Common Ground (32 page)

Mmmmmm. Mmmmmm.
The noises seem to come from somewhere else. From the ground. From the wood. But Thomas is making them. He is rocking back and forth, humming and shaking uncontrollably. The dead and dying litter the dusk-veiling wood –
aaah, aaaah, aaaaah
. And that sound is not the weir, but Arthur hissing. And Thomas wants to tell him he's sorry and how, after nightfall, he slid all the way back to their lines past those dead and dying and all he thought of was swimming together in the Nidd and shooting grouse on the Glorious Twelfth and hunting pheasants in Spring Wood at Christmas. But he can't speak; he lies on his face, moaning and shaking as the bell of Bilton church begins to toll.

You've forgotten the game again.

Too tired. Too tired.

The nettle. Concentrate. The nettle, for God's sake.
The shaking subsides but his hands are still too unsteady to strike a match.
Strike. Strike.
This time he does it and it flares in the air. He draws deeply on the woodbine, turns it inward to his palm. And rocks. And looks at the nettle.
How long does a nettle live?
The tobacco rolls in his lungs; the fog, the white mist rolls across his brain as the bell tolls its last. Seven.
How long does a nettle live? Indefinitely.
And he understands that he will never see this place again. This is the end of all of this, of him, of the hall, of Bilton Park, of the world he knew, of everything. That's what Arthur's been trying to tell him.
You don't need to be afraid, Thomas
. But he's not afraid. Not now he understands. Not now he's seen the sunset turning the sky orange and copper and there is the burnt-toffee tang of woodsmoke drifting from the cottages on Bilton Lane. Not now he's felt the
good earth
and drunk in its smell again. Not now he knows the nettle will endure.
There's your eternal life.
And not now he knows he will never be lost in that dead land. ‘For I shall leave myself here,' he says out loud. ‘All I've lived; all I might have lived. I'll leave it here.' And Arthur hisses in agreement,
Yesssssss, yessssssss.

Time to go.

Grasp the nettle
, that's what the colonel said the night before the attack.
We must grasp the nettle.
Right now, before that walk along Bilton's fields and under the fire-skies to the railway, before this shell of himself is bundled back through an unreal England and onto a boat for Boulogne. Before he wanders dazed and emptied back up the line to his death, like Charles I trussed on a mare.
First comes crucifixion then resurrection
. He will pass through the veil. The soul into the earth. He will release the edge of his being and let it seep into the stem and slip through its rhizomes, to be locked here in this land.
His
land.
We must grasp the nettle
for the nettle cannot die.
Pull them out and they'll only come back.
How did he never see before how perfect and sublime nature is? He looks at his hand and the pink burn in its centre. ‘I will stay for ever.' And Arthur hisses again in agreement,
Yesssssss, yessss.
And so, wide-eyed, half-smiling, Thomas reaches for the nettle and closes his fist around its leaves.

The nettle catches in my palm as I haul my way up the bank. Wrapping my arm around an oak, I feel a sharp sting and shake my hand free. It's a surprising-looking thing, the perpetrator: shoulder-high, gangly, old and woody with twisted stems and frills of yellow leaves trailing to the ground like moth-eaten embroidery. Toppling it against the tree is a weighty cluster of new leaves – as though a hefty sprig of mint has been stuck in its end. They are soft, small and delicate but, as my palm proves, potent enough. The burning takes a few seconds to materialise but I know it's coming. The broken-off tips of countless needles are already embedded, reddening my skin.

I find a ragged dock, crush and spit on a leaf then rub it between my hands, leaving a green, watery stain. Sitting down on the collapsed stones of what was once a wall, I inspect my throbbing hand and then look about me. This is a handsome spot, and one I've walked through before: it is the edge of the wood at the far side of a field where hares run in spring. I'm just inside the treeline, by the seam that separates the mass of pines, ashes and oaks from the crew-cut straws of harvested wheat. This margin is a cascade of nettles lit with the occasional autumnal golds and scarlets of dying willowherb and bramble leaves. Brittle thistles erupt with tufts of down the colour of dirty silk. A bird I can't discern –
a goldfinch?
– squawks a note from high up in the pines. Things crackle, click and stir in the undergrowth. It's a blessed place especially now as it gets the last of the streaming sun. With evening falling the light appears to slip down the gradient of the field and puddle at my feet. But there is also a strangeness here, a keen sense of what lies beneath. A thinness in the fabric. This is a margin within a margin. And as the sting becomes a burn in my palm, an odd air of melancholy materialises; I can feel an emotional transference every bit as real as the histamine swelling my skin. There is a very clear sense of someone else being here before, someone else seeing the same views over the field and, behind, down the steep side of the gorge to the Nidd; someone else seeing the lengthening of their shadow and the lowering sun flashing along the same river gorge through the trees. It's moments like these that make you think places have a memory of their own.

It's hardly a theory, more a feeling born of so long spent outside, but what if landscapes somehow become repositories of personal and collective memory? What if traces are imprinted or stored in an imperceptible or intangible way, and the land itself retains the culture of a place? Then, what if when a certain set of stimuli is triggered, a kind of molecular union occurs between that place and a person whereby memories and experiences are passed on like the sting of a nettle? You may laugh and perhaps it's all overactive imagination, but this is what it feels like as I sit and look out tonight from the edge of the wood – the sense of a presence, an emptiness and sadness, not of my making but occupying the ground, as if time is flicking back and forth and beyond worlds, long since committed, buried, forgotten, are leaning into mine.

In the self-indulgent
because you're worth it
tone of our times, the birthing books instruct couples entering the last few weeks of pregnancy to get a few things out of their system. Namely to enjoy all those things that they won't be doing for a while – seeing friends, having dinners out, trips to the cinema or the theatre, late nights and long lie-ins. Your world will soon be shrinking, they advise, horizons narrowing to a small bundle in a Moses basket. The walls of the house will become locked-down borders of your own little, happy, bleary-eyed country where time becomes a surreal concept and a rare commodity. Just finding a second to wash up or go for a shower will feel like an impossible task on top of keeping a tiny baby healthy and happy, alongside the pressures of earning a living. And there are plenty of warnings aimed specifically at expectant fathers: even if you're not the one doing the feeding, don't expect any downtime when you clock off work, mister. You will be in a whirlwind of nappy changing, clothes washing and cleaning up. So enjoy yourself now. Go out before you go in.

Self-indulgence or not, Rosie and I take the books at their word. It's a good excuse, anyway. Autumn is busying itself with politely but firmly evicting the now-destitute summer, apologetically brushing its belongings into the gutters and replacing them with its own ornaments: the dried, browned, straw sculptures of the hedges, roadsides and gardens, the ash keys, the bright, bloody haws and the inky orbs of elderberries; the scatterings of beech mast and conkers. In the wood it has already nailed-up its own curtains. They are threadbare compared to those that hung here a fortnight ago, but exquisite nonetheless, dotted with reds, lemon yellows, greener yellows and all stitched through with the holy light of golden sun. Every night for a week we walk through the edge-land and drink in the long evenings after work, moving at what seems an appropriately sedate pace with plenty of rest stops for perching and watching. We move at
Pregnant Speed
. Our quiet, slow tread surprises a roe deer walking through the field by the holloway; it hesitates and then whips its whole body sideways and runs, stroking the stubble with its hooves as it passes beneath a pylon and vanishes into the wood. Swallows on telegraph wires are unfazed as we pass below; silhouetted against the grey sky, wire and bird become Franz Kline abstracts of black line and sharp brush dabs and strokes. Rounding a corner at the top of The Lane, a thunderclap of riotous applause greets us as hundreds of little hedge birds burst from their roosts in a cloud flurry, like flies from a cowpat. They bounce away along the hawthorn and blackthorn, barely touching it, the way a finger tests a red-hot surface. In the fields we watch rooks rise and mass in the sky like iron filings around a magnet, pulled westwards over the viaduct to settle again down into the rusting trees.

On Friday at five o'clock I'm outside a pub carrying a round of drinks through a sun-flooded beer garden. The struts of the bare pergola above me turn the ground into a grid of light and shade. Rosie has driven south for the weekend to visit her sisters and I'm catching up with an old mate, Matt. He has plans for dinner with work colleagues in town, but there's still plenty of time for a pint or three. It's always the way with friends you've known for ever: you see each other far too rarely, and then when you do, you wish you had longer. We've hardly spoken since I moved north despite the fact that he only lives half an hour away, so we drink too fast, trying to make amends for lost nights and missed meetings. More rounds are fetched. And more. The light shifts and shadows stretch; we hop tables to keep in its warmth. Talk turns from babies to what's been occupying my time. I babble about the edge-land and its extraordinary variousness, about following the fox and the owls and the hares, about Sir Hare and Bilton Spring, about the deer leaping over me, the stoned kids and the mayflies, about the swifts gathering at the sewage works and the butterfly landing on my forehead in the meadow. I tell him about the edge-land's fragmented human histories and try to bring to life its topographic delirium. ‘Here, here,' I say eventually, pulling out a notebook and flicking through to the first map I drew. I push it across the table. ‘Do you know where I mean?' I run my finger along the old railway. ‘They're putting in a cycle-path here.'

He sips his beer and sets down the glass. ‘Bilton? Yes, of course I do.'

Of course he does. Stupid question. He is a surveyor in Leeds; he knows the geography of this region as well as anyone.

‘You know that whole area's a developer's dream, right?' he says.

‘It
was—
'

‘No, no. It still is.'

‘But they stopped building at the old railway in the nineteen nineties.'

‘They did, but they've been itching to re-start residential development ever since. There's a lot of land around there that isn't Green Belt. It's Green Field.'

‘What's the difference?'

‘One is protected. Well, sort of. For now, at least. The other isn't.'

I spin my map back around and tap my finger on its sketched meadows and fields. ‘You mean like these?'

‘Exactly. But others too. It's much wider than that. Thirty hectares or so.' He draws a diamond shape with his finger all the way over to the sewage works. ‘This area's known as
The Bilton Triangle
and they've been looking at it for decades. It's just the same story as everywhere else in Britain. Massive demand for housing and little available space to build on. But they're trying hard to push things through.'

‘How hard?'

‘Well, not long ago Harrogate District proposed to allocate land for three hundred houses every year up to twenty thirty.'

‘Three hundred a
year?
'

‘For the whole district. But the planning inspector rejected it out of hand.'

‘I'm not surprised. That seems an incredible amount …'

Matt frowns at me over his glass. ‘No, mate. They rejected it because it wasn't enough. The developers are suggesting nine hundred a year.'

I feel stricken. I try to imagine what that would look like, but it scrambles my brain. ‘Hang on. So what's stopping them building over it now?' I ask. ‘Local objection?'

He shakes his head. ‘The roads. There isn't the traffic infrastructure to support the numbers of homes they're talking about. It would mean a load of work and disruption to build the new relief routes required.'

‘But they will eventually?'

He nods. ‘They'll have to.'

‘How long?'

‘Could be ten, twenty, thirty years. Might only be five. But they desperately need the houses so, in the end, it's only a matter of time.'

After checking his watch he pushes his chair up and gathers our empty glasses. ‘Speaking of which. One last round? Then I've absolutely got to go.'

But he doesn't. And neither do I.

As night falls we repair to the main room and grab seats. After all, I'm under instructions.
I'm supposed to be here
, I remind myself while stocking up on more of the locally brewed ruby red. Then before we know it, a bell is ringing and the barman is shouting to make himself heard. ‘Last orders,' he bellows.
‘Last orders.'

All the way home along Skipton Road, walking unsteadily at
Pregnant Speed
, I think of the irony of the edge-land being safeguarded by a road, and of Matt's words –
It's only a matter of time.
I suppose you could say the same for anything. For the universe. When you boil everything down, all is a matter of time – or matter
and
time – but some things are too large to comprehend. I never expected the edge-land around Bilton to remain as it is for ever, I just hadn't thought of it ceasing to exist at all. We're not good at confronting endings until we're forced to, even though the unshakeable truth of our own conclusion is always with us, that deep terror lurking in the back of the mind. That curse of our consciousness. We become masters at training ourselves to forget about it, concentrating instead on the many joys and wonders of living, and the little distractions and the destinies we feel we can control – jobs, relationships, family, friends, going to the pub, the routes of cycle-paths. These are the walls we build to keep those other thoughts at bay.