Pennine Way 1. Today on the M62 is like clawing through sputum. And that’s for the drivers. I am hiking over a bridge which is the Pennine Way. Lights – nothing but faded lights – below crawl in the enraged throat of the cutting. Whether it is evening or morning, I can hardly remember: but, like the twilight of the morning which it recalls, surely, surely (says the suck on my boots) something is starting anew. What comes out of the muck and rock ahead’s a line of would-be toffs on horses (I know they’re would-bes because such live round here), two girls with rucksacs carrying Australian flags, and a sheep wrapped in pearls. The traffic here though’s moving faster than in the Hell below. I’d like a beer. Is this up here my home? It must be so, as I love it. I think. Well, not exactly here. But in other parts. At other times. Sometimes. You know how it is, with this and that: sometimes one and sometimes t’other, in the fog. 2. Speaking for myself Leave an indoor life caught on hooks, leave the phone that threatens to ring. Find self: a spring bubbling up, clearing through frozen water; or is it an old, paved way for sturdy packhorses, lying in a straight line over the hills still, under grass. 3. In fog only the particular seems to matter. One foot in front is the beauty of the water-glazed moor, sombre crimson and ochre. One clump of grass. A spring. A pool. Its sound. But then out of the fog a grim, stone spike tall as a factory chimney strides on the moortop. Stoodley Pike. I must be near Todmorden, down there lost in its nowhere. Todmorden. The thud thud thud of its syllables means ‘death’ and again, ‘death’ (or ‘waste’) ‘wood’. ‘Tod’ and ‘mor’: two languages, Saxon and Celtic, for the one word, ‘death’. ‘Wasteland by the wooded stream.’ Never a cheerful place, then. Here Zigmund Adamski, after fish and chips in Wakefield, was found dead on a heap of coal and marked by strange burns. Evidence pointed to his having dropped from the sky. The policeman called, sighted a UFO, then lost his memory. Three harsh valleys meet here: one occupied by Celts, one by Anglo-Saxons, one by Vikings. Above them, the looming Bridie Stones. Above these, the conference of stars focuses special attention, it is said, on Todmorden. Particular? Fog concentrates the mind on massive inner and outer worlds. 4. Bridie Stones Warm in the valleys – but June up there was wild and cold as a Shetland winter, at least it felt like it, and a wind brewed gods knew where chiseled those Ice Age cuttings. The moor was in its flowering, cotton-grass in drifts of white glazes lighter than the sky, snipe and curlew weaving through warps of rain but you were warm around me and this was our sacred, archetypal, Bridget’s ancient and enduring place, discomforting but for spirits in the air: ghosts of an ancient consecration. In an evening’s murmur of settling birds on a moor that still accumulates probes – radio masts and telescopes – I find stone antennae, a touching, through rain, of the awakening stars. 5. A path over rock and ridge that throws the towns aside. The valleys are scaled with grey roof-tiles as if slothed by the traffic’s snaking: Hebden Bridge, and Mytholmroyd to which my namesake, Ted, moor-enraptured, "returned less and less of myself". It was thus for me, too: on rambles I only cared to escape into the green or sky-ey joy that could neither hurt nor confuse. How arrogant I was. Now my desire is to live long enough and at liberty to take my grandchild to the crappy entertainments I once despised. My grandchild who teaches me we are but ripples in eternity, while sixty years have gone by like a shadow over the sun. 6. They say the railways are not safe anymore, don’t run on time, if at all, and overcrowded roads are blocked by accidents, and housing estates are flooded, and on television it seems that our drenched, offshore island might be governed by over-wealthy teenagers. And my ex-wife, it is rumoured, has joined the para-military wing of the Quakers. If I sound like that chap spouting the history of an ancient people who lived faraway – his words spurting with spittle like a roof-full of water hitting a gargoyle as he reads from his damp bible in the streets of Halifax - that might be nearer the truth than you’d imagine, that being the place I live in: one of the angry, Chartist and Luddite villages protectively huddled below his lordship’s moor. How shall we save ourselves? Why, as we’ve always done: trespass where we can to recover a birthright; trespass on learning, trespass on the moor. And seem to stay quite still, conserving resources. 7. Water and windproof jackets hang in the dark porch like a small crowd watching something hidden beyond the wall but ominous. An accident perhaps. A murder: so dark and still it is there. Dogs sniff and point at them, suspicious of our soaked, discarded selves while we, in the bright bar, we who have climbed a hill for the hell of it, ar e rowdy over our beer, and hope for a tomorrow when the skies might clear. 8. ‘Hikers and horsey folk this way’ – homemade footpath sign in Calderdale. Bed and breakfast. For bedside reading, a Gideon bible, Charlotte Bronte’s Book of Jokes, and Fun With Your Publisher by Carmen Callil. Younger hikers, wet through, irrepressible, drunk, are fucking in the barn. I face the hush of breakfast: a greasy devouring, restored to sacrament, at least to awe, to silence. Dare no-one speak? A whisper: "it were ‘orrendous, the flood. It buggered the Sky, we couldn’t get no football." Beyond the window and the blue-tits’ cage of swinging nuts are moors and an ancient wood wrought with pre-Roman paths and gashed with new, white falls of floodwater. The waxproofed horsewomen are clodhopping by. The enviable fuckers troop out of the barn. A rag of cerulean blue breaks the sky. A town vision Joe Pilgrim rambles the stony lanes. Furtive, on the hills, in air with hot eyes at the unready, he is alarmed always. Someone might hit him: a blow anticipated but still unexpected. Yet he must wander in all weathers. I have met him, with his soaked shoes, and lank Sixties’ hair fringing crazed eyes; dirty, and deserted by family and friends. Once a town-planner, he is now looking for demolished chapels, terraces, and the wood drowned under the reservoir; hunting the ghosts of what he destroyed, poor man. How well I remember the teams of ‘wreckers’ glorying in their idea of justice: Chartism and Luddism come to the fore again – the patient chiselling, the old crafts of seasoned wood and dressed stone, put to the fire. His associates have scarpered – bullied committees once in awe of the advice of Joe Pilgrim, now mad with his crimes: his one-way systems that have shoved aside Victorian crafts and splendour. Vanished wealth that has left a ditchbottom of hotmouthed drunks and teenaged mothers poisoning their prams from pendulous ciggies, an ugly vocabulary of expletives burning their mouths. Night lights Some defective imaginations in the nineteen-fifties killed the night sky’s beauties by lighting our country ways with street lights. Stars are dimmed and the moon is glazed as she peers at the hills’ meanderings of sodium lamps, perpetual fields of crocuses flaming. We have no sky at night - there is a roof of lit clouds, yellow and orange, keeping the universe from sight. Giving us light starves us of light; of the stars’ influence; of the universe that, while we talk for an hour, grows one billion miles larger, faster than the speed of light that travels so slow ly, considering how far it has to go to show only what was. Where are we? What are we doing here? We’ll never understand, boxed in by our own lights and reflected lights. So come inside. Updated: Tuesday, November 19, 2002
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