by Alan Garner
There was a path along the bottom of the Woodhill, above the footpath on Mottram Road. When I was strong enough to climb up I walked on it, while my mother stayed on the footpath, and my feet were as high as her head.
When I was even stronger we both climbed through the beech leaves, which came past the top of my legs, to another path, half way up the hill.
This path was wide, but knobbly tree roots crossed it and I had to hop over them. And the path was dizzy and the hill was steep, with the trees all around us. My mother and I held hands and sang:
‘We do not fear the gloomy wood.
We know the bears are kind and good.
Sing toora-loo, sing toora-lay.
We’ll come again next Saturday.’
And when I was bigger we used to pull my black pram up onto the path and fill it with sticks and dead branches to light the fire with back home.
At the end of the Woodhill there was an old quarry. The wall sloped away and had footholds worn in it, and I could climb up them; but I was too scared to climb down and always slid back at the side on my bottom through the leaves and where the bilberries grew.
People said the quarry had been for the stone to build St Philip’s church, but I didn’t think that was true. The quarry was soft stone coloured red and white and yellow, but St Philip’s was hard and grey.
The footpath changed to the other side of the road at the quarry, and a wall of the hard grey stone kept the field there from slipping down onto the path. My Hough grandad had helped his own grandad to build the wall. He was a stone-cutter, and the wall was the last job he ever did.
My grandad was ten years old, and it was his first job, the day after he left school. He left school early because Mr Consterdine, the vicar, said he was so clever he’d learnt everything he needed to know for what he was going to do with his life.
My grandad’s grandad chose the stones and fitted them together, and my grandad chose smaller stones to make the date, 1886. The date was a secret of the Hough.
The Woodhill ended at the quarry, and the bottom of the Edge was steep fields, and a path of red sand with white boulders in it went up beside them into the woods. I couldn’t climb this by myself until I was four.
The path joined a path that came from the right, and they made a path that went up for a short way to where the real Edge began.
It was a cliff leaning outwards, and beneath was a trough cut from solid stone, called the Wizard’s Well, and every few seconds one drop of water, then two drops together, dripped into the trough from the cliff. Whatever the weather, wet or dry, the water dripped the same. It never changed. And above the trough, near the top of the cliff, the face of an old man with a beard was carved in the rock. People said my grandad’s grandad had made it, and someone else a bit later had carved the words underneath:
DRINK OF
THIS AND
TAKE THY
FILL FOR THE
WATER FALLS
BY THE
WIZHARDS WILL
The path at the bottom of the cliff and round the well was slippery red clay, like salmon paste. That’s what I called it.
A short way along there was another face, the same as the first, and it was by a split in the rock we called the Giant’s Mouth. I could squeeze in and lie on my back with my nose up against white pebbles that sparkled in the light.
One day, when we were going past the Giant’s Mouth, I asked my father how the pebbles had got fast there, but he didn’t answer and told me to hurry up.
We were going to Castle Rock. It was along the flat path at the top of the Edge, and the front of it stuck out into the air above the fields and my grandad’s house which were nearly three hundred feet below.
We climbed onto the Rock up a wooden ladder at the side. The jutting point of the Rock had wiggly grooves in it made by the rain, and it stuck out because it was hard stone, and beneath it was soft red and white, which had worn away. People had skrawked their initials in big letters in the soft part, dozens and dozens of them. But my father said my grandad, when the vicar told him he could leave school and get a job, he was that vexed he came up here and cut his whole name in Real Writing, the only Real Writing anywhere on the Edge. No one else could do it. My father didn’t know where it was, but he knew it was there. One day, I found it and showed him, and he was that pleased he took his cap off.
I didn’t like going near the point of the Rock because it made me giddy. I could crawl on my stomach and put my fingers in the wiggly grooves, but then I hutched myself backwards to safety, to a big bench on three stone stumps, and I sat on it and stayed there.
(© the author)
From Castle Rock on a clear day we could see Rivington Pike above Bolton, and Manchester, and Stockport, and to Lyme Cage and Kinder Scout, and the land all between was fields of different colours. If we turned round and looked the other way we could see Bosley Cloud and Mow Cop and across to the mountains in Wales.
Before the war, we used to go to Castle Rock at night to watch the fireworks at Belle Vue Gardens in Manchester. When the war came, Harold and I went up once to watch the Blitz and the anti-aircraft guns firing in Johnny Baguley’s fields in the Hough below. Then, after the war, at the end of the blackout, people from the village went to see the street lights being switched on. We looked in the dark as the night and the stars came; and then quickly, in patches, there were stars spreading on the ground beyond the fields, and the patches joined up and Stockport and Manchester were two big fuzzes of light and everyone cheered, and the real stars went out except for the bright ones, and we couldn’t see The Milky Way.
My grandad’s grandad had cut two faces at the Wizard’s Well, but there were others along the lip of the Edge, always two, close together. Those that were easy to see had been smashed about the eyes and nose and mouth, and one of the two at Castle Rock wasn’t a face at all any more unless we knew. There was only the shape of it left. But further along, towards the Beacon, the faces were too high up to reach from below and hard to see because they were against the light and grass hung over them from the path above. My grandad’s grandad had cut proper faces, with hair and beards, but these below the path were a straight mouth with thick lips, a straight nose, big round eyes and a bald head. They went all the way to the Holy Well.
One head, near Castle Rock, was low down on the cliff and didn’t have another like it. It was the face of a chubby man, with short locks of curly hair; and the eyes and nose and mouth had been hit, though not as hard as the rest of the faces. I thought he was Lord Stanley.
Bert Pretty was a friend of my father’s; and he was what was known as a wild card. There were stories about him and his capers. And one day, when he was on leave from the army, he came with me and my father and we went to Castle Rock.
There was a gang of rough boys from Manchester making a racket and showing off. They’d fixed a rope round one of the bench stumps and were lowering themselves off the Rock to the path below then running back to the top and going down again, laughing and shouting and acting big.
We sat on the bench and watched them. My father was saying what he’d do if they were his.
When they were all on the path under the Rock, Bert Pretty got up and went to the edge and looked down. He shouted, ‘Below!’ And he jumped off.
My father and I climbed down the ladder and went round to the bottom of the Rock, and we found Bert standing on the path. All the boys were gawping at him and not saying a word. He’d jumped nearly thirty feet straight and landed on the path, which was only about eighteen inches wide there, with a steep slope beneath. But Bert was in the paratroops, and he knew how to land.
And the next thing, he took a handkerchief out of his pocket and blindfolded himself and set off to climb back. He went up the red and white rock and onto the hard overhang and to the top in one go. Then he took off his blindfold and called, ‘Are you coming, lads?’
We left them, and my father laughed all the way to Stormy Point.
Another day
, I was walking with my father on Castle Rock and I was looking at the patterns of the fields and the way the roads and lanes went between them. I asked him why Hough Lane had a bend in it. My father said, ‘So it can get round the corner.’
When we were on our walks, my father told me things. The path went along the top of the steep lip of the Edge, and below it were the woods; and the branch of one of the larch trees reached close to the path. My father told me how, in The Great War, when he was a boy, a man had tied one end of a rope round the branch, made a noose of the other end, put the noose round his neck and stepped off the path right there and hanged himself.
Another time in The Great War, my father had been sitting on Castle Rock, he said, and the shadow of a Zeppelin airship had passed over his head and made everything go dark.
And he’d been on the station platform as a train went through pulling cattle trucks filled with Russian soldiers, and they all had snow on their helmets and boots.
The path from Castle Rock curved below a mound on the highest part of the Edge. At the top there were stone blocks scattered about. They were what was left of the Beacon, which had been built to give warning of the Spanish Armada and Bonny Prince Charlie and his army from Scotland when he marched across the Edge to invade England. And my father told me how the people living on the Edge went and hid in Ridgeway Wood below Stormy Point, and one boy who’d just got his first pair of britches took them off and put them in a tree so the Scottish soldiers wouldn’t get them, because they didn’t have any britches and had to wear petticoats instead.
The Beacon was blown down in a gale on Christmas Eve three years before I was born.
My father finished work at dinnertime on Saturday each week. And after dinner he nearly always went to watch football in Manchester. Then he came back for his tea, washed and shaved, put on his suit, and went to the pub. He went to The Drum and Monkey, then to The Royal Oak, then to The Trafford Arms, then to The Union Club. Then he came home, went to bed and slept until dinnertime on Sunday.
On Sunday morning my mother got up and cooked the Sunday dinner. She roasted a joint of beef with potatoes in the oven, and she boiled more potatoes, and cabbage and carrots and Brussels sprouts my grandad had grown in his garden up the Hough. And she made gravy and Yorkshire pudding, and a rice pudding with a brown skin on top.
Twenty minutes before dinner was ready, my mother knocked on the beam below the ceiling with the handle of the carving knife and my father thumped back on the bedroom floor with his foot. My mother served the plates to the table, which had a clean white cloth on it, and my father came downstairs, sat in his chair and ate his dinner. He mixed the rice pudding with the gravy and it looked horrible. I sat with him and had bread and jam, and my mother sat on the arm of a chair by the fire with her plate on her knee. No one talked.
After dinner, my father read the News of the World in his easy chair by the fire, and went to sleep until teatime. My mother cleared the table, took off the white tablecloth and put on a blue sateen one with tassels, and washed up the dirty pans and dishes. Then she went to bed to lie down, and I read my comics because I wasn’t allowed to play out on a Sunday.
After tea, unless we were going to see my Hough grandad and grandma first, my father went to the pub and my mother and I listened to the wireless and played cards, always Strip-Jack-Naked, Rummy and Pelmanism. Sometimes we played Crib.
One Sunday, when I was five, my father sat down after dinner and read his paper. When he’d finished, he looked out of the window and said it was a grand afternoon and asked would I like to go up the Edge.
He’d never done this before on a Sunday.
We went along Mottram Road, up the Woodhill, past the Wizard’s Well, to Castle Rock. My father was whistling and telling me things, and I held his hand.
We went on, not hurrying or going anywhere. When we came to the path to the Holy Well, I said I’d like to go that way, but my father said the path was mucky and we hadn’t got the right shoes, so we climbed up towards Stormy Point and the Devil’s Grave.
The Holy Well was one of my best places. It was a stone trough below a cliff, a bit like the Wizard’s Well, but made of two slabs against two flat sides cut into the rock, and there was a little shallow dish, also cut, and shaped to a quarter of a circle.
The water didn’t drip but trickled fast out of the bottom of the cliff and sparkled over bright green leaves by a wooden bridge made of planks and branches. The water ran under the path and down into a bog called Holy Well Slack, and then into a field at the bottom of the Hough and into my grandad’s garden and another stone trough where he got his water from.
In the bog there was a huge boulder that had fallen from the cliff and landed on an old woman and her cow and shaken all the houses in the Hough. It did that in the year 1740, my father said my grandad’s grandad had said.
I could climb onto the boulder along the trunk of a pine tree that had been blown over, but I daren’t go into the bog. I had once, and got in a pickle. I sank in over my knees and was stuck, until an old man heard me shouting and came and pulled me out by reaching with his walking stick.
Round the corner from the Holy Well was the Wishing Well. It was a round trough in front of a cave and water ran into it from a groove in the roof. People said my grandad’s grandad had made it, and it was the only safe water to drink because of all the poison in the rock.
The water dribbled, but the secret was to find a leaf that fitted into the groove, and then it sent a spout you could get your mouth under and drink. Only one kind of leaf would fit, and it was a secret where to find it. After we’d drunk, we had to take the leaf out and throw it away, so strangers couldn’t drink.
The Holy Well was a quiet place. It looked out over the fields, with the Edge curving on either side. And sometimes, if the weather was right, noises sounded strange. Then we could talk across the Slack and be heard on the other side and in the Hough.
I could see my grandad’s house below and watch him working in his garden. If he saw me, and the quietness was there, he used to wave and whistle, and I heard him as clear as if he was on the boulder in the bog, and when I learnt to whistle I whistled too, and he waved again.
It was a special whistle he taught me. It was the whistle the donkey men used on the beach at Blackpool to make their donkeys turn round and come back when they were giving people rides.
There was another Hough whistle, which my father taught me. It was the first line of:
‘Oh, can you wash a soldier’s shirt?
And can you wash it clean?
Oh, can you wash a soldier’s shirt,
And hang it on the green?’
If I saw any of my uncles or my father’s friends, same as Inky Gezink, and whistled that, they’d answer by whistling the second line, and then they’d stop and talk to me.
Holy Well Slack had the only white clay on the Edge. It was under the leaf mould on the left down below the well and was another secret. We used it as soap to clean ourselves up before we went home after we’d been playing. And we used it to paint our faces when we were Cowboys and Indians.
We got our war paint from different parts of the Edge. Red was everywhere, but the best was at the Wizard’s Well. Green and blue were in the clay at Engine Vein, an old copper and lead mine near the Beacon; and black and yellow were at Pillar Mine, below Stormy Point.
Anyway, on the afternoon when I was with my father, we went to the Devil’s Grave.
Nothing grew on Stormy Point, not even grass. It was all rocks and pebbles and sand, from across the flat roof of the Devil’s Grave right down the steep to Leah’s fields.
The Devil’s Grave was an old mine, too, but it was small and not dangerous like the others. It didn’t kill people, and it was safe to play in and wasn’t all dark. It was a sloping cave with a sand floor and the way down to it was a trench in the rock. There was a round hole in the roof, part blocked with a square stone so people wouldn’t fall through the hole.
That Sunda
y, when we got to the Devil’s Grave we stood next to the square stone and my father told me it was the Devil’s Gravestone, and if you ran round it three times widdershins the Devil would come out and get you.
I asked him if it was true, and he said it was what he’d been told.
I asked him if I could have a go, and he said I could. So I set off running widdershins round the stone.
I ran once. Nothing happened. My father was looking at the view. I ran again. Nothing happened. My father still looked at the view. I set off again. Three times.
I said I’d done it.
He said I had and all.
A screech came out of the ground beneath my feet, and screams and groans and cackling and moaning, and pebbles flirted from under the stone and out of the trench, and sand and bits of twig, and there was a stamping sound in the cave, and more screeches.
I ran across the roof of the Devil’s Grave back towards the path; but I hadn’t gone far into the wood when I tripped over a tree root and fell on my face.
I lay there, shouting for my father, with sand in my mouth, waiting for the Devil’s breath on my neck and his claws in my back. I waited and waited and yelled till there were only sobs left.
Nothing happened. Then I heard a sound. It was an ordinary sound. I looked through the bend of my elbow. My father and my uncle Syd were standing side by side at the Devil’s Grave and laughing.
They’d planned it on Saturday night in The Trafford Arms.
My father was to get me to Stormy Point at three o’clock the next day, and uncle Syd would be waiting inside the Devil’s Grave. They reckoned it was time, and I was old enough to learn the Edge.
Bunty
I had two stamp albums. One was ‘The Strand Stamp Album arranged for the Reception of British, British Colonial and Foreign Postage Stamps, ample Provision being made for All Recent Issues, Thirteenth Edition fully brought up to Date, published by Stanley Gibbons, Limited, 391 Strand W.C.1 (opposite Hotel Cecil)’. That was for my collection. The other was ‘The Famous XLCR Postage Stamp Album, published by Thomas Cliffe, Rhyl, North Wales’. That was small and I used it for my swaps, or sold them at a penny discount with every shilling.