Imagination and memory

I went on a walk over Oaklass Moors with Mum and Dad. We set out very early, and were donning our boots and thick socks in Oaklass car park at ten o’clock.

Our route was a familiar one that we’ve done at least a couple of times before so I knew every part of it well. We walked through Oaklass to the waterfall, which is very popular this time of year, filled with lots of tents and cars and families. We struggled up the steep path to the ‘pavement’ of scree at the back of the waterfall and then through the desolate landscape beyond, leaving all the people behind. Oaklass Pond was soon opening up before us, its wooded borders contrasting with the high limestone scarred fells beyond.

We ate our dinner at the water’s edge.

The rest of the walk was a gradual climb beyond the Pond, following a tarmac road some of the way before cutting across the boggy moors to Ewedar Edge. I clambered into Albert Cave and briefly relived my potholing days as I crawled on my belly between boulders to emerge thirty yards away, much to Dad’s amusement. It was warm as we slogged along the foot of Ewedar Edge, the unchanging limestone precipices gleaming remote and glittering in the sun, the call of curlews and the lone silhouette of a hawk high above the rocky skyline.

Dad reminisced about a day out he had had as a fifteen year old, pushing his bicycle up past Ewedar, and the high crags and rock faces had never seemed so awesome and alone to him as then, and he’d wished he’d someone to share the feeling with. . . .

Soon the sun was swallowed up by grey rafts of cloud and we were climbing again, past Cartdale Hall in its bowl of black forbidding hills, overlooked by the dark granite peak of Coneyford Haw. Spots of rain began to fall but we trudged on and on, up and up, past herds of cattle and young calves, through limestone boulders breaking through the turf, up to the very head of the pass and a sweeping panorama back down to Oaklass Pond and beyond to Ainderdale.

In the plains towards Sandhow and Parson’s Moss, a grey pall of rain blotted out all but the faint whaleback outline of hills and threw the distinctive twin peaks of Owl and Black Crag into sharp, dark relief against the all-consuming grey. The rain still spat, and although we were still shadowed by a black cloud bottom its fringes were bright, and we could glimpse placid skies with towering yellow cumuli far away on the horizon.

It was late afternoon by the time we had descended once more to Oaklass for tea and toasted teacakes at Braystone Lodge. The journey home took fifty minutes and those vistas I can never capture in words were relegated once more to the land of imagination and memory.

The country is in the grip of what some would call a crisis. The miners have been on strike for seventeen weeks and the dockers are out now too, tightening their grip with today’s announcement that all lorries are banned from ferry services. Dad is convinced the two strikes are part of a larger plot by “subversives” and “left-wing types” to overthrow the established order.

I find it hard to understand when the leaders of the striking dock-workers are quick to deny there are any political aspects to their strike and that it’s purely economic. I suppose on one hand it’s easy to see why: The union leadership is scared of losing its stake, scared of destroying their bourgeois respectability—scared of making plain what they know deep down to be true. Instead of shrinking from the truth, the union leadership should broadcast it.

No doubt the workers themselves know it.

Striking is obviously political because economic relations dictates political power in the country—employees and employers, workers and state. When scenes of police clad in riot gear battling with stone throwing miners appear on our TVs who can deny that the strike isn’t for purely economic reasons? The miners and the dockers are engaged in a fight with the police, the judiciary and the media—all the apparatus of the State. I doubt they can win—indeed, in most peoples’ eyes they are the villains of the piece anyway.

A compromise, in famous British tradition, will end the dispute and life will again return to normal . . . . I hope I’m wrong.