The Ghost Lake, page 2
At home, I could see some of this oddness mirrored in my family. It was in my dad’s eccentricity, in my mum’s shyness. But even at home I felt anxious, and I couldn’t quite work out what was expected of me or how to integrate into the family. My anxiety was always there, and that was also a part of my oddness. I pushed away from myself, and I pushed away from the things that identified me as part of this tribe of oddness. In my teenage years, I wrote in my diary how much I hated myself, pages and pages of self-loathing and rules that I needed to follow to be liked, to be lovable and to fit in. To open those pages now feels like opening a wound, like sticking my fingers into a hot, angry pain that never quite went away.
When I first set out to write this book, I wanted to write about what it meant to belong to the landscape as a person from a rural working-class background. I wanted to write about what the landscape meant to me, because I’d seen so few of these stories written by people like me. However, as I began to write this book it soon became apparent that to discuss and explore the concept of belonging, I needed to recognize that there was a deeper sense of not belonging in me. I could easily identify the places where I had had to challenge assumptions and taboos around a sense of identity; they included being working class, infertile, bereaved, but many of my experiences of feeling out of place were being fed by another source, something that I found painful to admit to myself. I do not fit in. I am not like other people. To admit oddness is to admit that I am an outsider, and that is a vulnerable state to be in. But within that vulnerability lies a kind of strength. This, then, is a journey of interior landscapes as much as it is about exterior landscapes, because for me the two are intertwined.
Now, as an adult, I am awaiting an assessment for autism. Sometimes I think to myself, what if, after all this, you have the assessment and you are told no, this is not autism, you are as you always thought, just a person who cannot keep up, cannot fit in, that there is no underlying reason for this, no condition. Then I shall go on with my life unchanged, and I will accept that the parts of me that make me different are unchangeable. If I could have altered myself by hard work and determination, that change would have occurred by now. This self-examination, this long assessment of self and past, has not been without worth, because I now recognize that I do not need to change.
The only place I find a home for all my sensitivities and strangeness is in nature.
Years ago I thought that becoming a mother would be the answer, that I would pop myself back into the world like a dislocated kneecap being shunted back into place. I felt I would be able to fit in better with my sister, my mum, if we had shared experiences of motherhood, with my friends, but there was something else too. Motherhood seems so central to how women are perceived and accepted: as life givers, as something almost sacred. I wanted that connection, to be a link in a chain that stretched back to the beginning of time. But we found ourselves infertile and needed IVF to have a baby. More oddness, more not quite being right in the world. And then our daughter died, and the further IVF treatments ended in miscarriage or negative tests and then we stopped trying. The train that was a life with a family of our own carried on and away, and we found a different route. I lost the identity of mother.
When I thought of myself as working class that too carried a kind of shame. The class that I come from is always under pressure to conform to middle-class values and standards. To be working class is to be told to improve your accent, that you must aspire, that you must be socially mobile. To be rural working class is to be the butt of jokes about sheep shagging. To show yourself as happy to be working class is a strange thing indeed.
When I thought about my roots, it was to think about the pride that my dad had in his farming ancestry, that we had been farmers for generations, that his very name could connect back to generations of farmers before him. And though my dad was the break in that chain, though my dad was not a farmer, he saw himself embedded in it, and proud of it. I took that identity too, feeling a connection to a place I’d never lived, a life that I knew only through second-hand stories and a generational pride.
Over millennia, the lake site itself has transformed into so many different landscapes, it is many layered. I could see the ghosts of its past in the villages around its edges, and when the earth was peeled back by archaeologists, we saw a glimpse of what it had once been, its true form hidden under a skin of mud and rocks and grass. What is its true form? Before it was a lake it was a glacier, before the glaciers it was a different landscape, and before that it was a shallow sea. These were changes wrought by the natural cycles of evolution and creation. What we, as humans, had done to the lake was to change it, drain it, fence it, farm it, over hundreds of years we had forced it into a shape it never would have taken.
A part of my oddness is that I automatically assign human characteristics to animals, plants, even to inanimate objects. I become attached to them. I know I could never own a Henry Hoover because I would end up with a room full of them, never being able to take a broken hoover to the tip if it had a face on it. As a child, in the Co-op in Scarborough, I once poked holes in the boxes of a whole shelf of teddy bears because I worried the soft toys could not breathe. I created a complex system around choosing a stuffed toy to take with me to bed, fearing I would upset the others and leave them feeling left out and unloved. According to others, I was too soft and too sensitive. I had to harden up, get thicker skin. Something I never quite managed to do. Now, as I thought about how I might journey back to my authentic self, I questioned why treating animals, or even the landscape, with the respect one would treat humans with could be wrong. There were communities and religions that did just that, of course, and the Mesolithic Star Carr people had shown an obvious reverence for the animals that lived in this place and the landscape that provided for them.
I have always been attracted to rituals, to the displacement of emotion into a physical act, to the idea of pilgrimage as a practice in which the physical and the spiritual are merged. I have everyday rituals. My anxious brain relies on rituals to safely structure my life. I have a journalling routine that is a kind of ritual, and sometimes the act of being creative feels ritualistic. When I went out walking that too seemed to form a connection with a thing inside me that felt spiritual, natural. I’d left behind my Methodist church upbringing and had felt detached from religious and spiritual life for a long time, having previously drifted towards Buddhism, Quakerism, pantheism but never quite settling. Now I felt it was time to make my own landscape rituals, to find a way to acknowledge the magical, the reverent, alongside the practical landscape. I decided I would treat this ancient landscape, this ancient lake that I had driven around my whole life, as a place of reverence, rather than a backdrop. I would take a pilgrimage around the lake. I would make a series of deliberate journeys and consider my life in the context of this place. What if I could find a way to reconnect with myself by gaining a greater understanding and appreciation of the landscape I have always been embedded in?
There is a vague sense of ridiculousness as I sit in the layby and note in my journal all the things I want to do on this journey. I am giving reverence to an idea that seems, on the surface, unworthy of it. After all, I’m not about to climb Everest, or hike to Machu Picchu, or take a true pilgrimage to a holy place. I’m not taking a pilgrimage to an unknown place, or to a place of religious significance, but there is something spiritual about it.
There’s a wind blowing across the valley that is fit to freeze the cheekbones. I drive over the land bridge in the blackness and catch the occasional bright eyes of sheep and cows reflected in my headlights. Then I’m back on the road ringing the lake, heading home to my own village and its tiny church with its distinctive corrugated iron roof and beautiful stained-glass depictions of jackdaws and swifts.
It is early March. The weather is beginning to feel more like spring; the mornings and evenings are noticeably lighter. A rind of moon that has been visible for hours in the blue spring sky now becomes sharp and white as the sky deepens to violet. There is a lot of standing water in the fields. It is flinty and bright in the tractor tracks, and it pools and puddles in the valley where the water table is just under the surface of the land. We are emerging from a cold, wet winter. The temperature in the daytime has risen to a balmy eight degrees, and this morning I was able to sit in my conservatory with the door open and watch the jackdaws picking through the moss on the roof. I am longing for spring and the ensuing rush of life in the valley, though I am dreading the return of the overwhelming number of holidaymakers who will soon arrive at coastal towns; migrating to Airbnb cottages, holiday homes, caravans and campsites, returning to this place that they too may love, where they may well find belonging and a sense of peace. Some of them will return for good, escape to the country, retire and settle here forever. Some of them will buy second homes, their own roundhouses, to return to at will.
I return to my little ex-council house and the spare room that I call my office. It is a little haven of warmth and lamplight. I open the window to smell the breeze and hear the wind blowing the beech trees. I’m close enough to the coast to be able to hear the sea on nights when the weather is just right for it – it crashes against the rocks at the bottom of the cliffs and makes a booming sound, even when the air is quite still. A blackbird is singing its last song of the day from the top of the neighbour’s garage. I sit in the dark listening to it, breathing in the smell of soil and grass, and am settled into a place of safety and stability, a sense of home that is embedded in this landscape. I make some more notes in my journal, list the things I want to accomplish, then cross them out, feeling self-conscious. It would be easier simply to continue untethered, I think, or at least not revisit myself like this. But I think of my dad again, and I think of my place in this world and how, at forty-five, I don’t want to be distanced from the woman I am. I want to come home. I will return to the Palaeolithic lake site, the ghost lake that brims with my previous selves, and I will navigate its edges. I will thank it for my life, I will acknowledge it, know it. I will begin at the place where my wild self was reborn. I will begin at my daughter’s grave.
CHAPTER TWO
Woodlands Cemetery
Each time I visit my daughter’s grave, each time I drive up the tree-lined approach to the cemetery, I am taken back to the day of her burial. I am taken back to the pink blossoms drifting across the road. I am taken back to the way they settled in the hair and on the dark, sombre suits of the very few guests who were present, and the way that some of the petals went into the grave with her coffin.
When I look back, having emerged from the alternate world that is grief, I remember the way we fell into a series of rituals during her funeral, rituals that seemed almost choreographed, and I think how strange and beautiful the instinct behind that moment of grief was. After I had carried out her coffin, laid it on the ground on a green cloth, and the coffin was lowered into the grave, we formed a queue and each of us tore the rosebud heads off the flower displays and threw them onto the coffin lid. We took turns to do this thing, this rhythmic act of scattering petals. And then there was another line-up, one mixed with relief: a hug, commiserations, one after the other. There was a comfort in the rituals of that day, the soft flower heads, the sound of them hitting the coffin lid. They were our last chance to touch her, in a way. I imagine the rosebuds like a layer in a geological diagram: coffin, flowers, earth, grass, sky.
It’s early June, early morning. I have the car windows down. I’m sitting in my usual parking spot, just outside the entrance to the children’s section of Woodlands Cemetery. There is a slight breeze blowing up from the sea which lifts the smaller branches and leaves on the beech trees and hedges. It’s a smooth shushing sound, like waves on the shore. It forms a pleasant sensory mirror to the blue line that is the sea on the horizon.
I have come here as part of my journey. This is the physical place at which things in my life began to change. While I was pregnant with my daughter, I could imagine being another person, something far away from the version of myself I was trying to escape, the woman who didn’t fit in. I was going to be a mum. I was going to have a purpose – a good, clean, wholesome purpose – in the form of a beautiful daughter who would be with me forever. It is twelve years since I buried her.
The grief has worn itself down to something resembling a pebble in my pocket. In the beginning it was like a great sandstone block I couldn’t carry, but now I run my thumb along the seam of grief, and it feels like an old friend – something familiar, something that is a part of me, something that changed me and made me.
The experience of loss, especially baby and child loss, changes people. The sheer force of that change is difficult to measure. I have been picked up and placed many miles away from the life that I had, and perhaps that figurative relocation has allowed me to see things differently. I feel I have a voice that I didn’t have before. I have talked about grief a lot, even campaigned at Woodlands Cemetery to change the rules around leaving commemorative items on graves, trying to get the council to see the importance of this act for bereaved parents. I am not an expert on grief, but I am an expert on my own experience of grief, and in a world in which baby and child death is still such a taboo subject, a world in which we fear talking about death in general, I feel there is room for the bereaved to be listened to more.
I hadn’t really thought about the ritual nature of my grave visits until Mother’s Day 2018. I knew I was fulfilling a need in me, but if you’d asked me what that need was, I wouldn’t have been able to tell you. It was only when I felt that my actions were being challenged and threatened that I lifted my head up from the grave and realized there was something else going on, something that wasn’t just about tidying and making the grave look respectable.
I choose to use Mother’s Day to remind myself that I am still a mother, even if the only child I’ve ever given birth to, the only child I ever will give birth to, died during that birth. On that particular Mother’s Day in 2018, eight years after my daughter’s death, I parked my car in the usual spot and saw, immediately, that something had changed. White laminated signs had appeared, dotting the peaceful landscape. The message on the signs was written in the same sort of tone that might be used on signs in the office tearoom, politely asking you to be considerate and wash up your own cups. Instead, they stated that the council wanted grave owners to remove all grave goods, except flower planters, leaving nothing that would impede maintenance or look messy. They were enforcing a rule that had been in the guidebook they gave me eight years before, when I was crawling over the rubble of my obliterated world and my thoughts were elsewhere. They’d assessed the graves. Someone had been to my daughter’s grave and measured the size of the little fence we’d spent hours choosing. They’d assessed the little flowerpots and toys to see if they complied with the rules. Someone may have put their foot on the small plot of her grave and leaned over, nudging her things to one side to take measurements. They might as well have stood on her body.
Grief is a transcendental experience. I didn’t recognize myself as an animal before my daughter’s death. But I am an animal. The experience of this death has brought something more primal to the surface. And while I feel particularly protective about the grave site – instinctively, animalistically protective – this animal feeling has grown in me and grown out of me, into the life that I live away from this place.
I think we all have that wild in us, but perhaps we don’t always know about it until it rises out of a wound. I am still surprised by it now, this animal that appeared in grief, demanding that its needs be met. It was so akin to the instincts of pregnancy, so like the cravings and nesting of pre-motherhood, like that of an orca, carrying the corpse of its dead calf for weeks at a time.
The laminated signs are still there, warning people not to messily grieve all over the graves of their children. I am still resentful. Even though I campaigned, petitioned, spoke on the radio, gave interviews and eventually got the protocols around the children’s section of the cemetery changed due to the special nature of this sort of bereavement, the signs are still there. I can’t help feeling that I have been patted on the head, I have been told what I wanted to hear.
Woodlands Cemetery opened in 1941. It must have seemed so modern and practical at the time. The people of Scarborough were used to the rambling Victorian Dean Road and Manor Road Cemetery with its enormous tombs, elaborate headstones and winding paths that curl off into secret areas and wind away beneath dank bridges. By contrast, Woodlands, set away from the centre of town and positioned with views out to sea, appears to have been designed to be practical and bright, embracing the scents of wood bark and the piney resin of conifers. A great deal of thought has been put into how the bereaved might wish to grieve privately.
