21st-Century Yokel

by Tom Cox

  ‘Loves the heat, does Andy. But it’s done bloody awful stuff to his skin.’

  ‘Remind me to tell you the story about Andy regenerating his tail. It’s a long one though, so reserve plenty of time for it.’

  ‘Andy? Everyone knows Andy. He’s like the Kimberley answer to Jim Morrison.’

  I found only a few good shells on Blackpool Sands beach, none of them a match for the best in the grotto, but that was nothing new: my contribution to my nan’s project had always been derisory. As I walked west around Start Bay, towards the cliffside wraith copses above Hallsands, the light slowly dripped away. In the brown gloom, with the long wizard’s finger of Start Point ahead, it was more possible to imagine the terror that must have been experienced here during one of those shipwrecks: the utter helplessness in the face of the dark hugeness of roaring drunken waves and the unforgiving black humour of impassable cackling cliffs. When you go away from the sea, your mind has a way of making it smaller and more manageable. Its size in three dimensions, especially here, never fails to shake me. This is a big lonely landscape where there is room to think. Not in an obsessive, counterproductive way, where thoughts are folded repeatedly in on themselves, but in a bigger, more philosophical way. I had chosen solitude recently, opted to spend time alone in places like these, to live alone, to end a relationship, to resist entering a new one for a while. My nan chose solitude too, in a different way. There had never been any question of another man after my granddad. She had lost the love of her life. Nobody could ever replace him and that was that. The weight and earliness of that decision had never struck me more forcefully than it did now, as a single person, only a couple of years shy of the age she’d been when he died.

  Hallsands was once a busy fishing village but is now totally abandoned, having been ravaged by a series of storms during the early part of the 1900s. It was finally evacuated in 1917 after numerous houses and the village pub had fallen into the sea, all the result of a protective bank of sand and gravel being greedily and negligently removed for construction use at a dockyard on the edge of Plymouth by a local MP. Hallsands women were a notoriously tough breed, rescuing crew from sinking ships and habitually wading out to the fishing boats with their husbands on their backs to save their menfolk’s feet from getting wet prior to a day’s work. One of them, Elizabeth Prettejohn, remained stubbornly and heroically in her house right up until her death in 1964, at the age of eighty, surviving on fish and crabs she caught herself and eggs from a tough gang of hens which roamed through the glorified rubble that constituted the remainder of the village. When tourists came to see the infamous place that the sea had swallowed, Prettejohn, as its one remaining resident, was only too happy to show them around, but you can’t help wondering what else she did for amusement. ‘I know! I’ll found the Hallsands WI!’ you can imagine her saying in a lightbulb moment. Then, with a sigh, ‘Oh.’ Prettejohn could have moved but didn’t. She chose solitude instead, a tie to landscape instead of people. On a night like this it was possible to get a mental picture of what that solitude must have felt like here, at the edge of the world, and on fiercer nights when, in her own description, ‘the sea was like mountains’.

  It was lung cancer that finally killed my nan, although she’d only narrowly survived another heart attack a couple of years prior to that. For somebody who’d talked up her own frailty and imminent demise for a long time, she was very keen to hold on at the end. Her repeated refrain was that before she went she wanted to know everyone was OK. Going through the break-up of a marriage at the time, I found it a little more difficult to convince her on this front than everyone else, but I think she believed me. She died at home, surrounded by almost all of her closest family except for me. It was hard to know when the end would come and, living over three hours away by car or train, to ensure that I would be there for it. She died listening not to the fake swells and rip tides of motorway traffic but to a CD of birdsong, which continued to play at a lowish volume after the moment of her death. My cousin Jeff arrived at this point and stayed with her in her bedroom while my mum, Jayne and Mal went downstairs to make the appropriate phone calls. This was during a lull in the birdsong CD so Jeff had not been aware that it was playing. As he sat with my nan’s body the recorded sound of a vituperative crow pierced the room as if out of nowhere, causing Jeff, in a fitting final tribute, to levitate even further than my nan used to when her phone rang.

  I can put an exact date to the last time I was clean-shaven because it was the day of my nan’s funeral. She disliked beards, and I thought it was the least I could do for her to get rid of mine. I might shave again, but in seven and a half years I have not felt compelled to. I can look back at my nan’s funeral and see that it represents a threshold for me: the moment when I put on a couple of permanent extra layers – one made of hair, one made of something else less tangible. In the weeks before her death I returned the gold wedding band she’d passed down to me as the first of her grandchildren to get married, the same ring Tom had bought her. At her funeral in Nottingham each of us took turns to touch her coffin to say goodbye. I did not cry. I felt solid and accepting and slightly insulated from what had happened, as if I had an additional coat on made of nothing. Afterwards, I went for a drink with my cousins and hoped we’d all stay in touch, having lost the main glue that held us together. That night, in the space between wakefulness and sleep, I heard a light, gossamer Scouse voice say, ‘It’s all going to be OK, son.’ Whether I had willed it or it had come from some other place was not important; the important thing was that it was nice.

  My nan was the final grandparent I lost, but I believe I have had a relatively easy ride as far as the death of those close to me is concerned. Age brings the perspective to see this, but something that sometimes gives me an additional insight is that I have two friends who are funeral directors. The funeral directors’ names are Ru and Claire. When I moved to this part of Devon I was told by one of our mutual friends that I should get in touch with them because we’d undoubtedly get on. Was the reason I did not act on her suggestion straight away that classic one that makes people shy away from those who work with death: that I did not want to be reminded of my mortality? Or was it my appalling short-term memory? Perhaps a bit of both. So it wasn’t until many months later that we got to know each other, after Ru, who’d recognised me from a photo online, tapped me on the shoulder when I was browsing the beer shelves in our local 7-Eleven and announced his presence with the unforgettable words, ‘Hi. I’m the funeral director.’ Everyone who knows Ru and Claire loves them. ‘Oh, they’re fucking brilliant,’ a friend told me not long after I’d met them. ‘They set fire to my nan a few years ago.’ A couple of summers ago I was walking past Ru and Claire’s office, which is in a barn, and the doors were open, so they called me in and asked me to settle a disagreement they were having about whether a paisley coffin they had in the back room was pretty or not. Claire thought it was; Ru wasn’t so sure. I took Claire’s side although this was perhaps due to the comparatively low number of coffins I had seen boasting intricate floral designs.

  Only a small percentage of the time I’ve spent with Ru and Claire has been spent talking about death, but in that small percentage an extra awareness has been created for me of what people have snatched away from them and what people are finding the strength to deal with, everywhere, all the time. Ru lost both of his parents when he was young and started the Green Funeral Company in the years directly following his mum’s death, having seen the impersonal way the traditional ceremony was conducted and wanting to provide something different for others in the same situation. He remembers the feeling of being excluded by undertakers he describes as ‘a cross between removal men and bouncers’. He and Claire – who quit her job in the London music industry to join him as a business partner, and subsequently a romantic one – do not wear suits when conducting their ceremonies. They transport coffins not in a hearse but in an old Volvo estate which doubles as the family car. Their conviction is t
hat grieving people fall back, very understandably, on tired rituals and ceremonies that don’t reflect their beliefs because they don’t have the energy to look for an alternative. What they try to provide is something based not on quasi-Victoriana and fake solemnity but on honesty and participation and appropriateness and a respect for the earth. The opening ceremony of a new music festival in the area was performed by them recently: an incantation conducted above a rotating skull, evoking the swirling nature of time and genetics, which was probably something of a surprise to outsiders who’d come purely for the indie rock and limited-edition vinyl. But what Ru and Claire do should not be lumped in with some of south-west Devon’s more preposterous hippy excesses. There is no room for air quotes during their rituals; the importance of the subject matter will wash them away like violent weather.

  Ru and Claire’s natural burial ground is on a very high point above the Dart, over a chicane in the river shortly after it becomes tidal, and its curvy, oaky sweep to the sea – and that favourite bit of coastline of mine – begins. I saw my first wild Devonian barn owl not far from the burial ground, a daytime ghost vanishing as if embarrassed into a blue sky over the reed beds. Steep, shale-banked sunken lanes overrun with rubbly rocks and hart’s tongue fern race down from here towards Totnes and fill up with fast water in the winter so the line between footpath and stream blurs. Dartmouth sits on its rocky perch at the end of the estuary as imperiously as an old naval captain assured that his family has owned the spot since time immemorial, but despite being seven miles inland, Totnes was once the bigger port of the two. The river stays wide enough to support a small ferry up all the way to the town weir, which seals and gulls tend to mark as the northern point of their territory. You can’t see the sea here but you can smell a hint of it on the wind. This proximity is a continuing marvel to a person like me, a product of Britain’s interior, and at my first sight of blue on the horizon beneath the skyline I always do a little cheer, either internally or – to the bemusement of any complacent South West Peninsula natives who happen to be with me – out loud. I have used this proximity as one of several landscape-based arguments in favour of my continuing residence here, in the face of counter-pressure, both intentional and unintentional, from friends and family to move back in the direction from which I came. In this way I am like Elizabeth Prettejohn, standing firm at my beloved wild outpost on the edge of the world, resisting a more convenient life, more densely packed with other humans. Except I’m nowhere near as tough as Elizabeth Prettejohn. I have BBC iPlayer, don’t live in a ruined village and don’t have chickens, just cats, who cannot give me eggs and probably wouldn’t even if they could. But in these tussles with myself about what I want, landscape is the deciding factor. Good people I’ve met here – Ru and Claire included – win, but landscape wins too.

  Some days I feel the tussle more than others, though. In early November 2015 I’d just returned from a cross-country car trip, over the course of which I’d seen my family, several of my best and oldest friends, returned to the county of my previous home and felt deep regret that I wasn’t able to do it all more often. In the days I’d been away, late autumn’s dimmer switch had been turned. The lawn had had its last mow of the year and paths and roads were overspattered with marauding leaf mess. The granite on houses and churches was getting that inky rain-lashed look again that is synonymous with shorter days and pinched light. I was back alone in a house that I’d initially found for two people, still raw from my recent decision to end that partnership. Before I’d embarked on my trip I’d noticed a troubling smell in the small room where I keep most of my book collection but had not had time to properly investigate its source, and now I noticed that the smell was getting the opposite of better. I called a cat over for a cuddle, told it how much I’d missed it. It ignored me and headed for the garden, slamming the cat flap on its way out.

  If you live in the countryside and have cats what you’re essentially saying is, ‘I permit narcissists to hide dead things in my house.’ Cats are ardent creatures of habit but they also do not like to get in a rut. Cats only sleep regularly in one place for a month. After that, by law they must move or they stop being cats. They select and switch their abbatoirs with similar fastidiousness. For a spell the dining room had served as the killing floor for my two most bloodthirsty cats, Ralph and Shipley, then the bathroom, but recently they had preferred the book room. The chief problem had been rabbits. I’d managed to save a few, thanks to my advanced tackling skills. One had escaped and hidden behind the freezer, and I’d managed to lure it out, in cartoon fashion with an old carrot, then plonk it below a hedge. But I had a life to lead. I couldn’t be constantly sitting at home on a state of high alert with a carrot in my hand. Inevitably, there were casualties. A couple of weeks previously I’d cleaned up a particularly messy headless rabbit corpse on the floor of the book room. I don’t have the greatest sense of smell but, even though I scrubbed the carpet no less assiduously than a nineteenth-century saloon owner would have scrubbed a stain left from a gunfight, I could not subsequently convince myself I’d entirely got rid of the waft.

  I’m very fond of the book room. It’s full of books, after all, but it’s a cold room with no curtains or double glazing and not somewhere where I spend a lot of time in winter, which is another reason I’d been slow in clocking the strength of this latest smell and only begun to properly investigate it now.

  I made a couple of attempts to stop buying books in the distant past but I’ve since realised it’s an absurd denial of who I am as a person. The fact is, books have always been very kind to me, and I can’t stand to see them sitting alone in shops, unloved. One day I’ll probably trap myself behind a book wall for ever, but the way I look at it is that I’ll be reading as I starve to death, so it will be OK. My to-read pile at this point spilt far beyond the shelves themselves and far beyond sense, teetering in higgledy-piggledy piles on tables. Moving the books to shift the shelving units and get behind them – which, I assumed, was where the smell was coming from, having ruled out everywhere else in the room – was a major operation. My initial forensic work uncovered, not too surprisingly, the remains of two dead voles, long since rotted away, but I sensed I was in the middle of a bigger story here, and upon moving the fifth and final bookcase I reached its awful climactic scene.

  It was a rabbit, I could discern that immediately. But what it resembled more accurately was a charcoal illustration of a rabbit ghost, drawn by an artist with a bent towards satanism. I felt like I’d stepped inside the missing one of Fiver’s nightmares in Watership Down that got cut for being too adult. If I blinked, would it vanish? I tried to think of someone close to me who might come and briefly hold me in a tender way, then leave. Parents? Hundreds of miles away. My mate Seventies Pat? No. He lived in Dudley. The corpse’s edges were indistinct, as if surrounded by an evil vapour. I saw maggots writhing where its brain once had been. An impossible black ooze welded it to the wall and oozed with more determined malevolence as I attempted to move it. The smell was intolerable, like a monolithic forecast of every small awfulness you’ve ever worried would come true. As I went back in for a third time with every bit of cleaning equipment I could find in the house, I genuinely began to wonder what would be easier: carrying on with my attempt to save the carpet or quickly packing a couple of bags and moving to India.

  I headed off briskly to the supermarket and returned with more cleaning materials and odour-eliminating paraphernalia suggested by friends and my mum: bicarb of soda, coloured biological washing liquid, Febreze. After four hours I had rid the room of the dark spectre and its innumerable attendant maggots but it had taken out a mortgage on my part-working nose. From above me, a papier-mâché hare, made by my friend Mary for my birthday four and half years earlier and now pinned to the wall, gazed mordantly down at my work.

  This is the stuff that’s so rarely factored into the time management of a rural self-employed life with cats: the twenty minutes you will fritter away looking for a vole
in a cupboard . . . the half an hour it takes to strip off the spare bed’s duvet cover and carefully scrape all the chunky dried puke off it . . . the six hours twenty minutes you will devote to cleansing your house of an unnameable evil. It was almost 6 p.m. and I had wasted an entire working day. I knew I should make up for it by writing into the night, but Ru and Claire had asked me along to their natural burial ground for their All Souls Day ritual. It had been too long since I’d seen them, and the potential nostril transfusion the evening promised was too tempting: hilly night air and woodsmoke replacing the writhing shitfires of hell. There aren’t many times you find yourself heading to a burial ground to escape the taint of death, but this was one of them. I parked and followed two strangers – or rather the light of the sensible headtorches of two strangers – through a wicker arch and over the brow of a hill to a large fire surrounded by sixty or seventy people. In the distance the lights of the busy seaside towns of Paignton and Brixham twinkled. If you estimated the distance to the sea in hills, which was the tendency here, it somehow seemed closer. ‘The sea? That’s six hills away.’ ‘Oh, cool. Thanks. No distance at all!’ The blackness of the night added to the sense of its proximity. There is a magic in the air at this darkening time of year, but people in the United Kingdom tend to over-egg it nowadays with show-off pyrotechnics and the fancy dress of pretend Americans. What this gathering proved was that all you really needed to tease it out was a strong orange glow and the magic of naked nocturnal hills, with hot spiced apple juice as an optional extra. As I defrosted my hands beside the Sharpham bonfire I felt another kind of warmth that I had never quite felt before at any traditional ceremony dealing with death: a powerful breaking down of barriers, a removing of a certain ugliness. Not the ugliness that’s intrinsic to last rites but an unnecessary one often imposed on top of it.