21st-Century Yokel

by Tom Cox

  Now, seven months later, with the island in my sights, I walked down the hill to Bigbury Beach from the car park, then across the tidal causeway, dodging numerous sandcastles and selfie-takers, but by the time I’d waded out to the island I was alone save for a rockpooling father and his two teenage sons. I removed my T-shirt and reached in my bag for the float my dad had bought me and realised it was still in the car. That’s a shame, I thought only two-thirds sarcastically. I placed my bag on a rock and swam out eighty yards through gaps in the rocks in a pungent, fishy sea. The tide was coming in and the waves were medium-big, but my front crawl felt strong and effortless and I could sense a solidity and sureness to my shoulder muscles that I had not had the previous summer. But as I rounded the corner to the part of the island furthest from the mainland, I felt an abrupt solitude, and paused. I’d had a lacklustre morning of writing and badly wanted to get round that bend and that other bend beyond it, and feel the sense of accomplishment that went with it, but something was not right.

  Here I was again: frivolous me, a non-daredevil non-wetsuit-owning person in five-pound supermarket trunks, but the water didn’t give a crud who I was, just like the water didn’t give a crud who Jeff Buckley was when he swam into the Mississippi in 1997 in an apparently carefree mood, singing a Led Zeppelin song. What was the difference between being Randy California, the strong swimmer in the Pacific with his son, and Randy California, the tragic, drowned singer? What was the difference between being J. G. Farrell, the comic novelist sitting on a rock on the Irish coast fishing, and J. G. Farrell, the tragic novelist dead before his time? The difference was a tiny moment. Terrible sea stuff didn’t just happen far out in open water. My uncle Paul swam less far out on the north Cornish coast than I was now and got swept away by the tide, and would almost certainly not be still with us had a surfer not spotted him and come to his rescue.

  I turned round. I swam back past the rockpooling family and clambered out of the water over slimy, limpet-covered rocks. I walked purposefully across the beach and up the hill. I got into my car, painfully aware I had not wrung anywhere near my money’s worth out of the Economy Beach Car Park. I drove away. The interior of the car smelled of damp and crisps, which was entirely logical since when I was in it I was very often damp and eating crisps. Still in my trunks, I went directly to the lido, which like all lidos was originally built to take the place of swimming in seas and rivers and lakes for several reasons, many of which remain valid to this day. I swam forty-six lengths. I didn’t feel closer to the earth or my primal self, but I felt good and alive. I noticed a bumblebee on the far side of the deep end. I must have missed it when I got in. I transferred it to dry land, where it shook itself and staggered away. It was a quite large and beautifully furry one – almost fluffy in fact. It had probably been drawn to the water by the glint of the sun on the surface, but it did not have a sense of its own limits.

  9

  BLACK DOG

  Fur and Sherbet

  It was a thankless winter’s day, a nagging wind was shaking the last stalwart leaves from the trees, and I was trying to find some picture hooks so I could hang a couple of bits and bobs on the walls and make the place feel a bit warmer. I wasn’t having any success in the house so I decided to have a look in the garage instead. I hadn’t been in my garage for several weeks and, in opening its heavy up-and-over door, managed to disturb a sleeping cat. I’m not sure who was more surprised, me or the cat. We both did a little jump, and the cat escaped through a hole in the back wall. I hadn’t been aware that my garage had a hole in its back wall, nor that it had a cat living in it, and both these things made me think I should make an effort to get to know my garage better.

  The cat was not one of the four who each sublet a room from me for a non-existent payment delivered on the first of every month but an enormous tabby stray who’d been hanging around in and near my garden for the last few months, spitting cusswords at my three male cats and periodically trying to mount the female one. Going on his tumble-dryer-soft fur and athletic good looks, I’d at first assumed that he was what those who know felines well tentatively call ‘owned’, but time had proved otherwise: none of my neighbours knew who he was and, as the weeks passed, his 3 a.m. meowing sessions outside my bedroom window had become more keening and forlorn. Despite a vertical white warpaint stripe on his nose he was almost approachable when I first met him, but, mistaking him for a spoilt thug, I’d chased him off a few times, waving the bill for the damage he’d caused to the nose of my own tabby, Ralph. Since then he’d become less sociable but no less ubiquitous.

  You can live a relatively lavish life in summer and autumn in this somewhat utopian part of rural Devon if you’re a stray cat with a modicum of resourcefulness. After you’ve picked off one of the endless supply of unuspecting local rabbits you can wash its innards down with some fresh stream water then conk out for a few hours under a hibiscus while a person clad in sackcloth soothes you to sleep with their biweekly flute practice. But now it was early December. With the temperature dropping and the wind raging, I was glad my feline intruder had found a sheltered place to sleep among rusting golf clubs, old magazines and hardware.

  Even at its worst, the wind in the South West never makes your eyes, cheeks and chin sting in that way a winter wind on Britain’s east coast will. That said, it had been blowing with the breath of a hundred-headed Celtic demon recently. Branches tapped furiously on my dark office window as I wrote, and the thick granite walls of my draughty single-glazed hilltop house seemed to be all that was stopping it from being whipped up from its foundations and blown over the valley towards Newton Abbot. In the midst of this cacophony, a small alien meow could have the effect of a tiny person sitting in your ear, playing one of history’s saddest melodies on the planet’s smallest harp.

  On the morning that I opened my garage and discovered the stray cat – to whom I’d given the draft name of Uncle Fuckykins, because there was nobody around to stop me and, since he was unlikely to ever be mine, I probably wouldn’t be forced to live with the long-term ramifications – the wind was at its most heinous. It was the kind of undignifying wind that makes you hope that nobody you admire sees you while you are standing in it. Only a total idiot would spend any time in such a wind that wasn’t totally necessary. So, having left a bowl of food in the garage for Uncle Fuckykins, I got in the car, collected my friend’s dog and embarked on an eight-and-a-half-mile walk on a particularly exposed part of the moor. I’d read a bit about the section of the moor in question the night before in a nineteenth-century book. ‘This area is sometimes referred to as the Valley of the Thunderstorms,’ it announced. Brilliant! I thought. Let’s go.

  I had first met my friend’s dog, who is called Billy but sometimes referred to as the Blackberry due to his resemblance to a blackberry, a couple of years earlier on the Internet, which in our amazing modern world is now often the way that dogless men looking to borrow dogs and dogs looking to be borrowed find it convenient to meet. This had been made possible by a site called BorrowMyDoggy. It had taken me a little while to be totally comfortable about admitting I had met my part-time dog on the Internet, but I was OK with it now, and so was Billy. Of course others might have a problem when they found out how we got together, but in the end it was their problem, not ours. Back during the previous decade I’d borrowed dogs from people I had met in real life. There was Nouster, a proud birthday-card Border collie who lived with my landlord and who I’d walk around the two broads near my house in Norfolk. Then there was Henry, my neighbour’s cocker spaniel, who liked to roll around in pheasant carcasses and steal chips. But that was a different era and a different universe. Since then the lives of humans and dogs had become more virtual, and different ways to meet dogs had become more acceptable. Every Tuesday I picked Billy up from his owner Susie’s eighteenth-century cottage on the edge of the moor. Turning the back-door handle of the cottage was like a trigger that operated an invisible piece of elastic connected to Billy, who would twan
g towards me from wherever he was in the building, making a series of noises that shouldn’t by rights emerge from any animal not made out of rubber by a large corporation. Sometimes two more dogs were there with Billy. These belonged to Susie’s daughter Syd, and were older, dignified, sad-eyed hounds of great scruffy beauty, only unnerving to be around for the fact that – despite being unrelated by blood – they looked like tiny and massive versions of exactly the same dog. We’d quite like it if you walked us too, but we know you can’t, and we completely understand, the been-around-the-block eyes of the calm, wise scruffy dogs said as Billy pogoed the length of my body and yipped like a creature who was shortly about to explode from unalloyed joy and leave nothing but a small pile of fur and sherbet on the cottage’s irregular two-hundred-and-fifty-year-old flagstones.

  It’s not that I wasn’t flattered by this yipping and squeaking, which could go on for up to a quarter of an hour. I did feel, however, that it was a little fawning and unearned. My cats curled up on my lap, played inspired paw piano on my chest and headbutted my knuckles affectionately, but that was the result of my willingness to make myself an annexe of their personalities, plus the years of research I’d done into their likes and dislikes: what food to buy them, when to stop buying it and purchase a more expensive kind instead, which knitwear to donate to them as bedding, where exactly behind their ears to scratch them and at what time of day. All I did with Billy was allow him to accompany me on long walks across moors and cliff tops. I’d have been doing the walks anyway, even if he didn’t come along, so it was honestly no big deal.

  Dartmoor is the only place in Devon where the bite of the wind can almost match its east coast counterpart. As I climbed past the Nutcracker, a logan stone near Britain’s loneliest Christmas tree, to the summit of Rippon Tor, the breeze spun me in a quarter-circle and turned my hair into old, useless bindweed. Beside me Billy sulked slightly, having been put on his lead for the benefit of sixteen semi-wild cattle. Once we were over the brow of the tor I let him off and threw a stick to appease him. He fetched it then guarded it jealously from me in his customary fashion. I seldom put rotting wood between my teeth and had never given Billy any concrete reason to believe that I would steal one of his sticks, but even after knowing me a couple of years, he remained suspicious of my motives when he had one in his mouth. Billy is a black dog, an apt shade for Dartmoor, which is so full of demon hound legends they sometimes slosh over its sides, but ghoulishness is not really his area of expertise. A toy–miniature poodle cross, he is scarcely bigger than Uncle Fuckykins and possibly a degree smaller when his black curls are slicked down with upland rain. Susie had recently had a terrible infestation of rats, who’d chewed through the bathroom pipes and electrical cables in her cottage. A few weeks ago she’d gone into her kitchen and an especially big one had hurtled straight at her. ‘I jumped on a chair and screamed,’ she told me. ‘I was hoping Billy might come to my rescue but he just jumped on the chair with me and started screaming too.’

  As my borrowed black dog and I turned west for Top Tor and Pil Tor, I mentally listed the dark and mysterious moorland legends he might inspire. The best I could come up with were the following.

  1. The dark and mysterious legend of how he ran after a cyclist on a path near Ivybridge but then got spooked by some rainbow-jumpered hippy kids listening to dubstep under some trees.

  2. The dark and mysterious legend of how he ran away from me and my birdwatcher friend Roy down a deep ravine near Venford Reservoir, yip-squeaking after seeing what he thought was a sheep, and didn’t come back for thirteen minutes.

  3. The dark and mysterious legend of how a post office receipt fell out of my wallet, and he ran off with it then barked and chewed it when I ran after him and asked for it back.

  4. The dark and mysterious legend of how he wove through the legs of three cows in a water meadow, like a tiny idiot.

  5. The dark and mysterious legend of how he ran after a black Labrador into a river then thought better of it.

  6. The dark and mysterious legend of how he got miffed with me when I dropped him off at home an hour earlier than usual.

  Above us, further west, a celestial hole opened up in the clouds, shooting rays down over the ancient stone rows of Fernworthy Forest: as good a spot for a bucolic alien landing as there could be in England. In the valley below, just over a mile away, I spotted the unusually tall, damaged spire of Widecombe church and abandoned my route to turn half-right towards it, remembering the story Mike, a veteran member of the Dartmoor Search and Rescue Team, had told me about Jan Reynolds selling his soul to the Devil there in the autumn of 1638. One of the many commendable facets of selling your soul to the Devil in the seventeenth century was that you’d invariably have to go to a tract of bleak and windswept land to do it properly. Nowadays you can accomplish it far less romantically from the comfort of your own home just by running a corrupt property developing enterprise or writing a hateful column about immigrants or homosexuals for a tabloid newspaper. The Reynolds story is a West Country equivalent of Suffolk’s legend of Black Shuck and Blythburgh’s Cathedral of the Marshes, in which a real-life violent storm caused damage to the house of God and was blamed on demonic activity. In Widecombe the damage was not caused by a black dog, but by the Devil and his flying horse, who wrecked the church during their journey to claim the soul of Reynolds, a well-known local gambler and church-dodger. As Reynolds was carried off over Birch Tor, he dropped the playing cards he’d been holding, which allegedly left giant imprints on the moor in the shape of the symbols on the cards. Mike has been on the rescue team for a long time, but not long enough to have been actually involved in the attempt to rescue Reynolds from the Devil.

  Widecombe-in-the-Moor is even more famous for the folk song ‘Widecombe Fair’, which is also equine-themed: a tale of a horse theft in the area, along with a list of people going to the fair in question. An argument could be made against the necessity of the list’s length. The early-music-influenced psychedelic folk band Renaissance and trippy displaced garage rockers the Nashville Teens both made the song their own in phantasmagorical ways in the early seventies, but the lyrics remain a bit like an old-time folk version of one of those tedious conversations you overhear on a train in which a cocksure young man is speaking into his mobile phone to another cocksure young man and listing all the people he has secured to join them for a night out (‘Tom Cobley’s confirmed now, and his grey mare – it’s going to be sick!’). Behind me where I sat and ate a plate of chips smeared with melted cheese in Widecombe’s extremely welcoming Rugglestone Inn were some original 1800s illustrations detailing events at the fair. These were enchanting, although conveyed a strong ambience of ‘several people taking advantage of the hubbub elsewhere by sneaking off to have sex with people they shouldn’t’.

  While I ate my chips I read more about Widecombe in Sabine Baring-Gould’s collection of Dartmoor essays A Book About Dartmoor. It could be argued that the title of this is similarly overlong. A simple Dartmoor would have got the same point across adequately. Nonetheless, I decided to let that go at the time of purchase, as my local branch of Scope had been only asking £2.50 for it. Baring-Gould describes Widecombe as a village ‘walled off from the world’, but when I climbed one of these steep green walls twenty minutes later all I could see was that hole in the sky and beneath it heather, dead bracken, tussocky grass and large prehistoric boulders: a debatable definition of ‘world’ but one I was very comfortable with. There was room to imagine so much into existence here. Ascending Buckland Beacon beside a dog apparently made entirely out of knitting material, with that glowing crack in the clouds above and not another human in sight, it was not hard to look back and picture woolly rhino and mammoths trudging across the valley below.

  I like to imagine that there was a time when all animals were woolly, not just rhinos and mammoths.

  ‘That snake over there looks exceptionally warm.’

  ‘Yes. That’s because it’s a woolly snake.’r />
  The colour of the dusk as the walk ended reminded me of the dusk in An American Werewolf in London when David and Jack come down off the moor to visit the Slaughtered Lamb pub in East Proctor: smudgy granular purple-green. As a fourteen-year-old, I recorded some evening golf highlights on BBC2 and let the VHS tape run on so it also recorded the first thirty-five minutes of the film when Alex Cox showed it on the Moviedrome series. Over the next year I watched those thirty-five minutes more than a dozen times. When I finally saw the rest of the film, as an adult, I enjoyed it but felt slightly let down, particularly by its gory ending. I like my horror to be about the power of suggestion, not blood – another factor, quite probably, behind my love of Dartmoor. I amped up that power of suggestion on the way back by ignoring the classic American Werewolf advice to stick to the path, although this wasn’t the most swashbuckling move, as I remained thoroughly aware of where the path was the entire time. As a result, every bit of me up to shoulder height – and a few bits beyond – was mud-spattered, but that had been very much part of the plan at the day’s beginning. Where is the pleasure in being clean if you have never got dirty?

  A lone set of headlights winked around Rippon Tor in the distance, and the temperature underwent a drop that felt like a small old cushion being pulled from beneath us. We’d done almost nine miles, my hip clicked, my calves ached, and Billy limped a little on his back left side. We jumped peaty puddles in unison as if tiredly choreographed. Multiple gorse perforations incurred on the climb to Buckland Beacon gave me shin burn. Half an hour earlier I had been stroking the head of a cheerful storybook sheep in daylight; now it was abruptly apparent that this upland was not just the setting for the unwritten ghost stories in my head, but a place where, if you were tired enough and cold enough and lost enough, you would probably not take long to perish. I was glad to reach the car, to drop Billy off and to fantasise about the hot bath I’d soon plunge into. I nagged myself into making a quick stop at the supermarket on the way home – partly for me, but primarily to get some food of a slightly better quality than normal for my cats, due to the stab of guilt I felt for feeding some of theirs to Uncle Fuckykins. If feeding him was to be a regular event, some prandial hierarchy needed to be imposed. While queuing to pay I checked my phone: there was a message from my dad, who’d found out I was walking today. ‘DON’T STAND ON TOP OF ANY CLIFFS IN THE WIND,’ he said. ‘AND WATCH OUT FOR FOOKWITS AND LOONIES!’ I returned the phone to my rucksack. ‘Surprising item on the bagging scale,’ said a robot a couple of aisles away, calm yet intrigued. In front of me at the human checkout a woman was purchasing a jet-black eel, wrapped in cling film. I was not aware that any supermarket fish counter sold a creature of such size. It was longer than my arm and probably thicker. I felt very unadventurous with my blueberries, crisps and chicken slices.