by Gordon Burn
The names and numbers in the book that lies by the telephone are in Mrs E’s hand. It is Mrs E’s recipes that are written on plain four-by-five cards in the tin box in the kitchen. I sit in Mr and Mrs E’s chairs, sleep in their bed and eat my meals from their plates with their knives and forks. My clothes hang next to the few items of clothing of theirs that their children, for whatever reason, have decided not to let go.
I lie in their bath at nights listening to the riotous knocking and screaming in the pipes which, on the rare occasions they were away from it, must have formed a part of their memory of the house. Lying in bed in the dark, you can still hear mouse claws clicking in the rafters and the reassuring noises of the house settling around itself.
They have laid claim to it in so powerful, apparently permanent, a way that, although in many respects it was blindingly obvious, it came as a shock the first time I realised that other people had lived in Kiln Cottage before Mr and Mrs E.
‘Know what this is?’ Bob Brotherhood asked when he broke off from pottering in the garden and came in for a cup of tea one day. He was sitting in his favourite ‘elbow chair’ with his cap flattened across his knee. His country colour as usual was alarmingly high. He was rotating the tiny leather clog off the bureau in his chipped and worn old fingers.
(My thoughts immediately flew to the clog-shaped hole it would have left in the collected dust, and the bad report he’d put in to Mrs Brotherhood when he got home. He has an unusual attachment to the cottage and misses nothing to do with its well-being and maintenance.)
‘Found it in the wall, I did, when I was helping knock through here, time I was a boy. Put there years sin’, so they say, to ward off evil spirits.’
The cottage was originally three workers’ cottages. The original tenants were apparently jobbing gardeners and journeymen carpenters, masons and tailors, washer-women and domestic servant girls, all topped-and-tailed, incestuously shoe-horned in together.
The conversion to a single dwelling accounts for the surprising changes of level you now find between rooms; going upstairs, in some instances, can leave you standing no further from the ground than where you’ve started.
The cottage is wedge-shaped and built sideways into the foot of a hill that starts off as a sheep field so perpendicular the sheep look like fridge magnets stuck to it As the hill descends, it becomes a combination of ploughed red earth and grazing pasture, and ends up at the quay and the river.
Kiln Cottage is named after the lime kiln which now makes a picturesque ruin at the foot of the garden. The cottage stands alone between the quay and the lane which takes traffic down and round into the village. This is so narrow it’s possible to look into cars and see what brand of cigarette the driver is smoking while washing dishes at the sink. Or, alternatively, watch the flies gorging themselves in the mucus draining from cows’ nostrils when they’re lumbering past. (You can see how easily I have adapted to not having a television.)
‘The foetor there must’ve been them days,’ Mr Brotherhood said, absently polishing the child’s clog on his cap now. ‘Days before the invention of sanitary science. Open drains. I remember when the families what lived here had earth-closets. Wasn’t so long past neither. Slop-pails in the kitchen that smelled to beat the band. Smelt it when you were passin’, you could. But those days evbody roun’ these ways was the same.’
‘More tea?’
‘Often occurs to me to wonder who that little girl might have been,’ he said, peering into the shoe now as if something on the inside could give him his answer.
‘Would you like your tea heated?’
‘Just half a cup,’ he said, setting the mug down between his boots, which was the cue for the dog to make a dive for it from the other side of the room. (All my dogs have been tea drinkers.) ‘I’ll have to let some out first.’
*
There is a set of photograph albums stored in one of the cupboards. I didn’t look at them for a long time. But when I did, less out of any sense of genuine curiosity than as a way of filling an empty hour (there are some things you don’t want to know, and will put off knowing), a number of things became apparent.
Staff’s parents had moved into Kiln Cottage as young marrieds, when this place obviously represented what I recently saw described as ‘one of those Shangri-la-type concepts’. (Their well-bred young English faces – the eyes shy yet determined; the skin drawn tight across the bones – weren’t blurred with the inevitable loneliness apparent in the later pictures.)
They had also changed the cottage over time to suit their needs. A second bathroom, for example, had been added off the kitchen. (‘This sink leaks’ a notice posted here used to say when I arrived; still there but illegible, like all the other notices around the cottage – ‘The kettle sometimes switches itself on, so after use please switch off at socket’; ‘DANGER: the water from this tap can be VERY hot’, etcetera – it adds to the sense of layers; it forms the newest layer of secret surface information.)
There had been several other modifications. The original thatched roof had been replaced with slate at some stage. An asparagus patch, which was fertilised with seaweed and lay between the cottage and the kiln, had been turned into a tufted sloping lawn with a clear view over the water.
Most disconcertingly, what I still think of as the front of the house – the part of it which opens on to a small plot of garden and then the quay – used to be the back. As some of the earliest pictures in the albums make clear, the large cupboard on the lane-side of the living-room is built into a hole where the old front door used to be.
These discoveries about what had seemed such a rock-solid, unchanged and unchanging set of circumstances left me feeling oddly skewed for a while. I felt the way I felt when I learned (more recently than I care to own up to) that all matter is perpetually in a state of vibration.
I was still at the stage then when I believed that, simply by quitting London, I had entered a world in which all contradiction and complication had been swept away. In their literal matter-of-factness, the names of the cottages I passed every day walking through Cleve seemed to confirm that this was the case.
Rose Cottage (roses round the rustic gate, roses round the door). Plum Tree Cottage. White Cottage. Blue Shutters. Round House. Greystones. Court View Cottage (overlooking the municipal tennis courts). Smithy Cottage (opposite the old smithy). East Wood. West View. Churchunder. Steps End. End of the Strand. Slipway Cottage. The Slope.
They were the very embodiment of the life of certainties and ‘real values’ that all town-dwellers are supposed to aspire to as some kind of earthly nirvana. And for a long time, as I say, I bought it.
As the in-comer from a world I had no doubt they all regarded as ugly and tawdry and meretricious, violent and distasteful (I could hear them mouthing off at choir practice in the village hall, over whist, at the Young Wives’ Thursday Afternoon Club and the W. I., righteous eyes blazing, lips pursed in distaste), I kept myself scarce.
It took me a long time to get my eye in; to find out who the madmen are.
‘You can tell by their gardens which class they’re from,’I overheard one woman saying to another shortly after I arrived. Well I couldn’t. Not at first. (And, if I’m honest, still really can’t. Not the way I can tell at fifty paces genuine Rolex or Chanel from the Hong Kong bootleg. Short of match-practice as I am, I could still walk into most clubs and tell you what the bar take is to a penny.)
*
Cleve is really two villages, Cleve and Coombe, one on each side of a steep valley. The oldest parts of the two villages are down on the waterside, where a rough causeway connects them at low-tide.
The causeway is made of cement which must have been of some special fast-setting kind to resist being washed away by the current. In fact, impressions of water-movement are visible at certain points along its length – smooth, swirled areas fixed into the surface, which remind me of those time-stop shots of dandelions releasing their clocks, and the technically enhance
d pictures of the motorcade in Dallas that purport to show a section of President Kennedy’s scalp being blown away.
Near the water is where you find the traditional whitewashed cottages, black-tarred at their bases, which in the early days I fondly imagined housing unruly families of honest-to-God shit-kickers and decent, atmospherically stinking fisher-folk;
The name-plates attached to the cottages – hand-decorated and-fired tiles, and loftily inscribed lozenges of local slate (both styles no doubt the work of rat-race drop-outs and hairy back-to-the-earthers) – should have alerted me to the fact that these were all now either holiday homes or the homes of young commuter professionals and comfortably-off retirees.
A few hoorays come tooling in late on Friday afternoons in the spring and summer months and immediately set to it arranging themselves in outdoor tableaux straight out of the creamier advertising pages of The Tatler.
Almost all the locals are tucked away in the council houses tastefully screened from the main road by a stand of spruce and elm, and shop at the Co-Op, which has a rather forbidding notice displayed on the counter – ‘Unlike boots and shoes, the words please and thank you never wear out. Use them as often as you like’ – but gives stamps.
There’s only one shop on the Cleve side – a post office-cum-general store with a psoriatic old dog dumped in the doorway and only swampy lettuce and purpling scrag-end identifiable in the Neapolitan gloom inside. ‘We can get it for you’ is what you get if you ask for anything outside the basic range.
A fish van (prop. a recycled public relations executive, dried-out but still noticeably stress-clenched) comes round once a week. For everything else, you have to cross over to Coombe. This means the tide decides when you shop.
There is another way to Coombe, on dry land. But this means climbing a hill steep enough to bring the blood taste up into your throat; you also risk being flattened by on-coming traffic. It is this traffic whose headlamps and tail-lights I can look out and see at nights, the only things moving in the dark.
From halfway up the hill, Kiln Cottage on the other side of the valley looks like a picture-postcard or sampler of itself, ‘quaint’ in a way it never feels from the inside.
Taking this route, you have to walk through a sixties development of houses tricked out with Andalusian arches, ships’ bells and carriage lamps, and jacked up on stilts facing the river as if straining to catch a glimpse of the passing show.
These houses have names like ‘Thousand Fathoms’ and ‘High Standing’, and deep dark picture-windows where you sense the curtains twitching even when they’re not. (‘Rattle the corner of the curtain to show them you’re still there,’ was the advice an old pro gave me on the art of taking bows when I was just starting out.)
Going to Coombe by the river route is more scenic. Not only that, there’s the added excitement of miscalculating tide times and being left stranded on the wrong bank.
At low-tide, the river turns into a kind of concourse or pedestrian precinct, dotted with shoppers and awash with non-biodegradable junk. It’s a short walk across the rocks and seaweed, through the Mmmmmm-Matteson’s bacon wrappers and washed-up tumble-driers and spaghetti-hoops cans to the crossing-point, and the dog gets a chance to unload a couple of doo-doo’s on the way.
I’ve been caught on several occasions by the tide and had to whip off my shoes and roll up my trousers to beat the water pouring over the causeway, with the dog splashing along behind.
Queueing is still as much a way of life in these parts as it is in Moscow or Gdansk. Shopping is regarded as a branch of the performing arts, with scripts that are polished and well-worked rather than improvised.
‘If I were obliged to eat no meat for the rest of my life, on the whole it would be a relief and no hardship …’
‘I always think the flavour of asparagus is the very flavour of late spring …’
‘Very young, slender runner beans are almost as good as asparagus …’
‘Until I got a steamer I was always depressed about rhubarb …’
‘The joys of having one’s own new potatoes are worth any amount of sweat …’
‘A free-range egg is simply a different species from the stale, fishy-tasting battery variety …’
‘The best part of the flower becomes honey, and when I eat honey I like to believe that flower becomes part of me …’
The most important platform – Coombe’s Olivier or Drury Lane – is the shop run by a fleshy, middle-aged Jesus-freak. The most conspicuous thing in the village is the tall cross erected on the roof of Loaves and Fishes. Its surface is a skein of thousands of faceted foil pieces which lighten or darken with the sky, and shimmer brightly at night like an elementary demonstration of all matter being in a state of perpetual agitation.
The owner of Loaves and Fishes prides herself on being nutritionally, as well as spiritually, right-on: although it’s the only place for miles around where you can buy a zinc bucket, cast-iron doorknocker or nylon washing-line, she sees herself as being primarily in the health-food game.
Inevitably, her customers take this as a challenge to come in and ask for things that they know she hasn’t got: rapeseed oil, balsamic vinegar, falafel, Star polenta, Greek-style yoghurt, nitrite-free crisps.
She reaps her revenge by employing no help and taking several minutes to weigh out a paper-twist of yeast or blanched almonds or peppercorns; by slopping around on big bare gristly plates-of-meat, and larding receipts with religious texts which she programmes daily on the computerised till: ‘Jesus is wonderful. He is doing wonders in my life’; ‘Know Jesus, no problem. No Jesus, know problem’; ‘All I care for is JESUS and the power of HIS resurrection’.
There then follows an address for the International Miracle Centre, in one of the poorer postal districts of London.
Housewifely zeal extends to every corner of village life. A trend I’ve noticed in recent years among the afternoon walkers on the cliff path, for example, is voluntary doggie-doo retrieval. Out comes the carrier bag, down goes the tissue, and another part of the national heritage is saved from desecration.
It’s thanks to the various environmental, heritage and ramblers’ agencies that the turf along the many miles of the coast path is kept in the sort of condition that, if it was in a house (certainly if it was in my mother’s house), it would have a plastic runner thrown over it for protection.
The timber of the gates and stiles along the route is architectonically sunk, oiled, tongued and mitred. The benches have evidently never known a lovelorn Bev or Gary: they haven’t been gouged at or signed with graffiti. The sheep and rabbit pellets seem a last authenticating touch of the set-dresser.
It nagged at me for some time that I wasn’t having the proper response to the untamed beauty, the uncouth majesty, and so on, of the scenery. That I wasn’t experiencing those lashed-to-the-mast, big feelings that waves crashing on rocks, Turner skies, the sea’s rhythmic thrusts and sighs, were supposed to inspire. The dispiriting underwhelmingness of the experience kept reminding me of the old cockney one-liner: ‘You’re fuckin’ me, aren’t you? I can hear you.’
I worried that I didn’t have a feel for nature.
Only slowly did it come home to me that this was largely because the nature I was surrounded by had been patiently house-trained and suburbanised; toned down like Chinese and Indian and other ethnic flavours to suit the English palate.
This was impressed on me during my second winter. It took that long for the strength to come into my legs. And one day, in a fit of uncharacteristic enterprise, I decided to give them a test-drive by investigating a small bay that I knew lay beyond the perpendicular hill at the back of the house.
It was cold but bright when I set out. After a few hours, though, the weather went into full-dress gothic – thunderbolts, boiling black clouds, curtains of dense rain. I was clinging to a rock at the time, my feet skidding because of the cladding of red mud they’d collected, and my arms shaking from the effort of hanging on.
By now, you’ll gather, I was being visited by deep thoughts about those great elemental forces; I was getting it all in spectacular Sensuround and Vistavision – my nails were bleeding, my fingerends were shredded, I was soaked to the skin. I shuffled left and crawled what seemed hundreds of yards on all-fours until I came to a piece of sailing rope leading to who-knew-where.
I hauled myself up – the dog was peering down at me, his knuckle tail whirling with excitement – and, through a hole in a hedge, found I was eyeball-to-eyeball with a fishing gnome, complete with ornamental pond and cloche-covered runner-beans, and a wrought-iron sign on a gibbet saying ‘The Retreat’.
I was in the caravan park that is still the target of perennial local complaints about ‘caravandalism’. The vans were a uniform pea-green colour with threadbare fifties curtains at the windows and wizened TV aerials on the roofs. They squatted in their decorative plots like favoured pets, too old and settled in their ways to be going anywhere other than here.
*
That was my last piece of freelance activity. Since then I have been happy to fall in with the local rhythms and observe the established codes and practices.
I stay tuned to gale warnings at nights so I can hold my own on the weather. I keep abreast of the latest health scares – listeria, BSE, glass in babyfood, carcinogenic trace-elements in coffee – in case I’m called on for a comment while kicking my heels (and biting my tongue), waiting to be served. I wrap the empties in newspaper when I throw them out, so as not to embarrass or alarm.