Water is the oldest of ointments

An underground tale of dark rivers and love

 

 

Yorkshire watermarks

Before the tale begins, I scribble notes about gloomy paths, swimming holes, weather forecasts, brass bands and distant tremors. I thrill to the rhythms of the Kalevala and simmer my words in Dante’s sauna. Something is in the air, something is in the water, something rumbles underground…

 

Depth soundings

When you listen for earthquakes

under Yorkshire

waves resonate deep underground:

microseisms, low frequency, unheard,

easy to imagine -

 

the last breath of a shrew

looped, replayed for ever.

 

When you listen for earthquakes

under Yorkshire

waves resonate:

distant in time, violent, unheard,

easy to imagine –

 

Beowulf and Breca

swim against each other,

race the North Sea.

Breca sinks.

Beowulf is laid ashore

on the coast of Finland

breathes like a shrew.

Another rainy afternoon

Between numbers,

while the band get their breath,

adjust their mutes and slides,

the conductor tells a joke

about Lancashire,

which is mostly a description

of Yorkshire:

 

And God created

the finest cricket team,

the sandiest of sandy beaches,

the bluest of blue skies,

the greenest of Dales,

the proudest of people.

 

The conductor

raises his hand.

The band strike up

but do not arrive

at a note.

 

Instead, they blow,

find only sounds:

the whistle of wind

through West Nab,

waves at Sandsend,

the whirr of spray

in Gaping Ghyll,

the lash of rain

on Haworth Parsonage,

the swish of gaps

in drystone walls.

 

This watery tale begins in a Yorkshire place, something less than a village.

 

The hamlet of seven wells

Settling in to water and darkness

 

The cold told a tale to me

the rain suggested poems…

the birds added words

the treetops phrases…

Kalevala 1: In the Beginning.

 

Matthew and Rose, and their daughter Rowan, come to this hamlet of seven wells at the beginning of November. They choose to make their new start in ‘one of the dark places of the earth’. The waters gurgle beneath their feet wherever they step, inside and outside the houses. When Matthew shuts his eyes, looms of grimy wood clatter behind the weavers’ windows.

There is no pub, no shop, no church. A Victorian school, high as a cliff, newly reopened after the killing of dry rot, clings to the hillside. A tangled graveyard, so steep it threatens to lob memorial slabs into the valley below, lies behind a tumble of fallen walls. The narrow, winding paths climb rapidly, as if expecting donkeys rather than four wheel drives. They end in steep hayfields where horses lie down, waiting for rain.

Matthew and Rose and Rowan come to a house cracked and bent, a house in which some rooms have not been lit for a long time. They bring light: rewiring, installing, forever changing blown bulbs to keep out the darkness.

In the valley, far below the house, bonfires burn all winter. Men in hard hats are demolishing the outer sheds of Titanic Mill, built too late, briefly home to thousands of weavers, doomed like the ship it was named after. The men will hack it into apartments: there are rumours of a restaurant with pianist and grand staircase, a replica of the famous one so many fathoms under the ocean. Manchester commuters and the retired will live on an island of pleasure and convenience, stranded between the straightness of the canal and the swirl of the river. The trinity of waters will be completed by a swimming pool.

Sometimes, a man comes with a white van to the deserted house opposite and shiftily dumps the contents on a patch of earth. Then there’s a closer bonfire and Matthew shuts the windows against the black smoke of burning paint cans. The ups and downs of Euphonium scales penetrate the double-glazing. Often, it rains for weeks.

A well lurks at the top of the garden, a dark trough bordered with rubbery begonias, half hidden by ivy and rogue brambles. A plastic racoon stares from the windowsill of the shed. The eucalyptus is in the wrong country.

Summer splutters in. Day irises last a day. The never lopped giant weeds of sycamore and ash make a great canopy over the flowerbeds, keeping out the sun, so ferns and snails thrive. The barbecue is a sink of rust. Matthew pulls a green finch out of the cat’s mouth; the cat was waiting by the honeysuckle, out for the first time for days, enjoying the gap in the rains, killing.

A room underground

Water

Their neighbours told them once their cellar was boarded up. Under a house piled high with newspapers, it was stacked with wine: sweet dandelion, sour rhubarb, others brewed from berries on the hills, all gone to vinegar years before. Their cellar dripped like a limestone cave.

When they first viewed the house and came down the stone stairs, they saw the cellar without this knowledge. The long table was inviting; the smell of a freshly baked sponge egged the air. Black cartoons of a lady, a warrior and a dragon lovingly and badly decorated one wall. They did not notice holes drilled through the flags for water to seep away. They did not see the gills of fungi winking in the gap between skirting board and floor. The cellar spoke to them in firestone red and sun yellow. Its Yorkshire origins were thickly disguised by its Mexican accent. They did not hear the underground stream gurgle and bubble beneath the floor.

After they moved in, Matthew loved to lie down, put his ear to the flags and feel the rush of water.

Fire

Their cellar has a log burning fire, black cast iron, with two crusted spanners to stop logs fall through to the ash pan. When it is unlit, they can look inside and see The Three Billy Goats Gruff cavort in relief. When it blazes, ‘soldiers’ flicker on the back wall before they die. For tinder, Matthew takes out the Pace Egg basket and collects twigs from under the ash trees. The smell of wood smoke gets into everything on the floor above, even flute music.

Water

This is a summer story: the fire is out. Listen to the water.

THE FULL TEXT OF THIS WATERY SUMMER IS AVAILABLE IN THE INTERLAND ANTHOLOGY 'SIX STEPS UNDER WATER' PLEASE CLICK ON THE BOOK TO BUY