Mouldywarp
The question posed by the reiver display was one that we were often asked in the first months of living on the border. A young man whose family would be considered neighbours though they live four miles away came up to Margaret while she was parking her bicycle outside a village hall. ‘Are you the American lady?’ he asked. She confirmed his identification, adding that she came from Chicago via Nashville, Tennessee. ‘So if you wanted to,’ he suggested, ‘you could live anywhere you liked in America? You could live in New York!’ ‘Yes, I suppose I could,’ she agreed. His face creased up with incredulity: ‘Then why did you decide to live here?’
Later, the question changed. Instead of, ‘Why did you come up here?’, it was, ‘You’re still here, then?’ To people born locally, the decision seemed bizarre because of the scarcity of sun and what they saw as the inconvenience of not owning a car. But they understood a love of the country, and the thought of riding a bicycle in the rain was not as amazing to sheep-farming folk as it had been to some of our friends in the south.
The same question was asked by quite a different group of people with something more sinister in mind. To many southerners, ‘Cumbria’ means the Lake District – that miniature Scotland-without-Scottish-people, associated with Romantic poetry, happy holidays and relatively inexpensive retirement homes. Liddesdale, which straddles the border, is a long way from the tourist-thronged Lakes and there is no community of wealthy English ‘ex-pats’.
Friends of friends from southern England warned us about the world we had entered. Those fortress-like farmhouses were the lairs of unreformed reivers. One farmer was said to have ‘accidentally’ and repeatedly severed the electricity cable connected to the house of his new neighbours. Another Liddesdale miscreant had sprayed the outside of his neighbour’s house with slurry. The nearest inn, which could pass for a lonely smugglers’ tavern, was said to be reasonably safe, but only ‘until nine o’clock’.
This was the Cumbrian ‘breed’ I had read about in books and magazine articles, some of which were written by people who claimed to be, however distantly, Cumbrian. There was certainly evidence of feuds and clannish loyalties, grudges spanning generations, and a good deal of mischievous gossip. I have lost count of the number of local people reported to have been found drunk in a ditch. Far more complicated webs of enmity are spun through the suburbs of a city. Here, the effect of gossip is less pernicious. Stand on a deserted road away from any dwelling, and there is a good chance that, within half an hour, a small group of people will form. News of illness or accident spreads with astonishing speed. That winter, Margaret fell off her bike on a patch of black ice. She picked herself up and pedalled home unhurt. No house has a view of that stretch of road and no one was about. Over the next three weeks, a dozen different people asked if she was all right and still cycling. The news had spread as far as Longtown, nine miles to the south.
Was this an example of the rural telegraph which made the march wardens’ work so difficult? Catching a reiver unawares was practically impossible. The sophisticated noblemen who served the state were accustomed to ciphered letters and cleverly concealed post bags. Confused by their enemy, they watched tinkers and horse-dealers cross the border passes and thought of ‘spies and lookers into the privity [secrets] of the country’. They heard the cry of a barn owl or a curlew, spotted marks cut in a smooth patch of turf or in the bark of a tree, saw fires blazing on the tops of pele towers and suspected the existence of a complex communications network. The bedsheets spread on hedges and hillsides by the housewives of Liddesdale, ‘washed wi’ the fairy-well water, and bleached on the bonnie white gowans [daisies]’,7 were believed to be signals to alert the entire valley to a government raid.
Such subtle devices might have been used but they were not strictly necessary. Where nothing much happens, news travels fast. As one of the English wardens noted in alarm at the shrinking of distances, ‘rumours are swift messengers’. These days, postmen spend the morning driving up and down dead-end lanes, increasingly laden with news as the postbag grows lighter. School buses collect children from remote, deserted crossroads; shepherds lean on walls and gates, scanning large areas of hillside. Within twelve hours of a violent storm, some people are able to provide a comprehensive damage report covering about eighty square miles.
The effect is magnified by the web of family relations, but the main factor is physical geography and local government. The Cumbrian ‘breed’ is a product of environment, not genetics. Many of the people I thought of as Cumbrian turned out to come from elsewhere. I happen to know that the two local women mentioned in a recent book about the border line, who seemed to exemplify that Cumbrian taciturnity, moved to Cumbria from counties far to the south. The most notorious reivers, who might have sprung from the bogs and bentgrass of the Borders, had migrated from other parts. The Grahams probably originated in Fife and most of their ‘English’ tenants were Scots; no one knows for certain the origins of the Armstrongs, who arrived in the Debatable Land in the early sixteenth century.
The independent spirit of borderers, which ‘offcomers’ can mistake for effrontery, is inseparable from remoteness and the lack of services. The nearest police and fire stations are more than eight miles distant, but the police station is unstaffed and when the fire trucks arrived recently in Nicholforest to put out a fire large enough to be seen from a village several miles away in Scotland, no working fire hydrant could be found and the water had to be drawn from a stream swiftly dammed with hay bales and sucked up from a fish pond two miles down the road. ‘You could see Rodney’s fish flying into the flames,’ said the man whose property had been destroyed.
Southerners tend to view the native population in terms of social class, which usually entails a moral judgement. Borderers are more likely to consider people from the point of view of their social function. This can be as confusing to outsiders as the activities of the reivers were to government officials. The need to adapt to difficult conditions, the relative freedom from class constraints and a potent dislike of pomposity can make even the most candid of Cumbrians seem shifty and elusive. A gamekeeper in the wild looks very different from the same man dressed to guide a visiting party of pheasant-shooters, just as a reiver strolling through Carlisle on market day might have been hard to identify as the man who, the night before, had been setting fire to a warden’s house.
*
One of the locally famous ‘characters’ of Liddesdale – a man well loved by his neighbours and respected for his professionalism – might have appeared to be an enigmatic, disconcerting specimen of the human fauna of the Borders. Sometimes, he could be seen crawling over a field. At other times, dressed in a dapper moleskin waistcoat and an elegant hat, he would be pushing a bicycle along a street in Newcastleton. I first met him that winter when returning from Carlisle. The 127 bus slowed unexpectedly and stopped at one of the invisible bus stops in open country. A stocky, elderly man clambered aboard, weighed down by his muddy tweeds and a misshapen sack. ‘Only one caught,’ I heard him say to the driver. He tottered down the aisle, the bus remaining motionless until he reached his seat, then sat in front of me, facing away from the driver, and went on, as though the change of interlocutor were immaterial, ‘But only two traps set.’
Several months later, riding to Newcastleton over the edge of Carby Hill, we saw a hunched figure in a red bandana kneeling in a field near the top of the climb, high above the valley. He appeared to be conducting a small burial. Something resembling a giant clothes peg jutted out of the ground in front of him. I thought of a gypsy performing an obscure rite. As we drew closer, I recognized him as the man from the bus. By then, I knew him to be Wattie Blakey, the master mole-catcher with more than seventy years’ experience of ridding farmers’ fields of the inexorable ‘mouldywarp’ or ‘mowdy’ which damages ploughs, breaks horses’ legs, spoils the silage and spreads disease to sheep.
Mr Blakey grew up in Newcastle upon Tyne but was evacuated to Cumbria during the Second World War. He does not drive a car. The bus service is inadequate and yet he manages to serve an area stretching from Longtown to the edge of the Kielder Forest. The fruits and proof of his labour can be seen, hooked by the snout onto barbed-wire fences, like sacrifices to a local god.
We stopped to say hello. Noticing our bikes, he pointed to the junction at the brow of the hill where the road drops down to Newcastleton. ‘I had a bike stolen from there,’ he growled. We expressed our sympathy at this alarming news. Was nowhere safe? . . . He explained that the driver of a recycling truck, spotting a discarded heap of old metal, had heaved it into his truck and carted it off to the dump. This is how we learned about the mole-catcher’s solution to the lack of public transport. Over the years, he had acquired seven old bicycles, which he left in various locations along the sparse bus lines. This greatly expanded his field of operations. He had, in effect, invented his own bike-share scheme long before the idea came into use in cities all over the world.