Ring the Hill

by Tom Cox

  And they were right: I was lucky. I was not trapped in my car, down a ravine, bleeding to death, unbeknownst to the traffic above. I was at home, in a house with central heating, and still had a chance to complete my book, and – one day – to dance, to swim, to drink in sun-splashed beer gardens, to experience relatively pleasant weather once again. I had my friends Rob and Donna, who drove over from Sheffield to the plague village and fed me restorative home-made soup. My Achilles tendon was playing up a bit, from all the snow hiking, but I did not have the plague. It was not 1666 and I was not covered in buboes nor confined to one of Eyam’s pest houses, slumped among the newly dead, cough-vomiting and staring through a tiny mucus-smeared window towards a hillside where, last week, I’d buried my wife and child. It was 2019 and the earth was doomed but life contained all the convenience that had assisted in causing its doom.

  *

  When we escaped Eyam – him for good, me just for a day – both Reverend William Mompesson and I went a little over forty miles east in exactly the same direction. Had we been born in the same era, a stick or chunk of flint hurled by a plague-fearing peasant could have almost hit both of us on the same flight. Mompesson headed to a rectory at Eakring, in Nottinghamshire, where he stayed for a number of years, preaching to a slightly apprehensive new congregation in the village’s church. I headed to a house a few fields away from where the restored 1800s incarnation of that very same church still stood, where upon my arrival, like a twenty-first-century, Tupperware-owning Earl of Devonshire, my mum gave me food to take back to the plague village. I loved this red-brick, pantile cottage I had never lived in, which rested easy in this gentle, unshowy corner of the north-east Midlands. It was always full of plants and food and music and art and amphibians and cats. Even more of the latter, now. Roscoe’s bullying of Clifton had escalated, and to make her – and my – life easier, my mum and dad had offered, a little reluctantly, to take her in. She seemed to be settling OK, with one exception. Sarah, the friend who worked at the vet surgery in Devon and who’d initially given Clifton to me, had told me she was ‘almost certain’ Clifton had been spayed, but at Eyam Clifton had started to whine a lot at night and seemed increasingly interested in Ralph, going to various efforts to display her rear end to him. Ralph, who had last known what it was to have balls way back in 2001, had just looked confused, but my mum and dad’s solid young cat George and his all-white, toilet-roll-obsessed friend from next door, Casper, were, despite both being sterilised, apparently much more open to her advances. I am not sure how this fitted in with George and Casper’s own relationship, which had been very tactile for a long time, but they seemed to have come to an arrangement of some sort.

  ‘George smells brilliant at the moment,’ my mum told me. ‘It’s because he keeps rolling around in the coffee your dad spills on the kitchen floor every morning.’

  Outside, I noticed a table had been set to display the three ram skulls my dad had received from Richard. He showed me his new pitchfork and posed with it for a photo in front of the beds where this year’s lettuce, courgettes and pumpkins would grow. He pulled an impressive pitchfork face: the face, perhaps, of a person protecting his crop, or a member of a baying peasant mob, fearful of an intruder from a cursed village who he thought might infect him, or blight the season’s squashes and alliums, or bring him generic bad luck. ‘It’s far more complicated than that,’ you might have said to the member of the baying peasant mob, but he would not hear you. He had his simple beliefs and would not be swayed from them.

  ‘THIS REMINDS ME OF THE TIME I STABBED ALAN TITCHMARSH IN B&Q,’ said my dad.

  ‘You stabbed Alan Titchmarsh in B&Q?’ I said.

  ‘ALMOST. IT WAS A LIFE-SIZE CARDBOARD CUT-OUT OF HIM ADVERTISING HIS GARDENING FORKS. I THOUGHT IT WOULD BE FUN TO STAB HIM WITH ONE OF HIS OWN FORKS BUT THEN I THOUGHT I MIGHT GET INTO TROUBLE SO INSTEAD I WENT RIGHT UP CLOSE TO HIM AND WHISPERED “FUCK OFF, TITCHMARSH” IN HIS EAR.’

  We walked back towards the house, past George, who had Clifton’s neck locked tenderly in his mouth. ‘CHECK THE OIL IN YOUR CAR,’ said my dad. ‘AREN’T STARLINGS BAD-TEMPERED?’

  The garden would be coming to life in a few weeks, flourishing as it always did, save for one small patch, where trees and plants always mysteriously perished: a pear tree, a crab apple tree and a viburnum then two Himalayan birch. Once, many decades ago, pigs had lived and died in the garden. The grandson of the family who’d formerly lived here told my mum he remembered the area where the plants perished as being the same area where the pigs were killed then covered in salt. The theory was that the salt was still deep in the soil, so rife that when the roots of the trees went far enough down, they hit it and began to rot. Some of the trees my parents had planted in healthier patches of soil when they’d first moved here were tall now, which reminded me that this was no longer the new house in a new area that they’d bought a few years after I left home, no longer the two-bedroom wreck they were doing up. Next year would be their twentieth anniversary of living here. The elderly neighbours who’d lived next door to them on either side when they’d bought it were no longer of this universe: part of a whole generation of the village that no longer existed. A young family with an old English sheepdog had moved into the converted windmill next door. The old English sheepdog was named Shirley. Two Decembers ago my dad had taken a Christmas card out to deliver to a woman in the village who was also called Shirley, but forgotten to post it and, instead of going back, chosen to deliver it to Shirley the old English sheepdog instead. ‘Happy Christmas, Shirley!’ said the old English sheepdog’s card. ‘Love from Jo and Mick.’

  Mick was more embedded in his environment than he had been during their first few years here, when the house seemed more Jo’s project than his. The footpath which ran directly past the front door, which once might have seemed a potential nuisance, now just provided an extra, happy source of walkers, villagers and tradespeople for him to talk to about their life stories. He no longer spoke, as he had done regularly for my entire childhood and beyond, of how much better life would be in Derbyshire. I wondered if I might have been responsible for giving him a recent nudge a little further along that road. My house on the edge of Eyam reignited an old, dormant part of my dad and excited him with its romance, with its lack of twenty-first-century trappings, but now I’d been there almost three months and he had a fuller understanding of how difficult life was, up there on Witch Mountain in the ice – the dangers of the roads, the endless weather checking, the Achilles tendon injury sustained in the drifts, the huddling in the one warm room, all the tiring contingency plans – and what he and my mum might have let themselves in for had they fulfilled his dream and moved somewhere similar in the eighties. To some people I knew in the South, it was all the same, north Derbyshire, east Nottinghamshire: all just part of the same North or Almost North, that place where it was grim and bleak and cold. But it was far more complicated than that. I lived closer to my parents than I ever had, in all the semi-itinerant years since I first moved away from them, but our homes had never seemed more like separate planets.

  There were even more extreme weather reports that day I first visited Clifton in her new home, so, after I’d witnessed Casper mount her then shred a post-coital toilet roll, and my mum had called the vet, I took advantage of the remaining daylight to set off back to Eyam. Weather forecasters were calling it The Beast from the East. In a frantic and bustling supermarket in Chesterfield, people – people who probably mostly lived on genial urban and suburban streets – were talking about the importance of stocking up. At times like this, you realised how quickly British society would collapse and become totally feral should anything genuinely cause the country’s infrastructure to buckle. Chesterfield marked the halfway point between my parents’ house and mine. When I’d first moved, seeing the crooked spire of its church had fuzzed me up with warm childhood memories, making me tingle with anticipation me for the moment a few miles farther on where you enter the National Park and
the big views open up. Some say the spire twisted with the force of a sneeze from the Devil, as he was passing. Others say he was leaning on it, and bent it after turning in shock to see a woman who’d just been married in the church and realising she was a virgin. The consensus is that, whatever the case, he was travelling from Nottinghamshire at the time. Coming from the same direction, I began to associate my first glimpse of the spire with the melting away of the levity of my parents’ house and garden, the return to the cold, uncharitable place, where an incomprehensibly gargantuan heating bill, handwritten by my landlord for his incomprehensible self-run biomass heating system, was waiting. The Devil was in the sky, and I was on my way back to the plague village – not even the plague village, but the less welcoming place above it – and it was about to snow. Again.

  When I edged up to the house in renewed ice, the sisters next door were packing a van. ‘It’s too bleak for us,’ they told me. They, too, could not understand how their heating bill was so high, and planned to dispute it. A few days earlier, the couple who’d come here from Norway had vacated the other cottage. My landlord, I was told, was on holiday abroad. The Clivia still hadn’t flowered. I filled the bird feeder for the nuthatches, grabbed myself a warm cat, and stoked up the fire. The snow hadn’t quite restarted yet but you could sense the night growing fangs again.

  I’d already made my decision, although I wouldn’t be able to act on it just yet. I hadn’t initially wanted to let myself hear what my gut was telling me, as I didn’t want to be knee-jerk about the weather, wanted to give everything a chance, write more of the book, then when I’d written more of the book and stayed in denial for long enough, it had hit me like a deferred realisation about a lost lover: the south-west was the region whose arms I want around me for the foreseeable future. Perhaps the only way to fully realise it had been to leave. I wanted to be back there with all my heart and saw clearly all it had given me. I took a square look at the face of the upheaval it would necessitate, so quickly after the last lot of up-heaval, to get back there, and felt entirely accepting of that upheaval. The only thing that really worried me about moving back to the south-west so quickly was the questions people would ask me about it and how exhausting it would be to explain all the nuances of my decision. ‘It’s far more complicated than that,’ I could already hear myself saying.

  But first there was the snow, more of it than ever before. It fell softer against the thick sooty walls than it had on other nights, but I knew something more immense was happening out there in the dark. In the morning, I could barely open the front door. My car was a memory. A small cat, stuck out in that in a lost valley, surely would never have negotiated her way back. Waking up, at 3.44 a.m. from a nightmare where disembodied hands had shot out of the headboard and throttled me, I’d sensed that the gossamer mooring that had been linking the house to civilisation had snapped, and I was floating away. There was no going out, not even on foot. On the plus side, I no longer had a ghost dog, having a fortnight earlier met a small pile of narrowly living hair belonging to the sisters next door: a seventeen-year-old, deaf, dumb, blind terrier of no discernible breed. That is to say, the dog who sounded like a ghost through a thick wall, and possibly soon would be a ghost, had moved out. The furniture in the loft quietened down too, the carved fish remained in position, and only one picture fell off the wall, but as the temperature slipped further below zero, the place – in a slightly wider sense – frightened me more than it ever had. ‘Weather is ghosts,’ a note in my journal from this period says. The ominous spaces at the top of the rooms became bigger. I had a living room full of records but, unlike almost any other time in my life, didn’t want to play any of them. I huddled upstairs in the one warm room, worrying about my heating bill while sitting in bed in a woolly hat, repeatedly pressing refresh on property websites. On the fourth day, I ventured up the track to take the rubbish to the bin – a futile gesture, as the bin men hadn’t been able to get up the Hill That Never Ends for over a fortnight – in what, with wind chill, amounted to minus seventeen degrees Celsius. The light had changed. You might have called it piss yellow, if piss had no connection to warmth. It was a colour and light I’d never seen before: totally washed out, stinging everything. I am the last person left on earth, I thought. The road remained ungritted. My Achilles tendon injury made me feel like my foot was hanging loose from my ankle. The food ran out the day after that. My dad heroically hired a four-by-four to bring me supplies. Then, after going into a fishtail on the ice and spinning back down The Hill That Never Ends, he discovered the four-by-four the hire company had given him wasn’t a four-by-four at all. Luckily, a Peak District angel called Matt was passing at the time, in his old Land Rover. Matt transferred the food to the Land Rover, then to me. There was more of it than I could have eaten in a month. I wouldn’t have starved without it, but I definitely would have had to dive into at least one tin of out-of-date kidney beans, straight, no chaser.

  I continued to press refresh on property websites. The moment meltwater started trickling down the track and as soon as a suitable and affordable house in Devon came up to rent, with a provision for cats in the tenancy contract, I drove 280 miles south. I applied for the house. I got the house – but only because I paid my astronomical, nonsensical heating bill, since Mr White refused to give me a reference unless I did. I was not repaid my deposit on the Eyam house despite me leaving the house in better condition than I’d found it (the slugs lived outside now), nor the extra month’s rent I paid when, in my absent-mindedness, I forgot to cancel the standing order going from my account to Mr White’s. It did not surprise me. Some people stay well-off for a reason. Other people will never get well-off for many reasons, one of which being that they move house so much. But most importantly, to me, I was free: the state in which I am happiest. A month after I left, I was swimming in the sea. A month after that, I was writing the final sentence of my book of not quite ghost stories in 24-degree heat on a beach. My new house had nothing palpably malevolent in it. The kitchen drawers were sticky, as if they’d been used solely for the storing of loose home-made syrup. One of the exterior doors didn’t lock. The shed contained half-finished woodwork, a PlayStation and a scratched Prince record and smelt of sawdust and marijuana. The place oozed its past, like a boy-racer’s former car oozes its past. It was all party. The Eyam house had been zero per cent party. I am convinced nobody had ever had a party, or even a good time, there. Maybe somebody laughed, once, but the spirit memory of it had been trounced by the cold, cold atmosphere beneath the watching walls.

  Places change us more than we realise: not just their people or culture, but their air. The air in the house on the almost mountain made me uptight, blew away a mellowness the south-west had coated me in that I didn’t even know had been there. My hair was different, my skin, the way I breathed. Ghosts? I cannot say for sure. Extreme tiredness and extreme weather can change your perception of your immediate environment a lot. Our interest in ghosts is slightly egotistic. We can’t believe we won’t be here any more. We want some evidence we will continue, even if it’s in tortured, unresting form. The question becomes bigger as you get older. You stand there, this collection of experiences and opinions that’s become more complex with every year you’ve been on the planet. You and your unique accent, stewed in all the places it’s been. All that energy. It might not be in your body and mind any more when you die, but it has to go somewhere. Maybe the answer is that it goes into brick and stone, into woodland, valleys, rivers. Maybe it is in the wind, the rain, the snow. I am not a scientist, but I know this: every house, every valley, every copse, every hill speaks in its own particular voice.

  There were times in late 2017 and early 2018, on one of the less brutal days, when I would be driving across the Peak District – a notably high, desolate bit – and look up to a ridge, about 500 feet farther above that and think, ‘What crazy idiot would choose to live up there in winter?’ then, with a jolt, realise the answer was me. I might have only lasted jus
t over three months in the end, but it was the longest three months I can remember in my recent life: a period where time passed as slowly as it does in summer when you are ten, but without the fun, or the summer. The subsequent three months raced by, but, because of the happy and untethered way I spent them in the best weather I’d ever witnessed in Devon, put such a divide between me and my experiences in Eyam that, in their own way, they felt like a long time too.

  By June, when I sat beside my parents’ wild pond in the sun during my first trip back north, that unwelcoming house, that hilltop, felt as far away as a dream dreamed under a different monarchy. It felt far away enough for me, almost as if the whole winter had slipped my mind, to casually tell my mum that I’d perhaps like to try proper northern living, one day in the future. George and Casper were close by, napping, but Clifton was away on an adventure. She appeared to have a different concept of what home was to the other cats in my life. She disappeared a lot, my mum said, and had been found living in the village primary school for a spell, and in a couple of barns over in the direction of Mompesson’s old church at Eakring, but she always came back. We talked a little about Eyam and my mum promised me, for the third time, that she had never moved the carved fish. From one of the house’s open upstairs windows, we could hear my dad on the phone, loudly befriending an IT worker based in India. ‘He didn’t really need to phone them,’ said my mum. ‘He could probably have just shouted, and they’d have been able to hear.’

  My mum went inside to prepare lunch and I napped on the grass, fractionally under the surface of consciousness, until I was woken by a gang of ducks, charging past me in the direction of the water, talking in their varying local duck voices.