Moses Trod
A novel by
Stephen Morley
2011
Copyright and publishing information
Moses Trod
by Stephen Morley
Smashwords edition.
Published by Exoddy Books.
Exoddy Books,
PO Box 1206,
GUILDFORD,
GU1 9RH
United Kingdom.
The right of Stephen Morley to be identified as the author of the work has been asserted by him in accordance with the United Kingdom Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
Copyright 2011 Stephen Morley
Smashwords Edition, Licence Notes
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be resold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this ebook with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you are reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author
All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead is purely coincidental.
ISBN 978-0-9570621-1-5
Exoddy Books – England
Contact details available from: http://www.exoddy.co.uk
V.3.2:17/10/11
With special thanks to my wife for her assistance and encouragement during the writing and production of this work.
Moses Trod
Stephen Morley
September 2011
“God knows, I am still dark within.”
Moses the Black
Table of Contents
Twelve – A brush with insanity
Thirteen – A woman who stands alone
Fourteen – A game of consequences
Fifteen – A plague of circumstance
Sixteen – In the court of sad society
Seventeen – In tablets of stone
Eighteen – ‘And did those feet…’
One – Keepers in trust
It was the hills that made him. Silver, gold, green and grey, they stand austere or warming, naked or shrouded. There is no silence across the fells, but a man can be silent there. All living things achieve equality and equanimity among the rocks and streams and heather. The boulder fields are alive with weather, wind and water, their moods as various as the sea. The solid rock of those hills holds the truth in tumbling screes, unconquerable cliffs or gentle sands that slide down into mirror lakes. They hold no artificial life. Perhaps they are the only real places left in a country created and moulded by the hands of man. In those hills, a man may find his place in the world, a world where he feels so small and so full of life. It is still an adventure to seek out the secret paths where the mountains and the fells reveal their hearts; to stand in places where the work of man is seen below in true perspective, the farms that fill the valleys, the tracks that wind across the hills, the distant plume from a coastal factory, all are seen and understood. But these truths are only shown to those who take the time, who struggle through the wind and rain, who climb breathless to the ridge to see yet another ridge above them but still climb on with aching limbs, foot by foot by stony foot only to find the summit clouded and obscure.
This story begins with the hills. Mark Hunter was born between the hills and the sea one wet, windy day in March 1942.
The shroud of damp fog had seeped in through the window. Mrs Hunter lay gasping, sweating and distraught.
“Never again,” she swears, “never again. I will never suffer this pain again. I’ll die before this child is born.”
“That’s what they all say, dear,” the midwife smiles. “You’re doing just fine.”
And nature would have her way, so the child was born. But Mark was her first and last baby. From that violent first breath of his life, he could shout louder than his mother ever did. She just lay back exhausted and weeping. Above them, the bombers were droning on and then came muffled explosions but she did not hear them.
Mrs Mary Hunter did not take to motherhood any more than she had taken to being a wife. If you had asked her, which no-one ever did, she would have told you the war that took her man overseas was a blessed relief. But now she regretted her husband’s last leave in the summer of ’41.
A year later and Mark was crying at midnight as he had done every midnight for months, as he would do for many months and years to come. Slowly the wretched screech of the baby turned to the silent tears of a lonely toddler. Mary, alone in her bed, gripped her hands to the sheets to prevent her succumbing and going to the child.
Mark’s world was a small terraced house in a Cumberland coastal town. A brick prison of damp and cold in the wilderness of wet grey streets. Another year passed and a small child gripped the window sill to stare out across the coastal plain to the rain drenched and ancient hills. It was such a strange and dreary place and it scared the small boy, so he ran to the front of the house and looked that way instead. Out there in the distance was a grey and endless sea, as featureless and barren as the clouds above. At night, in the winter storms, he peeped out across the terraces wondering if the invisible, distant roaring waves would break in.
In his small way, he became aware of changing times. The ozone took on a new flavour. All about him, people were celebrating the end of the war and not daring to think of the future. By the hidden coast, piles of debris, brick and twisted, rusty steel were all that remained of the factory bombed the night Mark was born.
One spring morning in 1946, amid a blast of steam, rattling chains and squealing flanges, the heavy train pulled out of Euston with a full load of soldiers all returning home. An extra coach of kit bags weighed down the engine. Young men, who looked older, smiled with exhausted faces hiding a deeper weariness. They leaned out of every door and stared from every window, passing banter, as men will who wait for action. Inside, some of them sat in groups chatting quietly, smiling, laughing, smoking, happy or sad. Others stood restless in the corridors, nervous, exalted, and glad to be on their way at last. Clouded mirrors beneath the string luggage racks reflected the dull nicotine stained cream paint and teak. Astute officers sat in their compartments wondering how quickly the life of command would fall away and the mundane world of normality could consume them again. It was hard for them to see a future but they were desperate to forget the past of wasted lives and falsehood. At every station, as comrades parted, perhaps for good, there was a shaking of hands and a hollow thumping of backs. Girlfriends, mothers, wives stood on the platforms scared and excited by the moment. A signal clacked up the track. A shout went up from the platform end as a wisp of steam showed above the trees. A long minute later and a hundred women were waving as the train clattered in across the points, rounded the platform and rolled in to stop in a cloud of steam and scolding brakes. Coal dust black and caked with grime, the engine was as tired as the heroes it pulled home at last.
Corporal Hunter sat with two chums from the Royal Engineers.
“Can’t believe it Danny,” said one.
“Nor me, on the bloody train. The best we’ve been. Hey Jack, what do’ya say? Best day, thought it would never come.”
“Maybe...” replied Jack Hunter watching the fields roll by. “We’ve been good mates, but that’s all gone and what’s gonna come?”
“Come on, Jack, this is a happy day. You wanna go home, don’t yer?”
“Maybe I do, I guess. Don’t know what I’ll find there. Don’t know if I’ll find anything there.”
“Well, here Jack, take a tot of this and let’s drink to the good things to come, anyway. Home to a wife and a bairn, eh, Jack?” said Danny producing a battered flask from his jacket and handing it round.
“Things to come!”
They all drank the toast, swore they would stand true friends and the new world would be good. The cheap French brandy tasted of warmth and sunshine.
“Look at them fields and farms and such. This is what we fought for. It’s good to see and don’t say it ain’t, Jack.”
“Maybe it is,” murmured Jack.
Hours later, Jack Hunter arrived at the end of the terrace where he had been born, where he had been a boy, a lover and where he had brought home his wife.
“God, so this is it. The end. The end of the road. The end of the world, maybe.”
He stood there for five full, long, silent minutes, scared to step forward, scared to return to the house he used to call his own. Scared but empty. He had passed the first flowers of spring blooming outside the station beneath a warming sky but Jack Hunter felt cold inside.
In the distance, he saw a huge building site on the coast. He had heard whispers of this. More secret than the enemy, Calder Hall, the brave new world, electricity so cheap they won’t bother to bill it, the nuclear age. It might as well have been a different planet for all Jack knew of it. The promises for the future were as cold to him as the bombs so recently dropped a world away were hot. The incongruity of the old world now lost and the new world not made pulled at his mind and left the vacuum he felt in his heart.
All day he had seen other men run to their wives and laugh despite it all, the joy of returning overwhelming all the past terror and toil. The noise and commotion of a homecoming train had led to spontaneous outbursts of friendship and devotion. The first sight of their war born babies enthralled other men. Other men, who had not cried through years of terror and danger and pain, wept plainly, openly, proudly, on returning from the nightmare of war to this simple reality. Other men had dreamed of this moment, fought for this moment, waited and waited, and longed for this moment when the front door opened, to be home again. Other men felt exultant pleasure to sit in rest, to be their own master, to live their own time, to be honest and gentle and quiet, to be at peace.
Jack Hunter struggled against the desire to run back to no man’s land, to barbed wire and broken bricks, drifting smoke and broken spirits, and dragged his feet forward step by step to the front door.
“God knows I’ve faced it all and now I can’t even do the easy thing,” he murmured.
The dull red paint was faded and scratched. The brass had lost all lustre. He fumbled for the key before remembering he had none. Then he stood, silent, sad, deeply hurt but could not weep; he had no tears left for the world. So he stood and stood. Across the street, faces could see him but he was blind to their watching.
Suddenly, with a sound like a rifle loading, the door opened. Jack jumped back, shaking. Mary stepped forward into the sunshine, Mary holding Mark’s hand. She opened her mouth to speak but stopped silent. Jack felt the panic return as he saw the young boy for the first time. For a moment, they stood in silence.
‘My God, how changed he looks,’ she thought.
Mary smiled, the sun shining on her hair and glinting in her eyes. Then instinct cut in. She picked up the child in her arms to protect him.
“Hallo, Jack. Meet Mark, meet your son,” she smiled down at the boy and lifted her eyes to her husband’s empty face.
But he just stood with his hands on his kit bag; he dared not touch the boy. In the child’s face, he saw the smoking remains of a bombed city. Jack Hunter had never held his baby. And Mary, he didn’t know her, had never once dreamed of her. Jack Hunter was home from the war but he was lost on some foreign border.
“You’d better come in, Jack,” sighed Mary, resigned to another lost moment in life.
“Maybe, maybe you’re right.”
Indoors, the sunshine struggled to penetrate the dirty windows. The slim young woman Jack had married ten years before was looking careworn and plain. Jack looked at her but didn’t see her, he saw a nurse from the military hospital. Mary turned away into the house. Her long hair was tied back, she wore no make-up, her clothes were old and in the dull light, her eyes were sad, tired, averted. She settled the child and busied herself preparing a meal. So they ate their supper with barely a word spoken.
“Jack, won’t you speak?”
“I’m eating; can’t you see I’m eating?”
The eating done, Mary and Jack sat opposite each other in the small room and their eyes met for a moment but no emotion flowed between them. Mary looked away.
“I’ll clear away,” Mary sighed again and stood up. Going to pick up Mark’s plate, he took her waist.
“Mark, Jack,” was all she said as she pulled away to wash the dishes in the crazed porcelain sink. The child, perched on his cushion, watched the strange man silently.
“Maybe, maybe…” and Jack’s voice trailed off.
In truth, Jack never came back from the war. At first, he was just morose, then he was drunk and then he was violent. But he didn’t remember hitting Mary, he didn’t remember smacking his son, he didn’t remember the sobbing boy crawling away. The last memory he had was ‘somewhere in Germany or maybe France,’ he didn’t know where. It came to him every day, and far worse came to him in the nightmares that woke him cold and shaking, while Mary lay wide awake, eyes closed, with her back to this man, this strange impostor who had replaced her husband.
Before the war, Jack Hunter had worked at the factory, building sub-assemblies for ships, working with the steel. It was a man’s work, hard, heavy, skilled, and he worked in the gang, proud and satisfied. But there were no jobs when the war ended and the bombed factory was never rebuilt. Back home, the only jobs were down the coal mine, or working up at the new nuclear power plant being built on the coast.
“I’m not having you down a mine. I couldn’t stand it, worrying,” said Mary. “You going to take the plant?”
“Maybe I will, since I have no choice,” said Jack. “Maybe you’d like to do the work, an’ all, ’stead of me, seeing as how you know so much about it.”
So Jack worked for the plant on a maintenance crew, a job he hated for the twenty years he did it. If Mary had only known, it was even more deadly than the mine.
Meanwhile, Mark grew into a little boy caught between Jack and Mary, between silences that made him stop still, waiting for the argument to start. By the age of five, the smell of over cooked vegetables meant home to Mark. Beef gravy but no beef accompanied the dumplings, beans, radish and swede. But Mark grew plump and quickly. There was rhubarb from a neighbour’s allotment and apples in the autumn to colour the grey rations in a world that was making do.
Mark started at school when he was five, a tiny child about to lose his innocence. School was full of hardness: hard floors, hard walls, hard desks, hard rulers held by hard men, hard boots kicked by hard boys, hard words screamed and shouted, hard lessons learned and unlearned. School smelt and smacked and smothered as the endless minutes were tossed into the lost hours, lost days and lost lives. Drowning children learnt to swim or sink in this storm. And learning was a mystery of letters, of numbers, with no ideas and no thoughts and no freedom. So school passed hour by day by year, fenced in from the wasteland that surrounded it, unmarked by Hunter M. who hated it, was stifled by it and counted the seconds away: one, two, three, so many blasted hours, so many wasted days.
School failed the child as easily as the child failed the school. They were matched in their ambivalence. The institution saw no freedom and Mark saw only a prison. He secretly pursued his love of words and music before he knew it was love. But he found no home for them at school; he found no love at school. Mark would sit near a window looking out at the stone walls racing up the field boundaries into freedom, as lessons and teachers passed him by. On Thursday afternoons, he would bunk off games and head for the beach or the hills. In the evenings, when other children did their homework, he would spend hours staring at distant fells.
Looking back, he would remember how he walked along the beach with his mother to collect sea coal and driftwood for the fire. By the sea, she would stop and stare out to the horizon, remembering better times when Jack had been a smart young man courting her. She would talk to her child as though he couldn’t understand. How Jack used to lift her up and sit her on the high breakwater. How they would laugh together and run down the strand. While Mark looked on with dark eyes, she sighed to remember the long summer evenings laying together with her lover among the tussocky marram grass on the dunes, with no thought for the future, the sea singing lullaby as the moon rose up and they lay wrapped in Jack’s warm and comforting greatcoat.
As Mark ran splashing at the water’s edge, she smiled her rare smile. It would be good to spend endless summer evenings on the beach sitting on the hull of an upturned boat watching her son playing. The war was over for some but not for Jack and Mary Hunter. When would it end? When would the real Jack Hunter come home?
“Look at yourself, Jack. Proud of yourself, are you?”
“Maybe not, maybe, maybe…”
Happy times were rare in those early years after the war and mother Mary never forgave the pain she suffered or the man who made it. She fed the child, she clothed the child and she regretted the child. It was this child that kept her subservient, sad, wasted and inwardly angry: this child was to blame.
Mary worked in the kitchen while Mark sat silently watching. And in the silence, the tension was building until it burst. “Don’t stare,” she shouted. Mark jumped up and ran away, back to his room where he could be alone with the distant hills and remember a hundred other days the same.
Every morning Mark looked out of his bedroom window and could see beyond the weary streets to the grey misty outline, a place as far away as dreamland. On spring days, the clouds blew in from the sea and sailed across those fells in bright flotillas. He hardly knew how or why, but he loved that view as a comfort and a certainty, a solid belief in a vague world. On darker days, the clouds swept in with the rain that smeared the greasy dirt across the glass and subsumed the greys and greens of rock, and fell into the shapeless mass of sky. As he watched the ever-changing view, he felt a yearning. As yet, he was too young to understand it, but the emotional caress of that view stayed in his memory for a lifetime. Down on the street there was no sight of hills, no distance, no dreamland, only the rain. Down on the street was not a happy place.
But Mark was not just a dreamer. He saw the world as a place to escape from and discover by turns. Mark was not lazy; he would work for hours at hard, physical labour. Nor was he the quiet, shy boy he play-acted at school. On his wanderings, he met farmers, fishermen, carpenters, road menders, dry stone wallers and many others. An eleven, twelve, thirteen year old Mark could be found passing time with working men out on the roads, on the beaches, in the fields. At first, he would stop to talk and watch, and maybe share a tea break. Later he would offer to help the dry stone waller or the farmer or drag the fisherman’s boat to earn a sixpence here and there. A big lad and good with his hands, he learned to mend fishing nets in place of playing football, he grew strong stacking heaps of fallen stone ready to lay a new wall instead of writing essays. These men eyed him up and knew at once that this boy was not one for school, as surely as they recognised themselves.
“Hey, lad, your folks’ll be having a go at me keeping you up here when you should be down there learning books and stuff,” said Simon the dry stone waller, a particular favourite of Mark’s.
“I’m learning up here,” replied a twelve-year-old Mark, lifting another stone.
“Well, since you is here, we can sort this ’ere gate post. Needs two.”
Mark quit school at fifteen and started hanging around the streets just to get out of the house. But his freedom was all the freedom a shilling could buy. The town that had seemed so vast to the five year old was now a small and desolate place. The streets were empty, watched by empty eyes behind empty windows as Mark trudged by. A year passed, his father swearing ‘Get a job’, his mother staring silent accusing stares which spoke only of failure.
At sixteen, he no longer feared his father; he ignored him. Mark was four inches taller than his father, eight inches taller than his mother. Mark had no trouble from bullies or the roaming small town gangs and Mark walked alone. His substantial frame could not contain him any more than the desolation around him. He could see over the walls into hidden places and he felt the world he was born into was no world at all. He was the cuckoo in the nest.
A few more months and Mark was no longer on the streets. He picked out a living from helping out a dozen local farmers and the dry stone waller, Simon Simple, working up across the fells. But every penny he earned he kept ready for an uncertain future.
A new obsession entered his life. Music filled his waking hours. At home, he spent his time alone with his cheap guitar and the old valve radio he had bought from a junk shop for 2/6. It didn’t work, but he mended it. He listened to skiffle, and rock and roll, and despaired at the safe diet of the Light Programme. He dreamed of a different world, a world with an edge of excitement. The fifties were falling away and fading like a childhood memory into monochrome.
Post-war Britain was about to wake up from shades of grey night and start to dance into the colour and light of a new dawn. With the sixties came a fresh breeze. It was okay to challenge, it was good to change, to knock down the old world and build anew. All over Britain, a new generation was stirring. Ambition had turned the tide from past to future and the future looked good. Success looked like a new car in place of the bicycle, a holiday once a year. It was no longer taboo to talk about money. But not for the Hunters, where life went on unchanging, grinding away the years.
Mark was not getting a job even though there were jobs to be done. Mark was nowhere to be seen all day long. Mark was far off in the distant hills or down on the beach where he learned a new kind of survival. At sixteen, he had spent his first night alone in the hills up above Wast Water. It was the first of many. As his world expanded, so did his confidence and all the time he was growing bigger and stronger. He picked up enough work to feed himself and save money, cash in hand. At home in the evenings, he would spend hours with his soldering iron fixing radios and record players for townsfolk. He built a guitar amplifier to his own design and sold it to a local rock and roll band. They had friends who asked him to build another. With money came a new freedom and certainty. Two years passed. He knew he would leave soon.
On his eighteenth birthday, his father came in from work and poured Mark a pint of beer to go with his supper.
“Right then, that’s the first and last pint of beer I buy yer. If you don’t get a job by this time next month, you get out. Understood? Happy birthday.”
His father had no idea that Mark was already earning more than he did; neither did the taxman.
“No problem,” replied Mark quietly and leaving the beer and his birthday card unopened on the table, he stood up, picked up his haversack from the hall and walked out without a word. He did not return for two days. When he did get back there was a frightening row, at first between Mark and his mother and then between Jack and Mary.
Mark went into the kitchen and shouted, “Shut up, both of you.”
There was a moment’s silence before Jack walked out slamming the door behind him and strode off to the pub. Mary glared for a moment at Mark and then screeched at him with tears rolling down her face.
“Why don’t you get out? I don’t ever want to see you again. Get out. Now!”
But Mark just turned and went to his room. For the next few days, there was a cold silence in the house. None of them were talking. A week after the argument, the first of April, the day he left, Mark felt no need to tell his father or mother he was going. He saw no need to leave a note. He was sure of never returning. He had no forwarding address to leave. The certainty of another world was enough to survive. Survival was a word he would soon be acquainted with at first hand. But he already possessed the essential qualifications for survival in this hostile world. He was strong, self sufficient in thoughts and deed. His one sadness was leaving behind his beloved guitar.
It is still a long way from Cumbria to London. In 1960, it was much further. For a naïve teenager whose entire compass was restricted to no more than ten miles from his home, the distance was immense. But London was the goal, the only goal. He didn’t know how or why but in his mind, it was the place where the future lived.
He started out across the hills on the old slate road known as Moses Trod. It was cold and damp, and the remnants of winter snow still filled the cols on the fells. He walked on past the deep, shadow filled Wast Water where the screes slide endlessly into the depths of the lake from the grey crags high above. With each mile, the weather closed in and the freezing rain prickled and blistered the surface of the lake. Thickening clouds drove in across the fells until the huge world of distant hills had diminished to a space no more than a few yards across, surrounded by foggy drifts of cloud and wet. Suddenly he felt alone and scared. The cold damp was eating through his clothes. His eyes were sore. It seemed to Mark that the weather was trying to beat him back, but he was not so easily beaten. This old path led him over the ancient stone packhorse bridge into the cavernous, hard jaws of Feldale Head. There, the looming might of mountains, though invisible, could be sensed through the deepening gloom of the day. In the village, he took shelter by the church and sat soaking and miserable, watching the incessant rain falling, falling, falling and flailing the mist. Water flooded off the slates above him and clattered onto the stones in orchestrated cacophony.
‘What have I done?’ he thought. ‘Stupid, stupid, stupid.’
Ten minutes later he was still sitting hunched up with his back to the wall in a dry nook when a figure loomed forward.
“Well I never. If it ain’t master Mark. Long way from ’ome on a miserable day and nowhere to go, I’ll be bound,” said Simon, the stone waller.
“Jus’ taking stock.”
“Well, lad, I’m up ’t hotel. Why not follow on and get yerself dry?”
At the hotel, Mark followed Simon into the lobby and round to the bar.
“Your friend’s a bit young for here, Simon?” asked the barman.
“He’ll do no ’arm, Joe and ’e needs a place to dry off. You don’t mind ’im. I’ll vouch for ’im.”
An hour later and much refreshed by a hot lunch and warm fire, Mark stood to take his leave.
“I’d better get on, Simon. I need to get across the hills.”
But the barman looked at him.
“Lad, I wouldn’t go up there today. It’s bad enough down here but there’ll be a blizzard up in the pass, I’ll warrant.”
“Joe’s right, young Mark,” said Simon.
“But I can’t stay here; I need to get over the hills.”
“I suggest you go back home, lad. There’s going to be a right storm tonight,” said Joe.
“I can’t go back home,” replied Mark looking down at the floor.
The two men exchanged a knowing glance.
“Well, Mark, how about you come back to my place. That’s just a mile up yonder and you can lay up there ’til morning. Storm’ll be through and I’ll warrant t’morrow be a good day in the hills.”
So the pair buttoned up their jackets and Mark hoisted his pack on his back as they bent their hats into the streaming rain. At eighteen, Mark was already an impressive figure and stood nearly a head taller than the stone waller. In his oiled cotton jacket and leather hat, he passed for a man in the pouring rain. The paths ran like streams. The green grass in the fields was half-covered with cold spreading lakes and the sheep clustered beneath gnarled and stunted old oaks or sheltered by the walls.
Simon’s cottage was close by the beck as it flooded down from the fells. Behind the cottage, the hills rose up to unseen heights. The old track passed the small garden. The rough stone walls and green Honister slate blended into the dim soaking heather hillside behind. Inside, there were just two small rooms downstairs and a tiny staircase going up to the bedrooms. Simon’s two dogs ran to greet their master at the door. Many years had passed since Simon’s wife had passed away and now he lived alone in the cottage. The two dogs settled in front of the fire as Simon and Mark played dominoes at the small table.
“Well, now, lad, what brings you up here all set for a journey like you are?”
Mark looked at him with such a look of disappointment that Simon carried on.
“Okay, I’ll not pry. Let me tell you a tale instead. You might think I was born and bred in these hills but I ain’t. It was thirty year back I came ’ere. Start of the depression and there weren’t no work down Manchester way. So I thinks to meself, I’ll take a hike. I had a few quid put by and a few quid went a long way back then. I ended up here, it being the end of the road; it seemed a good place to stop. There was a bit o’ work to be had for a jobbin’ builder, which was my trade. ’Nough to keep a man alive. This cottage was derelict, no roof, no nothin’ ’cept the walls, and they was in a state. Farmer down the dale let the cattle in it. I had lodging in the village and was working for the farmer, and got to talking ’bout this little place. He tells me if I fix it up, I can live in it. So we shakes on that and I did fix it up. Few years later I’m gettin’ married to Dora, who’s this farmer’s daughter and he says to me, ‘Simon, you are family now and I want to give you the cottage.’ ‘No,’ I says to him, ‘that won’t do. I will make an offer.’ ‘Simon,’ he says, ‘the work you done on this place, more than pay for it. You look after this place and you look after Dora and I’ll tell you what I’ll do. I’ll put it in my will to Dora and you.’ So that’s how it settled. Anyhow, I’m sixty-five now and I am thinking to meself I need to pass it on somehow, but that’s another story. Guess what I’m sayin’ is, if you find a place to be, you must work at it, an honest livin’ an’ it’ll turn out most likely.”
Simon lit up his pipe and sat back looking into the fire.
“What happened to Dora?” asked Mark. “Or maybe I shouldn’t ask.”
“No worry lad, I don’t often speak of it but I’m minded to tell you what happened.”
Outside, the rain had turned to sleet and there was a distant rumble of thunder in the hills.
“Me and Dora was very happy here. She was a lovely lass and I couldn’t believe my luck. By that time I had got working out on the hills, a doin’ the walls. There ain’t a wall round here that I haven’t put my hands to it and there’s more than enough for me to do. But then the war comes along an’ everything’s changed. No-one was mending walls on the fells. I was struggling to feed my lady and me. I wasn’t took up as I was already over forty, but Dora says to me they needed gals down at the factory in the town. So every day she catches the bus down to the factory and comes home each afternoon. We never dreamed that any German planes would ever come over here. But they did and they bombed that damned factory and Dora was badly hurt and never recovered. When I saw her, she was already goin’. I held her hand but I don’t know if she knew me or no. I wanted to cry, but I couldn’t, I was so angry. A bad day, a bad day for everyone,” and Simon sat staring into the crackling fire in the early evening twilight with a battering wind jabbering outside and the hard icy rain clattering on the glass with a monotonous rattle.
“My birthday,” whispered Mark.
“Eh? What, today?”
“No, no. The day the factory was bombed. It was the day I was born.”
“Well, some good came of a bad day after all. Dora would’ve been pleased about that.”
They sat in silence for a while, listening to the flames in the grate.
“Like walking in the hills, you. I seen you often enough going up across the fell. The weather were like this back in ’32. We all met up at Bowden Bridge before going up over to Kinder. Last Sunday in April, it were, and everyone was expecting trouble and we got it. But we also got freedom, not just for us but for everyone. They called it mass trespass but there ain’t no law of trespass, nor never has been and all those hills, they don’t belong to anyone but everyone that works in ’em and walks in ’em. So now, you can walk free but who knows where one day we might get to. Who owns the land? No-one owns the land, we are jus’ passing through. We are the keepers in trust for them that follows. So I do my bit and mend the walls and clear the ditches. Then you come along from nowhere with nowhere to go and I figure I can teach you a little of what it means to be out on the fells and free. Well, then I done some good.”
The next morning dawned clear following on from the wild night. The hills were sharp against the backdrop of ragged clouds.
“Told you so,” smiled Simon as they ate breakfast at his old wooden table in the kitchen. “Well, lad, I guess you’ll be on your way. I hope you manage all right. The hills will be good today. Now I want to run a deal with you. I know you’re off and I don’t ask why or where but I want you to drop me a line every once in a while. Postcard’ll do. Drop me a line back to this place. Here, I wrote down the address for yer. And when you settle for a while, which you will, then maybe you can think about Simon Simple, the old stone waller. Here’s twenty pound to get you goin’ as no doubt you have little enough.”
“Oh, no. You can’t do that. I can’t take it. That’s too much.”
“You can and you will and you will thank me for it yet.”
So saying Simon thrust an envelope into Mark’s jacket pocket.
“Don’t lose it. As it’s Saturday I will come on a little way with you with these here dogs as need a run.”
So it was that on a glorious April Saturday in 1960, Mark, Simon and the two lively collies set off up Moses Trod by Sty Head over towards Honister. At the head of the pass beneath the huge bluff of Great Gable, Simon stopped to turn back. They took their leave and Simon sat on a rock to smoke a quiet pipe. He watched Mark walk on out of sight and sighing turned back down to his cottage.
‘He’ll learn the hard way and no doubt,’ he thought, ‘but perhaps he’ll remember this time and place, remember it as a place to come ’ome when there ain’t no ’ome to go to.’
Two – Fortune smiling
Mark felt fortune smiling in the April sun as he set off across the shoulder of Great Gable towards the slates of Honister. The music ever in his head kept pace with every step of the way. After an hour or so, he came to the top of the disused tramway that led down from the old mine to the pass. At Honister, he struck east and then north to Keswick. He had no map and was well out his territory but from Keswick he caught a bus over to Penrith. There seemed to be no turning back. But London was still over three hundred miles away.
In the centre of town, Mark found a small shop and bought some food. It did not take long to wander around the market town. As the afternoon closed, he sat near the castle to eat when he noticed a small group of people loitering near the gate. There were two young men and two girls and one of the lads had a guitar case. Mark felt emboldened by the guitar.
‘Anyone with a guitar must be okay,’ he thought and he walked over to talk.
They turned out to be an aspiring folk group. Chloe was a short, plain looking girl, perhaps a little plump, wearing a baggy, old Aran sweater, her favourite. She was the singer. Ronny was a gangling, rough looking youth with a loud mouth, slicked back hair and a well-worn leather jacket. Angular and abrasive, he played the bass. He also had a drum kit, but that was hardly folk. You could feel the energy emerging from his limbs as he never stopped fidgeting. An older lad called Vinny carried the guitar. He was quiet, slim and neat with a studious, earnest air and a tweed sports jacket. Julia was a handsome girl who played violin. Tall, well dressed, with long brown hair and dark, enticing eyes she immediately took Mark’s notice. A teacher’s daughter, she carried an air of confidence and elegance. The group had been to school together, except Ronny who came from Kendal. Ronny suffered the folk club for the opportunity to play and he had a secret soft spot for Chloe. He didn’t know why and didn’t question it either. He had once tried to date her but she hadn’t taken him seriously. So he shrugged and carried on playing bass. His real passion was for drums, rock and roll and the blues.
Mark towered over all of them and his easy sociability soon broke though the questioning gaze. Out of season, strangers were rare in the town. It only took a few words and he fell in with them easily. Without any effort, they invited him along to the folk club that night where they would be doing a couple of songs.
“Can I take a look at the guitar?”
Vinny took out a fine Gibson acoustic. It was a far better guitar than any Mark had seen or played before. He took it reverently and was conscious as he sat on the bench that the others were watching him critically. But Mark was confident of his playing and quickly ran through a couple of simple tunes before playing a more challenging classical piece he had learned from a library book. It sounded a bit odd on the steel strung folk guitar. As he finished he looked up just in time to see Julia nudging Vinny with an air of satisfaction on her smiling face.
They all laughed and clapped.
“Nice guitar,” said Mark handing it back to Vinny.
“Nice guitarist,” laughed Julia.
“Good playing,” Vinny agreed quietly, putting the instrument away.
They parted, but not before Mark had directions to the church hall that housed the folk club on a Saturday night. He had never been to a folk club before. He had never really been out at all. At eight o’clock, he was in the dusty hall and found himself a chair at the back. The lights were too bright and there was no stage, somehow it was not what he had expected. But the failings of the venue only emphasised the wonder of the music. It was a revelation to him as the different singers and instrumentalists stood up to play. Some of them just stood up where they sat in the audience and sang unaccompanied, while others, such his friends of the afternoon, stood at the front, in the space that took the place of the stage, and played two or three songs.
Ronny, Vinny, Julia and Chloe came on about half way through. Ronny’s big upright bass made a solid thump in the small hall. Between them, they acquitted themselves well. They played an arrangement of the classic sea shanty ‘Rio Grande’. Mark was surprised that the audience quietly joined in the chorus while Chloe’s clear voice sailed above them. Then they played a new song written by Vinny. Mark thought this was very good. Vinny could play his Gibson with accomplishment. But it was the singing that took his breath away. As soon as Chloe started to sing, he looked at her afresh. She might have looked plain but she sang like a professional. She had a full, clear, bell like voice that belied her young age and sounded very womanly and ageless. She could hold the words from silence up to soaring. He did not realise that he was staring at Chloe open mouthed until Julia waved and distracted him. When Chloe sang, she half closed her eyes and gave herself over to the music. The audience liked it too and they were offered a third song. This last one was Clementine. Mark was amazed. He had always thought it was a kindergarten song, something to be sung by rote, but the arrangement he heard that night elevated it to something far greater. The audience joined in the chorus with gusto and thoroughly enjoyed it but the last two verses were sung full of pathos and many eyes were moist as Chloe sang the final chorus just accompanied by a solemn violin ‘Oh my darling, oh my darling, oh my darling Clementine, thou art lost and gone forever, dreadful sorry Clementine.’ It was moving and beautiful.
For Mark, it was a musical awakening as the audience waited for the final note of Julia’s violin to fade away before standing to applaud them. They were good and they deserved it. After their set, they came down the hall to Mark to share the last couple of performances.
The club over, Ronny dived off to catch the last train down to Oxenholme, while Vinny set off home.
“Where you off to, Mark?” asked Julia.
“I don’t actually know,” admitted Mark, “but I’ll find somewhere.”
Julia raised her eyebrows. “You staying around here or what are you doing?”
“I don’t really know, it depends.”
“Depends on what? Don’t you have a home to go to? I mean it seems a bit strange, doesn’t it?”
“Leave him, Julia,” said Chloe, “none of our business.”
Julia whistled low through her teeth and announced that she had to go anyway and giving Mark a final quizzical look disappeared into the night. By now, there were only a handful of folk left in the hall.
“We’d better go, now,” said Chloe. “They have to close up pretty sharpish after the club.” Seeing Mark hesitate, she tugged his sleeve and smiled, “Come on.”
Outside there was a light drizzle drifting across the cool night air and they wandered along the street together.
“You sing beautifully,” began Mark. “You’re all so good. I really enjoyed it.”
“Thanks. We’ve been at it a long time, except Ronny that is. Strange thing to do, I’ll bet you’re thinking.”
“No, no, not at all. Made me feel odd when I was listening to you. Sort of proud and emotional, all mixed up.”
“You play well. Maybe I could sing for you sometime?”
“Listen, Chloe, it’s really kind of you to be here but I need to find some place to kip so you had better go home.”
“That’s okay. There’s no hurry, you can sleep at my place.”
“What! I couldn’t do that. What would your folks say if I turned up out of nowhere like and asked for a bed?”
“They wouldn’t say anything. I have a flat over the Post Office. It’s dead pokey, like, but there’s space on the floor and it’s got to be better than sleeping in the rain. Besides, I like you, you seem alright.”
“You’re mad. You don’t even know me. I could be anyone.”
“Maybe you could be, but you aren’t. Take it or leave it. It’s just a piece of floor, mind, nothing more. Understood?”
“Well yea, yea,” stammered Mark, completely unnerved by this mouse of a girl.
“How old are you anyway?” asked Chloe.
“Eighteen.”
“I figured about that. That’s okay then. I’m twenty.”
Chloe took Mark to her flat above the shop and Post Office. It was tiny with a small kitchen containing a miniature cooker, a small old porcelain sink and a table for two. There was a room that doubled up as living and bed room with a double bed on one side and a small settee opposite. The old rug in the middle of the floor had just enough space for a man to lie down and in one corner was a basin. The toilet was downstairs by the entrance and shared with another flat. It was all tidy, if a hotchpotch of odds and ends.
There was a guitar hung on the wall.
“Do you play, then?” asked Mark.
“No, not really. I can strum a few chords, that’s all. Not like you or Vinny.”
“Listen,” continued Chloe, “house rules. You can stay tonight if and only if, one: you take off your shoes indoors and two: you tell me what you’re really up to and three: you don’t run off without letting me know. Is that okay?”
“I guess so. You don’t have to do this if you don’t want to. I’ve slept out on the hills plenty of times.”
“Maybe, but this isn’t the hills, it’s a town and some of the folk won’t take kindly to finding you in their back yard. So you tell me what you’re about and kip on my floor tonight. Then we can work out what to do with you tomorrow.”
“Well I’m not goin’ back home.”
“Who says you are? But now you’re here, I take an interest.”
So they found a home for Mark’s pack and shoes, made some tea and sat down. He was on an old wooden chair and she sat on her hands on the bed. Mark related his story. Once he had started, it poured out of him while Chloe listened. It was the first time he had ever had anyone listen to him that way. Suddenly he stopped, embarrassed, realising he had been talking for ages while she had not said a word. She just watched him with her small round face smiling, seemingly fascinated.
“Go on, you’d better not stop now. You tell a good story.”
So Mark carried on right up to meeting her and her friends that evening. The time had moved on to midnight. Mark felt a strange excitement about him as he waited, still unsure if he was doing right or wrong.
“Well, Mark,” Chloe said quietly, “there’s some food for thought. Let’s sleep on it and tomorrow we can work out what happens next. Oh, and thank you,” she leant forward and touched his hand, “thank you for trusting me.” And she stood up and started to clear away the mugs while Mark got out his sleeping bag from the pack and laid it out on the floor.
“Okay,” said Chloe, returning, “here’s how it works. You go in the kitchen and have a wash – because, believe me, you do need one. You get to borrow my shampoo and a new bar of soap and the spare towel I’ve put ready because I’m guessing you don’t have any of that in your bag, right?”
“Er. Right.”
“It’s okay Mark. You don’t need to worry. Women think of this kind of stuff and men don’t. While you’re doing that in there, I’ll get ready in here and that way I won’t embarrass you, ’cause I’m guessing you would be embarrassed. And so might I,” she added with a chuckle.
So Mark got to spend his second night under a strange roof. He lay in the dark of that room for half an hour wondering about the day and especially about this strange girl. She wasn’t like any type of girl he had imagined. He couldn’t place her; she was entirely a new experience. All the girls in his imagination had been beautiful and quiet and dreamy and complicit and soft, and Chloe wasn’t any of these and yet she was a real live, living person.
Then a soft voice came out of the dark. “Mark, go to sleep.”
And he felt more comfortable than ever in his life before and he closed his eyes, emptied his mind and slept.
Mark was awoken by the sound of Chloe singing from the kitchen:
‘Early one morning,
Just as the sun was rising,
I heard a maiden sing
in the valley far below.
Do not deceive me,
Oh, never leave me,
How could you use
a poor maiden so.’
It became a memory that sustained him and became increasingly dear to him through the rest of his life. This extraordinary girl with her plain Jane looks could raise his spirits in a way that no other woman would ever do.
Chloe walked in, smiling, bright and wrapped in a dressing gown with a towel around her wet hair.
“Up you get, lazy bones.” and she gave him a gentle kick.
She went over to the window and cast it wide open as Mark followed her with his eyes. She turned and stood framed in the light, holding her hand to her chin and looking quizzically down at him, still in his sleeping bag.
“You don’t have a sister, do you?”
“No, why?”
“You’re still scared of me. Don’t be. I’m not your mother; I’m your friend. So I’m going to get some breakfast ready and you can sort yourself out in here, better air that bag, and then we can sit down and have chat about what’s next.”
Chloe stepped over him to the other room and he caught her glimpsing earnestly back as she closed the door. Later, at the breakfast table, they talked.
“So you’ve run away from home. You’ve got some vague idea of going to London, where you’ve never been. You’ve not left so much as a note for your folks. You haven’t bothered to think about money. And you’ve no notion of the disaster that’s about to hit you. Naïve or what?” and Chloe rapped her fingers on the table for a moment. “But it’s not all bad news, ’cause you’ve met me and the others and we can help. I am prepared to raise the cause, as it happens I have no other just now.”
“You’re too good to me and I was not expecting any help. I’m still not expecting any help and I don’t want to cause you any trouble. And, okay, I admit all you say. Call me stupid if you like. But if you don’t decide to do something, to take a risk, then nothing ever happens. I’m not prepared to just let life happen to me. I want to make my own life. Don’t you see?”
“Yep, I see. And I never called you stupid. Happens I wish I had the guts to do what you are doing. Only thing is, I might not be much older, but I’ve been dumped on by my past, by Hitler and by idiot men who I stupidly believed when they said ‘I love you’.”
Chloe raised her eyes to his.
“I’m a sucker, you see.”
“You don’t sound like one. And I’m sorry; I’ve been all selfish again.”
“‘Don’t be scared of society, it’ll get you where you want to go, but only if you believe in me and trust the man you know.’” She sang in reply. “Well, the one thing we know is there’s no hurry to do anything stupid. You’ve plenty of time to work it out. I don’t think you should head off to London just yet. You need to plan this stuff and besides you ought to think about other people a bit more,” and Chloe looked straight into his eyes as she spoke, “I might want to come too.”
There was a moment’s silence before she continued, watching him carefully.
“I know a bit about London. That’s where I come from. We moved up here when I was eleven. My mother is a nurse and got a job in the hospital here. She wanted to get away from London and all the bad memories of the war. We lived in the East End, out Limehouse way, near the river. The whole place was like a bomb site when I was a child, some of it still is. There’s rows of terraces and in every row there’ll be a few houses missing, like broken teeth. Me and my mates used play in all these heaps of rubble. People think that all the children got sent away from London during the war. All the posh kids maybe, but there were hundreds of them roaming around the East End. When I was four, I used to hang around with a whole crowd of girls and boys of all ages while my mum was at work. My dad was in the expeditionary force in France when I was born in 1940. He never came back from Dunkirk.”
“I’m sorry, Chloe.”
“No, don’t be sorry for me but maybe you should give a thought to your own folks. So how about we concoct a note for them, so they at least know you are okay and you can tell them you are visiting a friend? Then every once in while you can drop them a line.”
“Okay, I’ll think about it.”
“Meanwhile, I think you should stay here for a while.”
“But…”
“It’s not a problem. I work in the shop downstairs. That’s how I come to get the flat and they really won’t mind. They’ll think you’re my new boyfriend,” she laughed. “They’re pretty liberal minded.”
“But, I’m not. It wouldn’t be right. We only met last night.”
“Mark, it’s the 1960s. No-one cares. Let them talk. In any event, you’ve got to stay somewhere. Well, think about it. If you don’t want to, that’s up to you. I am going to see Vinny and Julia tonight, I suggest you come along and we talk about it all together. They’ll have good ideas too and you know that Julia fancies you!”
“What?” Mark could feel the heat in his ears.
“Just kidding. You need to calm down a bit. Look I’m sorry, but I am worried about you and I really think that between us we can help,” and with a beseeching look, “Do you forgive me?”
“Nothing to forgive. I must be an idiot but I kind of need to do this. And yea, you’re right. I really am grateful and, of course, you’re right, I just took off without really thinking it through. I’m not going back but I don’t want to get you into trouble and I don’t want anyone jumping to conclusions about you and me, ’cause I know that we’ll both regret that one.”
“Why do boys always relate everything to sex?” Chloe seemed mildly miffed for the first time and Mark frowned at his clumsiness.
“Sorry, Chloe, but it’s not the boys I’m worried about. I’ll stay today. I’ll meet your friends tonight. Then tomorrow I’ll see if maybe there’s some work round about and perhaps a place to live while I sort out what to do next.”
“Sounds like a plan. Let’s write that letter to your folks and then you and I can try a song. You can’t keep your eyes off that guitar.”
So the day went well enough and Vinny and Julia were bemused. Vinny was looking for a flat and suggested that Mark join him. Mark kept catching Julia’s sparkling eyes looking at him like unanswered questions and Chloe kept noticing Julia too. Mark spent three weeks on Chloe’s floor and a week out looking for work. It was Julia who found him a job. A friend of a friend was looking for a labourer in forestry. Two weeks after that Vinny rented a tiny house and Mark moved in.