XII. Rivington
THE MAP
When you stood on the top on Rivington Pike,
all the land spread out for you just as the map
said it should. Blackpool Tower, sharp as a spike,
marking the edge of the sea. If you drew a line
from the Pike through it, you would find it went slap
bang through the Isle of Man, and, if it was fine,
there it was. I would hold the map to my eye,
seeing the shape as it said I should, although
with the tide out, the Ribble estuary
wasn't as clear, but the dotted lines would show
where the sands could be. You see, the world was made
to fit the way that man has surveyed.
A MAP OF FEELING
There were so many maps I made of Horwich,
Rivington, Heath Charnock, and the Pike, with the roads
coloured differently; paths round the Cottage
dotted to show the secret trails; and symbols
for the churches and the pylons. Kept all the codes
learned from the Ordnance Survey, so our jungles,
deserts, North and South Poles were just as exact,
plain in the world, as the Pike. But, as a freak,
you could draw in the contours of a real tract
showing the place where joy was at its peak,
where she said that she loved me, pain was present
down there where she explained just why she didn't.
THE BOUNDARY
I would wonder what was it about Blackrod,
Lostock and Adlington made them foreign. You
could go up Rivington — wasn't odd
there, for my grandad's cottage could be seen plain
on the side of the Pike. You still had a view
round to the lake, even from the narrow lane
that went down to the lead mines, but beyond there,
up by the farm they called Jepson's, it wasn't
ours. Was no way to tell just exactly where
ours stopped and theirs began, for you just couldn't
find a place on the path. Was a 'Rubicon',
for you'd turn to a stranger if you walked on.
THE GOOD FRIDAY WALK UP THE PIKE
All the Protestants went up Rivington Pike
Good Friday. We Catholics stayed at the height
that we found ourselves. No one could really like
climbing up there. You only found a tower
that had no point except for people to write
rude words on it, and not even a flower
to pick save cotton-grass. And what was much worse,
all sorts of poor people after their money
set up booths and side-shows. You'd soon have your purse
emptied. As Mammy said, 'If that's Calvary,
they should give all their money away!' Suppose,
though, you gave it to the poor with the side-shows?
THE FLYING PIKE
Over Rivington Pike when it blew so hard
clouds raced behind it so fast you thought the Pike
moved along, not the clouds themselves, and it jarred
how you looked switching from one to the other.
The whole land seemed to move as if we would strike
into some other continent, wander
who knows where. We'd be carried away, not
knowing we were, all of us moved by something
very big, very secret, like some great plot
going on under our noses, while walking
about, thinking we chose where to walk each day.
I was glad it was just clouds that blew away.
THE REAL PIKE
Funny thought that the Pike, once upon a time,
didn't have any tower on top. Was just
a bare hummock that no one would want to climb
save some old shepherd after his sheep. And then,
I began to think, longer ago, there must.
millions of years back, have been no sheep, no men,
not a sign of a house. There'd be no one to
see it from Horwich or anywhere else. It wouldn't
even have this round outline from here. The view
couldn't be looked at by anyone! You couldn't
look, not being here. Underneath, now, you'd find
the familiar Pike still as strange and blind.
CLOUD-SHADOWS
When the cloud-shadows flowed over the Pike, they
showed where the clouds were in the sky, yes,— but showed,
too, the shape of the Pike. Was as if to play
you had a hand so gigantic you could stretch
out and feel what the hill was like. Shadows flowed
fingering rises and dips, so you could sketch
in your mind a great solid model to match
valley and summit, sensing the textures: grass
as a velvet; and heather that would scratch,
a coconut mat; brush-like woods; the lake, glass;
houses shrunken to dice. Right up on the crest
all the shadows could vanish, over a breast.
THE PIKE UPSIDE-DOWN
When the Rivington lakes were calm, you'd see the
Pike and the moors upside-down. If you looked through
your legs, all of the mirror would be the
real, and the real the reflection. But you had
to ignore any places a slight breeze blew
ruffling the water. Someone might think you mad
with your head down like that, but for a minute
you could forget that your head felt tight, that all
of the lower ground couldn't be seen, for it
turned the whole scene into wonder. With the ball
of the Earth as the sky and the sky the Earth
I could dream it was magic that stamped its worth.
AS HIGH AS THE CLOUDS
At the height of the Pike some days you could be
high as the clouds. Like ships they'd go past
with this dark one a tug, quite close to the quay,
soon overtaking the white yachts in a race
with them all leaning forward, the nearest fast,
those in the distance much slower. The blue space
was the sea, and the big bright ocean-liners
showed up the most, but you couldn't tell whether
they were moving or not, cheating your sight as,
try as you might, you stared and stared, but never
could you catch them — but once look away and look
back, and you'd find they had moved in the time it took.
MOCK MOUNTAINS
Sometimes over Winter Hill summer
clouds would be piled up so still, so far, that you
could imagine them mountains, summits higher
than any England could really have, any
land at all. You'd be in it. It wasn't true
but you was there all the same. Just how many
peaks, all so snowy and golden in the late
afternoon sunlight, no one had yet found out;
no explorer had tracked up there. Was your fate,
starting right now. You hadn't to pause or doubt —
something called you up there. The track would be shown.
Was more wonderful than you ever had known.
HEAVENLY MEMORY
I remembered one morning when going up
Rivington. Dew was in the thick grass shining
pins and needles in blue and pink. Buttercup
petals were varnished like ladies' nails. Daisies
couldn't get wider open. Leaves were rustling
like they were waiting for something, and blazes
of sun went off like Little Demons. I knew
when it was — going up Rivington — and it
was like heaven all made of sunshine and dew,
but I could only remember it, stand it
like a picture to look at. It wasn't fair!
I just couldn't remember being there.
SPOTS OF SPACE (I)
There were spots up in Rivington if you caught
them when the sunlight was fresh in the morning
was as if that you'd found the world as it ought
really to be, or actually was, only
everyday you forgot how to look. Warning
you, though, like that to be on the watch, lonely
places couldn't be blamed. Was our fault for not
being awake, or rather dreaming the wrong
sort of way. Top of Sheephouse Lane was one spot —
Dean Brook came down with a busy sort of song,
stairs of water that only eyes could climb to
a bare moor with a promise from keening curlew.
SPOTS OF SPACE (II)
I was cycling from Lee Lane into Brownlow
Road when the sunlight, the grey of the tarmac,
the blue sky, they all suddenly seemed aglow,
strong with some happiness. And that morning
on the way to the Cottage, a zodiac
sparkling with dew-stars at my wheels, enthralling
me with ruby that swivelled to sapphire, sea-
green into lilac — again I was somewhere
else, it seemed, so much better. I wasn't free,
though, to stay looking: it was no use to stare —
it just vanished. Perhaps it was the real way
you could look at the ordinary Earth all day.
THE MOUND BEYOND GILSBROOK
On a mound beyond Gilsbrook there were some trees,
birches and pines, and in the hot summer they
were a wonderful place, with bumblebees
poking about, and deep grass and gorse to hide
in. Reminded me so much of a midday
picture in Winnie the Pooh and a hillside
where the Swallows and Amazons played. It seemed
just as if you had gone into the books, found
all the world as exciting as you had dreamed,
scented and sunlit, a friendly, special mound
that was as happy as you, that knew what you feel.
When you left it, you walked back into the real.
THE GIFT OF WILLIAM HESKETH LEVER
The soap lord, to be lord, designed Rivington
an estate for us all. We fought in the square
of the Castle, as lords of a garrison
just as true as a real one, as solid
as the stone of his ruin, built with such care
as a tumbledown keep. We found, intrepid
as explorers, in private ground a Lotos-
Eater waterfall, where the crag had been hacked
by his workmen to wildness so stupendous
we pretended it heaven, on the cataract
clinging, feet on his steps. The Pike was a peak.
Take his road up there, any day of the week.
THE CASTLE AVENUES
At the Castle there were three avenues that all
pointed — north, east, south. To the west was the lake.
They were all lined with sycamores, and no wall,
hedge, fence or railing lay along them. Yellow
gravel made them for cyclists rough roads to take,
so they were wild, ancient, as if long ago
they had led to some magical place. Between
them, the rough, tufted grass made open prairies
where in summer you'd hide inside a thick screen
twined of dark rushes and fair fescues. Armies
won great victories, not a sign of them to
be seen, and nothing was heard save the call of curlew.
LORD LEVERHULME'S RIVINGTON
Could imagine what Rivington was like two
hundred years back, before Lord Leverhulme came.
On the lane below Grandad's I'd wonder who
dug out the level like a railway-cutting,
lots of navvies all slaving, decided the aim,
marked out with sticks, and watched them gutting
out the Millstone Grit, tearing up gorse, brambles,
laying the yellow gravel, setting the stones
crosswise. Roads going nowhere for the people's
free recreation, the land ruled into zones
geometric for liberty. All the poor
now could have an estate, all theirs to explore.
BLACK SWANS
On the Lever Park Pond behind railings were
black swans. They sailed around, stood on one leg, preened
their wing feathers wobbling their beaks, would stir
mud in the water for grubs — just like real swans,
and their sidelong eyes, staring back, showed they queened
round the enclosure, like noble galleons,
so it seemed they were proof of the soap lord's
right to nobility, fenced off from the likes
of us ordinary folk, as if they were wards,
lawfully cherished. Under Rivington Pike's
high protection were living safe from attack,
never letting it show they knew they were black.
MEDIÆVAL BEES
Called the Beehive Hotel that because, they said,
when the Plantagenets were on the throne, bees
were kept all through the forest, Horwich Park, spread
Bolton to Chorley. And the Squirrel Hotel
was called that because squirrels lived in the trees.
But now the forest is cut down, people dwell
nearly everywhere, bees and squirrels are gone.
When I saw Exmoor one summer the heather
was so pink, the bees' humming so loud it shone
pink and the pink hummed. I thought, could ever
have a person one day managed then to see
in our heather the last mediæval bee?
THE ZEBRAS
Grandad said there were zebras in Lever Park,
there where those shelters were with those criss-cross walls ,
where now deer rubbed their sides on the bark.
Emu and yak and some buffaloes. How strange,
I thought — what did they do in winter snowfalls?
Zebra would have to go in a barn, to change
into horses. But zebras were wild, would kick
you with those tiger-striped legs. Was as if our
land, our grass, sort of knew by some kind of trick
that now it had to pretend. Sunshine and shower,
oak trees, holly trees, had to be Africa.
Had the zebras been pleased with the replica?
THE FLOOR OF LORD LEVERHULME'S BALLROOM
A cold wind blew around us, with clouds so near
seeming to say there was nothing here that they
could be bothered with. Tiptoeing, tried to peer
through the cracked windows. Could just glimpse a dark floor
that was round as a fountain's pool. A parquet
floor it had been, but, dislodged from their secure
place in pattern, the pieces lay like tumbled
dominoes, scattered like leaves on a still pond.
They were waiting. For what, then? Till they crumbled
just as they lay? Or until sometime beyond
next year, burning as rubbish? I wanted to
do the jigsaw again, make them all like new.
THE PROHIBITION NOTICES
There were notices everywhere. By the spring,
by the shore of the lake, on dams. 'Liverpool
Corporation. Anyone found tampering...
tipping filth, waste, or rubbish...' Locked in cages,
inside coffers, in tunnels, set with bascule
weights, controlled by chained wheels, and checked by gauges
shut in chapels of stone on green mounds, thrusting
water rushed through pipes for the city to drink.
I could hear underground a thrumming. Rusting
slabs and cobbles, dried slime, white grass, and a stink
from the rainbow mud, lay in the overflow.
How I longed for flood! How would the water go?
THE RESERVOIR
You could stand on the dam, look across the lake.
Wasn't a proper shore where you stood, all blocks
dipping down into darkness; the waves would shake
them, a roof going down into brown fog. No sand
and no pebbles, no little mountains of rocks,
only a leaning massive rampart that spanned
the old valley. Had made a little river
into a broad and working reservoir, where
sometimes waves made reflections flick and quiver,
trees that would dance, and the Pike rippling through air.
Other days, in the wind, it wore a rough pall
just as grey and as stern as the massive wall.
THE YARROW RESERVOIR IN DROUGHT
There was drought came one summer. The Rivington
lakes all went down. The Yarrow reservoir all
dried away — wouldn't cover your wellington.
Right round a pond in the middle were levels
upon levels as if lines to stop the fall
over and over again had been drawn with pebbles
and with sticks and with cracked mud. They were perfect
contours: it made a real map on the bare
earth like we were taught at school. The rooks pecked
hard at the mud and the rubbish for a share
of the dead things. The bed was all ruled and true,
but you thought of the water's mysterious blue.
WATER IN STREAMS
It was wonderful watching water in streams.
Always it knew where to go down and how fast.
Slowed and dulled inside moss, darting with long gleams
through a low gully, an upturned tusk shifting,
dazzling in its inside where a sharp ledge cast
it to a pool below, but never lifting
itself, always in search of the best way down,
save in the footprint it patiently filled so
it could get on its way again. It would drown
even the highest of dams. You'd hear it flow
as applause for success, the laughs of its scorn,
but it went where it had to, secretly drawn.
FENCES AND WALLS
Up a drive called 'The Street' was a house behind
white-painted metal fences, thick yew hedges,
rhododendrons and cypresses, a dark blind
where only the blackbirds warning you off were free.
You could see through at one place down to where sedges,
bulrushes, water-lilies spread in the lee
of a bank of lawn out to a green island
where I could never go. Up on Winter Hill
all the high black walls had big holes in them, and
walking on either side wouldn't keep the chill
winds away. You might wander lost in a fog.
Some boys said you might suffocate in a bog.
THE PLEASURES OF ARSON
If you looked inside old gorse bushes, you saw
lots of brown prickly bits clumped together, dry,
and the wrinkled old boughs, as crackly as straw.
Oh, what a hungry roaring meal for a fire!
Just a little, then more, and flames magnify
out from one spot, like some sort of eager game
where you scored on your scoring! Small furnaces
opened inside, intense red hollows like caves.
You could poke a new stick in them and rubies
burst out, a necklace of them. Above, the waves
in the air showed the heat. It was only one
of the bushes! We didn't tell anyone.
PERMISSION
Because Ken's father worked on the Reservoirs,
we could walk along dams whose walls went tilting
out of sight under water, behind the bars
of the valve prisons where vibrations, secret
throbbings, tingled our toes. The first filtering
was in beds like a swimming-bath, but quiet
and invitingly virgin, with the notices
that prohibited dips. I saw for the first
time the hidden canals, the orifices
spouting out from the ground what would quench the thirst
of thousands. It was like water in a drought
when the sight of Ken stopped the Water Man's shout.
WHOSE HYPOCRISY?
He went on: 'Dad and I cycled all over.
I joined t'club in the end...' I was shifting my
toe-cap this way, then that. Steve had yawned. Walter
turned his hand-grip round. Den was winking again.
But the Water Man kept us standing there, high
on the hill. He was speaking as man to men,
he in navy-blue, we in grammar-school black.
Such a brisk bonhomie, like a policeman.
But at last he went off, and we saw his mac
disappear in the Grounds. Then with hooligan
glee we rolled stones downhill, until he heard it.
We rode off from the shouts of the hypocrit.
THE REVEREND'S CUSTOM
Was a 'reverend', John's father. His collar
made me remember my table manners. Though
he still wasn't a priest, you knew a vicar
knew about sin. He had a big map he'd pinned
up of Europe and on it he would follow
armies advancing in the war. Examined
all the papers, his spectacles on, and then
moved little flags this way and that, and we must
be so quiet as soon as we heard Big Ben
'cause he would make notes on a pad and adjust
Union Jacks forward, swastikas back. A game,
you would think, but I knew it wasn't the same.
MR. HESKETH
Mr. Hesketh was handsome, like a film star.
One day you heard he was dead. How could that be?
On those days all before it, there was a bar,
right across knowing, that this brisk smiling man
in the future would never be there to see.
No one could help Mrs. Hesketh. Was no plan
he should die. You were happy one day, and not
after. To see her, you knew you shouldn't feel
afraid. Course you were sorry. Didn't know what
sort of strange space, full of grief, like dreams but real,
you were trapped in when someone you loved had died.
Couldn't keep it from mind, though you tried and tried.
THE TWO LADIES
There were two ladies lived up in Rivington.
Couldn't help wanting to stare, though I didn't.
Tweedledum, Tweedledee, you could say, woollen
tweedy suits, uncoloured, like a uniform,
big shoes, thick stockings. Nuns from a convent,
ever so serious, looking much too warm
in the sunshine. Their hair was cut straight and short,
just like a boy's. Was as if they knew something
that was very important they had been taught.
Everyone else didn't know it, but knowing
it had made them quite sure they were right. So shy,
if you did look, you never could catch their eye.
KEEPING SOMETHING TO YOURSELF
It was funny you had your own thoughts that you
could always keep in your head if you wanted.
At the farm up in Rivington we all knew
rather a fat family, father, mother,
son and daughter, so pink, so clean, so rounded,
sandy-haired, eyelashes whitish. You'd never
get them cleaner, as if they washed themselves in
milk, and their food was bread, eggwhite,
and fat meat. Couldn't help then, deep within,
thinking they looked like pigs. Had to keep it tight
inside, Mammy said, telling no one. I knew
even God had to keep it to himself too.
SHARING
It was my tent. I'd lugged it on my bike two
miles or more. I had pleaded at home for it.
After all it was my turn as the one who
had been playing with John's expensive train set,
his Monopoly, his Meccano, the Kit
of Electrical Wonders. That he would let
me join in on his plans, be signalman
in the attic, mechanic operator
of his cranes and his swinging bridge, artisan
of the Miniature Power Station, was a
guilty pleasure. 'He's your friend, John! Daft old tent!'
they said. 'Come with us! Leave him!' And off he went.
BARNS
Barns were houses and castles and caves. The hay
could be arranged any way you liked, and how
it was made you make up something to play.
Snug in a den with a maze leading to it
you could play other games, and so feel that now
wasn't the now outside, nor the where. You'd sit
by a tiny green window with triangle
webs at the corners, watching motes in a beam
winking in, winking out, spangle by spangle,
or, on a rainy day, watching water stream
down the pane, feeling driest of dry. You'd scheme
for the future some plan, some marvellous dream.
THE ECHOES
In the quarry an echo. You shouted 'Hello!'
Back came your voice with 'Hello!' like an answer.
I t was faint and all hollow, a kind of oboe
twang in it, ghostly and thin. It seemed to come
from all over, a giant mouth, a hoarse whisper
speaking without a body, a stony drum
that would take your word and repeat it, but not
just as you said it, another voice coming
out of somewhere or somewhen, so prompt it got
you to repeat till you chimed in, strumming
from the rock a strict music, real voice, ghost voice
rhyming wildly. You felt it wasn't your choice.
AFTER BLACKBERRYING
Was strange, when you'd done nothing but blackberried
all afternoon, fought your way into bushes
just to reach those last wonderful ones, emptied
tins twenty times into the big bowl, and looked
underneath to find clutches of fat berries,
trying to miss nettles, getting your clothes hooked
and your shins scratched, that, when you went to
bed late at night and you closed your eyes, you saw
in your brain hosts of blackberries, ones that grew
huger than real, plump as grapes, black ones galore,
floating up out of nowhere, briar on briar,
like your mind had gone mad with a fierce desire.
CLOSE TO PLANTS
Playing hide-and-seek, ambushes, spies, you would
get up so close to plants. Your nose would take in
all the tang of the leaves, the smell of snapped wood,
crushed grass, the bitter privet, and meadowsweet
like a honey, and smooth rushes with their thin
white pith inside — you sniffed cold wind and damp peat
and a cloudy sky all along with their breath.
Found that your hands carried traces of summer grass,
and the leaves of the autumn printed their death
strong in a raw perfume on fingers. To pass
through, they said, 'Take our seeds on your clothes and your hair.'
What you'd broken, you felt, was what they could spare.
SPRING
All those buds folded in on themselves across,
turbans, or when you fold your arms and your knees
and then curl up tight, Varnished smooth with a gloss
keeping the water away. All opened on
hinges — cockles and mussels. Out of the squeeze,
leaves like umbrellas went up, made of chiffon,
greeny gauze — satin concertinas playing
silent accompaniments for the birds keen
to our ears with their quick piccolo singing.
Made all the trees like flowers, so fresh the green.
Made them each a bouquet. On that April day
you went out and around, did nothing but play.
RAINBOWS OVER RIVINGTON
As I cycled to school, the sun behind me,
there would be rainbows when showers were trailing
over Rivington Pike. But where did I see
them? Just how far away? You could only tell
by their covering something. They went sailing
forward ahead as I pedalled. By some spell
they would stay out of reach in nowhere. Double
ones had a fringe of fainter colour-echoes
as if hundreds more rainbows in a ripple
out to that nothingness had hidden their glows
there in front of the rain, the soft, leaning hair
of the brush of the cloud that swept through real air.
BLUEBELLS IN RIVINGTON
We picked bluebells in spring. You hadn't to pull
hard, or the long white stem would come out and that
meant no bulb for next year. But arms would be full,
eyes then so close to their delicate texture,
you could see through the blue, a little girl's hat
made from a glistening, sweet-scented, azure,
tender stuff as of cirrus-cloud stilled into shape,
tinted with sky. Rings of white sap at the ends
of the stems oozed out, so we couldn't escape
getting our fingers sticky. Their soft green bends
hissed together like silk, and felt smooth and cool
as we waded knee-high in a skyey pool.
MOSS
If you took your eyes right down to the moss,
you could imagine a forest all over
the stone mountain, each tree with a velvet gloss,
some with high brown canopies quivering too
fast for our world, some hooked like a crosier.
How I would like to walk where I wanted through
that amazing plantation where huge nodding
pods like bananas of bronze swivelled above
you, a hundred feet up. And what was wobbling,
lodged in front of you, a balloon you'd love
to see, big as the trees, made of a strange new
water, never to burst? Was their sort of dew.
YORKSHIRE FOG
Under trees along Rivington avenues
grew the grass Yorkshire Fog. I remember it
as in April, a clear morning, with my shoes
hidden in broad blades, their one glaucous green made
into thousands of shades, shadowed and sunlit,
dewy and dry. Shift eyes an inch, and this jade
multiplicity re-pricked the dew-points, gold,
emerald, rose, each like a lighthouse piercing
with its message to now. But this manifold
green drew me most in the deepest shadowing,
where its celadon-greys were cool. Dark prism
of one colour, the freshest, the most solemn.
LICHEN
It just grew on rocks sometimes, lichen, bright
orange, like bicycle-tyre patches, splashes
of paint (Who had been painting what orange?), quite
crumbly and old-looking, but moist as rubber.
Or you'd see it on old oaks and old ashes,
frilly rosettes in a mushroomy colour.
Was a 'parasite' there, but the trees didn't
mind‚ with their sleeves like those players of tango
tunes, a costume for fun, or an ornament,
all of it living. Was like the mistletoe.
Were some people had so much money or love
they could spare just a little for a lichen glove.
RIVINGTON TREES
All the trees they were special. The Rivington
avenues all had the sycamore, choc-box
bark and ghost-shaped leaves, casting their shadows
those set below them, intersecting dark green
with the sunnier. Tall pines for the Jabberwocks,
cones topped like turtles. The oaks' rigid branches, seen
plain in the winter, all witch-fingered, stiffly
rustling in summer. The yew at Gilsbrook, brown
and dry-needled shade underneath, its ropy
trunk in unpickable strands. An upside-down
beard the Bungalow juniper. Liked the trees.
They seemed quiet living things that wanted to please.
IN THE DAMPNESS
Was the only thing moving. A long sticky
noise from your tyres, for the damp had breathed the whole
of the world into quiet. All the drizzly
rain had long stopped, and you thought of it going
gently off into the past somewhere. Now you stole
on through the sodden stillness, no wind blowing,
every leaf, every blade of grass holding its
drops as if spellbound. Even the Pike's outline
keeping up with your speed still had moulded its
shape to the mild silence. Wouldn't make a sign
to you. Pedalling on, you knew it was like
you were trespassing under some other Pike.
AUTUMN LEAVES IN THE WIND
Watched the autumn leaves blown by the wind, hustled
pell-mell in tumbling herds, fast as antelopes —
next, the wind dropped them dead, where it liked. Rustled
them as they twitched to his whip and then swivelled
up in eddies, his tops, spinning to his hopes,
never to theirs. Flat, curled, shrunken, shrivelled,
all would fly if he said so, or grovelled down,
choking the gutters. They couldn't raise an arm
for help unless he helped them. He let them drown
there in the stream: others could play free from harm
round the trees. But with us — could push us along,
force us back, but we still knew right way from wrong.
'LAST WEEK IN OCTOBER'
To hold fast to the leaves, watched the trees all fight.
Wasn't much use. They knew they would go at last
but they fought as if knowing they wouldn't. Tight
wrestles and snatchings-back went on all the time,
and a few of the leaves were caught in the blast,
flying right off as if they preferred to climb
up the sky like the birds, but you knew they would
finish all trapped in a hedge or a corner
or just rotting in puddles. Some would twizzle, could
whirl up a top that would drift like a dancer,
as if death hadn't come to them yet. The air
won the battle at last. The trees were left bare.
A WILD WIND ON THE PIKE
We were up on the Pike one October day
when a wild wind, it seemed, blasting across
from the gleaming sea, nothing to block its way
over the miles from Wales, now buzzing, hissing
blustering round the walls, showing us who was boss,
tearing our words away nowhere, dismissing
talk as invisible rags whisked off over
Winter Hill, lost with the toppling clouds. But we,
at a sudden whim, ran with its pushover
power, hands out like wings, shouting in our glee,
to discover you didn't know whether you
were free or you did what it wanted you to.
AUTUMN STILLNESS
I remember an autumn afternoon when
all was so still it just couldn't be stiller,
as if some god of frost had pronounced 'Amen',
but it was cool, not cold. A few clouds stayed where
they were. Sunlight seemed part of the calm. Shiver,
flutter or flap, all were forbidden by air
that had lost all its spring. Leaves fell where you kicked
them. All the trees seemed in league to do nothing.
If a bird dared to fly, the stillness soon tricked
it back to some hideaway perch. My walking
turned to dawdling, until I stood motionless.
Was the end of the world, held in readiness.
AUTUMN SONG
It was nice on a still autumn day, the sun
warm. When you looked at the grass and the fallen
leaves, it seemed as if some magician had spun
time in a spell, all the colours made deeper,
and yet softer, as if they all knew autumn
said that they'd all have to join in and keep a
single chord going, sad and calm, like a choir's,
able to hold to a note for ever so
long. You knew you had heard it before. On briars
each of the rosehips sang like a soprano,
and the chestnuts were tenors. You heard them blend
all their tones just to sing 'It comes to an end.'
ON THE MOOR
Up on Winter Hill you would notice the sky.
Moorland was open. There were no houses or trees,
shops or hoardings to hide the world from your eye.
Black-blotter peat, bog-cotton, brown grass tufted
like a candlewick blanket, where cold winds wheeze,
brandishing heather, left you an unbounded
view, where, at the horizon, the land you stood
on, with no thought of what reliance, vanished
in a mist of the sea and the sky. You could
see yourself floating, all fixture relinquished,
in a cosmos of cloud, the moor's bleak present
all dissolved at its edge till non-existent.
MOORLAND PEAT
Like a walk on a bed. Where the roots hold it,
it can cohere like tough bread, from centuries
of compression. Resounds like wood. Millstone grit,
rifted and tawny, lies underneath eight feet
of it, bared by the streamlets, whose vagaries
gouge ragged valleys, render dark soup from peat.
All their sides the sod overhangs like slumping
snow. And the firmness is gone: boots sink into
pulp, are glad to reach plain rock after stumping
hurried, off-balance. On the ridge the residue
is a charcoal dust, soil become derelict,
for peat freely frays thin, like knitting unpicked.
THE BURNT MOOR
It was strange to run over the burnt moor where
fire had been raging. Funny to feel safe when
even ground was all ash, just a bouncy bare
desert of black dust with branches of heather
snapping through underfoot, so frail you saw then
all the rest, every charcoal bone and feather
quite unmoved though you'd crashed and flattened a whole
third of the plant. And the tang of the ash rang
in your nose everywhere that you went. You stole
secretly, freely, over deadness, and sprang
over streams that were feeding no life. A seared
empty world where you played, which others had feared.
MILLSTONE GRIT
When a stream runs on granite, sugared, rounded
boulders and rough-edged stones result. Red Sandstone
becomes knobbed and smooth-ribbed, like a shell. Founded
through a peat-cover down to our Millstone Grit
streams reveal toppled monuments, not of bone
hollowed as limestone, but blocks, cubes, prisms, slit
along brick-like cracks, massive sarcophagi,
brown cabin-trunks, slabs, and tea-chests with edges
clear-cut, dense, weighty, iron-tinted, sway-marked by
waves of its laying, no smooth stones but wedges,
thick books, bars. Like the tough tufted heath-grass, suits
the bleak rains and winds, this landscape's rock roots.
OLD RACHEL'S
Over heather that buzzed, stepped out of the cold
wind and sat down on the fallen stones. No roof —
the grey sky and the rains and the frosts and old
snowfalls, the rotting of timbers, had left stone
like the bones of the farmhouse, the only proof
lasting till then of the lives that in this lone
moorland dell had once laboured up there. They were
bones in some graveyard, bones that had obeyed
them as willing as horses. The only stir
now was the nodding of bog-cotton. Afraid
of the ghosts where the bleating of a sheep could
only be from the past, I ran to the wood.
THE SCOTSMAN'S STUMP*
Up on Winter Hill near the top a pillar
stands, made of iron, as if there'd been a building
there, or part of a ship: mark of a murder
hundred and fifty years ago. A rusty
truncheon, giant metal punch, ugly lifeless thing
locked in its concrete. All round the dusty
peat, the tough grass, the wiry heather. I did
not there 'look round for my lost guide', nor read down
in the turf any murderer's name, noted
only the word 'barbarously' on the brown
plaque, and thought of the eyes blown out. Saw a lust
in the tough grass, the heather's wire, the peat's dust.
[cf. William Wordsworth, The Prelude (1850), Book XII,
ll. 225-261]
FIRE ON WINTER HILL
In one very hot summer Winter Hill caught
fire. A vast wedge of smoke, like a cheese, or hair
that was combed from the globe. It should move, I thought,
but it was so far away it rose like a scarp
of a mountain on Mars, because of the glare,
volcanic-red, there underneath. Like a harp
it had widened, the blue loaded with bulged grey,
lava too big to be lava. All this far
above Horwich, as if it was Doomsday
but there was nobody knew. The reservoir
couldn't put it all out. When we walked up there,
there was ash and black skeletons everywhere.
MINING
In this stream was a mineral, galena
(that's lead sulphide). This heavy metal crystal
made the place for us both an Argentina.
We prospected for hours, that is, we heaved rocks,
trapped our fingers, got wet through, raked the gravel,
to go home with pockets full and our socks
bulging as bags of gold. Then hours of Bunsen
burning, finger burning, shouts of 'Wasting gas!'
from my mother. The kitchen was an oven.
But the silvery drops were lost in the mass
of the ash. My father saved us all our sweat:
he used just one crystal in a crystal set.
THE FOSSILS
In the rock in the stream at the lead mines saw
fossils inside a kind of bubble, all packed
close together like potted meat. Kind of flaw
let us dislodge a flag and lift it. Never
had we seen before fossils, though we had cracked
open so many rocks and stones whenever
we were there for galena. How hard we tried,
levering, banging, poking to loosen round
them, but obstinate, tough Millstone Grit defied
all our attempts. And, at last, tired out, we found
we had ruined the one fossil specimen
we had ever discovered in Rivington.
ROUND LOAF, ANGLEZARKE
From the lead mines we'd climb up to Round Loaf, a
'tumulus' Miss Moscrop said, where some ancient
king was buried, sort of his last throne, a
monument no one could name save with a plain
trope from food. It seemed everything was silent
as to the man or his people, if his reign
had been good or a failure. His bones are earth.
Yet they were earth then. It is the pile of stones
that still shows what he had been, right from his birth
there in the minds of those who covered his bones.
And the sign is still there though the wind is dumb
as it sighs, and our own feel for myth is numb.
WHITTLE-LE-WOODS
'Whittle-le-Woods!' It was lovely there, they all said.
Going along the canal, all in a barge.
'There's a field full of buttercups!' There we'd spread
out all the picnic things. 'Do you like butter?'
If your chin showed the gold, you did. You could charge
everyone that way with liking it. Under
boughs pretending to catch us, we were drifting
nearer, so solidly, the boughs were really
going back, and the water really shifting
out of the way. Dennis went round cheekily
with a dead nettle asking, 'Who likes
butter?' In the field we found only green spikes.
ON SEEING A PICTURE OF SOUTH LODGE
Oh, South Lodge! that sweet chalet under the hill!
Can't now recall all the Irish stories told
me by she who was called 'Storey'. Thought my will
drew me along solely because of the red-
lipped and dark-eyed Patricia, but the real hold
lay with the mother. I hung on what she said,
loved to laugh at her tales of Tipperary.
Irish romance glowed around the silent Pat.
Was I loving the mother through the chary
daughter? Still now, from this grainy photostat
picture, thatched roof, windows unchanged, the pain
makes me wince as I walk up the sloping lane.