“Because of that need to belong, I returned home to Cumbria, not a return to people but to a place - the Eden Valley” [Lorna Graves]
The journey: how many times have I landed on the platform at Newcastle, tottering under an overambitious collection of luggage, looking for the stopping train that will rattle its way west along the South Tyne valley to Brampton? This, though, the first time since I sold our small house in Hallbankgate: so is this a home-coming, or something else?
Met at the station by my oldest and best Cumbrian friend, I spend the weekend at Low Luckens, their farm out beyond Hethersgill. The weather is mean, constant snow flurries whipped horizontal by a wicked wind, the house without central heating, but the kitchen has a wood-burner, another in the sitting room. I sleep under three quilts with a hot water bottle and in the whole-heartedness of the welcome I am warm as the proverbial toast. Rather than home to roost, though, I am perched: not that tentative and temporary state that is ‘perching’, poised for departure, but washed up on this foreign hillside, among its bare branches or atop this crooked wall of crumbling stone, at least 50 shades of grey in its lichened surfaces. Not quite a stranger, still the tremors of recognition are absent now: you can only stay away for so long before you are forgotten. And why not? You made your choice, preferring the flat fields and watery reedbeds of the south-east to these northern hills. The rangy uplands and blunt openings and sharp edges have their own geography, answerable only to themselves. It’s not so much that they keep you out; rather they shrug you off, busy with their own rhythms, uninterested in those who like you, in passing through, expect more than their due.
And then, just when you are thinking your ghosts are laid and you have cut loose the ties that bind you, here is a face once known, now an accent familiar as your own voice – ‘dawn’t really knaw’ – ‘and then the snaw, eh?’ The bus labours up beyond Milton – new lambs – a lapwing displaying – scrubby grass spread skimpily over the coaly earth. The posh hotel nestles smug on the flat ground before the last climb. The lane end to Kirkhouse and Farlam – the sign for The Belted just ahead of the sharp bend – and here memories one after another thickening like the slender trunks of the pines immediately before the village boundary, one then another then another. Past what was our house, the anticipated emotional tug surprisingly absent, and into the shop, transformed now into the Hallbankgate Hub with an impressive selection of cakes, I'm surprised by old friends, one rendered almost speechless by my arrival unannounced, squeezing my upper arm repeatedly.
We walk the familiar circuit: Clesketts, skirting Howgill along a still snowy track to Forest Head, the empty dwelling virtually collapsed now. Up the hill past Whinny Fell, the sky clear blue, sun warming our shoulders with the promise of spring. There is dereliction everywhere: the hotel on the edge of the tarn roofless, its top removed in a cynical ploy to avoid council tax, windows boarded or gaping, the pinkish stone visibly disintegrating; the burnt-out remains of the Richardsons’ house still screened by metal fencing. Alongside the road, the hedges and dog roses brutally ripped back to ease the passage of tractors, the raw ends smacking of a mean spirit.
The next morning an early lift to Penrith, the town dour and chill. Women sit smoking outside Costa Coffee where the Bluebell Bookshop used to be. They watch narrow-eyed as I pass.The museum remains firmly shut long past its opening time. I swallow an odd version of a soya cappuccino in the Three Crowns Cafe (banoffee cake on the counter top, the menu boasting all-day breakfasts and home baking). Browsing the Benetton shelves, I linger over a vivid blue merino wool cardigan until the museum opens at last for ‘Memories of Belonging’, an exhibition of Lorna Graves’s work. Lorna is the reason behind my visit; or rather, my friend Clare the poet who has written a memoir about this local artist whom we both knew.
Amongst other local exhibits, a small square room is packed with Lorna’s work: paintings, hand-written notes but mainly the ceramics: the boxed shapes, the human figures and the animals, arranged as in her piece ‘Migration’, all heading in the same direction. Strung along the back wall, a line of ‘museum labels’, written by local school-children who were asked to choose their favourite piece of Lorna’s work, give it a name & explain their choice. Several had chosen her artist’s palette – ‘Could this get any more messy?!’ I think Lorna would have loved this. I am pulled up short by a familiar name amongst those who have lent work for the exhibition. I take more photographs, buy all but one of the available postcards: not the usual overpriced reproduced-for-the-exhibition selection, these must date from when Lorna was alive, her telephone number ghosting the back of each card below the artist’s name.
Later, back in the George, still dogging Lorna’s footsteps, coffee slides into lunch, the revolving doors admitting a steady stream of what I imagine are regulars: ruddy-faced big-bellied men, women hunched in fake fur, stick-wielding, bag-toting, voices raised in jovial greeting or hushed for confidences - ‘aye… aye...naw… aye… mm… aye’. The board opposite the entrance advertises ‘LIVE music every Saturday, Sunday Jazz, a 70s-80s-90s Party & Buffet and 2 for £12 cocktails’. I order a goats cheese & beetroot salad and a glass of red wine, let the murmuration of Penrith’s earthbound starlings wash over me, touched (thank you Lorna!) by so many signs of homespun tenderness, belying perhaps their domestic realities of indifference or, worse, casual cruelties.
The next morning, up before the rest of the house is stirring, seduced by the unexpected sunshine I head into Brampton and then back over the Moat - not a circle of water as the name suggests, this is in fact is a motte, as in motte-and-bailey, a castle mound. It’s steeper than I remember, and dizzyingly precipitous at its edges, but there are great views over the sprawl of this small town and the house where we lived. I continue onto the RIdge Walk. I’d forgotten the wonderful way the path takes you high enough so that the land to either side falls away: to the left, the outskirts of the town on the valley bottom and, to the right, snow-streaked Cold Fell. I head into the wood, Dylan Thomas’s words keeping time to my footsteps:
O may my heart’s truth
Still be sung
On this high hill in a year’s turning.
It’s the end of ‘Poem in October’ so quite the wrong season; a birthday poem, though, so in that respect almost perfect timing. Sadly, I fail to find the stele, the memorial to Lorna which was the other reason behind my morning’s walk. It seems I turned back just a few steps too soon.So thanks to Nicky for chivvying me out again mid-afternoon and helping me find the spot.
O may my heart’s truth
Still be sung
On this high hill in a year’s turning.
It’s the end of ‘Poem in October’ so quite the wrong season; a birthday poem, though, so in that respect almost perfect timing. Sadly, I fail to find the stele, the memorial to Lorna which was the other reason behind my morning’s walk. It seems I turned back just a few steps too soon.So thanks to Nicky for chivvying me out again mid-afternoon and helping me find the spot.
The book is launched: a crowd of familiar faces have assembled to send it on its way. In some ways the event is an anti-climax: all those plans and rehearsals unbalanced by non-functioning tech stuff and an overall feeling of disarray. There were moments, though, when Lorna herself - a fragment of her singing, a phrase from her diaries - seemed to hover in the room, on the edge of sight, just beyond reach.
Another Day Lost: 1,888 & Counting... Issam Kourbaj Cambridge 2017 My Cumbrian visit ends with a couple of nights in Carlisle, staying with Francesca and Nick, and Sherbert, mistress of the feline pirouette. We walk and talk, books and films, mooch round the city in uncharacteristic spring sunshine, have supper at Gianni's. I find I’m revising my starting point: something like ‘a return to people as well as place’. The nature of what we call home is on my mind again today when, back in Cambridge, I hear Syrian artist Issam Kourbaj, who left his homeland, ‘the country formerly known as Syria’, in 1985, speak about his life and work. He begins with a piece he calls 'Emigration', drawn from his visit to Cuba where he found people desperate to get to Miami, pulling apart their tables and chairs to build boats, his raw material gathered from the stock of old theatrical furniture at the back of the ADC theatre. Most striking for me is his account of the exhibition ‘Another Day Lost’, a series of installations representing refugee camps with ‘fences’ of burnt matches, another match added each day to mark another day lost since the Syrian uprising, its people forced to become ‘citizens of a tent’; a home of a kind, I suppose.
The exhibition 'Memories of Belonging' continues at the Penrith Museum until June.
Winter Flowers: The Life and Work of Lorna Graves 1947-2006 a Memoir by Clare Crossman is published by and available from Bookcase, Carlisle
You can see work by Issam Kourbaj at Kettles Yard Cambridge until 2 April
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