The Ghost Lake, page 12
We wind along the raised, chalky track and suddenly there it is. The farmhouse. And it is much changed from all the photographs and all the imagined stories that I have. Everything I know of it vanishes immediately, and part of me wishes I had not made this journey because the farm I had in my head was much prettier to look at. But I check myself. The farm is like a person. Or like a piece of the landscape. It is very old, hundreds of years old, and has seen so many alterations over those years that it is simply not the place it was when it was built.
My dad was sketchy about the history of the building but was adamant that it had been a leprosy hospital, and that that had been its purpose when it was built. In my research I find that there was a spital nearby, a place for taking care of travellers and the sick, and it’s possible the farm was built on that site. One of my aunts tells a tale of the house being haunted: a blocked doorway in one of the upstairs bedrooms, a ghost that rattled the latch of the ancient doors to get access to it, my aunt who would simply leave the door open at night so as not to have her sleep disturbed.
When we step out of the car, I can see the history in the house. At some point since the family left, the house has been split in two. It is now two separate properties. The back of the house is an utter patchwork of different bricks, marking the places where windows and doors had previously been. There are doors gone, new doors in new places, new windows, windows bricked up. Some of these bricked-up scars are obviously very old – I can see the curve of an arched window, a doorway.
The side of the house we are facing is unoccupied, available to rent and awaiting a tenant. The other side is occupied, so we dare not poke about too much. Later, I’ll look at pictures of the interior on the estate agency website and be surprised by the low ceilings but wide, deep rooms. The fold yard – a kind of courtyard created by long, red roofed barns forming a square at the back of the farm – is gone, and in its place are industrial barn units in steely greys and hard-wearing metals. The garden is much changed. There are no roses, and it seems smaller than the photographs I have of it. The landscape feels bordered, by telephone wires and railway tracks and roads. It is bleak and plain.
As a child, on one memorable Christmas morning, I woke to find that my dad, with my mum’s help, had built me a farm playset, with a green baize grass surface and papier-mâché hedgerows. There was a pond with ducks, a barn with cows and sheep, a tractor with a trailer that dropped plastic bales when pushed forwards. There was a little farmer and a little farmer’s wife. When I first found out my dad had this terrible cancer growing in him, my mind went straight to that farm set, and the effort and time that he had put into it, all while working twelve-hour shifts driving buses. It summed him up in so many ways. I look at the family farmhouse now and it reminds me of that playset; it feels like all the elements have been stripped away around it, leaving just a building.
I wander down the farm track towards the next farm on the road. The middle farm, which is no longer a farm, and is now a private house, was recently valued at three million pounds. It is very luxurious and so very different to the family farm with its industrial units and practical, farm labourer cottages. I turn to look at ‘our’ farm from a different angle, the angle that one of the photos I own, from the 1970s, is taken from. I can see that from the front, from this distance, it is recognizable. I can see the farm as it was. It doesn’t stir anything in me – I don’t remember it. I have a vague memory of my brother and sister and me walking this road and them running off, and the awful anxiety when I couldn’t remember which farm was ‘ours’, but that could be a false memory, a reflection of the guilt I feel in the pit of my stomach because I want to feel something. I want to feel something for my dad, to be able to say, ‘Yes, here it is, Dad, I can see all your stories now.’ But there isn’t anything like that.
We stroll around the farm lanes and up to the little reservoir where two swans are swimming. This is where my grandad’s ashes were scattered. It’s pretty, peaceful and it’s practical – a reservoir for use by farmers. There is a shush of the wind in the trees and the constant alarm calls of pheasants nearby and far away. An owl pellet is on the ground under a beech. I poke it with a stick, but it doesn’t yield anything interesting. Nearby, the hum of the electricity pylons is a constant, slightly threatening noise, and the Thirsk bypass, just visible, and the occasional train rumbling past mean it isn’t as peaceful as I imagine it would have been when my dad lived here. There are few hedgerows, no pond, no orchard, no chickens, no life, just a bland patchwork of fields. I am romanticizing the past, I think, but still feel a little deflated.
If my dad was here, I think he would bring it to life. Auntie Mary points out her bedroom window. We talk about how they were all born in the house, the slightly mundane experience of being told at school that they suddenly had a sibling, arriving home to an entirely new person in the house, a sudden expansion of family. I take a few photos.
When we drive over to see the third farm on the track, there are people walking by the little beck and I have a memory of us, our family of five, by the beckside, but not here, over towards where my grandad and nana moved to. I realize now that a lot of what we did as children, a lot of the activities that my dad planned for us – the rides out to the moors, the travelling around looking at rundown houses and imagining living there, paddling in becks and camping in deep dark valleys – was him recreating his own youth for us, so that we might enjoy the freedom of a farm lad’s life. The smallholding, that Dad worked so hard for, that he worked so hard to own, that too was a small-scale recreation of this farm life, a life that his own father gave to him, passing down the joy of the outdoors. Now I carry that joy too.
I look at the skyline behind the farm and see that it is not dissimilar to the valley walls that I see when I step out of my front door. The valley that I have always seen when I have stepped out of my front door. It gives me a sense of home, even though I have never lived here. I think it is the knowledge of the connection, of the land itself, of the love of it. It brings me peace to think that way. As we drive away, I don’t feel like looking back. It doesn’t really own a place in my heart, and I’m surprised by that. Perhaps, like some sort of chemical catalyst, my dad needed to be attached to it in some way to evoke a feeling, and I don’t really feel him there.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Folkton
It’s April when I come to Folkton. April is the month of the anniversary of my daughter’s birth and of her death. I have this on my mind as I park the car and walk down the slope of Folkton village main street, past a huge and newly green willow. I want to turn my face to the sun like a child, to absorb the early spring warmth. The wind is moving through the willow like a wave.
There are lots of very old-looking houses and converted barns and just the one long road which winds down and then turns onto the carr. There is an old red phone box that has been repurposed as an information centre for the village, and then there is the church: typically Norman in style, with a square tower and ivy climbing up the walls.
I’m here to visit the church graveyard and the church itself if it’s open. The metal gates are the colour of the 1940s; that dark, jungle green that I equate with old farm doors and enormous enamel tea pots in church halls. The gates are stiff. Initially I think them locked and search for a padlock, but with a good shove I get them open and enter, walking down the sunken path, the headstones at head level, like being led through the underworld. The church is locked, the handle swings round and round uselessly in my hand.
It’s a shame, as I’ve read there’s a Romanesque carving of a hare inside. It’s thought that Folkton was in fact a Roman military settlement hundreds of years ago. Though whether this hare was a repurposed Roman carving, I do not know. When I read about the hare in this church, I wanted to visit and pay some sort of homage to it. Hares are symbolic of life, fertility, worldliness and magic, and when my daughter died, and I began writing about her, the hare became a symbol for her too.
The first poem I wrote about the experience of pregnancy, that incredible transformative process, used the hare as a metaphor. I wrote about a witch-hare – a witch who can transform into the shape of a hare. I wrote about the feeling of another creature pushing through the body, the growth of it, the delicacy of it, the hare as the ultimate version of wilderness and of wildness.
When I think about my pregnancy, I think in terms of a kind of animal instinct that my body expressed of its own accord. I was compelled to try to capture that in poetry, in prose, in any artform I could for years after her death. It was as if I might bring her back if I could just conjure the exact feeling of my body and hers living and breathing in the same space. When we chose the inscription on her headstone, it too was a poem I had written, a last letter to her. When I wrote my poetry collection, When I Think of My Body as a Horse, the hare symbol ran right through it, with the narrator emerging from the hare’s body to survive. I wanted to capture our story and pin it down, but it was more than that. The process of writing about her, of using those symbols to capture her, was almost involuntary, a purge, a compulsion. Now, thirteen years later, almost to the day, that compulsion is quenched. Except, here I am again, revisiting in a different way the things that hold us, pin us, remind us.
I vow to return when the church is open so I can see the hare stone carving, but today I will wander around the pretty cemetery. As I pass the wall of the neighbouring farm, I accidentally set their dog to barking. It continues to bark the whole time I am visiting. The sharp sound ricochets off the chalk buildings and I feel suddenly self-conscious, aware that people will be looking to see who is wandering in this tiny place.
It is the first warm day of the year. All around in the villages and the towns the tourists are arriving to make the most of a sunny spring weekend. This village, though, and the churchyard, is mostly peaceful. There is no reason to visit here, unless you are here for a specific purpose, as I am.
The blackthorn is in blossom and small white petals are drifting over the slumped headstones. Blackthorn is one of those plants that feels magical. The wood from a blackthorn is slow-burning, and the leaves can be steeped to make a tea. A witch’s wand could be made from a blackthorn, and the deep purple sloe berries have been used to make herbal drinks and sloe gin, or they can be eaten raw after the first frost of the year has sweetened them. Ötzi the Iceman, a frozen mummy from 3350 BC, found defrosting on the border between Austria and Italy in 1991, had sloe berries with him. I am thinking again of the Star Carr people, gathering sloes to eat in the autumn, and the nineteenth-century farming folk from Flixton gathering berries from the hedges on the common land. I’m thinking of this blackthorn hedge in this cemetery and the sloes that will come and how someone, surely, will gather them for gin, because I will do the same in my own village. I was told once that blackthorn trees are a Bronze Age boundary marker. If you see blackthorn in hedges, it’s possible that the tree has been there since the Bronze Age, delineating land borders, or acting as a pen for cattle, the hard spikes a deterrent against animals pushing through hedges and escaping. I like the idea of continuity through nature, that the creamy petals drifting over me might have drifted over this land long before me, may have drifted over the lake when it was water, before it was even fenland.
I turn to the north, and I can see Seamer Beacon on the opposite horizon, always the waymarker. I think of my daughter buried all the way over there, on the other side of the valley, below the beacon. Behind the church cemetery, the stubs of well-maintained fruit trees are beginning to blossom. From my spot in the graveyard, I can see three farms and know of another two on the way out of the village. This place is a real mix of the agricultural living village and something more romantic. A couple of the houses have been renovated to a high-end Country Living beauty. The others look like they’ve always looked – white chalk bordered with red brick. The air is full of the calls of crows, blackbirds and chaffinches and jackdaws. Saturday mornings used to be about hangover recovery – from getting hammered in the nightclubs of Scarborough – but now they are about deciphering tithe documents and wandering cemeteries to match names to people I’ve read about on census forms. I do not miss the hangovers.
It looks like no one has been buried in this churchyard for a long time. The cemetery is mainly filled with headstones from the late 1700s up to the early 1900s. There are a couple that look even older, but I can’t read their dates. On some of the headstones the writing has bloomed with age, the lettering weathered. It is as though the words have been lost to the wind, that last tribute from the people who buried their loved ones has been blown away.
Recently I have been deep diving through the online census records to find out who the people of Folkton and Flixton, these two villages so close to each other on the edge of the lake, were. Now, walking round the graveyard, I find myself recognizing the names of individuals, knowing their professions. Few headstones have the occupations of the dead written on them, but one of them proudly states ‘blacksmith’. Knowledge of the merest details of these people’s lives, lived two hundred years ago, feels one step away from putting names to faces. It feels not dissimilar to walking into a room full of people you vaguely know, albeit they are all silent and made of stone.
There is a single war grave in this cemetery, set back from the other graves and noticeable for its neatness, the sand-coloured stone carefully incised with the French horn and Yorkshire rose emblem of the Yorkshire Light Infantry.
‘T. Ireland King’s Own Yorkshire LI.’
9th September 1918 aged 37.
This man died just nine weeks before the end of the First World War. A little digging about in census records shows he died at the Western Front, but I don’t know the specifics. Later I trace his family backwards through the census, and I see his father, William Ireland, a farm labourer, moving between Flixton and Folkton, working into his late fifties. I learn that Tom Ireland, the man killed in the First World War, was, according to the census in 1911, ‘travelling the Wolds handling machines’. I’m not sure how to interpret this. It’s possible I’m misreading the slanty, hastily written description. But it could also be someone with no job title, travelling across the Wolds doing odd jobs, and perhaps this was something he had a skill with, working and maintaining farm machinery. If he had apprenticed at his father’s side, it’s probably just that. My dad did the same at his father’s side, learning to fix tractors, learning to drive farm machinery, how to patch up fences, how to repair boilers and engines of all kinds. While my grandad seems to have had an affinity with horses, my dad had something of an affinity with horsepower and could fix pretty much any vehicle, a bonus if you were a bus driver out on a ‘magical mystery tour’ in the middle of the moors when your bus broke down.
On the anniversary of my daughter’s death, I am feeling the familiar, yearly panic about her being forgotten. My pilgrimage to selfhood, to rootedness and belonging, is weighed down today by a desire to know that the dead are not forgotten. It is as if I am trying to find safe harbour for us both, my daughter and me, a place for our memories, as if by anchoring myself somewhere we will be permanent, we will become a part of the archive of the landscape. I am looking for that sense of permanence when I go searching through the census. I worry a lot that the responsibility of her whole life is with me, that there is only my husband and me to remember my daughter. While I am alive, she is physically present in me.
When a woman is pregnant, she exchanges cells with her baby, through the placenta. These cells can migrate all around the body, ending up in the brain, the liver, the heart. They can still be present decades after the birth of the child. It pleases me to be carrying tiny parts of her physical body around in my heart and it saddens me that when I die, I shall be taking her with me.
I have come to this churchyard to acknowledge and honour my landscape ancestors. Perhaps by remembering them I am harbouring their memories like cells. Perhaps when you read this book you will be taking these memories into you too, becoming a part of the story of this place. There is so little of the rural working-class people recorded, so little of their joy, their suffering. But I find them listed in the censuses, and from the censuses I can build pictures of their lives.
Once this pilgrimage is complete, I might find that being remembered doesn’t actually matter; that the point isn’t to be remembered, it is simply to experience life. What matters is that my daughter lived, that she was real, small but impossibly powerful, with a gravitational pull that caused me to orbit around her. I’m thinking of a poem by a writer friend, John Foggin, who died recently. The poem, from his last collection, Pressed for Time, is titled ‘In the Meantime’. He used the words of the Venerable Bede to explore his own quick ember of life. Bede wrote, ‘the life of man on earth is like the swift flight of a single sparrow through the banqueting hall’. John’s poem saw the bird fly through a mead hall, experiencing the bad smells and raucous noise, but also the sound of a harp, and an epic poem in a language it couldn’t understand before it disappeared into the night and ‘who knows what happens next’.
Just because a life is short it doesn’t mean it is meaningless. I think about the sparrow in the mead hall, the brief brightness and smells it experienced. I’m thinking about the women who have lost babies, and the babies who have lost their tiny lives. In the 1911 census, when records were becoming more detailed, there is a section for the number of live births and child deaths a person has experienced. This, I suppose, is an indication of the high infant mortality rates at the time. The number of live births recorded for Sarah Ireland, Tom the soldier’s mother, is four, with the number of deceased children recorded as one. After some searching, I find all of Sarah’s children – Shushanna, Tom, Walter and Lizzie.
