"Tis the yeares midnight, and it is the days..."
One of my favourite poem openings (from John Donne’s Nocturnall upon S. Lucies Day), its sonorous tone and that last long syllable just right for the gloom of the winter solstice, and particularly apposite for a Hallbankgate morning, which dawned with some hope but by ten had darkened to a glower, rain whipped in spiteful squalls horizontally across the battered garden. Unfair of me to paint it so black – the sun did appear, briefly, later – and churlish, too, since it welcomed me so warmly and felt – yes, in a way like home. Which is where there are those you care about, Jan suggested; maybe, though I think what makes the difference is if they care back. And I guess you can have more than one – home, that is.
One of my favourite poem openings (from John Donne’s Nocturnall upon S. Lucies Day), its sonorous tone and that last long syllable just right for the gloom of the winter solstice, and particularly apposite for a Hallbankgate morning, which dawned with some hope but by ten had darkened to a glower, rain whipped in spiteful squalls horizontally across the battered garden. Unfair of me to paint it so black – the sun did appear, briefly, later – and churlish, too, since it welcomed me so warmly and felt – yes, in a way like home. Which is where there are those you care about, Jan suggested; maybe, though I think what makes the difference is if they care back. And I guess you can have more than one – home, that is.
Favourite moments? The fellside golden in the first morning of sun; the afternoon everyone burst out laughing when we got off the bus in an entirely local blizzard; being offered a lift on the back of a horse; seeing Debbie looking like herself, on the way back from a sudden serious illness; picking my way through the jam of broken vehicles in the car repairs yard for a hug from David in his overalls; and last night’s carols in The Belted (its full name with the final ‘Will’ rarely used). I arrived ten minutes late to find the pub packed, shouters and drinkers three deep at the bar and a motley crowd of thirty or so gathered round the pool table, belting out (ha!) ‘Hark the Herald’, accompanied by Fiona (accordion), Steve (guitar) and Sexy Ed the vicar on fiddle. We rollicked our way through a dozen tunes, including a very up-tempo version of ‘Good King Wenceslas’ which left us breathless and laughing whilst Sue touched up her lippy and Jackie bellowed out the descants and Ed downed his pint before leaving to run a youth club down the hill. We stayed for fish and chips.
It’s a fascinating place – so I find myself snapping away like a tourist, wanting to share it with you if you haven’t seen it for yourself. There are – sheep, a lot of sheep; hills; lorries (there’s a quarry a mile up the road); yapping dogs. ‘Off-comers’, artists, writers, many with a hint of the erstwhile hippie about them, are tolerated by the locals. There is a lot of weather, a lot of language, predominantly ‘bad’ and dialect. There is a disquieting sense of hopelessness in some I meet – ‘there’s nowt for anyone up here, eh’ – (that ‘eh’, which sounds like ‘bed’ without its consonants and which is sometimes elaborated to ‘like, eh’) a suffix to almost every utterance. It’s not the same story everywhere, though: the school behind our house is flourishing, there’s a programme of visiting/touring theatre and music and last year’s Burns Night was apparently a great success. Just before I left I met Ryan, carrying an enormous television up the track; he stopped to say he’d heard I might be selling up, and he wondered… He laughed when I said I felt the house ought to go to a Hallbankgater – ‘I don’t know much outside this village’ – and looked sad when I said I’d decided not to sell.
I had one day of gardening – or rather attempted garden-clearing. I thought longingly of the Botanics, where my brief is to absorb myself in the fruits of other people’s labours rather than get on with my own, and also of my rather contrary affection for the wild. My lovely lady’s mantle, Alchemilla mollis, a delight in flower, has become invasive, filling every vacant space in the beds and lining the garden wall with crumpled brown stems and leaves welded firmly into the ground. The buddleia is enormous; and the two roses I planted a year or two ago have produced a rampant growth of gnarled branches and towering uprights, all covered with punishing thorns. My day with the secateurs didn’t make much impression.
Now I find that there’s too much weather everywhere. I’m stuck on a stationary train somewhere near Rugby: apparently a tree branch has blocked the line and two ‘services’ out of London have driven into it. And it’s been dark for hours of course, Lucy’s seven hours’ unmasking long over, and I should be home before midnight. My preparations for Christmas are already running woefully late, though – will I ever get there in time?
RSS Feed
