My name is William Millhouse. I am not a remarkable or interesting man, but these are my memories. It is late in the day now, and I have decided to set them down, not because I believe them to be a record of a great or interesting life but because if I don’t, being survived by no living relative, I will take them with me to the grave. Maybe that is not such a great tragedy but within my life is the life of a place too, and I feel great alteration is afoot, and some of that life may soon be frittered and blown on the wind. There will be others who could tell it better and wiser than me, but I am not quite as simple a man as some have taken me for, and this is my story, or at least the parts of it I remember most clearly. In the telling, I do my best, with the knowledge that I might make mistakes and be victim to tricks of the mind, as all who have tried to recall and record the times they have lived through surely have been.
1862 was the year of my birth. The time was May, the sweetest of all months, and the hour was early. As my mother would later tell it, our cockerel, Old Percival, crowed his biggest crow, and the next moment I arrived, and henceforth I was known as ‘Cockadoodledoo’, then, within time, ‘Doodle’, and it was said by those close to me that the spirit of the ancient idiot cock was in me. I was always the first up in the morning, always experimentally pecking at morsels I shouldn’t. I tried in vain to reach for objects that were beyond me, springing up in a flapping, futile fashion. It was hoped that this habit would change once I reached maturity, but, since my height failed to progress much beyond five and a quarter feet, such hopes proved forlorn. My mother, Dorothy, did not shred words when irate with me, frequently hurling insults centred around my stature. She was a fast squall of a person, a busy knapsack full of sharp stones, constantly taking charge of all situations, as she’d had to since her own childhood, living with her own mother, Katherine. Katherine, who died shortly before my birth, had been feckless in character, a serving girl at the Big House who’d been put in the family way by her employer Joseph Bamford when she was just sixteen. Therefore my grandfather Edward, a seller of kitchen utensils and mousetraps, was not my true grandfather, just a kind man who had stepped in to save the face of everyone concerned, with the exception of himself. Though not from a farming background, Edward, being his mild and easily plied self, in his later years came into the ownership of a cow named Mumble, as an alternative form of payment from a customer who was unable to remunerate him for a set of pots and pans. In the evenings, Edward and Mumble would graze the long acre, Edward, holding a rope attached to Mumble, taking the same route each time: a circle past the church, over the back of Stumper’s Cross and along Riddlefoot Lane. It was from Edward that I learned about the clairvoyance of cows. Nowadays I have thirteen of my own and I continue to place trust in their judgement as forecasters of fortune and weather. A cow, as it gazes on you, steady and vacant, takes in more about the core of who you are than most folk imagine.
That Joseph Bamford is my real grandfather – though never a man I have ever thought of as my grandfather, in the way Edward was – means I have the blood of country squires pumping inside me, though I must say on most days that I do not feel it, and I do not sense that many who meet me suspect it within me. I am rarely dressed up to the dick and I pass quietly along the edge of most occurrences in the parish unnoticed, that being a feature of my size and my daytime habit of being clad in the hues of the earth and the stone around me. Some saw the way I would remain quiet around my schoolmates and elders yet talk in great depth to chickens, cattle and sheep and thought me maized as a brushstick but just because I am not a man of conventional learning it does not mean I am a fool. I have seen a lot happen here but always opted out of village gossip. When I bore witness to Mary, the wife of Oldsworthy the baker, cavorting with Thomas, the schoolmaster’s boy, in the orchard behind the church, my lips remained as tight as if they had been sewn together, and I mention the incident today only because both parties are long gone from this mortal coil. I learned a lot about the benefits of silence in my home environment, where an ill-chosen word in front of my mother could so readily lead to a ladle or saucepan flying towards your head. My father Henry, a quiet man, learned the same, and in our house it was not a bad thing to learn since, owing to Edward and his trade, kitchenware was a thing that was never in short supply. His seat at the kitchen table was in front of the cottage door and on warm days, when it was open, it was not uncommon for a traveller passing along the lane beyond to have to dodge a plate or spoon as it came spinning into their midst.
My father worked as a gravedigger at the church of St John. I never believed I smelt the dead on him, but an earthy odour lingered constantly around his skin and clothes, crusty and pungent, with an edge to it that made me squint when he kissed me goodnight. As he was ordered around at home he was ordered around at work, mostly by the stern vicar, Alfred Boyland, whose sermon on local sin had once infamously sent members of the congregation at his previous parish, Wickhampstead, running from the church in tears. ‘It’s not just about laying a body in the ground,’ my father told me. ‘Folks like things just so.’ When John Ludgate succumbed to cancer of the throat, the Ludgate family insisted that he not be buried on the south side of the churchyard, since over there had been recently interred Richard Cavendish, a rotund bully with whom Ludgate had been involved in a thirty-year feud over a prize hog. The bereaved, however, more often requested that the north side of the churchyard be avoided, since it was said that was where the Devil’s Door was located. As a child I searched and searched for the door, but was never successful in locating it. Some said black dogs had been buried there too, but my father was dubious of that and had never found any evidence in his excavations. When not with a shovel in his hand or being harangued by my mother, he hid in books, taking a great interest in the history of the moor, particularly its Bronze Age and Beaker relics and the unfortunate vandalism inflicted on many of them during the last couple of centuries. It saddens me that he did not live to see the excavation of the kistvaen near Trembling Hill mine, in which the remains of a girl, thought to be no more than fifteen years old, were found preserved in the peat, along with those artefacts her people had believed would see her safely into the next world: an axe, a necklace and a shawl, woven from a beaver’s pelt. It was his habit of a weekend to walk up there, along the old Lych Way, and he once remarked to me that when he did, he felt the presence of the dead more strongly than he had ever done in his working day.
It is a right handsome church, St John’s, here in Underhill, and as the child of one of its employed I came to know it with some intimacy. I did not like the fresh, slick tombstones – their cold blankness frightened me, and seemed like a hard stark statement about what was waiting for me in the great beyond – but the old stones, with their dimpled lichen tales etched all over them, always gave me comfort. When nobody was around, in the autumn evenings, and the air was smeechy from bonfires, I would sometimes get close and give them a proper big cuddle. I don’t know why I favoured this activity more on those autumn evenings with a new chill in the air but that was the way it happened. The building itself has a heavy appearance, even more so than most other churches in the area, a wider rim of granite being used close to its foundations, and it is said that this was a deliberate measure taken so the Devil did not carry it off to higher ground, as he had done with the little-visited St Constantine’s, whose ruins stand halfway up Underhill Tor. Over on the west side of the church is a yew tree of some 1,400 years in age and, for the first decade of my life, and the century preceding it, carcasses of the badgers and foxes that had been killed in the parish were left on the trunk, five shillings being paid to the successful hunter for a fox, half a crown for a cub, and a shilling for a badger. Mercifully I have no actual memory of this.
On the whole, I associated the church with feelings of warmth and benevolence. Other children in the village were most frightened by the Bird Lady carving on the font, in which a woman is crudely depicted, apparently about to do grievous harm to a man, while watched by her sisters and her feathery accomplices, but I always thought of the Bird Lady as a friend and many times had dreams of her watching over me. Like her, I possessed a great affinity with avian life. Whether or not this has anything to do with Percival, and the way I arrived into this world, I do not know, but to this day, blue tits and chaffinches are not shy about entering my kitchen. It is far from uncommon for me to arrive downstairs of a morning and find a song thrush perched on my ottoman. At the Underhill Fair in 1901, when a great gust of wind blew down the Duck Marquee, setting a melee of geese, ducks and hens flapping across the village green, many eyes – eyes that normally ignored my presence – looked immediately to me for assistance, knowing of my reputation. I caught four geese and a duck very easily, while Mrs Addlestrop from the tea room at Upper Wadstray showed great calmness in her handling of a large, vexed black cock. By this time Old Percival was long gone, although he had lingered for more years than had been expected. Many was the time that Dorothy would instruct me to check on him with the words, ‘Doodle, be going out to that hen house un see if that bird un snuffed it yet,’ upon which instructions I would promptly venture to the wooden enclosure where Percival roosted, peer in, ask of his health, and be answered with a croaky ‘Cwawwwk.’
My playground was Combe Woods and it was here that birdsong was most intoxicating, especially in May, that most colourful and bonny of all months, the month that I still believe is mine, by birthright. I could not imagine that the most talented symphony orchestra in all the land could come close to matching the melodies my friend Sarah Slatterley and I heard above us in the infinite emerald canopy as we amused ourselves on those stretchable afternoons. Sarah was possessed of a singing voice as pure and life-affirming as a blackbird, and, while I fail pitifully now in trying to recollect the voice she spoke with, the melodies that issued from her mouth are as fresh in my mind as they would be if I’d seen her just yesterday. Sarah was always in charge of the games we played in the woods, one of her favourites being Black Pig, in which I would hide behind one of the many large boulders in the woods and it would be Sarah’s task to find me before I leapt out, making tusks with my hands, running at her and shrieking ‘Black pig! Black pig!’ In her other favourite game, which she called Little Meg, it would be my job to build a bridge across the river for Sarah at one of its shallower points, using whatever material – rocks and branches, usually – was not too heavy to carry. I would place a chain of dog daisies around her neck and Sarah, being Queen of the River, would then stand on the platform I had constructed for her and wave to Her People, who I always imagined were Lilliputian and not completely of this earth. I do not know why the game was called what it was called, other than it was also the name of an old song Sarah used to sing very sweetly. One day, when we were out in the trees, she asked me, ‘Doodle, will you call me Meg, but only when we are here?’ so, because I would have sawed off my own right foot clean at the ankle if Sarah had asked me to, that was what I did, and it became one of the many little secrets we stored in the trees. Maybugs were often around as we lolled on the grass in Riddlefoot Meadow and we laughed at the noise they made, so loud and impolite that it seemed to come from the century ahead of us, or maybe that is just how I now think of it, now I am in that century. Billywitches, my father called them. Sometimes, as an evening chill stalked through the tussocks and raised pimples on our bare arms, Sarah pressed up close to me, and I felt a feeling I didn’t understand that was like syrup pulsing through me and that, while only being a foreshadow of a feeling I would feel as a fully developed man, was no less potent for it.
I could see nothing important in my future but Sarah’s face at times like these, framed by the soft honey of her hair, but I feared she was a girl whose yearnings stretched out far wider, far beyond me and this glade.
‘Doodle,’ she said, one especially fine afternoon, as we sat under the Black Tree.
‘That is my name,’ I replied.
‘If I told you something I have not told another soul, could I tell it to you, knowing you would keep it to yourself and it would never enter the ear of another?’
She had an oil beetle crawling across her forelock, but I did not want to sidetrack her, so chose not to mention it.
‘You could,’ I replied. ‘I promise it shall go no further.’
‘One day, I intend to go to Honiton, and France, and maybe even the Americas.’
It was from my father and Edward I heard about most of the legends of the moor: the black dogs and the piskies and the river sprites. Edward told me it had been many years since a flibbertigibbet had been spotted in the area but they were rife in his own father’s boyhood and, having learned of their reputation for frightening young maidens on dark lanes, I worried about what that could spell for Sarah once she made the transfer to womanhood. Because of this, I always insisted on walking her to her front door when we were out anywhere close to nightfall. Then there were the piskies to worry about, too. My father himself had never been tricked by them but Edward remembered a time when he was up the moor and the land seemed to slant half on its side as a great mist came down and every direction he walked in led him to the same locked gate, the air only clearing when he turned out his pockets. My mother dismissed this story as ‘pish and twuddle’, claiming that Edward had never had any sense of direction and could not be trusted, as a man who had once argued blind that Scarborough was in Cornwall.
I did not need to speak to my father to know of the story behind the stones on Trembling Hill, since it was common knowledge that each was a young girl who had been turned that way for the crime of dancing on the sabbath. Underhill has long nurtured a reputation amongst neighbouring parishes for breeding disobedient women and I have seen enough evidence with my own eyes to not doubt the reputation’s foundation. Many is the time that I saw a young lad from the village being led emphatically by the hand towards the woods by a member of the fairer sex, although it is seldom that I have seen the reverse. I often picked up an abandoned blouse or frock, corset or pair of breeches on my wanderings in Combe Woods. Houses being crowded places, where bedrooms were shared with siblings and even on occasion sheep and goats, more children than not were conceived under the stars. Our cottage, containing for many years just me, my mother, my father and Edward, was a relatively capacious anomaly, although my mother’s personality filled the space that would probably normally require six other persons of at least medium size. With each year she became more ornery, and with each year my father took another polite step back from asserting himself, perhaps hoping that it might placate her, when in fact it was an equation that seemed to make the opposite result, and finally he retreated so far back that he was entirely within his books and antiquarian concerns. It is from reading his diaries, and later his library, rather than any of my schooling, that I am able to put words on a page in the way you see before you now. He never missed an entry, and though some are rather mundane (‘grey rain, saw a strange horse outside Mrs Fitchett’s’), others are a document of alterations in the parish, the lores of the time, and his concerns about the frittering of our history in front of his very eyes. On 3 March 1871, he laments the vandalism of Hannaford’s Plob, the tomb of a fifteenth-century hunter, by local builders who repurposed the stones for new cottages on the moor’s north-east side. Later that month, he talks of watching a young couple in the village pass their newborn through the forked trunk of an ash tree, to cure the child’s nascent cough: a custom I have heard about from other sources but not seen evidence of for nigh on four decades. ‘Edward twisted fiveways insensible with drink,’ says the entry for 5 September 1883, and nothing more. ‘Solstice. Bilious. Coach to Newton,’ the diary is told on 21 June 1882. ‘Flowers for Dorothy. Not bright enough.’ By this point, the feared Alfred had passed away, being replaced at the pulpit by his son, Cedric, a far milder character and keen early student of photography. My father had a stout and rewarding relationship with Cedric, especially after – if memory serves right – my father saved his life by pushing him out the way of a falling gargoyle during a storm in 1887.
A phrase I learned about the moor from my father was ‘If thee scratch my back thee shall pay for it.’ In his mind, if you attempted to tame the moor, to force your industry into its acid soil, to harness the great power of its rivers and trees for profit, it would eventually exact its revenge. To him, that great domed expanse rising above the surrounding countryside was always ‘She’, never ‘He’. ‘Old Her be angry today,’ he would sometimes say, and I would be uncertain as to whether he meant the great wild space above us or my mother. But then I would see the fearsome skies over the tor, and the even more fearsome ones over Trembling Hill beyond that, and he would add, ‘I wonder who’s angering Her today,’ and I would know what he was talking about. For me, those sombre slopes were where the world ended, and I never felt the need for more world beyond that. I have never been to London, never wanted to, and now I never will. But, seeing the row of houses that has just been built over towards Summersbridge – ugly dark red boxy things, without individuality or charm – I fear the city will soon come to us, and it is one of old age’s small mercies that I will not be here to witness it.
There is the high moor, with its tough wire grass, ice winds, vast treeless slopes and wind-blasted sheep, and there are its footslopes, with their soft river valleys and speckled woodland, and I do not rightly believe you can ask for one without the other. People told me Hell was a place down below and Heaven was above but in Underhill I know the positions to be the reverse of that, and down here in our Heaven Sarah and I continued to play under the plumed chorus in the faery light that can only be created when strong upland sun shines down on thick tiers of burgeoning leaves. Winter surely happened too but I scarce remember it, whereas now it happens at least once a year. The river gets rude and high and the stepping stones Sarah and I placed at even intervals across it close to Summersbridge can no longer be reasoned with. I have seen the river landed only twice in my life for, even when it is full, it moves too fast for that. Half a mile further up the valley is Megan’s House, empty now for many a year. My father said an old crone, not Megan but Lydia, lived there until not long before my birth, and used to walk over twenty miles a day on the moor, getting up not long after midnight in midsummer in order to make the most progress possible. He studied lines in the landscape: he noted that a straight line went from the Trembling Hill kistvaen, where they would later excavate the body of that young woman, through the stone circle and the centre of the tor and the churchyard, and the line brushed the edge of the house where Lydia lived too. Now I see there is this man Watkins, who has lately received much attention for his books on prehistoric lines, but my father was making note of the very same some fifty years earlier. History is full of quiet men who do not get the credit they deserve and would never ask for it, even if their life depended on it.
But then there are men like Cranford Frogmore, who will let the world know who they are, and what they have done, at any possibility.
Frogmore arrived down from Bath one spring with his fawning band of archaeologists, strutting about in his clean white frock shirt, speaking to other men he met as if they were so many woodlice in his path. It was in the orchard that I first spotted him, his train of similarly attired cohorts in his wake, as Sarah and I were lazing beside some new lambs and their protective mothers. ‘Who is this prize spoon on a stick?’ I remarked, but as Sarah’s eyes followed his thin prancing legs through the grass, she remained silent.
By this point, I had finished my schooling and had been given work by Mr Cosdon the thatcher, not because of any great talent I had for handling a blade or laying a water reed top lane or wheat reed ridge, but because I was known as a good little climber who could squeeze into a spot smaller than himself. The business was to an extent in the family, since my mother had once worked as a comber of reeds for another old thatcher, Toddler Crockford, who lived up in Wychcombe in a very horrible house. There only being a limited amount of thatch to renew in Underhill, my work also afforded me the opportunity to travel, once even almost as far as Sidmouth. Not being a person who got the chance to look down on much when walking at ground level, I loved my new life in the sky, even though I felt all of the weather there more keenly than ever as it came down off the tor. One night I dreamt I was a church bell, with the face of a very beautiful lady. In this dream it was my job to stand high above the town and ring myself whenever bad weather or danger was approaching. Everyone looked up at me and smiled and appreciated my work but nobody ever got close to me, and I felt lonely in the dream and would have liked to have had another bell beside me. Not long prior to this, my father, who did some ringing himself, had told me that the first bells in the church had been sounded as an answer to coming thunder and lightning, to frighten it away. He loved to hear the bell tapping on the stay, the tick-tock it made, and often remarked that it was pleasantly like being inside a giant clock.
Sometimes, now, I think of my life as having been lived in two distinct parts: the one where I was climbing higher and higher, and the one since then where I have made it my business to tunnel down, into the essence of things. This perhaps begs the question: when have I lived on the level that most people do? Perhaps very rarely. And perhaps that has suited me just fine. Here on the moor, the air is known for its buoyancy, and you don’t have to be perched on a roof to feel that, but up so many feet above everything, I often felt like I could just ascend to the clouds, especially not being a person of any great heft. I liked the view my work gave me of the trains coming into the new Wychcombe Junction station. In those days the brakes were not the most reliable and many times the carriages overshot their mark, meaning passengers would have to walk very many dozen yards back down the track. Not all trains did stop and once I watched the carriages creak to a halt, only for nothing but several thousand bees to disembark, in the form of six hives that were then transported to Riddlefoot Meadow. Our parish has also not been without eminent human visitors. Prime Minister Gladstone passed through Underhill on his tour of Devon in 1872, and although I have no memory of this, my father said he had the opportunity to shake his hand and felt that he was ‘not a proper person’. Sir Walter Raleigh, it is said, was at large in the alehouses of the moor not long before his arrest in 1603. Edward claimed that, as a young soldier, he met Napoleon when he was moored in Torquay harbour, but Dorothy dismissed this as ‘whiskey talk’. Edward also assured me that as a child he’d met a man whose grandfather had been one of the royalists who had been infamously ambushed by parliamentarians while playing cards in the old Wickcoomb Inn, but by this point Edward was well into his eighth decade and often known to go amiss for several days, taking his night’s rest in fields and hedge bottoms.
Living with three men who were constantly bringing pieces of the outdoors back into the house with them – me with my dry reeds, my father with his soil and Edward with the burrs and leaves and buds that had attached themselves to him during his wilderness naps – was the bane of my mother’s existence. She reminded us with little respite about the relationship between soap and the almighty and it was as if, in her eyes, none of life could quite happen right unless every surface of the cottage was spotless. But of course as soon as it was spotless and life did start happening, the happening of it would make the surfaces dirty again, so in a way the life she hoped would happen was destined to always be but an unreachable dream. She worried terribly what her peers in the village thought of her and was forever haunted by the day in 1868 when she had visited Sidmouth without a bonnet: an incident she had later overheard two of the sisters from Pixies Cottages gossiping about. She was vehemently against the drinking of tea, maintaining that it was the Devil’s own drink, destructive to the senses, and did not allow it in the house. I never felt more taboo or lawless than when drinking a strong brew in Sarah’s kitchen – an exception mayhap being the time that Fernie Saville and I went out in the snow and, with one of my father’s shovels, dug up the sign to Upper Wadstray and Wychcombe and turned it in the opposite direction.
It was Cranford Frogmore who took Sarah away, as I suspected he would, from the moment I saw her eye roving towards him in the orchard. The day that I did not find Sarah at home when I called for her and saw his white frock shirt discarded on the ground near our old stepping stones, then heard giggles from in the copse behind, confirmed my worst fears. From the moment Sarah’s body began to mature, a wall that could not be perceived by the eye had gone up between us, and that feeling of syrup pulsing through me as she pressed up to me in the long grass was now just a memory. I had accepted this and that she was deserving of more of a man than me, but Frogmore was not a fraction of what I had hoped for her. I saw that he viewed everything in his immediate environment at best as part of a supporting cast in the play of his life, and any lover he chose would eventually have to be a victim of the same fate, and worse. If he had been less interested in the upkeep of his own moustache and the suppression of those in his stead, maybe it would have been him who found the prehistoric nuggets right under his nose in the kistvaen on Trembling Hill, rather than his more pleasant successors, some three decades later. He and his supercilious gang of trousers had only been in Underhill two days before they had commandeered a table in the corner of the Stonemason’s Arms, which they looked upon with as much ownership as if they had been responsible for the carving of its own sturdy legs from oak. ‘Do as my shirt does!’ he had commanded me, when I had the temerity to take a seat at it, and it was only later I had realised that what he was telling me to do was kiss his self-adoring arse. I walked silently away from that, just as I walked silently away from Sarah’s involvement with him. I have always shied from conflict. It is my way. Yet it is in my memory of these days that can be found my life’s great regret.
She never returned to the village. The rest of the Slatterleys moved away, to Penzance I believe, not long after. I heard many years later that Frogmore ploughed his way through the whores of Hackney while she went mad, alone, in a big Regency house up in Bath, before being committed to the madhouse. But who is to say for certain? As I have mentioned, I am distrustful of rumour and tittle-tattle.
I recall Sarah’s and my small story here so it will be held in print, but it strikes me as futile, not just because I do not know who would ever be interested to read it but because I am sure the earth and the river hold it and tell it too, as they tell all our stories, and that when they tell it they do so with a far greater eloquence and recall than I ever could. My father, despite the nature of his work and his diligence in attending his employer’s sermons, possessed a quite pagan view of the afterlife. He believed that parts of us seep into the earth, to become parts of the landscape around us, and perhaps parts of other souls yet to be. He saw it as a sort of dispersion of narrative. The root ball of a tree planted in a churchyard, he said, would soon go to work in absorbing the dead. He told me about the highwaymen who had been caught and hung in chains up on Underhill Tor, starving, getting their nutrition only from shreds of candle wax fed to them by those passing by until they finally expired and rotted into the earth. I saw in my mind’s eye the thick broth rain up there washing their secrets down into the soil and the river, and the river telling those secrets, just as it told the secret of the lady in the carving in the church and the secret of my mother’s true father.
Because the rainfall is so great here, digging is usually not difficult, but during a rare dry spell it was not uncommon for my father to break a shovel. He always kept a spare in a small attic in the stone barn behind the cottage: a topsy-turvy space that my mother constantly reminded him to keep tidier than he did. Could my father’s life have been as quiet as he wished it to be, if he had actually taken on board some of the advice my mother barked at him, or would she just have found more shortcomings to chastise him about? It is hard to say. I try now, as an older man who spends time underneath matters, to see more of what made her what she was: the story under the story, what it took for her to hold everything together, in a house of cows, chickens and men that were invariably either uncommunicative, crapulous, clumsy and hungry, if not all four at the same time. Heavy responsibility and lightness of manner cannot easily go hand in hand. What I do know is that my father rarely remembered to do any of the tasks that she shouted at him to do and, because of that, I know that on the day that she dislodged the shovel from the attic space and it fell on his head, it would have been in a precarious position, and because of that, it is questionable whether she can be blamed directly for his death.
I can picture the scene now: my mother on the ladder, growling her dismay at the disorder of my father’s tools, her hands busy above her, rummaging. My father directly below, staring at his dusty boots, uttering not a word, waiting for the storm to pass. The shovel falls and the sharp metal blade hits the softest part of his temple. The end of his life was not slow, although part of me suspects that my mother’s verbal annihilation of his character continued for a minute or two, even after he passed from this world into the next. It is hard not to note the irony that so many heavy objects had been propelled towards him over the years – earthenware mugs, griddles, trays, china birds, plates – and he’d lived through it all, yet the one that finished him off was the one she accidentally sent in his direction.
For the remaining twelve years of her life, my mother was a milder presence, particularly from the point two years after my father’s death when Edward’s liver finally became too pickled to keep him above the earth. I had never noticed at the time, but when she had talked to me or my father or Edward, her hands were constantly held together, her nails digging half-moons into her palms, and it was only now that she ceased to do it that I noticed she had ever done it. Cats, hens and dogs no longer fled into hedgerows at the sound of her voice. She ate more unselfconsciously, remarking on many an occasion with a satisfied chuckle that she was ‘full to pussy’s bow’. The stones in her tone became smaller, less sharp, and her mission to tame dirt for good abated. The cottage was at the lowest point in the valley, where all water seemed to come to gather, and that dampness was more noticeable as my mother’s obsessive cleanliness and tidiness fell off. The walls have always felt like crumbling cake here. I believe it is a building fit more for cows than humans. Yet it still stands, and I am still in it, also standing, just about.
My father is interred on the north side of the churchyard, near that Devil’s Door that I have still not located, and it was I who dug his grave, and who planted the ash sapling beside it, which I trust is now hard at work absorbing his essence. It was the driest spring in living memory and the bluebells leaned and withered as soon as they flowered. After Cedric Boyland saw that I could dig with an enthusiasm and strength that belied my size, he believed it only logical to offer me my father’s old position, and I accepted, and at that point the part of my adulthood I lived in the sky ended and the more sunken part began. Yet it is in this subterranean part of my life that my mind has floated higher, into unknown places that seem to be somewhere above the clouds. Sometimes, I think a more significant part of it than not has been spent inside dreams – extremely lucid, deeply textured dreams, sometimes more real than Underhill itself.
There is not a lot else to tell.
I am still here, still digging my holes and filling them in, and am still for the greater part the person I was when I first began doing it, although my bones ache a great deal more, and I fear I only have a year or so left at it. My reading and writing has improved, with the help of my father’s old books. Mumble the cow is no longer amongst the living. In the end, she outlasted my father, Edward and my mother, and very close to the end of her life, I decided she should not be so lonely, and got some companions for her, after purchasing some land off Benny Woodcock. The herd – or their successors – provide milk but I don’t push them hard or make a song and dance about its availability. If people come for it, they come. Nonetheless these cows are more than enough to occupy the time I do not spend deep in the earth or words. I am glad of them and glad to not be a man who depends on them for income, to be a man who owns a plot of land and the roof above his head. Some say the damp in here is not good for my lungs but I have outlived many a man who spent his life in more parched rooms. My mother, in her more sensitive, confessional final days, told me that when he had the place built, Edward inserted a shoe in the wall, and a doll which an old lady in the village had told him would give the place protection from misfortune. The doll, she said, had originally been part of a pair. But I do not know about the truth of this. There are a few things I know for sure. Children swimming in a river will never be quiet, that is one. You cannot count the tadpoles in your pond, that is another. But there is infinitely more I don’t know, just as ever it was.
In truth, it is Underhill that has changed far more than I ever could. More folk arrive on the train now and, thanks to its improved brakes, it stops at the station platform with fair precision. The advent of the motor car has brought more daytrippers to the moor and not all of them treat it with the respect it deserves. Just the other day, I had to apprehend a young gentleman with an accent I could not place who was pulling moss off the trees in Combe Woods. He seemed startled by my interference and, were I younger and larger and less reserved, we might have sparred. Instead, with the remark to his lady friend ‘It seems the piskies do live and speak after all, Jean!’, he departed, towards the road. I fear great change coming. Sometimes, I dream images I do not recognise, unfamiliar machines with too many wires, popping and crackling with electricity. In one dream I saw my own tombstone and the words inscribed on it: ‘William Millhouse: virgin, underestimated’ but it did not have a date. In another I was sitting in a meadow in May surrounded by all its floral glory but looked up at Underhill Tor and saw a face in the hillside and the face was screaming. I fear the advent of a vandalism coming far greater than the one that concerned my father. I suspect the moor is about to have its back scratched and there will be multiple payments due.
That we became briefly famous, as a village, owing to the findings at Trembling Hill, has also brought more people to the area. They said that she, the girl they discovered, was put to rest in a crouching position, facing the rising sun. This strikes me as not a position of dignity, but we are nearly the same at the end, underneath our airs and graces, our bonnets that we sometimes remember to wear into town, our tailored shirts and lacquered gentleman’s moustaches. I do not doubt that she did pass into the next world but I suspect it is as my father said and that world was a dispersed one, of trees, earth, flowing water, flowers and souls yet to be born, and that, contradictory to what her people thought, her amulets, clothes and tools did not go with her. It is still the same now: I have buried people with vases and quilts, with hammers and banjos, with cats… even once with a favoured mouse. I know every inch of the churchyard, know just how many Sarahs are in it (three), just how many Davids (sixteen), Williams (eleven) and Megs (seven), but there will, of course, be more beneath that, long forgotten. The stones will talk, I think, if you give them long enough. I still recoil from the younger headstones, the very clean ones that glint in the sun. They give me a chill. But as far as other chills are concerned, I have never seen a ghost here, nor a piskie. A newly qualified young doctor in the village, a golfing man by the name of Fitzpatrick who moved here from the west coast of Ireland into one of the ugly new houses, told me that on his way back across the tor after playing the back nine he was led astray in the mist, unable to get home and found himself mistakenly over by the ruin of the old barn that once belonged to the Warners, and said he saw a plume of smoke rising in the doorway, in the shape of a woman. I think he is a very imaginative man but I also do not doubt the moor’s intention to spin and confound people on its more vexed days. I have heard it claimed that the figure in the carvings on the font has been seen as an apparition, but few people have spent as much time in her manor as me and I have never set eyes on her, although curiously, she does often visit me in dreams.
At these times, I am often digging and she stands to my rear, quietly observing, making sure the job is done right. I like the idea of her presence. It gives me comfort when the dark thoughts creep in: when the tor makes its rain to blacken the world and I am out in it alone, when the belltower captain rings out the nine tailors for another man lost and I dwell on the inevitable solitude that comes to us all in the end, or when I wonder what I could have done for or been to a woman.
It is now a while since I have broken a shovel. I have three in all and they live in a low and accessible place, in the porch, near my shoes and raincoat. Not far beyond can be found my mother’s old ottoman where, when May is at its peak and the sun is shining and I leave the door open, I will still often find a chaffinch or song thrush perched. At the close of these sweet, bright, late spring days I will sometimes open the ottoman and put on one of the garments within it. There are a couple of dozen in all that I have collected from the woods over the years, although it’s rare for me to find one there now. I favour a couple of cotton frocks in particular whose bright and intricate patterns seem to match the foliage around me. I take the back way into the trees, through the leaning gate in my old dripping garden wall that is half off its hinges and I tell myself I will repair, drekly. It takes me ten minutes to follow the thread of the stream to the river. All the old bridges on the moor began with stepping stones and the ones that Sarah put down are still there, negotiable in fair weather. As I balance on them, enjoying the way the fabric feels against my skin, I remember her standing there, singing her song to her people that I could not see, remember the great stillness in me that contrasted with the great yearning in her and the yearning in the water that seemed to match it. Sometimes I have imagined that I still hear the song. One time, when I was feverish with summer flu, I was even sure I heard it croaked back to me by the rocks in the river and I shivered and swayed with its power.
After I have stood on our makeshift stone bridge I rest in the long grass, at the end of this unremarkable life, aware, as I lower myself, of every twist and ache and fault and gap in this contraption I still call a body. But then I feel it all getting under the cotton and passing through me – the sun, the butterflies, the maybugs, the tune of the water, the breeze, the falling light – and I am the moment and nothing more.