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True Grit/True North

28/3/2016

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​On the way to Arncliffe for our seven days in the Dales, we stop in Grassington to top up our already bulging bags of provisions. Although we’re up north, true to southern form we head to the deli for tahini and brown rice and top-of-the-range locally-made granola. Even our glove-buying takes on an unexpectedly gentle direction when the shop-keeper belies his Yorkshire burr by smoothing the fabric into the spaces between my fingers. Not much in the way of northern grit here.  

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​As always it’s an absolute pleasure to perch on the edge of country lives, especially at this time of year. New lambs, the first primroses, larch budding like raspberries, lapwing nesting. The bubbling spiral of the curlew accompanies us everywhere. Evenings in The Falcon provide good company. The skies are big, the weather kind. Still, we are reminded often, in broken fences and ailing sheep, tractor breakdowns and all-night lambing, that this is no easy life. Our nearest of the ‘three peaks’, Pen-y-Ghent, nicknamed ‘Doom Mountain’ by Carole’s family, broods over us, snow-capped. Is it male or female? We can’t agree.

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​Mid-way through the week, we head for Settle. From the Market Square, the lady in the Tourist Information Office explains, you can walk along Kirkgate, past the fire station and Booths Supermarket and onto the river. I’m tempted to step back in time by the open doors of the Victoria Hall, apparently England’s oldest surviving music hall. Built in the 1850s, it has a history of continuous musical and theatre performances and, in the early 1900s, as ‘The Picturedrome’ cinema. An ‘act drop’ (a scenic alternative to closing the curtains during a performance interval) this one showing Settle Market Place in 1822 and painted by Edmund Handby, fronts the stage. A dance floor was installed during World War Two. Now run by a charity, the refurbished hall was reopened in 2001. Outside, I’m not quite returned to the present: next door, a double-fronted villa, peeling pale green paint, suggests grand designs and better days. No clues about its owners, past or present, though.

PicturePhoto: Alexander P. Kapp
My route takes me along the edge of a fifties council estate – a woman walks a dog, another wanders into her front garden in slippers, her bare legs raw in the sharp wind. The smell of coal fires transports me back to childhood Carnforth and our own bit of then new social housing – and through a much-renovated mill complex before I reach a footbridge over the river. I dawdle by an information board, reading about the geology of the Ribble, millstone grit upstream and limestone down – or is it the other way round? – and the history of the riverside. I learn that there were mills on this stretch of river from the middle ages onwards and that the present buildings, dating back to the 1800s, were water-powered mills for spinning raw cotton which was imported to Liverpool and delivered here by canal. Families from all over the country were brought in to work the mills and other burgeoning industries, and housed in terraces of workers’ cottages built for the purpose, children working part-time until they were old enough at 14 to be considered adult. Which is where my mum was destined, did in fact land in one of Lancashire’s neighbouring mills until she was rescued by that other flourishing industry, the railways, in the person of my father. Despite extensive memory failures, she can still speak eloquently of the horrors, though I don’t think she mentions the fire risk, an occupational hazard apparently from all that fluff floating about. At any rate, today’s children avoid such fates: at my back the students of Settle College chatter and play happily on the field during their lunch break. I watch one skinny rip in a t-shirt clamber about on mossy rocks and lichened branches and roots chasing a rugby ball which has landed in the river, for the hundredth time by the look of his expertise.

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​So, north (or is it south?) to limestone, or the other way for grit? I choose north, but it could as well be the other direction, as the polarities persist: permeable or impermeable? Poor or rich? Victorian villa or mean back-to-back? Certainly plenty of the mill owners made their fortunes at the expense of the lives of ‘hands’ like my mother. For her, growing up on the edge of the town, the moors were as dark and satanic as the factories themselves, and the north has always been somewhere to escape from, rather than to. Still, sixty years on, I’m pulled both ways. My path takes me along the river bank for a mile or so – from waste ground to verdant pasture, from the faint chemical tang of the water near the factories to the rich smell of farmyard manure – and then follows the course of the railway before allowing me a way through an underpass (road or rail?) and up onto the hills above Langcliffe. All along the Dales High Way down into Settle, the urban and the rural jostle for the foreground. 

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​Back in Arncliffe and thereabouts, the sense of duality stays with me. I revel in the pleasures of the countryside, the space, the near-silence. I love the mass of the hills, the way the landscape folds into itself, the textures of marsh and meadow, the skeletons of winter trees. And the colours! Green pales to dove-grey and sable in the mist; marram grass glows peachy pink in the late afternoon. On our last morning, the sky is suddenly clear blue, the fields bathed in real spring sunshine, the thrush loud in its celebration of the season. Pen-y-Ghent still looms over us, though, both hard and soft, limestone and grit. True north? it seems to say. Neither hard nor soft, neither one thing nor the other. Or maybe a bit of both.
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Curlew Country: the Yorkshire Dales

26/3/2016

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Day One: Arncliffe

​Up the track at the side of The Falcon past the dead larch and diagonally up the hillside. Late afternoon light. Curlew.
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Day Two: Littondale

Across the fields/through Scoska Wood/stepping stones across the Skirfare. The river low, stony bed and pale creamy mud. Coffee in the Queens Head then over the footbridge and a steady pull up a disappearing track before back via East Garth & fields to Arncliffe. A few small lambs.
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Day Three: Simon's Seat


Via Grassington to Skyreholme/challenging scramble up to Simon’s Seat and back down the long rocky track and by the river to Appletreewick: pretty name/pretty village/disappointing pub. Skyreholme Mill Cottages have enchanting gardens stepped down to the river.

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Day Four: Towards Pen-y-Ghent

From Halton Gill up the fell road towards Blishmire Close and Pen-y-Ghent, parking at its foot (is it male, female or ‘it’? We can't agree.) Lapwings, sheep. 3 miles along the fellside (Dawson Close) passing Giants Grave, a limestone scar/pavement according to Robin later, 3 miles, level walking at first then dropping down to New Bridge, before back again via East Garth to Arncliffe, 6 miles all told. Lambing officially starts today – lots more new lambs now.
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Day Five: Settle

Heading north along the Ribble/Dales High Way to Stackhouse, across the footbridge and alongside then under the railway, across fields and dropping down into Langcliffe before a steep pull up a fieldside and along the Pennine Bridleway back into Settle. Half an hour in the Museum (first day of opening for the season) then a nod at the railway station before tea and a hot cross bun in Ye Olde Naked Man. A grey wagtail wags his yellow backside on the bench outside.
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Day Six: West Burton Valley Walk

Driving through Hubberholme to Hawes for cheese then back via West Burton for a walk along the road beside Walden Beck, almost to the end of the valley then back along the other side: 7.5 miles. The first primroses. Mist/drizzle clearing. Curlew country; lapwing & oyster catcher sharing.
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​Day Seven: Arncliffe/Grassington

Rain/rain.
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​Day 
Eight: Nidderdale

Middlesmoor Valley Walk: a long goodbye to Arncliffe then a walk from Middlesmoor across fields down to the river and back along the other side. A series of 40 or 50 moles in various stages of decay hang on a barbed wire fence; the newest have miniature pink hands. Larch buds like raspberries. The first day of warm sun. Space. Sky.
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Lips Tight Shut

15/3/2016

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Photo: El Lane Calais Hunger Strike

​​I read three pieces about Calais yesterday, and all the time in the back of my mind I have this image of your lips with the thread clearly visible where you have stitched them shut. I think of how much it must hurt – I remember terrible pain when I had stitches in my tongue – and so I know how desperate you are feeling, to add this hurt to the other hurts you are suffering. 
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The first article was Nick Hayes’ description, with drawings, of ‘The End of the Road’ for the ‘Jungle’. Like many I’ve spoken to, Nick went ‘for a week over Christmas… and stayed for a month.’ Everybody mentions the squalor, and Nick’s account doesn’t shy away from the varieties of pain and distress, not least the presence of the police ‘combing through the camp, masks on their faces, plastic bags on their boots, armed with pistols, tear gas and batons’. I know all this – I’ve been there, seen them, but I still find myself lurching between tears and anger as I read. What are we thinking, I wonder, to pile on the pain when people have come so far to escape pain and look to us for help, and all we can do is make life even more impossible? So impossible that you are driven to hit back, to resort to cruelty and violence also – but towards yourself, rather than to anyone whom you might reasonably hold at least partly responsible. We know about self-harm these days, and perhaps this is something of this order: like Lear, who chooses to be out in the storm because it will not give him ‘leave to ponder/On things would hurt me more’, perhaps for a moment your self-inflicted pain takes away the deeper wounds?
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I’m thinking of Shakespeare I suppose because the second piece I read*, about the history of the camp and its destruction by the authorities, was based around a resident from Syria who had taken almost a year to reach Calais. As well as speaking fluent English, we learn he has ‘a degree in English literature and a Master’s, plus an uncle in London and a cousin in Wales…’ Such madness, such a wicked waste: if it were no one’s fault, it would be bad enough. But the thousands like Baraa Halabieh are not victims of some random act of god or nature. They ‘have fled countries where in recent years the French and British have dispatched troops or bombed from the air. Others have escaped from regimes armed by France and the UK…’ Halabieh speaks with the same quiet dignity as you do when you explain the hunger strike: ‘We are not criminals and we are not terrorists. We are just trying to find a safe place. We’re here because of the actions of European governments in our countries. We are the outcome of your actions.’ 
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Your silent protest seems to me every bit as much of an accusation as this. It’s as if you are saying, ‘This is what you have done, to starve me and silence me. You have destroyed the kitchen where we gathered to eat and left us to line up like children at the back of a van for enough food to get through the day. You have done your best to make us invisible, shrinking the small spaces we have found. And your ears have been deaf to our cries.’
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The third Calais account is Glenys Newton’s ‘Have we lost our Elgin marbles?’ It hits home with her characteristic mix of searing anger, heartfelt compassion and humour. Like the other two writers, she finds laughter in the Jungle, and hospitality and, even in these terrible times, hope, whether in the Greek philosophy of Filotimo –  gratitude, generosity and humanity – or in ’Rise Of The Give A Shits’, all those who are ‘stepping up to fill the gaping holes left by our governments’. 
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All three accounts deal in figures. Glenys’s final statistic is the shocking 24,000 a day – (a day – I make that almost 9 million a year) – who die of poverty. Nick’s article ends with the arrival in the camp of an Iraqi family, ‘a journey of 5,000km that ends here, 40km from its destination’. Ben Ehrenreich’s report contains two numbers which pulled me up short, though why I should be surprised I don’t know. The first, a detail of the Anglo-French ‘comprehensive action plan’ signed in September 1914, a British pledge of 5 million euros a year (a year) to strengthen port security and build ‘robust fences’ to keep migrants away from motorways. I think of other ways that this sum (I make that almost 14,000 euros a day) might be spent for your benefit instead of your bane. The second, even more chilling: according to Calais mayor Natacha Bouchart, now that the southern section of the Jungle has gone, the northern half is the next target. Once that’s gone, work can begin on a 675 million euro expansion of the port.
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So it’s all down to money. As Glenys said last night at the special screening of ‘Hora Chilena’, it’s shameful. Our greed, or selfishness, was thrown into sharp relief by the story which the film told, of Cambridge’s welcome to Chilean exiles from Pinochet’s brutal regime in the 1970s. I found this a particularly poignant evening as one of my friends, Argentinian Elisa, was both in the film and in the audience. I first heard her story some years ago, part for me of an exploration of the horrors of the Argentine junta and the thousands (somewhere between 8 and 30 – thousand – depending on whom you listen to) of the Disappeared. Yesterday evening focused instead on the good news, although even this came with the familiar sting in the tale: now we live in a time when selfishness has become respectable, according to one couple interviewed.
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I first met Elisa through tango and as usual I’m writing with the sound of tango music in my head at least, if not actually in the background. ‘Lo pasao paso’ is a current favourite: ‘what’s passed is past’, Famá sings. ‘Let it go.’ We can’t go back, although those I sat with yesterday evening spoke of their time in the Jungle with some shared sense of loss. Unlike Dan, I don’t need to go back for a haircut, but there is something about being there which feels more – real? Is that it? Is there something about our Cambridge comforts which, like a cushion over the face, restricts our breathing, dulls our senses?
 
I can go back to the Calais Hunger Strike facebook page, though. There’s a new photograph, with a caption. I press for the translation: ‘Today was 14 days’. I run my fingers over your lips, feel the ridge of the thread through my skin; make myself not look away. We can’t get that 1970s welcome back but we can fly in the face of the prevailing monetary wind and listen to your pleas for action, use the template to write to our MPs,  and make sure that somehow our doors stay open. Indirectly at least, maybe this will help you take out those cruel stitches.
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Photo: Reza Hassani Calais Hunger Strike
Ben Ehrenreich's 'Diary'* appeared in the London Review of Books for 17 March 2016. I took the liberty of  sharing it on my timeline, where I hope you can read it in its entirety.

You can listen to Francisco Canaro's orchestra with Ernesto Fama singing 'Lo Pasao Paso' in a 1939 recording here. Meanwhile I'm thinking my rough translation should read 'what's past is past' - should it? Now I'm not  sure...

​And you can read more about the Calais Hunger Strike on their facebook page
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