Winter on the the Hill – Twenty Three
I know, the title Winter on the Hill is looking less appropriate as we head into early summer, but it’s metaphorical, right?
So:
The earth is rusty-red and dusty here, the sky a deep sepia tint, fading to the colour of straw where the sun has just gone behind the hills. There’s a pleasant warmth to the air, and a dryness. It’s coming out of the earth, quaking up from the rocks themselves as they give back to the heavens what the sun has poured into them all day. I’m sitting on the porch of a pioneer’s wooden cabin, out in the wilderness of Western Australia. We’re somewhere on the frontier, as it was I suppose towards the later nineteen twenties, and as near as I’ve imagined it at various points in my life.
News from home isn’t good. The vacuum of peace following the war to end all wars has been filled with the decimation of traditional industries and civil unrest on account of poverty. In America there’s been a market crash and stock brokers are leaping from the windows on Wall Street, though all this was as nothing compared with the hundred million worldwide who had already died from the H1N1 contagion, the so-called Spanish Flu.
I’m with Annie, the pair of us gazing at the afterglow of the sun. She came out on the SS Balranald in ’23, left her child with family in Ulverston, and she misses him deeply. He’ll come out when he’s older, just in time to get swept up in that second war, and sent out east – or rather west from here – to fight.
Charlie’s been dead since ’18 of course, but she still thinks of him, though by now she’s married anew, and carrying another man’s child – always something pragmatic, adventurous and uniquely admirable about Annie. And I suppose, though again I’m imagining all of this, what I admire in her, what marks her out for me is that she set the frontier of my matrilineal blood furthest from home, travelled as far as she could around the globe, planted her shovel in the dirt and said, this is where I’ll start again.
The world has seen such unimaginable upheaval, and no more so than in the first half of the twentieth century. Europe at least saw relative peace and prosperity after that, a period that coloured the aspirations of all, like me, who were born into the second half of that century. We never knew a world like Annie knew, and it’s hoodwinked us into thinking it’s impossible things could ever be like that again. I suppose ours being also the nuclear age, it gave us a certain bleakly arrogant confidence, that should such upheaval ever be visited upon our generation it would result in the earth being turned into a cinder, and would anybody really be so stupid?
Don’t answer that.
“I guess I’m dreaming all of this then, Annie?”
She nods, smiles tenderly. Her hair is dusty from a day tending the stock, which she describes as a sea of sheep, and her face, her cheeks, are different to my imagining, with their more natural pale Lancashire pallor burned red.
“I suppose so, Richard. But it’s lovely to see you, anyway.”
I’m not in the habit of dreaming of Annie, not like this, not so,… vividly. I know I tend to conjure her up in waking reveries, but that’s different. This is coming from the deeps, and there’s an easy pleasure in it, something comforting. I’m not saying this is anything more than it is, that I’m just dreaming, right? The thing is, I don’t know where I’m dreaming from, from what part of my life I have slept. Indeed, I can barely remember any of my life, yet still feel perfectly myself here, and complete, for all the lack of memory.
“I think I know what you’re trying to say to me,” I tell her. “But you were barely thirty when you came out here. I’m at the wrong end of my life, and anyway there’s nowhere like this now for ruined Brits to go to any more. All our bridges are burned. Our horizons have narrowed. Soon there won’t even be a Britain any more, just an England. And sixty million of us cooped up and screaming at each other.”
“Well, you don’t need to come all the way out here and tend sheep, Richard. All you need’s a bit of money to be comfortable. And you’ve got that. Do you think I would have made that decision if I’d your money?”
“But do I want to be comfortable? Is that all I’m good for now? Am I just another last man standing?”
“Well, no fun in prison either,” she says. “Or with your head bust open by a policeman’s billy-bat. Those are the times I remember too, and the times you’re running up against all over again, or so it seems to me, and God help you. But you’re in a position to ride it out.”
“True. And I’m too old for all that protesting anyway. I’m scared by it. And I don’t like being on a watch-list, same as any bloody murdering terrorist psychopath.”
“So what is it you want?”
“Just company, Annie. I want to be with someone who wants to be with me. Someone I can take care of. Protect.”
“Why protect?”
“I don’t know. Because in a way I was trying to protect others by my politics and my protests. By sticking it to the man on behalf of others.”
“And because you enjoyed it?”
“Yes, I’ll admit that. I did enjoy it.”
“So you led them to vote, and they voted for you to shove it up your arse. Fair enough. So maybe now you’re looking for something smaller and more docile to protect, like a hamster maybe? But have you thought what you need more than all of that Richard is someone who wants to protect you? Also, maybe you’re looking at things the wrong way. Sure events being what they are, it’s easy to say the world’s done for, but what about you? Are you done for? Inside I mean? Or after all the ups and downs of your life, could it be, do you think, that in spite of the way your thoughts are most naturally inclined these days, you’re actually on the cusp of a greatness of spirit like you’ve never known before?”
“Cusp of greatness? Doesn’t feel like that to me. Were you ever, do you think, on the cusp? Coming out here I mean?”
“Sure, why not? Can you imagine Blackburn in the nineteen twenties?”
“Seen pictures. Knew it best myself in the seventies. Time’s not improved it much.”
“Coming out here, Rick. I found myself, I think, or as near as a body could. You can do it too. You’ve got to see beyond events though. Events,… they’re just noise, like the clatter of a loom, it’s all incidental to the weave of the cloth. You see that, don’t you?”
“The cloth?”
“You, Richard. The warp and the weave of you.”
“You’re way ahead of me, Annie. You’re wasting your time looking over my shoulder. Me and my times, we’ve nothing to teach you.”
“Well, like I’m sure I’ve said before, you don’t get to my age and not pick up a thing or two. Nearly made it to ninety, I did. Outlived two husbands. Plus the times were, shall we say ‘interesting’. You tend to grow up fast when there’s a lot going on.”
“But you said the times, the details, they’re just noise.”
“Sure they are, which means in quiet times you can learn as much from the small things if you know how to look and how to read them. Me, I learned some lessons those six weeks crossing the world from Blackburn to Freemantle, say nothing of the next fifty out here. You’ll maybe learn as much just crossing over the threshold of a woman’s house. That can take you to a different continent, too, you know? All depends on what you do with it.”
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This is going up on Wattpad, a chapter at a time. We’ll be done by Christmas, when it’s winter again. I’ve no idea how it will turn out, but I’m finding the ideas fascinating, also the fact that Coronavirus hijacked the story half-way through, without derailing it one bit. It’s just the way I write them.