Breaktime

A limbering up for Helen! Which reminds me, where’s the telephone? Outside Woolies.

  Riffle through the telephone book (cigarette-smokey-sniffy, dogeared pages, scrawled messages, e.g. Come and lay me, cooky 3694758. Tringaling my dingaling 6256943.) And I’m away.

  Hello?

  Could I speak to Helen, please?

  Just a minute, the baby’s crying.

  I’m sorry, that’s better.

  Could I speak to Helen, please?

  O, yes, just a minute, who shall I say?

  Tell her, it’s the boy she left behind.

  It’s who . . . the baby’s crying again. Just a minute . . . Helen! . . .

  She’s just coming.

  Hello?

  Help.

  O!

  Pee.

  It’s you.

  Go to the top of the class and give the penicillin out.

  You’re chirpy.

  Cheeky, I’ve just been told.

  That too. By whom?

  Waitress in Richmond where I purchased sustenance.

  And anything else?

  She was too busy.

  Not that you weren’t willing.

  No. She was a little Massy Harris for my taste.

  Have you any?

  Can you have, without experience to teach discrimination?

  Always one for the words.

  The currency of intercourse. I thank you for the compliment.

  Take it how you like.

  You’re still mad at me?

  Am I?

  I’m asking.

  I’m wondering.

  Words it was did for me yesterday, eh?

  Perhaps.

  I’m sorry.

  Are you?

  I think so. Will you forgive me?

  I’m not sure.

  If I say please?

  I don’t like being called . . .

  Promiscuous?

  Yes.

  You knew the word.

  Yes.

  Ah, I see! You can’t talk?

  No.

  The baby’s stopped crying.

  Yes.

  We could conduct this conversation much more comfortably somewhere else. This phone box stinks.

  I’m not sure I want to.

  Look, Helen, I meant what I said on that note.

  Embarrassing!

  At the bus?

  Yes.

  Desperation breeds disregard. But I’m sorry if I embarrassed you.

  Two apologies in one day. What’s the world coming to!

  Never mind the world. What about us?

  Whatever have you been doing, watching old movies?

  Nothing so exciting. What have you been doing, by the way?

  Nothing so exciting.

  You too? We must meet at once and swap notes.

  As they say.

  But I am—desperate, I mean.

  For what?

  Do you want the graphic details on the telephone? We might be bugged.

  All right. Don’t bother.

  You’ll meet me?

  What’ll you do if I don’t?

  Throw myself off Richmond Castle into the Swale?

  Not imaginative enough.

  Streak through Gunnerside at tea time on Sunday?

  There’s nothing you’ve got that they haven’t seen here in abundance. Boring. Anyway, most of them here are Primitive Methodists.

  And you’ve not had any excitement? Tut, tut. Well, let me see. Dress in drag as a district nurse, call on your aunt saying I’ve come at the request of her visiting niece to check her for pregnancy.

  You’ve a putrid mind.

  Desperation, as they say, knows no squalor.

  Okay, where?

  The 11.44 from Reeth, arriving Hag Wood by the caravan site 12.10. I’ll be waiting in the bushes disguised as a weary rambler.

  All right but under protest.

  Protest as much as you like, but give in in the end.

  Anyway, how did you find this number?

  Elementary, my dear Watsonia. Your uncle’s your dad’s brother. So much I knew. Your dad’s brother is likely to own the same surname as your dad. And therefore yours. A quick ogle at the invaluable GPO reference manual. Three are listed. Only one in Gunnerside. Bingo.

  Smarty pants.

  See you.

  If you behave yourself.

  O, and Helen . . .

  What?

  Don’t bother to bring your pyjamas.

  The town was busying. I wanted to leave before anyone who had been at last night’s fracas recognized me. This town ain’t big enough for both of us. But I had things to buy. I wanted everything right for Helen.

  The food was easy. Brown rolls, still warm from the oven; lettuce, cos—the crispy kind; a couple of soused herring for starters. Two fresh-cooked meat pies with flaky pastry from Fawcetts and a small tub of sauerkraut (we’d have to pig it with our fingers) for seconds. A quarter of Wensleydale cheese, a couple of pears for afters.

  But what to drink? Beer was the obvious thing. But cans are bulky and weigh heavy and I was already overloaded. I had had to tie a plastic bag containing the food on to my pack. So I settled for a couple of large McEwans and set off out of the square, making for the High Gingerfield road out of town, up on to Out Moor above Whitcliffe Scar. But I was not happy about the drink. There was not enough and beer was the expected thing.

  In Victoria Road I passed Saccone and Speed, the wine shop. Voilà! In I went.

  I know nothing about wine. I would like to. What little I’ve drunk I’ve liked. But wine is another case of plenty of indiscriminate experience being needed to breed discriminate taste.

  At those prices, who can drink enough of the stuff ever to know?

  Enter a grey-suited middled-aged gent of retired military appearance. An imbiber. Sharp, red veins laced his face.

  ‘Sir?’

  Pointless to prevaricate; he would know. Bull by horns.

  ‘I know nothing about wine. But I would like a reasonably priced bottle that would go well with a picnic. Could you suggest anything?’

  ‘I’ll do my best. Of course, it all depends on your preference—your palate, you know. And on the food.’

  ‘I don’t know what I prefer. But the food is soused herring, meat pie, and Wensleydale.’

  His eyes scanned the shelves. Soldier bottles on parade, labels at the present. Some flat out.

  ‘With the meat and cheese, I’d suggest this.’

  A baby laid in my dubious hands.

  ‘A youngish Côte du Rhone. Not too heavy. Nothing special but a pleasant wine that can stand a little . . . ill treatment.’ A laugh. ‘If you’ll pardon the presumption.’

  ‘I’ll take it, thanks.’

  I was left with a pound by the time I’d paid for the bottle, which cost me as much as all the food put together.

  ‘You have a corkscrew, sir?’

  ‘On my knife.’

  ‘Could I suggest? Allow me to open the bottle for you. I’ll replace the cork securely but leaving enough for you to pull it out when you’re ready. And, if I might advise, I would remove the cork a couple of hours before drinking. Let the wine breathe, you understand. It will taste all the better. Not left in the glare of the sun, but not kept cold.’ He eyed my pack as he disgorged the cork. ‘And keep it upright as near as conditions allow.’

  ‘I’ll do my best. Thanks for the help.’

  Laugh again. ‘Delighted. I’ll just tuck the bottle into this side pocket, shall I? Safe there, and upright. You shouldn’t have any trouble. Just be careful when you dismount.’

  We enjoyed his joke together this time.

  ‘Have a good picnic. Wish I was going with you myself. Lovely day for it.’

  Off up Hurgill Road and Belleisle Hill at a steady plodding pace, in high spirits. The morning—nine thirty by now—still spring-brisk enough to make walking with a loaded pack pleasant work. As I slowly left behind the last houses of the town, rising above them till Richmond itse
lf was a cluster below, I felt again as I always do going up into the dale an almost explosive sense of release, of unfettering freedom. Like leaving a hot, stuffy room crowded with people, and stepping out into an elevated garden laid out in sparely planted folds that carry you up, one beyond another, always one more beyond, into the stretching sky. Earth breakers surfing you on to the skylimitless shore of space.

  I love highpoints of unbroken landview. I love carved cliffs, scooped valleys, distant rivers mirroring the sky.

  Whitcliffe Wood and Scar.—Towards the west end of town, through Quaker Lane, is the West Field, a beautiful open walk full of delightful prospects, which succeed each other in endless variety; and at the upper end of it, is Whitcliffe Wood, and the frightful precipice called Whitcliffe Scar, ‘where,’ to use the words of Mr. Clarkson, ‘we see the violent convulsions which the surface of this globe must have received at the great deluge, when the earth was torn from its centre, and rocks, water, and woods, separated from their old habitations, were removed to a distance.’ On ascending the bold romantic Scar, we behold the wild and sublime rocks projecting on every side, and wooded to the very edge of the precipice; and on its summit is a spot known as Willance’s Leap.—History and Topography of the City of York and the North Riding of Yorkshire, Whellam, Vol 2, 1859.

  For Dad it is the sea. The sea and the sky. A ship and a star. His romance. His image of release. His break into space.

  At Redcar a flimsy-seeming (to me, fourteen) fishing smack-boat, a cobble, famed for seaworthyness and tough as rawhide. But out we went though weather worrying, wind and waves rolling with white horses on their spines. Into the troughs and seasick rolling with the curling sea above one second and below the next and Dad laughing and handwringing his pleasure, his release, while I groaned and puked and wished for home and still landed fish quick as I could drop my line, one flapping, gasping, scale-glistening, glaze-eyed, musclebound, cold-blooded, fin-spiked, salt-smacking vertebrate after another as though every gill-breathing member of the rollercoasting North Sea swim wanted to join us in that heaving tub, perhaps in order to escape the tide of bile I was pouring into the waves.

  But when our pleasure jaunt was over, we back ashore like all jolly sailor lads grinned undaunted courage at our perilous exploit while pitiful landwalkers crowded our ark to buy at knockdown bravado rates the rewards of our daring. And Dad might have been salted Neptune himself as he gazed with longing a last time at the now high-treacherous ocean before we drove inland home.

  It was his last time: never again since.

  In his hospital bed does he now fancy himself becalmed on a sunless windless sea?

  How do I tell you, Morgan, that there, just above High Gingerfield and just below Rasp Bank, I suddenly and without self-warning, wept? I did. Hills and sky before me, sea and sunless bed within my plodding memory met confluent in my flooding eyes and wrecked me. I had to stumble to the road-skirting wall and cling to its cool, crumpled stone for comforting support. And I did not merely weep. I gasped for air like a drowning man, my body clenched in an uncontrollable spasm.

  Lamentation for dying boy and dying man.

  Subdued, and at last calm, I set off for the Scar, sly-eying around me in case I had been observed. (Why is it we are so ashamed to cry?)

  Just by Out Moor radio beacon you cut across quarter of a mile of mirey coarse-grass field, then through a gate, and you are there: on Whitcliffe Scar. The double-monument: one, a square-based obelisk imprisoned in an iron-rod cage; the other, twenty-four feet away and ten feet lower on the slithering valley side, a grave stone, triangle topped. Each inscribed with the same celebratory message.

  1606

  HEAR US

  GLORY BE TO OUR

  MERCIFUL GOD

  WHO MIRACULOUSLY

  PRESERVED ME FROM

  THE DANDER SO GREAT

  He wishing to be heard was one Robert Willance, a Westmorland man by birth:

  who had pushed his way to wealth as a draper in Richmond. With his name is connected the following marvellous story, thus told by Canon Raine:—

  ‘In the year 1606 he was hunting near his own estate, on the high ground between Clints and Richmond, on the northern bank of the Swale. The hunting party were surprised by fog, and Willance was mounted upon a young and fractious horse. To his horror it ran away with him, and made right for the precipitous rock called Whitcliffe Scar, which looks down upon the Swale. The horse, no doubt, as it neared the verge would become conscious of its peril; but as is very frequently the case, the danger that paralyses the rider only makes the steed more fearless. As soon as it left the level platform above, three bounds, each covering twenty-four feet, brought it to the verge of the cliff, down which it sprang. About a hundred feet from the top of the scar there is a projecting mass of rock and earth, upon which the horse alighted, only to throw itself upon the ground below, some hundred feet further down. It was killed by the fall, and Willance’s leg was broken. With wonderful presence of mind, he disentangled himself from the dead horse, and, drawing a clasp knife, he slit open the belly of the animal, and laid within it his fractured leg, to protect it from the cold till help arrived. This precaution in all probability, saved his life. His leg, however, was amputated, and he would hunt no more. As a memorial to his wonderful escape, he marked with an upright stone each of the three bounds which his steed took before it sprang over the cliff. On two of them he put the following inscription: “1606. Glory to our merciful God, who miraculously preserved me from the danger so great.” And he had indeed great cause to be thankful, for no one can look at the grey cliff over which he was carried without a shuddering feeling of astonishment that any one could survive so fearful a fall.’—History, Topography and Directory of North Yorkshire, T. Bulmer & Co., 1890.

  Willance’s Leap on Whitcliffe Scar was to be my riding place too.

  My tent-site I already knew: a flat grassy ledge, thirty yards down valley from the monuments, and nicely below eye-level of anyone strolling along the scar edge. From view below it was screened by bushes, yet over which, lying in my valley-facing tent, I could see the inward-curving ribbon of Swale glinting in its bed. Hag Wood rose opposite up the fist of moor ending in a straight edge just below the top, leaving the moor bald headed and grained with a fish-net grid of dry-stone walls. Bluegrey misted hills touched the sky beyond.

  My eyrie.

  (I say that, but have never wished to be a bird. Cannot say I have ever thought about it, in fact. But it is a good image of my site, and my feeling that day: poised and predatory. Not like an eagle, though; all too grand. More like a modest kestrel.)

  Ten-fifty. Only just time to pitch my tent, stow the food behind a keep-cool rock, the wine, uncorked in the shade of my tent-flap, and then a careful scramble down the scar, across the river (hoping the rope bridge was still there, its frayed demise having long been expected) and up through the caravan park to the road in time to meet the 11.44 from Reeth. If the bridge had collapsed at last, I was in for a wet crossing.

  Filled my water bottle at the caravan park. Then, early, not late, after all. Ten minutes to spare. Patrolled the road, eyes restless for sign of moving metal-green. Mouth dry. Limbs in a faint tremble. Nerves.

  She climbed down. Stockingless feet in open sandals, scruffy-smart blue jeans perfectly faded, smoothly fitting; loose cheesecloth shirt in subdued stripes of colour, revelatorily tantalizing; long hair, light brown, shampoo bouncy; old patchwork shoulderbag bulging and nonchalantly swung. A desirable cliché.

  Ditto stares untongued, not sure how he wishes this adventure to begin now it has begun. Helen stands in the road confronting him, as bus noise and engine fumes vanish into the distant air.

  ‘I can’t be so stunning,’ says Helen. ‘And it would be nice to leave this road in case we’re seen. . . . I said I was going shopping . . .’

  There was a moment when he might say goodbye.

  But it passes.

  He smiles, feeling a corncob boy.

&nb
sp; ‘Stunning!’ He hopes his tone displays his doublemeaning mind. Pointing to the road at their feet, he says, ‘From here.’ He raises his arm, straightstiff, slowly, till pointing finger directs Helen’s eyes to the no more than nipple-point of Willance’s caged obelisk intruding into the sky, ‘To up there.’

  ‘Hmm,’ she says. ‘Quite a stretch.’

  ‘A vertical stroll to give you an appetite for lunch. May I take madam’s bag?’

  They saunter off towards the river, through the bungaloid urban order of the caravan park, affecting casual uninterest in the face of curious caravaners ogling Helen.

  The slewing rope bridge brings the first shedding of pretence.

  ‘I can’t cross that!’ she says. ‘It’s crazy!’

  ‘Fairground fun,’ he says. ‘Here, grab my hand. Just swing with it, don’t fight it. Bend at the knees. And don’t look at the water.’

  She is giggling with excitement and has lost her magazine-phony sophistiwalk. Like a bather testing the water, she treads suspiciously on to the footboards of the slippery bridge. Her laughter clams into eager concentration and he sees her prettier self. Stepping backwards that he might face her and give her reassurance, he thinks how self-forgetfulness brings out the beautiful in people.

  They reach the middle. Low point, they are but ten feet above the river, the bridge swaying its dizzying worst. He makes her pause.

  ‘It’s so scarey!’ she says but with confidence now. Her speaking is almost drowned in the riversurge. She hazards releasing his hand to push back her hair from curtaining her face, where the breeze has blown it. But grabs again as she loses balance. He finds enjoyment in her dependence. He squeezes her hand and she smiles with all her face through the veiling hair, eyes and mouth confirming the truth of the shared moment.

  ‘You get a smashing view from here,’ she shouts.

  Their heads turn. Suspended above the water, they see the river sweeping into perspectives, trees and bushes and rocks serrating the lines of its banks; and the valley rising beyond. Nowhere else, he thinks, can you feel the river’s energy, its own life, as here. From the bank it seems almost placid, certainly contained and gentle. From here you knew it for what it was, maker of the valley, a powerful force. Here you knew the river did not belong to the dale but the dale to the river. Swale’s dale.

  ‘Ready?’ he asked when they had looked their fill, and the bridge had settled its thrashing. She nodded and with surer feet they climbed the slope to the bank.