by Jeremy Page
My mother’s flower garden and the firework display were one and the same, down to the clumps of pansies burning in the marsh and the bowers of sweet peas dripping their flames. These two women had choreographed them together.
‘Give it to ’em,’ my uncle whispers in my ear, and the great round shot of Goose’s bollock leaps darkly into fifty or sixty feet of air, before exploding in a bumping sound, which shakes the windows of Blakeney and Cley. The display is over.
Afterwards I stayed till the fire had burned to its core, revealing the rowing boat’s bones, just like the Mary Magdalene when it had burned in the yard. I smelled the damp ground as it dried. Stars rippled through the thermals as though suspended in a heavy, clear liquid. All around it seemed the blaze had purified the air. The few people who hadn’t left for the Albatross Inn stared into the softly crumbling embers, tracing hypnotic glows crawling through the remains of a fire, finding sudden shapes and faces and scenes they recognized in the ever-changing patterns of ash and light.
With sudden energy something caught deep in the embers, and a pall of greasy smoke rose into the air. The soul of the Mary Magdalene, I thought. Through it, the emptiness of saltmarsh stretched flat for miles. And then, close by the fire on the other side, I saw a vision of my father, leaning to one side with his arms crossed. Looking straight at me. Again smoke wafted through the milky air above the fire, and I waited for him to disappear. But he remained, the wobbling vision of his body more solid than ever before, standing like he’d done by all the fires: the bonfire of rubbish he’d pulled out of the sheds when they’d first moved to the Saints, the sad buckling shape of the Mary Magdalene, the diseased elm tree’s brilliant fountain of light, the blaze of the hen-coop.
He lifted his arm in greeting, wearily, and in my pocket my fingers curled round his stolen razor, tracing the engraving of the charging bull carved into the handle.
Goose appears off the marsh and walks straight past my father. He doesn’t exist in her eyes, but she knows not to get involved. She comes up to me and says I ain’t never gonna speak to that man again, and she holds my hand to make me listen. Her skin feels gritty and dry and there’s a dangerous gleam in her eyes. But it’s best you hear him out, she says. Don’t do nothin’ though. Don’t you do nothin’.
She heads off for the Albatross and my father comes round the fire.
We sit in his car looking over the darkness of the saltflats. The air freshener’s still stuck to the dashboard, like a dried fungus. He’s been drinking. I can smell it on his breath and his clothes and he’s sitting slumped in his seat, his pale blue eyes looking out there at something.
‘These marshes, ain’t nothing like them anywhere. Ain’t no light out there but there’s this glow, ain’t there? Glow over the Point, and once you know this place that’s all you need.’
He’s full of talk. His hands look heavy and useless on the steering wheel. He has farmer’s hands, at last.
‘Don’t know whether you’ve been to the Hansa yet, but you should. She’s an old boat now, about sixty years maybe, left up there on the high tidemark. That’s the wreck, you know, the one where your granddad spent his days, to get shot of the old girl. Used to wade over there and sit in the sun and carve the wood. All sorts of things he carved in there with the tide going in and out the boat.
‘Me and Kipper and your mum used to go there. Just sit and fish and chuck stones and that. You know, there ain’t no reason for me to tell you all this. I ain’t going to make sense of nothing.’ He gave a brief, half-hearted chuckle.
‘I ain’t never got on with Goose, but she’s got a big heart. Used to right scare me when I was a kid, round here. All them years ago. Suddenly it don’t seem - you know - it’s like it’s all happened to someone else. First time I saw your gran I was up there on a gate by the five-acre, blabbing my eyes out. Field up there. ’Cause I’d got to kill this calf in the morning, you know, the next day, and I couldn’t see no easy way of doing it. Never killed squat before, and I guess that’s why they was making me do it. So here comes your gran, all covered in mud, and she says - your gran, that is - told me get her the tongue and think nothing more. First time in my life I never slept a wink all night and I still think about it since.’ He sat quiet for a while, nibbling the skin by the side of a finger.
‘Look, lad, it’s all gone wrong and all that, but it ain’t too late. Mum was ill, you know. Used to say weak in the head, if you get me. But I don’t reckon that’s it. She just couldn’t cope and that ain’t nothing wrong, you hear. Some can’t do things like others. It’s sad but there weren’t nothing we could’ve done. She went off. That’s all. Just, sort of, just had to go. I knew that all right the day I came chasing after you lot across the Fens. Down Bedlam Fen. I knew it then . . .’
Suddenly I’m in the bull-pen at the Stow Bardolph Estate, the sound of my father’s low calm words threading between shadows and sunlight. Dust motes stirring as the bull swings his great head. I hear the heavy stumble of those hooves on the dirt floor, and just once, the sight of the bull’s pink eye looking directly at me. Me, up on the ledge by the windows. My father’s voice, speaking through the shadows, calming, quelling, defusing a natural rage.
In the car now, my father falling silent, listening with a practised ear, trying to second-guess his strange child, stretching his arm again and now pulling the bull’s head to one side as he brings his voice once more to the great ear.
‘. . . truth is, I ain’t cut out for looking after you. Whenever you want you just turn up at the Saints and I’ll bake you a cake and all that. But it’s best off you stay here. Here with your gran and Kipper. ’Specially him. All right? Don’t believe nothing you hear about him, OK? There ain’t no truth in any of it. Give you a job someday. And with your gran - just don’t take no notice of all that cloud shit.
‘I ain’t pretending nothing happened but we got to go on, you know, you’re so young and sometimes I don’t even remember what it was like your age. How I felt and all that. But thing is, you’ll grow up and know how I feel now, someday. I ain’t saying you got to know now, just that some time, you will . . .’
The bull shakes its weary head, and my father’s flung back on his heels against the wall. Dust falls from the bricks, and he looks up and gives me a brief, reassuring grin. He goes to the bull again, digging his fingers deep into the thick curls of hair across its head and I see the bull calm, and I feel once more the touch of my father’s hand as he ruffles my own hair in the dark corridor of the farmhouse. Vaguely, I trace the outline of the bull and know it’s a drawing I made when I was seven, on to the wallpaper of the farmhouse, and as the drawing fades, I’m standing there once more in the corridor. My father, at the end, silhouetted against the window, the feel of his switchblade razor deep in my pocket. The charging-bull insignia on its handle. I remember the fantasy I had of running at him, watching the gleaming silver fish of the sharp razor in front of me, and I know this is the time to use it and I hope my father will quickly leave, because I can’t face much more of this.
‘. . . ain’t never known. Maybe you’ll turn out right. Your gran says it’s all in the sky and maybe it is, but it ain’t done her no good so don’t think that’s the answer. Just remember she’s a tough ’un, that woman, and she hurt your mother before anyone, before anything.’
He looks at me and gives me the smallest of nods. I open the door and feel the sharp cold of the winter air collect me, strengthening me as I step out and push the door shut. My father, inside, looking trapped behind the glass and leaning awkwardly over the seat where I was sitting, trying to say something to me. I weaken to it, fumbling for the door handle, suddenly anxious to hear what he’s saying, and when the door opens again, a thin yellow light goes on and he’s smiling apologetically at me.
‘You have to slam it,’ he repeats.
For a while I watched his car as it sat all by itself on the edge of the marshes. I couldn’t see what he was doing inside. Eventually I heard him turning the ca
r’s ignition. Four, five times. I listened to the silences between each time he tried, imagining him counting under his breath like he used to at the farm. Counting to thirty before he tried again. Habits are the last things to change.
When I’d reached twenty-five, I heard him try again, the engine fired, and he drove off.
There was a cloud over the saltmarshes. The moment I saw it I knew it was a rag cloud. While I watched, it began to change, spinning like candyfloss around the stick until there it was - the exact shape of a whale. A great sperm whale, turning slowly on to its side and spouting its last, giant breath. Riding on its back, two figures in the moonlight.
14
Saints and Sinners
It’s an overcast winter day, the saltmarsh looks the same as the sky, as grey as old farm tools, heavy and hard-hearted. I’m ten, and it’s my first visit to the Hansa. I’m in a thick parka walking along the Point by the water’s edge. As I walk closer the wreck seems smaller than I’d imagined and strangely warped at the bow; the tides of the North Sea have over the years put its nose out of joint. The wood’s black as oyster shells with winter weather, and a dark oily stream flows out through the hole in its hull. The wheelhouse has sagged on one side, but most of the deck is still there, and rising from the centre I see for the first time the broken mizzenmast covered with Hands’s intricate carvings.
The second I’ve hauled myself on it I lie on the sloping deck - the only thing in miles of saltmarsh and water that isn’t utterly level - and I think this is my boat, the famous Hansa, which has wrecked itself into the stories of three generations of my family. The mast is amazing. At its base Hands had carved a pot-bellied, snub-nosed whale, with a great Machiavellian grin on its face. Above it, the cruel eye of a sea bird, and then half-formed marsh spirits climbing like ivy towards the flames my mother had once described to me on a bright April day on the grassy bank of the Twenty Foot Drain: St Elmo’s fire, see, clings to a mast before the storm. All those waves and creatures and things of the North Sea, he carved it all there on the Hansa.
That day in the Fens she’d described all the carvings of the wreck, but as I remembered it, the flames were the top of my mother’s mast. So why hadn’t she mentioned the carving I saw above it now? That of a man in a little boat, reaching up to something that had either never been carved, or had broken off in some winter storm. It was the figure of Hands himself, jostling on the North Sea in the tiny Pip.
The soft gurgle of water, the popping of mud, the calm moat of the Pit round the boat on nearly three sides - it is a special place. Hands knew it, spending his days here, avoiding my grandmother, looking to the horizon with a dreamy expression, keeping his knife sharp with a whetstone. And Lil’ Mardler too, coming to sit and trace her finger over the carvings and picture the man who’d done them. Even those Langore brothers had a feeling for the place - swimming across the Pit like a couple of pirates - trying to out-swim each other, trying to impress the girl they’d found so abandoned.
A gull lands like a sack of stones on the hollow wood - gripping the rail with metalled claws and staring with a soul full of hate. I think of my father and of the dreamer-boy he’d once been. Out here, on the wreck, alone with the birds. A boy close to slitting his own throat rather than kill the calf he’d reared. A boy who’d grown out of the saltmarsh under the same vast sky, gaining an unnatural ability to connect with animals, understand them, know what they wanted.
At some point he’d changed. Bidding for the Mary Magdalene at auction, yes, he must have been a dreamer then. But the dead-hearted marshman dressed in oilskins rising from the mud and storm of Bedlam Fen was a different man entirely. At some point he’d chosen to turn his back on his ill wife and mute child, chosen to lock the study door, chosen to joust improperly with the wrong fondue stick and chosen to burn, burn everything, boats and coops and the dreams he’d once had.
These North Norfolk saltmarshes, they make you dream all right, and they were unlocking something in me. I was beginning to see things from a new perspective, connecting the stories and half-stories my family have long been dragging out of the mud here. I could feel it welling up in me like a tide, persistent and stealthy. I felt the little miracle long before it happened - but the day it happened started there, not on the Hansa, but on the marsh, in the glowing whiteness of a sea-fret. It was cold and damp and I was listening to Bryn Pugh’s song coming through the mist . . .
‘There once were a lass, she were a funny-lookin’ lass,
A swimmin’ off-a Crom-er . . .
An’ there’s me up on the sand
Wi’ me crabline in me hand.
Thass for being a roamer.
‘ ‘‘I in’t ashamed that my face look like a plaice,’’
Is what this gal were sing-in’,
Wi’ a voice what bruk the flints
Which ha’ scared me ever since,
Thass for never liss-ning.
‘Then along come a boat wi’ ol’ Frank dressed in his coat,
An’ says she in’t for sa-vin’,
He puts a hook right through her lip,
An he reel her in right quick,
Thass for miss-behavin’.
‘Foll-I diddle-I, foll-I diddle-I,
Thass for miss-behavin’.’
... and I can’t help but be there, in the thick fog of the sea-fret, third behind Goose and Bryn on the raised path. Their coats look bulky and grey and beyond them the marsh is glowing with a milky strangeness, which has made the air too quiet. Goose is as nervous as a horse.
‘Foll-I diddle-I, foll-I diddle-I,
That’s for miss-behavin’.’
‘Pip!’ Goose says, urgently, breaking the spell. ‘Don’t you look too hard out there in that fog. I seen shafts o’ light and it’s got my hackles up. This ain’t nothin’ more than a cloud we’re in right now - cloud can’t float no more so it’s down hair on the ground.’
We walk into Blakeney, which looms out of the mist like a lost island. The streets are dripping and the flint walls shine like glass. The village is empty, the streets have an echo I’ve not heard before. We turn into an alleyway next to the Albatross Inn, where Bryn knocks on a side door of a two-up two-down cottage. Through the bubble-glass of the door a thin man with white hair approaches, his shape rippling as he does so, holding a pair of glasses up to his eyes while he fiddles with the latch and Bryn mutters here comes the saint under his breath. The door opens and Gideon bends his long straight back down to Goose. Good. See you’ve brought your fine grandson. The kettle is on. Morning, Mr Pugh.
Gideon’s house smells of turps and linseed and herbal tea. We sit in the front room, where each wall is covered with paintings of saints, icons and religious scenes. He sells them at country fairs and to occasional visitors, but most of his trade comes in the pilgrimage season where those walking to Walsingham make a detour to Blakeney, pick up an icon of their favourite saint, and finish their walk with it pinned to their chest.
‘When it come to money,’ Goose says, ‘nuns are bitches. You tell him, Saint.’ He looks like he’s been slapped. A comment like this, so early in the morning. Goose is undeterred - she goes on to tell how she’d watched three nuns arguing in whispers over an icon of Saint Francis of Assisi here at Gideon’s cottage, white-knuckled with the stress of it, while Gideon brewed vanilla tea and Goose had smoked her pipe. ‘The fat one lost out,’ Goose adds, as if it’s something to note.
‘Yes, it’s all true, I’m afraid,’ Gideon sighs. ‘The others settled for Saint Sebastian and Saint Anthony of Padua.’
Bryn lets out a snort. ‘Should paint more Madonnas. Clear as muck that’s what they want,’ he says, but Gideon won’t be drawn by an atheist.
On the walls, Saint Francis and Saint John the Baptist outstrip the Madonnas by a clear margin. Both of them with distinctly pinched Norfolk faces, marching across fields, sitting by rivers lined with rushes and marsh. St John the Baptist stands in the middle of the ford at Glandford, a group of ducks pecking bre
ad by the water’s edge and a Morris Minor with a family in it waiting to cross on the far side. Saint Francis stands in beech-woods, magpies and jays perched on his shoulders, badgers by his feet. The disciples are there too, doing the jobs they’d held before Christ chose them: Saint Peter, on a crab-boat at Cromer, pulling in pots and letting lobsters go free; Levi, son of Alphaeus, collecting taxes in the Inland Revenue office in Norwich, looking dreamily at a snowscape paperweight while the forms pile up on his desk. The disciples opt not for a last supper but an afternoon tea at the Pretty Corner Tea Rooms. Christ, in a smock, breaking not the bread but a thick slab of carrot cake - St Peter’s greedy eyes on that - while at the end of the table, Judas pours salt in his cup. There are saints running across fields and brandishing sticks at tractors. Seagulls and rooks pecking the sunburned backs of sinners. On Cromer Pier, St Camillus - the reformed gamester - strides past arcade penny-fountains as they spit out coins from their mouth-like slots. Meanwhile, further up in the town of Cromer itself, St Gengulf rescues crabs by lifting them from a vat of boiling water with his bare arm, gratitude clearly seen on their crabby faces. In the background they crawl down Corner Street towards the sea, while a woman backs into a doorway and tries to shoo them off with a walking stick. It’s a painting that will have special significance for me - I shall take a second to gaze at it a little longer, just to see if those crabs were revealing their secrets yet.
Bryn has folded the local newspaper with a flourish and is reading aloud an article on Kipper with great glee: