished, openly disapproved of, marginalized further, and the business he kept was strangled at source. Hain’t got a good word for that ’un. The fishermen had refused to sell him their catches, fearing their wives more than their loss of income. Them pots go to Sheringham, you got that, Jonny Boggis? But one by one they would return, selling their catch and putting his money deep in their pockets. My uncle’s fish would be back in their kitchens, and his smoke would drift through their houses. He’d be in control, once again, and they could do nothing about it.
And with his finger on the trigger he lights the first fuse. A thin whoosh, which turns the crowd to look over the marsh. There he is, with Goose behind him, glowing tapers in their hands. Don’t be hasty, old gal, I imagine he says, crouching by a row of rockets. Like we planned it, right? Hot gusty flares of orange and red leap out of drainpipes buried in the mud, while white flashes spark along a length of clothesline curving by a creek. All those evenings Kipper’s spent in his study, an Ordnance Survey map of the saltmarshes in front of him, drawing his design in a pool of lamp
light. Hair go, you bastards, he mutters, a thin-lipped smile curling up at the edges of his mouth like the line of a child’s drawing. Lock up your pets. The crowd seems uneasy with the closeness of the explosions and the surprising glows of vapours rising from nearby pools. Goose has poured a jerrycan of paraffin out there, and the marsh is glowing with the blue-hearted spirits of her stories.
Now the bangs and fizzes grow as both figures work faster and faster in the smoke. Rockets spring wildly from the ground, firing in all directions, changing speed mid-flight and tumbling back to earth suddenly. Watch it! a man shrieks, as a shard of burned casing thuds off his coat. He stamps it on the ground as someone shouts shit! there’s children hair! and the fireworks march closer like an enemy barrage finding their range. Something whizzes dangerously near, parting the crowd like a hornet, before tunnelling angrily into the grasses. More things spit furiously at the ground, unable to lift from the mud and dying where they started. You gotta nerve, Kipper Langore, someone says, pissed-up on beer and excited as a bomb fizzes into the creek off the quayside. Missed! he shouts and someone tells him to shut the hell up it ain’t no laughing matter. But Kipper’s laughing all right, out there, chucking fistfuls of firecrackers at Goose, making her hop and dance, and her laughs come across the marsh like the cry of a gull in a snare. And a row of fireworks shoot up, leaving a dotted line of blue flashes like the bells of a foxglove. A foxglove - no, it’s not that, it’s a delphinium - one of the tall blue ones in my mother’s garden. A row of six, in a line. The ghostly blue flashes of delphinium petals and beyond them the red-hot pokers. Rockets leaping out of a dark fenland lawn. Clouds of gunpowder smoke, drifting across the grass like the rolling bushes of her gypsophila.