by Rob Cowen
He sips his beer and sets down the glass. ‘Bilton? Yes, of course I do.’
Of course he does. Stupid question. He is a surveyor in Leeds; he knows the geography of this region as well as anyone.
‘You know that whole area’s a developer’s dream, right?’ he says.
‘It was—’
‘No, no. It still is.’
‘But they stopped building at the old railway in the nineteen nineties.’
‘They did, but they’ve been itching to re-start residential development ever since. There’s a lot of land around there that isn’t Green Belt. It’s Green Field.’
‘What’s the difference?’
‘One is protected. Well, sort of. For now, at least. The other isn’t.’
I spin my map back around and tap my finger on its sketched meadows and fields. ‘You mean like these?’
‘Exactly. But others too. It’s much wider than that. Thirty hectares or so.’ He draws a diamond shape with his finger all the way over to the sewage works. ‘This area’s known as The Bilton Triangle and they’ve been looking at it for decades. It’s just the same story as everywhere else in Britain. Massive demand for housing and little available space to build on. But they’re trying hard to push things through.’
‘How hard?’
‘Well, not long ago Harrogate District proposed to allocate land for three hundred houses every year up to twenty thirty.’
‘Three hundred a year?’
‘For the whole district. But the planning inspector rejected it out of hand.’
‘I’m not surprised. That seems an incredible amount …’
Matt frowns at me over his glass. ‘No, mate. They rejected it because it wasn’t enough. The developers are suggesting nine hundred a year.’
I feel stricken. I try to imagine what that would look like, but it scrambles my brain. ‘Hang on. So what’s stopping them building over it now?’ I ask. ‘Local objection?’
He shakes his head. ‘The roads. There isn’t the traffic infrastructure to support the numbers of homes they’re talking about. It would mean a load of work and disruption to build the new relief routes required.’
‘But they will eventually?’
He nods. ‘They’ll have to.’
‘How long?’
‘Could be ten, twenty, thirty years. Might only be five. But they desperately need the houses so, in the end, it’s only a matter of time.’
After checking his watch he pushes his chair up and gathers our empty glasses. ‘Speaking of which. One last round? Then I’ve absolutely got to go.’
But he doesn’t. And neither do I.
As night falls we repair to the main room and grab seats. After all, I’m under instructions. I’m supposed to be here, I remind myself while stocking up on more of the locally brewed ruby red. Then before we know it, a bell is ringing and the barman is shouting to make himself heard. ‘Last orders,’ he bellows. ‘Last orders.’
All the way home along Skipton Road, walking unsteadily at Pregnant Speed, I think of the irony of the edge-land being safeguarded by a road, and of Matt’s words – It’s only a matter of time. I suppose you could say the same for anything. For the universe. When you boil everything down, all is a matter of time – or matter and time – but some things are too large to comprehend. I never expected the edge-land around Bilton to remain as it is for ever, I just hadn’t thought of it ceasing to exist at all. We’re not good at confronting endings until we’re forced to, even though the unshakeable truth of our own conclusion is always with us, that deep terror lurking in the back of the mind. That curse of our consciousness. We become masters at training ourselves to forget about it, concentrating instead on the many joys and wonders of living, and the little distractions and the destinies we feel we can control – jobs, relationships, family, friends, going to the pub, the routes of cycle-paths. These are the walls we build to keep those other thoughts at bay.
Crossing a bridge over the train track my eyes are led off by the row of arc lamps below, a diamond necklace of corollas strung through the darkness towards the distant edge-land. Around me the houses thicken in every direction, traffic whooshes past, streams of taxis and buses pour out of the town, headlights blazing, sweeping me with their tunnels of light. This spot was once an edge of town itself. It too was woods and old paths and memories before it was commandeered by the sprawl for an intersection. There’s old man’s beard growing along the railway, elder and ash reaching over the bridge’s sides and the pavement. A pine curls up from an isolated square of grass outside a school. Through blurred eyes I can just about picture what it must have been like before. But in this place I also see what the edge-land will become. Time flicks back and forth like the cars. Beyond-worlds leaning in again.
Sometime around mid-afternoon the hangover slackens in its ferocity and I roll myself off the sofa, switch off the TV and head upstairs to pack a rucksack. With Rosie not returning until tomorrow and that creeping sense of alcohol-induced claustrophobia, I know where I want to spend the rest of the day and the night. Part of it is about clearing the fog in my mind, part of it is making the most of the weather – the forecasts are adamant: Enjoy it while you can for we’re in for some REAL autumn weather next week with high wind and rain sweeping across the country – but these are only the surface reasons. The truth is that I want to sleep out in the edge-land again – now, while I still can – and remember it all.
Swinging my pack onto my shoulders, I take the long way round because the sky is as beautiful as I’ve ever seen it. From our street, above the chimney pots, aerials and pigeons, silver-spun clouds roll like surf breaks. Over the ring road starlings swap loud swannee-whistle notes from rooftops and the crowns of pavement-locked lime trees. Behind them the expansive plane of shape and light continues unheeded. In one direction it is the soft-focus of a Renaissance painting, tinted as if to emphasise some important event happening on the ground below. Southerly it is more Dalí – flat, crisp layers of blue and the steam train billows of cumulus. The sun is hoisted high and hot on one side of me; on the other, above the rotting fascia of a William Hill, is a trimmed toenail of moon.
At the crossing point, the cycle-path looks smart and flat and tidy. It is the same thick black as the bitumen cliff drooping down the raised concrete block of the old coal platform for the Barber Line. I can hear the diggers clanging away out of eyesight. They’ve almost finished tarmac-coating the viaduct already, pushing on over the Nidd with the same speed and spirit as the Leeds and Thirsk Railway Company before them. ‘The Sailor’s Hornpipe’ blares dementedly from an ice-cream van somewhere in the Poets Estate. Thanks to the cut-back trees and shrubs I get a view of the fields beyond and the fuzzy green backbone of the holloway. Clouds form the shape of a basking shark, mouth open, drifting over the pale land.
I’ve had this annoying phrase flicking around my head all day: ‘Bilton will be built-on.’ The clue was in the name all along. It seems so obvious now, both the wordplay and the inevitability of the matter. I mean, what urban fringe won’t be built on in years to come? And how can we object to it anyway, we who have babies on the way? I’m bringing new life into this overcrowded world. Where can I reasonably expect our children and our children’s children to live? Everyone involved in the debate – politicians, planners, even those who object to new developments – all agree on one thing: the housing crisis is only going to get worse. The evidence from demographic trends suggests that six million new homes are required over the next thirty years. That’s 200,000 per year, and yet, in England, building just over half that number in the last twelve months has been fraught with problems and setbacks. I know all this, of course, and I’ve picked at these thought-threads a thousand times, but now I’ve found this place, I hate to think of what will be lost, of the monumental shift that is coming even for these long-humanised lands. I know Matt’s right; it is just a matter of time. Nothing lasts for ever. Not me; not this land. Bilton will be built-on, but it hasn’t been
yet. The road still holds the future at bay. There’s still tonight, the wood, and breath in my lungs and maybe, in the end, that’s as much as we can really hope for.
‘There was nowhere to go but everywhere,’ wrote Jack Kerouac, and that’s how it feels as I meander down the holloway, pausing to sit and marvel at the mystical light slipping in strips through its woven hazel walls, barring the stones of the drovers’ track. I don’t need to slow my pace now, to rest frequently, but I think I’ve grown addicted to moving at Pregnant Speed. The hawthorn hedges are washed with a silvery shimmer; their leaves glisten like fish scales. Flashes of flame leap over me between the crab apples – flitting chaffinches and robins – and I spin my head around, trying to follow their light. The sun stays aloft but becomes oddly heatless. As I pass into the wood, the air feels colder still, so I pull on my jacket then roll along upstream beside the river. Knock-knock-knock, a nuthatch taps a haul rhythmically against an alder branch. Sweet cicely grows in parsley-like clumps and I grab great handfuls and breathe in its school-bus scent of aniseed. Away to my left, on the ridge of the high bank, there is a crash loud enough to be heard over the static rush of the weir. The profile of a roe deer bounds through a holly bush. I watch it disappear. The rush inside me fades and I make my way up the gorge side, using the tree roots and saplings as handholds, keeping an eye out for the nettle that stung my palm last time.
At the top of the bank I slide off my pack and fix up my hammock, threading its heavy cord around the trunks of two sturdy pines. This is where I’ve wanted to be all day. It is this handsome, haunted spot that lured me from the sofa. This small space just inside the treeline where I can watch the last of the light slip down the field and linger in the nettles. This thin place in the fabric, this margin within a margin. Where day meets dark. And after a few minutes I feel the same sense of correspondence as I did before – the same sense of presence and the awakening of memories. I feel a resonance with the thoughts and lives and layers committed to this ground, as though faintly remembering an old dream. A calm, chilling intimacy. A knowing. And I’m not afraid. I’m not afraid of anything. On the contrary, in fact: I came here tonight searching for just such company, for this union, for the fellowship that would share in and make sense of my own feelings of needing to say some kind of goodbye. The going out before the going in. Perhaps to slip through the fabric and leave a trace of myself, immune to age and forgetfulness, consigned to this precious, doomed land.
Force of habit: I wait another hour before lighting a small fire. I haven’t seen another person, but I don’t want to have to leave now. I couldn’t face that. Not as the excitement of the slow autumn dusk descends and the bliss-nerves that come with sleeping out alone swell in my chest and crawl up the skin of my arms. Dusk is the moment when the simple act of spending a night outside seems thrillingly transgressive, somehow an inverting of the orders and strictures of our everyday lives. The senses are sharpened. Ears strain. Eyes watch for the slightest movement. You are suddenly very alive. Searching for firewood I pick my way along the margin, through its million stings, gathering up the standing dead, snapping branches that have slumped but not yet rotted and piling them around my camp in bundles. Woodpigeons clatter up from the field. A crow barks. Squirrels scramble around the trunks. Water in the ruts of a tractor’s tyre trails are deep lagoons, slicked an oily bronze by the sky. Amid the brambles and nettles, rosebay is feathering at its ends; everything exudes the pungent, ferny tang of leaf mould and bracken. Near the hammock, on the field side of the collapsed wall, I make my fire, sparking the shreds of honeysuckle bark with a match and watching them twist and turn to become whining, flaming tongues that lick the pine kindling into life. Over the field and the wood and the pylons, the post-sunset sky gleams above the hills with the same fiery tones: bursts of yellow, bright white and the ash-grey clouds. Geese honk westwards in a drifting curve, lifting my attention up to the migrant skyways, the invisible songlines that now ripple with the voices of departing birds. After a while others intersect them: the calls of birds returning for winter. Wind farms spin on the furthest skyline behind the town, glowing red lights at their propeller centres. In the sprawling space between here and there, streets echo with dog barks and sirens; columns of smoke rise from chimneys like a forest of ghostly trees. A bell rings faintly.
I stack the fire for warmth and cook my tea – Super Noodles – on a little gas stove close by. I’d meant to buy a tin of vegetables, but forgot. No matter. I put on my gloves and pick a few young nettle heads, adding them to the bubbling broth, watching as they turn the dark green of spinach. I eat it all mixed together straight from the pan as the blue-black twilight snuffs out the last of the day, dissolving everything. Dark now. I hear noises register over the sound of the weir: footfalls and brushed foliage. Things shuffling, gathering, dispersing. From down in the gorge, the trembling shrill of a tawny owl. I load up the fire, then unpack my sleeping bag. The hammock has a flysheet in case of rain, but I unclip it so I can look straight up through the pines at the scattered stars. And here I lie, warm and cocooned, with only my face exposed, suspended between the endlessness of the universe above and the thousands of years beneath. Absorbing everything, I drift off with the sensation that I’m descending into the blackness of the gorge, being absorbed deeper into the earth.
REVELATIONS
Seeking a voice in the dark, I flick on the radio and walk straight into an argument. An impassioned affair, already well underway, echoes off the walls, forcing me to dash back and turn it down. That is not what our research suggests … growls an irate government minister before the interviewer cuts in: But it is what the evidence says and isn’t that the problem? The science is clear. This cull will not have any significant impact. It may even make things worse …
I rub my eyes and open the cupboard. The oven clock glows 6:51 a.m. Between that and the radio’s display there is enough light that I don’t need to switch on the main bulb. Black presses against the kitchen windows, invading the corners in the cold sweat of condensation. Arms folded, leaning against the sink, I listen to the debate as the kettle bubbles up to boiling, but it feels too early for such barking, especially when it’s going nowhere. The minister refuses to concede ground and the more it escalates, the more he begins to sounds like a school debating champion entrenched for the sake of it, bloody-minded and priggishly fighting a line he’s been handed. I start to wonder whether even he believes what he’s saying. As he begins yet another sentence with Let me be absolutely clear, I hit the ‘off’ button. Enough with the professional politicking. It’s been the same for weeks now and the only thing the government is not being is clear. Clear as in unobstructed; clear as in transparent or without impurity; clear as in evident to the mind, free from guilt.
Sipping coffee, I stare through the window into the shapeless gloom outside, scanning the pre-dawn dark behind our house for sunrise in the east. It’s taking its sweet time but then again, that’s October for you. All hush, no rush. The slow-start days. Murky, misted mornings. The steady unpicking of the trees. The clocks going back. And in keeping with the rhythm of the month, our baby is now nine days overdue. It’s a strange feeling that comes with the waiting, like we’ve momentarily fallen off life’s merry-go-round into our own excited space. We’re on permanent standby and entirely freed-up. Appointments are cancelled. Meetings re-scheduled. I work when Rosie sleeps – in these early hours, an hour or two in the afternoon and later on at night. The rest of the time is given over to enjoying our suddenly spontaneous days. It’s like going back to when we first met at university, the impulsive, hour-by-hour existence of students newly let off the leash. Let’s tramp the moors; let’s go get ice creams; let’s get the train to the coast! There is a freedom and intensity that comes with knowing that things won’t stay as they are for long. A strange simplicity; a clarity of sorts.
It was a snap decision yesterday to head out for a walk through the edge-land, coming in from the west and cutting up through the mead
ows to the old railway, following the cables threaded from pylon to pylon. It was getting on for late afternoon but the sky was still warm and huge, the sun a luminous disc ringed by a circle of pale blue. We ate the last of the blackberries and sat for a while sky watching, eyes shifting from rubbly clouds with gilded edges to great chrome-coloured sweeps. Rosie suggested we walked a loop, down the holloway to the river, along the gorge and back past the sewage works. Messing around where the track sinks into the trees from the field level, I scaled the slope and kept pace with her as she descended along the woody tunnel. The soil beneath my boots was like cocoa powder, recently milled to a fine tilth. It stretched out to the straggly hedges to the west and south and, where the earth curved, it took a red tint, like dried blood. The prints were obvious in the surface; a series of darker, round dots, but the soil was too soft to retain their details. I called Rosie to join me and, as she cut through the trees, she found the others – a whole channel of them pressed into damper ground at the edge of the wood. Hind and fore paw prints overlaid each other – rough ovals, like soap dishes, with traces of five-clawed toes. ‘A badger?’ she asked and I nodded. More than one, in fact. Prints of different sizes. Possibly a family group. I snapped a photo of the clearest, then fit my hand in its depression, scrunching it up so that my palm sat in the pad and I could push a couple of my fingertips into the holes left by its toes. It suddenly mattered to me, the act of touching those traces. It mattered because I’d seen neither hide nor hair of a badger since January and now, here, was the irrefutable proof they were still around. It mattered because the way they wove between the borders of the ‘wild’ wood and the neatly ploughed field reminded me of the edge-land itself – unseen, evasive and surprising. And it mattered too because those muddy prints traipsed an unexpected darkness into our expectant world; they were a breath of wind down the neck. They made real the madness of what was happening in the outside world, giving a shape and a form to a shy creature currently being dragged into the spotlight and fought over in every corner of the national press.