Souls

We set off at about half-past ten. It was drizzling and cloudy, but the sun began to break through as we drove through Gillrigg and Washgram. We met Rob and Carol in Stonesdale in the early afternoon, after a journey of over eighty miles.

We had a cup o’ tea and cheese-on-toast at a café in Stonesdale, the same café I remembered from three years before. Once again the family was all together, Mum and Dad and their three sons and daughter-in-law, together for perhaps the last time in a long time.

The caravan, a cream and brown contraption, sat in a corner of a small field near Friar Beck Farm, under great sprawling trees which darkened the sky. We unpacked quickly and wandered along the road towards the moorland by the ancient mounds of Wath Hill. It grew very warm; there were quite a few picnickers sitting about by their cars reading newspapers and eating.

We climbed up the short rabbit-cropped grass amid junipers and grey rocks and sat awhile gazing out over the haze-shrouded valley. Andrew took a few photos and Dad and Robert disappeared in search of what they thought was a shrike. We didn’t stay long and walked lazily back along the narrow road to our field beneath the trees.

I didn’t feel too good. Again I was overcome with tiredness and I slipped into sleep in the caravan. I don’t know why I’m so tired. I wonder if it’s anemia or something similar? I’ve not felt too good all week and when I wake up my sheets are sopping wet. I feel drowsy most days too. Too much inaction probably.

We had a quiet tea followed by a walk along the medieval Blea Gate, the wall of which skirts the lower end of the field in which our caravan stands. All was still, a silence broken only by the occasional chatter of a farm machine or the calling of sheep. Robert wandered off by himself.

He and Dad get on famously; as Robert gets older he slips more and more into a sad, melancholic and contemplative frame of mind which seems to strike a chord in the part of Dad that Robert springs from.

I felt so tired that I seemed to be having difficulty generating interest in anything; my eyes felt heavy and my feet leaden. We spotted a lone deer, standing solitary in the fields, watchful and alert below a clump of trees; two tiny fluffy wrens were rooted to a wall in static panic, desperately hoping they wouldn’t be seen.

As we approached the caravan, a group of Oystercatchers screamed and wheeled across the sky, circling round and round the ancient fortified mound that stands behind the caravan in a field. In myth, Oystercatchers are supposed to be the lost souls of drowned sailors, long dead. Around they flew, screeching and calling hauntingly, before winging their way across the fields away into the dusk.

It’s now nearly dark and I’m sitting outside the caravan in a camp chair, listening to the hiss and quiet roar of wind in the leaves high above my head, while in front of me Dad and Robert are deep in conversation about Alan Garner and Arthur Machen. Robert’s voice is insistent, exuberant, Dad’s low and droning.

They’ve just gone in. The wind is whipping at the pages.

[Audio version]