My old man was a lorry driver, back in the eighties. He went all over and knows northern Europe like, he says, the back of his hand. I try and tell him it’s all changed since his day, how the terrain morphs as we age. More black tar cutting through the land. More out-of-town supermarkets, retail parks and agribusiness. More post-EU regulations and migrants dodging the cops in Calais. Dad’s map of the world ossified sometime around 1987, when the trees were closely packed together and strange shadows were cast on the ground.
I like to think his world was just that little bit wilder back then and I’m envious of that, hungry for whatever it was he saw in the woods. I yearn for days with a bit more breathing space, greater anonymity and more personality.
Dad talks about those years fondly, the days on the road before the kids and the divorce and the new family grounded him on the Essex coast. Proudly tells people how he can still roll a cigarette while driving, steering with his knees, how he saw some mighty odd things out on the road that you wouldn’t believe. Straight-laced businessmen blowing each other in lay-bys. A head-on collision with a lorry carrying stationery supplies, staples and reams of paper spilling out like guts over the tarmac. A white fox just staring, yellow-eyed, and meeting his gaze, nonplussed, before he hit it.He talks about how it was tough but how he enjoyed the solitude and the anonymity life on the lanes gave him. There, he was just a driver. The mastodon roar of the traffic he found soothing, monotonous and dependable. To this day he’s an excellent navigator, can get around by instinct alone. I’ve rarely seen him use a map, and satnavs don’t really register on his radar.
It’s funny how the memories of your family become your memories too. I have an image of swimming under my merchant navy ship, somewhere off the coast of South Africa, tanned men diving down, challenging themselves to curve under the ship and back up the other side. But this is a story Dad told me, about his dad. Grandad was the one who, at the point of bursting lungs and desperate to get to the surface, sees a circle of hammerheads and nearly drowns, arms churning the water in fright. Granddad, a man I never knew, transmitting his stories over the decades. Granddad survived the sharks and the deep dives under the trading ships, but he couldn’t survive the Thames and drowned in its murk back in 1981, not yet an old man.
My uncle was a long-hauler too. He shut down the Blackwall Tunnel once when his twelve-wheeler’s engine packed in. I think of him sometimes, stuck somewhere under the Thames, neither in Greenwich nor Tower Hamlets, choking off one of south England’s busiest arteries. And here’s me, who can’t even drive.
Granddad’s story is in the blood or something, genetic in a way an ability to drive clearly is not. My own biography involves no sharks, no long-hauls across Europe in winter. I have my own stories, though, of bloody knuckles and shaved heads, of spearbirds and skydancers, of a man coming down with the syndrome standing messianic in the busy streets of Jerusalem. But those are for another time.
There’s a story of Dad’s that niggles at me, one I come back to again and again, embellishing details, making minor edits. In those dead moments, when I’m staring out of a rain-streaked bus window on the way to work, crammed into the armpits of commuters on the Victoria line, or those days when the simplest of things seems a struggle, I think of Dad, a young man, lost in the Black Forest, a broken-down lorry and a fear he’d never get home. Dark descending and the bite of winter. Something out there, a shadow among shadows.
Like many men of his generation, Dad’s cheery when discussing things that should be distressing or disturbing. Trauma is brushed off with a grin and the assertion I could handle it, no bother. Men didn’t complain back then, he believes, nor should they now. He’s old school and small-c conservative. But when he talks about Granddad sinking beneath the Thames and the circling sharks and that night in the Black Forest, there’s perhaps a slight crease around the eyes, the tiniest hint of a grimace or wince showing that, below that surface of skin and bravado, some events do leave a lasting impact and, sometimes, things are just not OK.
When I lie in bed at night, listening to the traffic outside my window, I see the circling hammerheads. I think of bubbles escaping an open mouth and the grey waters of the Thames, my uncle stuck in his lorry somewhere far beneath. Imagine I hear a growl in the darkness. The story of that goat-legged thing and the solitary bird-tower, the arranged branches, the lonely woodcutter. The slow lowing of huddled cattle, the endless trees. It’s a good yarn. I tell it in pubs to friends and acquaintances in London and Kent, my own interpretations and changes stitched into the story’s fabric. I have this compulsion to tell it, something to puncture the humdrum, a little bit of the uncanny to enliven our dreary weekends. When Dad goes, I’ll be the conduit for both him and Granddad.
*
Dad is doing one of his long-hauls over to Europe, the destination somewhere in Germany or Austria, requiring cutting through the Black Forest. It’s winter and Christmas is coming. This is the last job before he heads back to Essex, to my mum and us. Some sort of bonus pay packet, overtime in order to stuff our stockings and buy Mum something decent for once. He feels bad that she’s stuck at home with the kids, but what can you do? A man’s got to work. He gets the ferry over the water, sets off through France, into Germany in a time before the Berlin Wall came down and the Cold War was still something discussed in the present tense. Were those times better or worse? I guess, at the very least, you had a sense of your place in the world.
Driving through that forest, he sees the slope of mountains carpeted with trees so dark they appear black, a few locals doing what they do along the roadside, cattle being herded in seeming slow motion to destinations unknown. A solitary woodcutter hefts an axe, fresh out of some Grimm tale and Dad thinks he can smell sawdust and pine resin. Dad imagines his own children – me, my sister Lisa – lost out in these woods, following breadcrumb trails and shivering with fright, coming to terms with their abandonment. Alone, tired and suffering from twelve hours straight on the road, his mind fills with leering lupine grins and bright menstrual reds, cannibal hags, confectionery dwellings. The forest, he knows, is a place where things happen. He passes a sort of wooden tower, its use opaque. Birdwatching, perhaps. A German hobby popular in these parts. A home for the lonely woodcutter.
Miles from anywhere, the engine packs in with a stutter and a sigh. The lorry grinds to a halt. It’s getting dark already, the evergreens standing stern like angry patricians. It’s cold and getting colder. Dad weighs up his options. The nearest town is at least five miles away. He doesn’t know the terrain and his mind is full of sharp teeth and bleeding fur. The best plan, he decides, is to sleep in the lorry. Walk to the nearest town in the morning, flag down some passing motorist if he’s lucky. Maybe the woodcutter will save him. Dad pulls his coat over himself, rubs his hands to try and stay warm, thinks of Christmas gifts for Mum and beds down for the night. His stomach growls but he has no food, and he shivers himself to sleep.
About three in the morning he wakes, breath pure white fogging up the windows, the moisture quick to freeze. There’s ice on the inside of the cab. There’s a chill in him that goes bone deep: it’s all encompassing and his limbs now are dead wood, unresponsive. He’s ready for the chop, unless he does something. He thinks of Granddad thrashing underwater in fright, forces himself awake and out of the lorry. Begins, ridiculously, doing star jumps, running on the spot, laps around the vehicle, anything to get the blood pumping and his temperature up. The woods are still and silent. He’s thankful for his torch, its perfect line of light cutting through a blackness thick and tar-like, ready to consume the unwary.
Nothing but the closed ranks of the evergreens. No, on closer inspection, in a gap among the trees he can see small signs of humanity. A rough path, compressed pine needles and leaf litter. He thinks he hears something, sees what may be the light of a fire ahead. Curiosity overcomes fear. To this day, he’ll claim he was half-delirious with cold and hunger and fatigue. He enters the woods. Feels the eyeless glares of the pines regard him from all sides, the prickly rustle of the pine needle carpet he walks on making him think, absurdly, of Christmas back in Essex. The torch beam is a single yellow line slashed across black tarmac. He thinks about all the impossible chains of events that lead to these moments in our lives.
He sees cut branches, arranged pyramid-like, a jerry-built temple. Like the skeleton of a tipi maybe, but festooned with plants and offerings. Sharp holly and bloody berries, some straw facsimile of a human being, pine boughs bent like the arms of crippled children. In the light of day festive and seasonal, but here, in this black night, in the depths of a fairytale forest, malignant and cancerous. Ahead, a faint orange fire-glow.
That’s when he hears a kind of growling chuckle. His torch beam frantically scans the terrain, and maybe there’s a hint of black fur approaching, the shadows thicker and darker in places than they should be. Dad staggers back, sees something goat-legged and red-tongued, a furred forest god grinning, and behind it androgynous beings of golden straw standing motionless amongst the evergreens. Hints of a blade, clawed fingers on curled hands. In that moment, he sees the thing he knows is impossible and utterly of this place: forest devil, horned god, punisher of the wicked. A warning for the children. The thing sees him, this English man from Essex, and seems to smile and flex its claws, and maybe it beckons him. And you know what? He feels the pull. To join this world and never come back. He knows, deep down, he is wicked. But he thinks of Mum alone and my sister sitting under a plastic pine tree.
This is when he runs, runs back to the road and leaves the lorry where it is: runs, walks and stumbles until he hits the next village five miles down the road and bangs on German doors for help and the assertion that this is the real world, not that world out there in the woods, where things he doesn’t want to know about happen and are happening and will always happen.
He’s quizzed by local police, is savvy enough to keep it simple and say he simply got lost and frightened. They find the lorry the next morning, ice on the inside. Call a mechanic who gets the job done. As he works, Dad scans the lines of evergreens and the path of trampled needles is not there. He hears, somewhere, a man chopping wood.
He quit the lorry driving soon after that, and then found Christianity in a big way, hit it like a drug. Mainlined the stuff. Mum says it was the guilt after he left us but I think it was something else. It’s something I’ve never forgiven him for, and I know that the beginnings of that flight toward what he considers holy began with that thing that may have been a bear, a tree, a magnificent horned stag, but was not.
He doesn’t want it, it embarrasses him. The story is mine now.