The Bactrian was but a wild, childish man,
And could not write nor speak, but only loved:
So, lest the memory of this go quite,
Seeing that I to-morrow fight the beasts,
I tell the same to Pboebas, whom believe!
A Death in the Desert
You must have noticed that until now my tangled tale has observed at least some of the unities proper to tragedy: I have not tried to relate what other people thought or did when this was outside my knowledge; I have not whisked you hither and yon without suitable transport and I have never started a sentence with the words ‘some days later’. Each morning has witnessed the little death of a heavy drinker’s awakening and ‘each slow dusk a drawing down of blind’. The English, as Raymond Chandler has pointed out, may not always be the best writers in the world but they are incomparably the best dull writers.
If I have not always made clear the rationale of these events, it is partly because you are probably better at that sort of thing than I am and partly because I confess myself quite bemused by finding that the events which I thought I was controlling were in fact controlling me.
It has amused me, these last few weeks, to cast my recollections into some sort of disciplined mould but this foolishness must now cease, for the days are drawing in and time’s helicopter beats the air furiously over my head. Events have overtaken literature: there is time for a few more leisured pages and then perhaps for some journal jottings; after that, I suspect, no time at all, ever.
It looks as though, by a piece of vulgar irony, I have come home to die within sight of the scenes of my hated childhood: the ways of Providence are indeed unscrupulous, as Pat once said to Mike as they were walking down Broadway – or was it O’Connell Street?
Getting here was easy. We flew from Quebec to Eire in the same aircraft but not together. At Shannon, Jock walked straight through Immigration waving his Tourist Passport, they didn’t even look at it. He was carrying the suitcase. He took a domestic flight to Collinstown Airport, Dublin, and waited for me at a nice pub called Jury’s in College Green.
For my part, I spent a quiet hour in the lavatory at Shannon with half a bottle of whisky, mingled with various groups of travellers, told all and sundry that my wife, children and luggage were in planes headed for Dublin, Belfast and Cork, and wept myself tiresomely and bibulously out and into a taxi without anyone asking for a passport. I think perhaps they were rather glad to get rid of me. The taxi driver milked me systematically of currency all the way to Mullingar, where I shaved, changed clothes and accent, and took another taxi to Dublin.
Jock was at Jury’s as arranged, but only barely; in another few minutes he would have been ejected for he was pissed as a pudding and someone had taught him a naughty phrase in Erse which he kept singing to the tune of ‘The Wearing of the Boyne’ or whatever they call it.
We took a cheap night flight to Blackpool, and only acted drunk enough to fit in with the rest of the passengers. The airport staff were waiting to go to bed or wherever people go in Blackpool: they turned their backs on the whole lot of us. We took separate taxis to separate small and hateful hotels. I had potato pie for supper, I don’t know what Jock had.
In the morning we took separate trains and met, by arrangement, in the buffet on Carnforth Station. You may never have heard of Carnforth but you must have seen the station, especially the buffet, for it was there that they made Brief Encounter and it is sacred to the memory of Celia Johnson. Nowadays Carnforth has no other claim to fame: once a thriving steel town with an important railway junction, today it is distinguished only by the singular, and clearly intentional, ugliness of every building and by the extraordinary niceness of the people who inhabit them – even the bank managers. I was born five miles away, at a place called Silverdale.
Carnforth is in the extreme northwest corner of Lancashire and has sometimes called itself the Gateway to the Lake District. It is not quite on the coast, it is not quite anything, really. There are some good pubs. There used to be a cinema when I was a boy but I was never allowed to go, and it’s closed now. Except for Bingo, naturally.
One of the hotels is kept by a nice fat old Italian called Dino something; he’s known me since I was a bambino. I told him that I was just back from America where I had made some enemies and that I had to lie low.
‘Donter worry Mr Charlie, thoser bloddy Sicilian bosstuds donter find you here. If I see them hang around I get the police bloddy quick – are good boys here, not afraid ofer stinking Mafiosi.’
‘It’s not really quite like that, Dino. I think if you see anyone you’d better just let me know quietly.’
‘O.K., Mr Charlie.’
‘Thank you, Dino. Evviva Napoli!
‘Abassa Milano!’
‘Cazzone pendente!’ we cried in chorus – our old slogan from years ago.
Jock and I stayed there in close retirement for perhaps five weeks until my armpit was healed and I had grown a more or less plausible beard. (I want to make it quite clear that Dino had no idea that we had done anything wrong.) I stopped dyeing my hair and eating starchy foods and soon I looked a well-preserved seventy. Finally, before venturing out, I removed both my upper canine teeth, which are attached to a wire clip: with my upper incisors resting lightly on the lower lip I look the picture of senile idiocy, it always makes Mrs Spon shriek. I let my now grizzled hair grow long and fluffy, bought a pair of good field-glasses and mingled with the bird watchers. It’s astonishing how many there are nowadays: ornithology used to be an arcane hobby for embittered schoolmasters, dotty spinsters and lonely little boys but now it is as normal a weekend occupation as rug-making or wife-swapping. I was terribly keen on it when I was at school, so I knew the right cries and, as a matter of fact, I became rather keen again and thoroughly enjoyed my outings.
This part of Lancashire contains some of the best bird-watching terrain in England: sea and shore birds in their millions haunt the vast salt-marshes and tidal flats of Morecambe Bay, and the reeds of Leighton Moss – an RSPB sanctuary – are alive with duck, swans, gulls and even the bittern.
I gave Dino three hundred pounds and he bought me a second-hand dark-green Mini, registered in his name. I plastered on a few stickers – SAVE LEVENS HALL, VOTE CONSERVATIVE, VISIT STEAM-TOWN – and dumped a Karri-Kot in the back seat: an inspired piece of camouflage, you must admit. We contrived to get a pair of tinted contact lenses for Jock, changing his startling blue eyes to a dirty brown. He liked them very much, called them ‘me shades’.
Meanwhile, since Carnforth is on STD now, it was safe to dial a number of guarded calls to London, where various naughty friends, in exchange for a lot of money, set to work creating new identities for Jock and me, so that we could get to Australia and start a new life amongst the Sheilas and Cobbers. New identities are very expensive and take a long time, but the process of obtaining them is so much easier now that there are all these drugs about. You simply find a chap who’s on the big H-for-heroin and not long for this world, preferably a chap with at least some points of resemblance to you. You take him under your wing – or rather your naughty friends do – lodge him, supply him with H and feed him whenever he can gag anything down. You get his National Insurance Card paid up to date, buy him a passport, open a Post Office Savings Account in his name, pass the driving test for him and fix him up with an imaginary job at a real place. (The ‘employer’ gets his wages back in cash, doubled.) Then you pay a very expensive craftsman to substitute your photograph in the new passport and you’re a new man.
(The drug addict, of course, now becomes a bit superfluous: you can have him knocked off professionally but that’s an extra, and awfully expensive nowadays. The best and cheapest course is to deprive him of his medicine for three days or so until he’s quite beside himself, then leave him in a busy public lavatory – Piccadilly Underground is much favoured in the trade – with a syringe containing a heavy overdose, and let Nature take its kindly course. The coroner will scarcely glance at him: he’s probably better off where he is; why, he might have lingered on for years, etc.)
In short, all seemed well except that William Hickey or one of those columnists had once or twice dropped delicate hints that certain People in High Places had been receiving certain photographs, which might or might not have referred to the Hockbottle art work. If so, I couldn’t really see who could be doing it – surely not Johanna? One of Hockbottle’s horrid friends? Martland? I didn’t let it worry me.
Last night, when I walked into the bar of Dino’s hotel, full of fresh air and nursing a splendid appetite, I would have told anyone that things were going uncommonly well. I had spent the afternoon on the Moss and had been fortunate enough to have had a pair of Bearded Tits in my field-glasses for several minutes – and if you think there’s no such bird you can jolly well look it up in the nearest bird book. That was last night, only.
The barman should have smiled and said, ‘Evening, Mr Jackson, what do you fancy?’ I mean, that’s what he’d said to me every evening for weeks.
Instead he gave me a hostile stare and said, ‘Well, Paddy, usual I suppose?’ I was completely taken aback.
‘Come on,’ said the barman disagreeably, ‘make your mind up. There’s other people want serving, you know.’
Two strangers at the end of the bar studied me casually in the mirror behind the display bottle. I twigged.
‘Arl roight arl roight,’ I growled thickly, ‘av coorse Oi’ll have me usual, ye cross-grained little sod.’
He pushed a double Jameson’s Irish whisky across the bar at me.
‘And watch your language,’ he said, ‘or you can get out.’
‘Bollocks,’ I said and tossed the whisky back messily. I wiped my mouth with the back of my hand, belched and lurched out. It is a good thing that a serious ornithologist’s field clothes are more or less the same as an Irish navvy’s drinking kit. I fled upstairs and found Jock sitting on the bed, reading the Beano.
‘Come on,’ I said, ‘they’re on to us.’
We had kept in a state of readiness for any emergency so we were out of the hotel by the kitchen entrance some ninety seconds after I had left the bar, heading for the station yard where I had parked the Mini. I started the engine and backed out of the slot; I was quite calm, there was no reason for them to have suspected me.
Then I cursed, stalling the engine, paralysed with dismay.
‘Smatter, Mr Charlie, forgotten something?’
‘No, Jock. Remembered something.’
I had remembered that I had not paid for my whisky – and that the barman had not asked me to do so. Drunken Irish navvies hardly ever have charge accounts at respectable provincial hotels.
I got the engine started again, jammed the gears cruelly into mesh and swung out of the yard into the street. A man standing at the corner turned and raced beck towards the hotel. I prayed that their car was pointing in the wrong direction.
I rammed the unprotesting little Mini out of town to the north on the Millhead Road; just before the second railway bridge I doused the lights and whisked it off to the left, towards Hagg House and the marsh. The road dwindled to a footpath and then to a wet track; we squashed barbed wire, nosed our way down banks, half-lifted the Mini across the impossibly soft parts, cursed and prayed and listened for the sounds of pursuit. To our left some three-headed spawn of Cerberus started to yelp and yap dementedly. We continued west, hating the dog with a deep, rich hatred, and found the River Keer by pitching into it. To be exact, the Mini had pitched down its bank and come to rest, nose downward, in the squishy sand beside the channel, for the tide was far out. I grabbed the almost empty suitcase, Jock grabbed the knapsack and we scrambled into the stream, gasping with shock as the cold water reached groin level. At the far side we stopped before scaling the bank and showing ourselves on the skyline; half a mile behind us an engine raced in a low gear; two cones of light from headlamps waved about in the sky, then suddenly went out.
The stars were bright but we were too far away to be seen by our pursuers; we scrambled up the bank – how I blessed my new-found physical fitness – and made off northwestwards, heading towards the lights of Grange-Over-Sands, six miles away across the glistening mud flats.
It was quite unlike anything that has ever happened to me, it was the strangest journey I have ever made. The darkness, the unheard, nearby sea, the whistle and bleat of the wings of flocks of bewildered birds, the slap of our feet on the wet sand and the fear that drove us on towards the wriggling lights so far across the bay.
But I had this much going for me: I was on familiar ground. My plan was to strike Quicksand Pool – a two-mile treacherous lagoon – at its most dangerous point, then turn northeastwards and follow it to its narrowest part and cross there. At that point, the friendly shore of Silverdale would bear due north at two miles’ distance. This depended on our having crossed the Keer at the right spot, and on the tide being where I believed it to be – I had no choice but to assume that I was right about both.
That was where the nightmare began.
Jock was loping a few yards to my left when we both found ourselves on quaking ground. I did what you should do in such a case – keep moving fast but circle back sharply to your starting point. Jock didn’t. He stopped, grunted, tried to pull back, splashed about, stuck fast. I dropped the suitcase and hunted for him in the dark while he called to me, his voice high with panic as I had never heard it before. I got hold of his hand and started to sink also; I threw myself down, only my elbows now on the quagmire. It was like pulling at an oak tree. I knelt to get better purchase but my knees sank straight in, terrifyingly.
‘Lie forward,’ I snarled at him.
‘Can’t, Mr Charlie – I’m up to me belly.’
‘Wait, I’ll get the suitcase.’
I had to strike a match to find the suitcase, then another to find Jock again in the tantalizing shimmer of wet sand and starshine. I thrust the suitcase forward and he laid his arms on it, hugging it to his chest, driving it into the mud as he bore down on it.
‘No good, Mr Charlie,’ he said at last. I’m up to me armpits and I can’t breathe much any more.’ His voice was a horrid travesty.
Behind us – not nearly far enough behind us – I heard the rhythmic patter of feet on wet sand.
‘Go on, Mr Charlie, scarper!’
‘Christ, Jock, what do you think I am?’
‘Don’t be stupid,’ he gasped. ‘Piss off. But do me a favour first. You know. I don’t want it like this. Might take half an hour. Go on, do it.’
‘Christ, Jock,’ I said again, appalled.
‘Go on, me old mate. Quick. Put the leather in.’
I scrambled to my feet, aghast. Then I couldn’t bear the noises he was making any more and I stepped on to the suitcase with my left foot and trod on his head with my right foot, grinding at it. He made dreadful noises but his head wouldn’t go under. I kicked at it frantically again and again, until the noises stopped, then I clawed up the suitcase and ran blindly, weeping with horror and terror and love.
When I heard the water chuckling below me I guessed my position and threw myself at the channel, not caring whether it was the crossing place or not. I got over, leaving my right shoe in the mud – that shoe, thank God – and ran north, each breath tearing at my windpipe. Once I fell and couldn’t get up; behind me and to the left I saw torches flickering: perhaps one of them had gone to join Jock – I don’t know, it’s not important. I kicked the other shoe off and got up and ran again, cursing and weeping, falling into gullies, tearing my feet on stones and shells, the suitcase battering at my knees, until at last I crashed into the remains of the breakwater at Jenny Brown’s Point.
There I pulled myself together a little, sitting on the suitcase, trying to think calmly, starting to learn to live with what had happened. No, with what I had done. With what I have done. A soft rain began to fall and I turned my face up to it, letting it rinse away some of the heat and the evil.
The knapsack was back at Quicksand Pool; all the necessities of life were in it. The suitcase was almost empty except for some packets of currency. I needed a weapon, shoes, dry clothes, food, a drink, shelter and – above all – a friendly word from someone, anyone.
Keeping the low limestone cliffs on my right hand I stumbled along the shore for almost a mile to Know End Point, where the salt-marsh proper begins – that strange landscape of sea-washed turf and gutters and flashes where the finest lambs in England graze.
Above me and to my right shone the lights of the honest bungalow dwellers of Silverdale: 1 found myself envying them bitterly. It is chaps like them who have the secret of happiness, they know the art of it, they always knew it. Happiness is an annuity, or it’s shares in a Building Society; it’s a pension and blue hydrangeas, and wonderfully clever grandchildren, and being on the Committee, and just-a-few-earlies in the vegetable garden, and being alive and wonderful-for-his-age when old so-and-so is under the sod, and it’s doubleglazing and sitting by the electric fire remembering that time when you told the Area Manager where he got off and that other time when that Doris …
Happiness is easy: I don’t know why more people don’t go in for it.
I stole along the road leading up from the shore. My watch said 11.40. It was Friday, so licensing hours would have ended at eleven, plus ten minutes drinking-up time plus, say, another ten minutes getting rid of the nuisances. My soaked and ragged socks made wet whispers on the pavement. There were no cars outside the hotel, no lights on in front. I was starting to shake with cold and reaction and the hope of succour as I hobbled through the darkened car park and round to the kitchen window.
I could see the landlord, or joint proprietor as he prefers to be called, standing quite near the kitchen door; he was wearing the disgraceful old hat which he always puts on for cellar work and his face, as ever, was that of a hanging judge. He has watched my career with a jaundiced eye for some five and twenty years, on and off, and he has not been impressed.
He opened the kitchen door and looked me up and down impassively.
‘Good evening, Mr Mortdecai,’ he said, ‘you’ve lost a bit of weight.’
‘Harry,’ I gabbled, ‘you’ve got to help me. Please.’
‘Mr Mortdecai, the last time you asked me for drinks after hours was in nineteen hundred and fifty-six. The answer is still no.’
‘No, Harry, really. I’m in serious trouble.’
‘That’s right, Sir.’
‘Eh?’
‘I said – “that’s right, Sir.”’
‘How d’you mean?’
‘I mean two gentlemen were here inquiring after your where-abouts last evening, stating that they were from the Special Branch. They were most affable but they displayed great reluctance to produce their credentials when requested to do so.’ He always talks like that.
I didn’t say anything more, I just looked at him beseechingly. He didn’t actually smile but his glare softened a little, perhaps.
‘You’d better be off now, Mr Mortdecai, or you’ll be disturbing my routine and I’ll be forgetting to bolt the garden door or something.’
‘Yes. Well, thanks, Harry. Goodnight.’
‘Goodnight, Charlie.’
I slunk back into the shadow of the squash court and crouched there in the rain with my thoughts. He had called me Charlie, he never had before. That was one for the book: that was the friendly word. Jock, at the end, had called me his old mate.
One by one the lights in the hotel went out. The church clock had struck half-past midnight with the familiar flatness before I crept round the building, through the rock terrace, and tied the garden door. Sure enough, someone had carelessly forgotten to bolt it. It gives on to a little sun-parlour with two sun-faded settees. I peeled off my drenched clothes, draped them on one settee and my wracked body on the other, with a grunt. As my eyes grew used to the dimness I discerned a group of objects on the table between the settees. Someone had carelessly left a warm old topcoat there, and some woollen underclothes and a towel: also a loaf of bread, three quarters of a cold chicken, forty Embassy tipped cigarettes, a bottle of Teacher’s whisky and a pair of tennis shoes. It’s astonishing how careless some of these hoteliers are, no wonder they’re always complaining.
It must have been four o’clock in the morning when I let myself out of the little sun-parlour. The moon had risen and luminous clouds were scudding across it at a great pace. I skirted the hotel and found the footpath behind it which goes across the Lots, those strangely contoured limestone downs clad with springy turf. I gave the Burrows’ heifers the surprise of their lives as I jogged between them in the dark. It is only a few hundred yards to the Cove, where once the sailing ships from Furness unloaded ore for the furnace at Leighton Beck. Now, since the channels shifted, it is close-nibbled turf, covered with a few inches of sea-water two or three times a month.
What is more to the point, there is a cave in the cliff, below the inexplicable ivy-gnawed battlements which surmount it. It is an uninviting cave, even the children do not care to explore it, and there is reputed to be a sudden drop at the end of it, to an unplumbed pit. Dawn was making its first faint innuendos in the East as I clambered in.
I slept until noon out of sheer exhaustion, then ate some more of the bread and chicken and drank more of the Scotch. Then I went to sleep again: dreams would be bad, I knew, but waking thoughts for once were worse. I awoke in the late afternoon.
The light is fading rapidly now. Later tonight I shall call on my brother.
To be exact, it was in the early hours of this Sunday morning that I stole out of the cave and drifted up into the village through the dark. The last television set had been reluctantly switched off, the last poodle had been out for its last piddle, the last cup of Bournvita had been brewed. Cove Road was like a well-kept grave: husbands and wives lay dreaming of past excesses and future coffee-mornings, they gave out no vibrations, it was hard to believe they were there. A motor car approached, driven with the careful sedateness of a consciously drunk driver; I stepped into the shadows until it had passed. A cat rubbed itself against my right foot; a few days ago I would have kicked it without compunction but now I could not even kick my own brother. Not with that foot.
The cat followed me up the slope of Walling’s Lane, mewing inquisitively, but it turned tail at the sight of the big white tom who crouched under the hedge like a phantom Dick Turpin. Lights were burning up at Yewbarrow and a strain of New Orleans jazz filtered down through the trees – old Bon would be settling down to an all-night poker and whisky session. As I turned right at Silver Ridge there was one brief deep bay from the St. Bernard, then no more sounds save for the whisper of my own feet along Elmslack. Someone had been burning garden rubbish and a ghost of the smell lingered – one of the most poignant scents in the world, at once wild and homely.
Off the lane I picked my way along the just discernible footpath which drops down to the back wall of Woodfields Hall, the seat of Robin, Second Baron Mortdecai, etc. Golly, what a name. He was born shortly before the Great War, as you can tell: it was de rigueur to call your son Robin in that decade and my mother was remorselessly de rigueur, as anyone could tell you, if nothing else.
You’d never guess where I am writing this. I’m sitting, knees doubled up to my chin, on my childhood’s lavatory in the nursery wing of my brother’s house. It has happier memories for me than most of the rest of the house, which is haunted by my father’s cupidity and chronic envy, my mother’s febrile regret at having married an impossible cad and now by my brother’s crawling disgust at everything and everyone. Including himself. And especially me – he wouldn’t spit in my face if it were on fire, unless he could spit petrol.
Beside me on the wall there is a roll of soft, pink lavatory paper: our nurse would never have allowed that, she believed in Spartan bums for the children of the upper classes and we had to use the old-fashioned, crackling, broken-glass variety.
I have just been in my old bedroom which is always kept ready for me, never altered or disturbed; just the kind of false note my brother loves sardonically to strike. He often says, ‘Do remember that you always have a home here, Charlie,’ then waits for me to look sick. Under a floorboard in my room I groped for and found a large oilskin package containing my first and favourite handgun, a 1920 Police and Military Model Smith and Wesson .455, the most beautiful heavy revolver ever designed. A few years ago, before I took up whisky as an indoor sport, I could do impressive things to a playing card with this pistol at twenty paces, and I am confident that I could still hit a larger target in a good light. Like, say, Martland.
There is one box of military ammunition for it – nickel jacketed and very noisy – and most of a box of plain lead target stuff, hand-loaded with a low powder charge, much more useful for what I have in mind. You wouldn’t be allowed to use it in war, of course, that soft lead ball can do dreadful things to anything it hits, I’m happy to say.
I shall finish my bottle of Teacher’s, with a wary eye on the door lest a long-dead Nanny should catch me, then go downstairs and visit my brother. I shall not tell him how I got into the house. I shall just let him worry about it, it’s the sort of thing he does worry about. I have no intention of shooting him, it would be an inexcusable self-indulgence at this time. In any case, it would probably be doing him a favour and I owe him a lot of things but no favours.
As I let myself quietly into the library, my brother Robin was sitting with his back to me, writing his memoirs with a scratchy noise. Without turning round or ceasing to scratch at the paper he said,
‘Hullo, Charlie, I didn’t hear anyone let you in?’
‘Expecting me, Robin?’
‘Everyone else knocks.’ Pause. ‘Didn’t you have any trouble with the dogs as you came through the kitchen garden?’
‘Look, those dogs of yours are as much use as tits on a warthog. If I’d been a burglar they’d have offered to hold my torch.’
‘You’ll be wanting a drink,’ he said, flatly, insultingly.
‘I’ve given it up, thanks.’
He stopped scribbling and turned round. Looked me up and down, slowly, caressingly.
‘Going ratting?’ he asked at last.
‘No, you needn’t worry tonight.’
‘Would you like something to eat?’
‘Yes, please. Not now,’ I added as his hand went to the bell. ‘I’ll help myself later. Tell me who has been asking for me lately.’
‘No village drabs with babies in their arms this year. Just a couple of comedians from some obscure branch of the Foreign Office, I didn’t ask what they wanted. Oh, and a hard-faced bitch who said you’d been heard of in Silverdale and wanted to ask you to address the Lakeland Ladies’ Etching Society or something of that sort.’
‘I see. What did you tell them?’
‘Said I thought you were in America, was that right?’
‘Quite right, Robin. Thanks.’ I didn’t ask him how he knew I had been in America; he wouldn’t have told me and I didn’t really care. He sets aside a certain portion of his valuable time to following my doings, in the hopes that one day I’ll give him an opening. He’s like that.
‘Robin, I’m on a Government assignment which I can’t tell you about but it does involve getting quietly up into the Lake District and living rough for a few days – I need some stuff. A sleeping bag, some tinned food, a bicycle, torch, batteries, that sort of thing.’ I watched him thinking how many of the items he could plausibly pretend not to have. I unbuttoned my coat, which fell open: the handle of the Smith and Wesson stuck up out of my waistband like a dog’s leg.
‘Come along,’ he said cordially, ‘let’s see what we can rustle up.’
We rustled up everything in the end, although I had to remind him where some of the things were kept. I also took the Lake District sheet of the one-inch Ordnance Survey map to add colour to my fibs and two bottles of Black Label whisky.
‘Thought you’d given it up, dear boy?’
‘This is just for washing wounds out with,’ I explained courteously.
I also took a bottle of turpentine. You, shrewd reader, will have guessed why, but he was mystified.
‘Look,’ I said as he let me out, ‘please don’t tell anyone, anyone, that I’ve been here, or where I’m going, will you?’
‘Of course not,’ he said warmly, looking me straight in the eye to show me his falseness. I waited.
‘And Charlie …’
‘Yes,’ I said, face blank.
‘Do remember, you always have a home here.’
‘Thanks, old chap,’ I replied gruffly.
As Hemingway says somewhere: even when you have learned not to answer letters, families have many ways of being dangerous.
Topheavy with my load of Boy-Scout dunnage, I pedalled erratically to the cemetery, then down Bottom’s Lane, turned left at the Green and skirted Leighton Moss until I came to Crag Foot. I pushed the machine very quietly past the farm for fear of dogs and threaded my way up the broken road to the Crag.
The Crag is a sort of crag-shaped feature of limestone, rich in minerals and seamed with crevasses or ‘grikes’ as they call them hereabouts. It is a mile square on the map (SD 47:49,73) but it seems a great deal larger when you are trying to pick your way over it. Here, two hundred years ago, hoved the dreaded Three Fingered Jack, conning the Marsh with his spy-glass for unprotected travellers whose bones now lie full fathom five, enriching the greedy sands of Morecambe Bay. (Oh Jock – ‘never shake thy gory locks at me!’)
The Crag is riddled and pitted with holes of every sort, the Dog Hole, Fairy Hole, Badger Hole – all of which have given up ancient bones and implements – and forgotten shafts where minerals were dug in the vague past, and the foundations of immeasurably old stone huts and, highest of all, defence works made by the Ancient Britons themselves. It’s a wonderful place for breaking a leg, even the poachers won’t risk it at night. In front are the salt marshes and the sea, behind stands the Gothick beauty of Leighton Hall. To the right you can look down over the reedy haven of Leighton Moss and to your left there is the desolation of Carnforth.
Copper was the great thing to mine for here, long ago, but what I was aiming for was a certain paint mine. A red-oxide working, to be exact. Red-oxide or ruddle-mining was a thriving industry on the Crag once upon a time and the deserted shafts still weep a messy redness, the colour of a really vulgar Swiss sunset. It took me an hour to find the shaft I remembered best; it goes down steeply for ten feet, looking very wet and red, but then flattens out, turns right at an acute angle and becomes quite dry and airy. A friendly bramble now cloaks its entrance, I had the devil of a job fighting my way in.