Fourteen

Aldingham and Baycliff – A Ghost in the Grass

The South was under water. So much you could imagine the whole country beginning to tip, ever so slowly, underneath the weight of it all. In Cumbria we had such a dark beginning to the year: rain, grey skies, and even more rain. The land was sodden and our boots had a permanent tideline of mud that I gave up trying to clean off.

But like rare pearls amongst all the gloom were days when the sun burst through to illuminate everything, lifting the spirits. I’d planned a trip to the far side of the bay. A friend had reminded me about the small church in the hamlet of Aldingham. She’d told me that the church, the churchyard and the foreshore all had a particular quality, an energy to it, and that you could feel it. So I set off to re-visit for the first time in years.

The coast road from Ulverston follows the level terrain out of the town and into open farming country. It passes close to the Buddhist Centre at Conishead Priory, an imposing, if architecturally challenged building. The site has a significant history that pre-dates the current house. In the 12th century a hospital was founded on the site, followed by an Augustinian priory. After the dissolution of the monasteries a procession of landowners took control of the estate and there were disputes, deaths, land claims and counter-claims over the centuries until the present building was begun in the early 1800s.

The house took 20 years to build; its owner, Thomas Braddyl was bankrupted by disastrous speculation in the Durham coalfields. A veritable parade of buyers and losers followed until a Scottish syndicate developed it into a hotel. It had its own railway that connected to the main Furness Line at Ulverston, the line of it passes through the woods to the east of the priory. A long straight path leads down to the bay, passing over the disused track and a low bridge, a place where ferns populate the dank walls and water seeps and drips onto the ground. I’d walked here hundreds of times with friends and our dogs. Through the dark of the wood, the chiaroscuro trunks of hornbeam and beech and oak; beech mast crunching brittle underfoot. In winter, the spread of snowdrops, like light falling. Through the Victorian gate and out to the shore at the edge of the bay: Chapel Island, not much more than a stone’s throw away across the sands and the channels.

At some point in the 1960s the building was turned into a convalescent home, ironically, for miners from the Durham coalfields. My primary school teacher, with whom I had a not altogether successful relationship, was at least possessed of the saving grace of music. She played the piano and we sang and played recorders most days. As well as musical productions in school, she arranged for us to give a concert for the miners at Conishead. Beforehand she told us about the conditions the men had worked in down in the mines and the diseases that affected their lungs. I think then that we had gone into the concert room with trepidation, wondering what on earth the men would be like; memory tells me that they were just friendly, smiley and appreciative. The room was high-ceilinged and I remember that light fell from tall windows. Thinking about that room I see the palest greens and yellows, like an aura surrounding the memory; whether this was the colour of the walls or sunlight pouring down into the room from that high window, I couldn’t say.

Once the convalescent home closed, Conishead was abandoned for a significant number of years. During that time legion quantities of dry-rot spread its creeping mycelium behind walls where it ran rampant, unseen. During the 1980s the priory found new owners – a group of Buddhists. These days, after years of work to rid the place of rot and to repair the building, it is now an internationally renowned centre for meditation. There’s a sparkly new temple too.

* * *

At Bardsea the character of the bay has changed dramatically in the time since I moved away. Saltmarsh now extends a significant distance into the bay. The roadside car park used to give an uninterrupted view over the bay, a place where retired folk came for an ice cream, a sit and a look. Not that the sands were necessarily golden though; far from it.

There was an evening in the 1980s, it was early summer. I’d brought a group of boys from the residential school I worked in. We’d come down to the bay for a picnic and an ice cream from the kiosk and a walk. And then the boys decided to find water. They wanted to swim, but the tide was far out, and I wouldn’t have let them in the tide anyway. But being the kids they were, they found water in a channel near the shore and jumped down into it, stripped to their undies, throwing their clothes onto the sand at the edge and were splashing about in the shallow trough of water. The top of the channel was roughly at boy head height. When they emerged a while later, they’d become tribe. They came, advancing in a line towards me with wide-legged, joggling steps, each one plastered from head to toe in thick, drying mud. We hadn’t brought towels, and I sent them back into the channel to wash off the mud. It stuck fast. As I drove them back to school that evening they waved and smiled at everyone we passed, teeth and eyes looming white from inside their dirty Morecambe Bay mud faces.

* * *

At Sea Wood the road begins to rise and passes through the trees, then follows the banks and bends and emerges into the light again at Baycliff. Here the view opens out over the whole bay. On that January day the bay was at the mid-point of sea and sand. Channels formed arabesque lines and shapes, the water within them glowed quietly in the light. At the far extremity of Morecambe Bay, the meeting place of sea and sky had fused into one metallic band of silver-grey cloud. Further west bright sunlight sparked along the horizon.

The road dropped down again. The land here is green, parcelled into farms and fields marked out by drystone walls and small lanes. I turned into the lane to Aldingham and stopped the car outside St Cuthbert’s Church. As soon as I turned the engine off a memory came in of the last time I was here, and I couldn’t explain to myself why I hadn’t made the association sooner. Some 25 years ago a former boyfriend, Howard, had died after enduring months with cancer. On the day of his funeral I’d travelled over from my home in the North-East.

Howard wasn’t a religious man but during his illness he’d befriended, or been befriended by, the vicar at Aldingham, and he’d come here to sit and talk, or to sit and look out over the bay, and to think. He’d found some kind of peace in amongst the enervating days battling disease and contemplating, as I remember he did in our conversations, the end of life. The small, intimate church at Aldingham became the obvious place for the service.

A group of Howard’s close friends arranged for a memorial stone to be made and letter-carved by his friend, Boris Howarth. I began to search amongst the few dozens of stones set face-up in the grass, their intimate scale perfect in the small churchyard. Some had flowers, either recent and fresh, or faded. Others, plastic or silk, had become edge-singed through the wear of time and weather.

Then there it was. The grass had begun to encroach around the face, but in the centre, carved in curving calligraphic script his name and dates: ‘Howard Steel 1948–89’. Time collapsed.

Kneeling on the grass I grabbed the turf-edge and started to peel it back, pulling off the longer tendrils that were creeping across the face of the stone, and exposing again the inscription arranged around the edge:

and the only bridge is love, the only survivor, the only meaning.22

The grave seemed abandoned, forgotten. I wanted flowers. I wanted to restore a sense of care, of remembering.

After the funeral service, I’d walked arm in arm with a friend along the rocky foreshore, trying to make sense of this early death, of having witnessed this big man physically shrink over the months as the cancer took over. Then a friend of Howard’s came running along the shore towards us and as he came closer I saw that he was running over the stones in bare feet. I wondered if the physical pain involved might have had an effect, ameliorated his sense of grief.

* * *

I went into the church and walked along the aisle to the east window, a large piece of stained glass made and installed in 1964. The figure of Christ is central, and above him the dove of peace and a hand descending from the blue firmament; God, I imagine, with accompanying angels and their unfurling banners bearing the legends ‘King of Kings’ and ‘Lord of Lords’. But besides all the usual religious iconography, the glass-artist and designer – the wonderfully named Harcourt M Doyle – has given us the bay.

There’s an oystercatcher probing the sand with his orange bill, observed by a redshank. A black-headed gull, its wings pulled back and up into the zenith of movement, lifts itself over the bow-wave of the Morecambe Bay tidal bore as it thunders back into the bay. And the work is populated by the people who live and work beside the bay. There’s a farmer, shirtsleeves pushed up in the warmth of a late summer harvest, hefting armfuls of bound wheat. A fisherman holds up his catch – a Morecambe Bay fluke, what else? The fish is silver-grey against the dark blue of the fisherman’s gansey. Both men look up at the Christ figure rising over the landscape; they’re unsurprised by his presence. On the opposite side of the window, the low escarpment found just further along the coast, the site of an Iron Age hill-fort, and two unexpected figures. A young woman; she reminds me of the way Leonardo da Vinci painted women, golden hair falling down her back and a rope of it coiled over her shoulder. She’s holding a baby in her arms, swaddled and cosy, fast asleep. She looks to the earth as her man digs the soil. At first I can’t make sense of what I’m seeing and have to look again. They’re wearing animal skins. It makes me smile. It’s a nod to our past, to where we come from, our beginnings, the sense that we weren’t the first to be here. This is the beginning of cultivation, of farming, of coming in from the nomadic hunter-gatherer way of life and settling here beside the bay. Wildflowers and grasses surround the man’s feet as he makes the first cut into the earth. It’s an image of hope and expectation, looking to the future but absolutely acknowledging the past. It says that there is more than one way to look at the world, even through the eyes of faith. And I like this, this idea that it doesn’t matter who on earth you are, or what era you lived through or what your belief system is; we all belong. It makes sense then, that this was the place Howard chose to come to, to be in. Above all the figures in the window, great cumulus clouds move over the bay, in just the way they do.

* * *

Out into the sunlight again, a mass of snowdrops were growing in the shelter of the drystone wall, their faces fully open, probably for the first time this year. Their structure was complex, layer upon layer of petals inside the flower head of that first green of the year and edged with a tiny frill of white. I picked just four stems for Howard, placing them on his stone just to the side of his name, and arranged them with their faces turning upwards towards the sun.

* * *

The sea had moved further away, leaving a milky meniscus of water. A family were walking on the sands and the way the light fell it was as if they were walking suspended, just above the surface. The boy called to his Labrador and chased it around in muddy circles. A group of redshank probed the sands and, as they moved, the reflections created the illusion of their legs being doubled in length, like birds on stilts. On an impulse I took my shoes and socks off and walked around, checking to see if I could feel the energy that Fay had talked about. Nothing mystical happened, just the cold, like the shock of stepping into a chill stream. Then I remembered the man running in bare feet over the stones, and thought that this was good, that maybe I was connecting to that final collective moment for Howard.

* * *

I was feeling subdued, all this stuff coming up that I hadn’t foreseen, all this unanticipated analysis of an old relationship. Then more memories came piling in. Of when I’d gone to see Howard the day before he died. I’d travelled back to Cumbria to say goodbye, though I never got the chance. Howard’s friends and colleagues had gathered at his house and stayed by his side so that he never had to be alone. I wanted to say goodbye, to know that I’d done this instead of shying away, of avoiding, and living with the consequences. But how do you make conversation, or be, at a time like that? I wanted to go up to his bedroom and hold his hand for a few minutes, to stroke it gently and say goodbye. But the invitation didn’t come and I found that I was speechless and couldn’t ask, rendered mute. Another memory: I’d heard that the man in bare feet was the one with Howard at the end, holding him tight, cuddling him like a baby, as he’d slipped away.

* * *

I put my shoes on and walked down the steps onto the foreshore where a singular, sickly smell jolted me back to the present. A fox, its eye an unnatural cavity, lips curled back and teeth squatter, blunter than I’d imagined. Washed up, apparently, and lying in the tideline that, because of the very recent storms, had been pushed up tight against the steps and the churchyard wall. A female, I thought, smaller than a dog fox and no urban fox either. Her coat was in good condition, pure rusty red and underneath that a lighter, thicker, more golden layer of insulating fur. Her brush lay stretched out horizontal as if in anticipation of speed, but had become diminished through long immersion in water. My eye made this quick initial survey and then travelled back over the animal more slowly, and the find took on a darker, more gruesome tone.

All that remained of the fox’s legs was one front humerus, the newly exposed joint gleaming unnaturally white. There were no signs of other leg bones, nothing. I tried to make sense of it. What was the story? Had she been washed out from a bayside den inundated by storm waters, another victim of the three successive storms that had very recently smashed into the bay? She’d have been no match for the weight, the swell and roll, the speed of it. But it seemed unlikely that the legs would have simply rotted away. Had she been dug out from her nearby lair by some irate farmer? Having whacked it over the head, dispatched it with the spade that had dug it out to the light, had he hacked off the legs in a gesture out of all proportion?

Two women were walking towards me, each sweeping a metal detector just above the cobbles. I saw them stopping close to the dead fox. One of them unpacked a fold-out spade and began to dig, immune apparently, to the stench from the rotting carcass. Now there’s commitment for you.

* * *

I drove back along the coast road to Baycliff. I wanted to go down to the shore to see the rock carvings made by one of Ulverston’s much-loved eccentric sons. Bill Stables was a master-craftsman. He ran a workshop from a lock-up garage in the middle of town. Inside it was a mass of stacked-up timber, machines and equipment, and from here he made traditional wooden rocking horses that were beautiful, detailed – and coveted. He made roundabouts and furniture too, all from this cramped, apparently disorganised space. Someone once asked him how long it was since he’d last been to the back of his workshop. ‘About 10 years,’ he’d said.

I only ever saw Bill in a black shirt, open to the waist in all weathers. White, curled hair sprang out from his huge, barrel chest. He was a fit man, walked with a swagger, chest out, shoulders back. As a child I’d seen him walking through town with his cat perched up on his shoulder.

Bill was a well-known naked swimmer. He spent most of his free time at Baycliff swimming when the tide was right, and carving when it wasn’t. When Bill realised that I was a swimmer he was very encouraging. He’d been getting deafer and spoke in the over-loud voice of those who can’t tell how loud they are speaking. He spotted me in town one day, and in a street packed with people he bellowed across the road:

‘Come with us down to Baycliff to swim! You don’t need to bother with a costume! We’re all pals!’

Lucky for me I’d seen the funny side.

Once Bill had swum he would stay on the beach letter-carving into a broad sheet of flat, white limestone rock by the shore. The rocks were, in the end, a memorial too; Bill didn’t want a gravestone.

I couldn’t think about Bill and Baycliff without remembering my friend Marie. We’d completely lost touch. She’d been a great friend for years. We’d played tennis, cycled, swum together and spent evenings in the pub with her husband, Chris, and our friends. Her family home in the small hills behind the town was a welcoming place; there was always a meal in the oven and home brew.

The nuclear reprocessing plant of Sellafield was not very far away up the Cumbrian coast, and we’d both been involved in anti-nuclear campaigning. In 1983, it was widely reported that a team of divers from Greenpeace discovered high levels of radioactivity when they tried to block the Sellafield underwater discharge pipes. Due to concerns about contaminated discharges, the Department of the Environment effectively closed stretches of beach near the plant.23 A small group of activists began to hold local meetings, but the scale of the action grew almost overnight after the showing of a TV programme about childhood leukaemia in the village of Seascale. A public meeting was held in Barrow – the hall packed with people, just ordinary people who wanted to be involved. Pete Wilkinson of Greenpeace came to help us get organised; he was like a rock star in our midst, all black leather and London swagger. He talked to us about making and maintaining a coherent and sustainable campaign. We needed teams of people to take on particular jobs. We stood in queues to sign up for something – direct action, publicity, administration. The atmosphere in that hall crackled with the sense of the campaign becoming something tangible, of the possibility of David taking on Goliath.

But then a woman’s voice broke above the hubbub.

‘There’s something not right here. What about those two?’

A Barrow matriarch was standing up. She was pointing at two men near the back of the hall, arms folded over their chests.

‘What have they signed up for? They’ve signed up for nothing! What are they after?’

There was a sense of their metaphorical feathers ruffling momentarily, but they sat on, implacable, arms folded across their chests.

Other voices joined in.

‘Where do you work then – Sellafield?’

‘How come you’ve not signed up then? Who are you working for?’

‘Have you come to observe then?’

And within minutes they’d gone, melted away into the evening. It was our first encounter with observers.

Later, some of the group came to suspect that phones had been bugged. Phone calls were made to make plans for protests at Barrow Docks as new shipments of spent nuclear fuel arrived from Japan, but the police would always get there first.

But Sellafield did not merely annoy a group of anti-nuclear demonstrators in Cumbria. Since those times there have been a number of protests from both the Irish and Norwegian governments about the plant, amid wider public concern about the risks posed by radioactive contamination.

* * *

Marie and I had swum together outdoors all through the summers, and without this daily immersion in natural water we’d felt unable to function. But she was made of tougher stuff and swam outdoors all year. I’d watch her stomping on layers of ice at the edge of Coniston Water to make an opening large enough to swim in, then in she’d go, hooshing and whooshing until she came out shivering but sated, a few minutes later. We’d swum together at Baycliff but I came to it with a wary eye. I couldn’t understand the attraction compared to swimming in lake water. Here you could only swim at the turning point of the tide. Come too early and the tide might pull you up the bay; too late and you might be gone. You had to know how to look at the water and judge the flow and only swim at the turning point of the tide. I liked much more the meditative qualities of lake or river water, the way your skin felt afterwards, as if the water remained like a membrane over your skin. The mossy smell lingering.

I parked the car at the top of the lane that led down to the shore and as I was gathering my belongings noticed the coast road bus coming along the road. It pulled in at the stop and a woman climbed down. She was wearing a long, black coat and bright red glasses, and white hair fell down her back from inside a woolly hat. She had bags of shopping and a rucksack. She set off down the lane ahead of me, but it wasn’t long before I caught her up. As I drew level with her I noticed activist badges lining the front of her coat: ‘Free Gaza’, ‘Close Guantanamo Now!’, ‘Free Tibet’, ‘Troops Out of Afghanistan’.

I said hello.

‘Oh sorry,’ she said, ‘I was miles away.’

We looked into each other’s faces, then time collapsed for the second time that day. We hugged each other. Questions began to come, one after another.

‘What are you doing here?’

‘Well, what are you doing here?’

She answered my question first.

‘I’ve lived here for years, in one of the chalets.’

‘I’ve just been thinking about you and remembering the swimming and Bill. I wanted to see if I could find his carvings again.’

‘I think they’re still there – just further along the beach. I haven’t been to look for ages. I love it here – it’s so peaceful. What about you?’ she asked. ‘Have you come back?’

And I told her about coming back to Cumbria to raise the kids, about Steve, his work, my work, the boys. We swapped stories and major events as we walked on down the lane towards the shore, talking and stopping, setting off again to where the metalled lane became a grassy track leading off towards the fields. I said it must be a great place for stargazing, and she told me yes, it was.

We reached a chalet, a car on a gravel bed beside it, a small walled garden; the wall made of those cast concrete blocks in the shape of a flower. The shingle beach butted right up to the garden wall.

The door opened and a woman came out, followed by a man with a bucket. They greeted Marie and she told them about our meeting, just back there in the lane, after all those years.

‘I can’t believe it,’ we said again, laughing, and looking into each other’s eyes.

We reached a gate in the hedge, held fast by winter clematis and ivy. And like Mr Beaver disappearing into his dam, Marie vanished into the opening. I followed, curious.

There was a narrow garden passage leading to a front door. Suspended from branches, clipped onto fixings on the wall or standing on the gravel path, were dozens of blue pots with last summer’s plant growth cut back to twig forms. Overhead, hawthorn trees spread their branches to form a private, half-wild, half-domesticated covered passageway.

We talked of meeting up again and hugged each other and then it was time to go.

I walked along the shingle beach towards the place I’d swum with Marie. I came to the rocks that Bill had carved and there, after so many years of weather and tides washing them over, his carvings, still legible:

Thank you Baycliff

for all the wonderful summers

I have enjoyed during my vocation on this planet

The year is 1972 AD…

Socialism is rife

In an unchristian society in which some people cannot afford to work

and others have highly paid unnecessary jobs.

Someone had re-worked the word ‘rife’ so that it was now ‘life’.

Elvis Presley King of rock music dies

Bing Crosby a great…

His signature is…

But the popular song of the year was

By the Swedish group Abba

The title Knowing Me Knowing You

I will write you the chorus

And he did…

Best wishes for you people

In 2077

Still civilised…

Us boys and girls…

Then stars awarded for all year-round swimmers, together with their names. Whilst the carvings are a rambling collection of thoughts, they clearly mattered, and were close to Bill’s heart. Even now, if I hear the Abba song I have a small inward smile to myself.

Bill was in no sense an academic philosopher, but his words and messages play a role in maintaining the idea of the great English eccentric. Too often we don’t think to record until we’re past the moment of reckoning, and things that we don’t regard as ephemeral prove to be just that.

I walked further, looking out at the bay. A pair of shelduck probed the sands. The light was changing again. Although it was still early afternoon, already there was a sense of things closing in, of the poignancy of winter afternoons when we want the light to stay, but we know full well that it won’t.