The Ghost Lake, page 10
Back in the early years after my daughter died – after more IVF, more losses, a long-drawn-out investigation into her death which resulted in the devastating news that she might have been saved, that we were let down, that she was let down – I found myself no longer able to work in the hospital in which we had received substandard care, and where that substandard care, that clinical negligence, had been proven to be a factor in me no longer being a parent, in me never being a parent. I had worked there in the pathology laboratory first as a technician, then through the completion of a part-time biomedical science degree, generously funded by the NHS trust. I had worked my way up to the role of microbiologist.
My parents had a strong work ethic and taught me never to turn down an opportunity to better myself professionally. Even though I think I knew at that point that microbiology might not be for me, I was drawn to the idea of pulling myself up, doing better, being better, being one of those women that beauty magazines were always angled to, professional women with make-up and haircuts and smart trouser suits. You never see factory worker chic in Vogue. I worked in the lab for thirteen years. I never once wore a smart trouser suit while I was there. And if I had, it would have been under a Howie coat – a lab coat that fastened right up to the neck and right down to the wrists. Did I enjoy the work? Yes. I liked helping people, I liked being a part of a machine in which the patient was at the centre. I liked being a part of the NHS. But there was a lot that I didn’t like too.
There were a lot of things that came together and caused me to leave the lab and my family of lab workers. Grief had destroyed everything that had been normal about my life. There was no returning to it. It affected how well I could work. I found that when it was time to return to work after my daughter’s death, and do a job that paid well and had a good pension scheme, I couldn’t. Added to this, each miscarriage floored me, each IVF cycle destroyed me, each stage of the investigation into my daughter’s death eviscerated me. I was wrung out from grieving. Every day became an obstacle course. I was living a life so far away from normality, so far away from the life I’d had before, that I felt like I wasn’t a real person. I longed to be set free, and freedom was this – animals, outside, weather.
The last couple of months of maternity leave, when I was preparing to return to work, were spent in an agony of anxiety. After my maternity leave ended, I struggled to go back into the laboratory building itself. I struggled to stay in one physical place. Time had become unstructured. I time-travelled between the ward where things had gone wrong with my pregnancy, and the place in which I was a working member of the team, needing to be switched-on, competent. I would find myself staring at the wall, spaced out, reliving my emergency c-section. I wouldn’t be able to tell you how long I had been away from myself. Small things took me back to that time immediately after the loss – the sound of a fan turning, the smell of disinfectant, the soft hum of voices. At lunchtime I would sit crying in the car rather than go into the building and sit with people whose lives had just carried on, the inevitable pregnancies and births, the inane chatter in the break room. It wasn’t like that constantly, and I did make progress in getting back to ‘normality’, but the problem was that the impact of this traumatic loss had destroyed what was normal. There was no normal to return to, just a jigsaw of shrapnel and the impression of the life I used to lead.
Every loss I experienced after that point threaded back to that initial atomic bomb of losing my daughter. I didn’t have time to heal because we were straight back to IVF treatments. I dragged a heavy clock around with me that counted up the days since losing my daughter and counted down the days to menopause.
When the investigation revealed just how many things had gone wrong with our care, I became completely paranoid about making any sort of mistake at work and causing the same pain to someone else. I became convinced I was somehow a talisman of baby-death and couldn’t bear to be around pregnant women in case I somehow infected them. Sometimes my body took over, like a guardian angel, and I would find myself driving straight past the hospital and, instead of heading into work, instead of driving into the car park and getting out of my car and walking into the laboratory, I would simply keep going. I would simply not turn down the road, not park in the car park. I just wanted to feel a little bit of the experience of not putting myself through that every day, not having to build armour and wear it for eight hours. I’d end up on the moors, driving towards Whitby, feeling a thrill of freedom in my chest. No, not a thrill, a relief. But then that little tickle of responsibility would kick in, that feeling of guilt, that feeling of letting people down, of knowing I needed to pull myself together and get on with it, that everyone goes through tough times, I wasn’t special, I was weak for not being able to handle it. I’d pull into a passing place, turn the car around and head back, the weight of the day ahead settling like a cannon ball in my stomach.
There is only so much pulling yourself together you can do before you start to turn yourself inside out, split your stitches, break. In short, I was broken, suffering from PTSD and repeated bouts of severe depression and anxiety, and eventually, one day, I couldn’t do it anymore. One day I left for real. I walked away. Literally, I got up from the bench, got up from my microscope and walked out of the lab, the hospital and just continued walking. I rang my husband as I was striding away from the town, walking over the rise, looking out over the cemetery and the hospital, and I told him I was done. I am aware of how utterly inconvenient it was for my teammates, and I carry that guilt with me, but I had exhausted everything and I couldn’t do it anymore. When I look back now, I don’t know how I did it at all. I wish I could go back, as the person I am now, and protect myself. I wish I could go back and advocate for myself in front of the panels of NHS HR representatives and laboratory bosses who had standards to meet.
Once I had experienced that animal grief, abandoned the rules of society and allowed myself to be consumed by it, how could I then zip back into my human skin and belong in a world of microbes and antibiotics and work schedules and staff nights out, all the things that had meaning and value to me in the before time? Even writing this, in my office at the break of dawn, where the jackdaws have just flown past the window to their daytime roosts, where all is peaceful, thirteen years after my daughter’s death, nine years since I stopped working at the hospital, six years since the last IVF treatment, I can feel the terror, anxiety and grief building, I can hear the fan turning in the hospital ward where we sat with my daughter’s body.
When I ground myself – by watching the trees outside my office move in the breeze, by watching the magpie on the fence, its head tilted as it examines the last shrivelled berries on the bush, by looking out to the ridge of the valley wall and seeing the sun returning, as it has done for millennia, as people have watched for thousands of years – I remember I am not there. I no longer need to be that square peg in that particular round hole. I am making my own place to be. Sometimes it is enough simply to exist in time. And here we are, here I am, a writer, telling my story to you, in a published book. My dream has come true. My pain, my experience, is a part of me, it is embedded in me like a piece of broken glass. I run my finger along the scar and feel for it like an old friend. I do not need to conquer anything; I just need to exist and experience it. I think about this as I pass the stables and smell horses and dung and sweat and leather and say a silent prayer of thanks to the universe that I am no longer forcing myself to work through PTSD, and no longer hunched over the microscope in my kitchen, surrounded by horse poo, bleaching my worksurfaces until they began to disintegrate.
After I had left the hospital and was no longer a microbiologist, I set up my own animal care business including horse faecal parasitology. From this point I gradually took on more and more writing and workshop facilitating work until the day I decided to close down my animal care business and settle to the thing I’d wanted to be so long ago, a writer. I regret nothing of the path that I chose to get here, each situation, each experience, had a set of lessons to teach me. Some of them were life-affirming, some of them were warnings. It took a long time for me to value my own skills.
There are more people about than I expect. North Street and Flixton Carr Lane must be popular dog walking routes. I am greeted repeatedly by small dogs and big dogs. As I pass a farm that breeds Hereford cows, a small family appears – two toddling children and, presumably, their dad, all in wellies and overalls, with a dog that looks like Tintin’s Snowy. The little dog is immediately on me, licking my hand and running between me and this little family as they laugh and attempt to call him back. They’re going the opposite way, heading up to the village. The landscape is one of wet and cold, but still there is a flock of starlings and fieldfares making their way industrially across the grass in one field, and high above a buzzard is being harried by crows. I watch them with my binoculars, then turn to look for the elusive roll of land that is Flixton Island. Flixton Island is one of several raised areas in the Paleolake Flixton site that would have been islands at the time when the lake was a true lake – a body of water. It’s thought that the Mesolithic people of Star Carr might have hunted on these islands, using small boats to row across the water. During excavations of Flixton Island, evidence of Palaeolithic people and their lives has been discovered.
This is not the first time I have driven down this lane to seek Flixton Island. Years ago, while I was still working at the hospital, I spent a day as a volunteer on an archaeological dig of this place. I was late on my first day, my anxiety had got the better of me, and I’d spent too long paralysed by it, frozen in the doorway, my desire to be at this dig, to do something I’d always dreamed of, fighting against my social anxiety and my desire to crawl back into bed where it was safe. My desire to be at the dig won and I followed the directions down the lane, horrified that I would have to drive over the narrowest of bridges to get into the field.
The day was hot, and I was unfit. My knees creaked and ached from bending, and I had to keep turning my ankles to bring life back to them. My back felt hunched and crumbling from kneeling in the mud. I was surrounded by, mostly, nineteen-year-old students who leaped in and out of the trench we were working in, lithe as gazelles, while I maggotted my way along the ground, a big old lump. I worried that I might accidentally throw something away that was incredibly important. As far as I know, I didn’t discard anything that should have been in a museum. After a while of this steady work, moving in a line up the trench like grazing cattle, my mind settled into the rhythm, and it felt good to feel the light and shade of clouds passing over the trench. It felt good to hear the skylarks and to be embedded in the landscape, quite literally. I became a kind of conduit, the place where the ancient past was meeting the present, and I felt emotional, deep inside, and also somehow away from myself. I felt like a bird looking down on myself. It was a completely unique experience for me. I felt I might do something mad like start talking to the earth or try to communicate with long-lost people. I wanted to be gentle with the earth, here, as we were unpicking it.
We peeled the black peaty earth away, thin layer by thin layer, so gently, so delicately, as if we were surgeons operating on the ground. And as we worked our way down, the earth began to tell us its story. We could see the recent plough lines just under the turf, their wave formation across the field. Further down were the medieval plough lines, and further still were the sedge, the reeds, the ghost lake, and then out of another gravelly white layer, a sudden scatter of half-moons; horse hoofprints emerging from the ground. These were late Palaeolithic or early Mesolithic hoofprints from horses long extinct. Short, stocky little horses, truly wild horses that had come to drink at the edge of the long-gone lake. I felt the physicality of their presence, imagined I could smell the dungy, sweaty scent of them. Time had become thin enough to reach through and touch the stiff bristled mane, smell the grass on their breath.
As the dig ended for that day, a discovery was made in another trench. Horse bones. Butchered horse bones. This, then, was a hunting site where late Palaeolithic or early Mesolithic people had come to kill the horses where they drank. The bones were a rusty red colour. To my untrained eye, they looked like red sticks or tree roots. But these bones, with their butchery marks, were stacked neatly together, and deposited in the ground, or the lake, by the people who had hunted here. There was such gentle reverence in the act. The reverence of the act moved me. It spoke to me about the relationship between food and man, animal and man.
The land around Flixton has a long history of farming development. It has been conquered in the name of farming. This place was once fenland. Fenland is lowland, marshy land, prone to flooding. The process of transforming from a lake to fenland was gradual: over thousands of years the lake slowly began to fill with reeds and the reeds became peat and the ground became liquid in places, boggy in places, solid in places. It existed in this watery state for hundreds of years.
When you say the word ‘fen’ or think of ‘The Fens’, you might automatically think of the east of England, Lincolnshire, Cambridgeshire, Norfolk. But Yorkshire was fenland once too. The Yorkshire fens stretched north of Lincolnshire for 3000 square miles. This fenland was still part of the landscape four hundred years ago, in the sixteenth century, and in some areas well into the eighteenth century. In some places the fenland was so watery that villages were like islands within it. The people living in this complex environment were tuned to it, skilled in the ways of gathering, surviving. You can’t see this fenland environment anymore – it’s lost to drainage now – but it is there in the named places. Every place marked with ‘carr’ – from the old Norse kjarr, meaning wooded marsh – is an indicator of the landscape, its history and its people.
The people of Paleolake Flixton would have been tuned to their watery environment. The uncontained River Hertford, running in its natural state through the middle of the lake site, fed the wetland, flooding regularly and spilling silt into the spongy earth, the meadowlands, providing a nutritious base for hay growing. At this time, anywhere that couldn’t be used for arable farming was classed as ‘waste’ or common land. Common land was open to the common people, the cottagers and villagers. The people used the fenland – they fished it, they hunted waterfowl, they gathered the plants that were useful, like willow and thatch.
It is difficult to imagine exactly how people lived, how different life was in this period, right up to the eighteenth century. Again, I think of the hunter-gatherers of Star Carr, the horse hunters of Flixton Island, and I can see a bridge between them, stretching also to the eighteenth-century villagers who lived on the fenland.
The fenland in this area would have been utilized alongside farming systems that had been in place for hundreds, maybe even thousands of years. This started to change gradually as land began to be enclosed by those with the money and power to do so. A typical village, like Flixton, in the medieval period onwards, would have had a manor with enclosed, private grounds, but also land owned by the manor that was common ground. Some version of an open field system would have been in use for the villagers. These systems were varied and based around landownership but were communal places. Within the open field system, strips of land were divvied out. The strips were spread between different areas so that everyone had a chance to use good quality land, as well as the less productive land. No one was lumbered with only unproductive soil. There would have been a hierarchy running through this system. The lord of the manor was always the biggest landowner. Below him would be any non-gentry, wealthy landowners, then those who paid their tithe to use the land strips, and below those the people who, by disability or circumstance, were not able to work the land. These people were reliant on charity and the church. The farming of land was a community affair. To plant new crops or bring new farming practices into use, all the community had to agree to them.
People with no land, the poorest of the poor, still had a legal right to access common land. It was open to all, and there was more to it than simply being a place for cattle to graze. Medicinal plants were gathered from meadows. Berries and fruit could be foraged. Hedgerows, many of which contained fruit-bearing trees or bushes, played a hugely important role in supplementing the diets of the people living around the fenland, and they also provided fuel for fires and stoves. Run well, the system provided autonomy and a sense of purpose – the people worked for themselves and gave a portion of their profit in exchange for more land to work and houses to live in. They used the common land as a means of enriching their diets and their income.
This changed gradually. Any expert on the history of land enclosure will tell you that it is complicated and to polarize it with a simple right or wrong argument would be oversimplifying an extended period in which communities felt differently about land enclosure depending on whether they benefited from it or not. But it is impossible not to have some sort of opinion on it as you dig deeper and realize just how much impact the gradual removal of common and communal ground had on poorer, working-class people.
I am not an expert, and I find the timeline of enclosure challenging; the laws and motives of those bringing in regulations and rules are difficult to comprehend from a distance. What I understand of it is that between the thirteenth and twentieth century, enclosure of lands began to occur. It happened by choice, and it happened by force, but put simply, the people with power – the monarchy, the landlords and the lords – systematically reduced the land that working-class rural people could exist on and had access to. The common land was gradually privatized. The first moves towards this privatization of land perhaps began with the Statute of Merton in 1235, a law that allowed large landowners and lords to enclose land that was directly around their manor houses for private use. Previously, although they were the beneficiaries of the land, it was still open to use by the community. At this time, a person tended to own the rights to the land, or to certain aspects of the land, and movable property on it (e.g. animals) but the land itself could still be accessed by the public. Factors that led to this gradual privatization of common land included the price of British wool increasing, and therefore the value of good grazing land increasing. Why grow barley or wheat when you could farm sheep? It was more profitable to graze sheep and sell the fleece than it was to take a percentage of what the villagers could grow on that land.
