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These hills don’t quite make sense. Three of them together, standing up from the lower land of the Scottish Borders, miles away from anything else on the landscape that might explain their origin. Other ranges of hills demonstrate the ancient folding of Earth’s crust or the gouging of high land in glacial ages past. These just stand there as though lost.
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Berlin, UNter den linden, 1937 – Bundesarchiv, Bild 146-1998-011-01 / Hagemann, Otto / CC-BY-SA 3.0
It is always an exciting day when someone that we know and admire has their book published, especially when it concerns itself with our home city of Berlin. Emma Venables is an extremely talented writer (whose work we are proud to have published here on Elsewhere) and her debut novel Fragments of a Woman is both startling and impressive. Following the lives of five women in National Socialist Germany, I was extremely privileged to be given the opportunity to read an advance copy ahead of its publication this month.
Exploring themes of identity, nationalism, womanhood and motherhood, trauma and the crimes of National Socialism, this book is unflinching, moving and beautifully written, and for this reader at least posed a number of uncomfortable questions about how we as readers approach certain types of characters and the expectations and preconceptions we bring to someone else’s words on the page. Fragments of a Woman tells stories of Nazi Germany, at a time when there are no longer many around who can share their experiences, and stories such as these, when written with diligence and intelligence, will be increasingly important.
This book holds the reader by the head and makes us look, which we do with both empathy and, at times, horror. It is a fine achievement, and we thank Emma for the chance to share this extract with you… – Paul Scraton
Fragments of a Woman – Chapter 4
By Emma Venables:
Gisela loves the smell of a Berlin bar, loves the smell of stale beer, of smoke, the hint of vodka, sweat, and polish. She loves the sound of good music – the whine of a violin, the tinkle of a piano. She loves the way heads turn when she walks in, even though the men around her, in this particular bar, are not inter- ested in her curves, her flesh, her pulse. A few smile, raise their glasses as she makes her way through the crowd. She raises herself to her tiptoes, looking over familiar and unfamiliar heads to find Volker. She recognises his back, would recognise it anywhere, for he always wears a waistcoat, and tonight his chosen one is her favourite shade of purple.
She steps left, then right, around the patrons blocking her way. Someone steps on her toe, and she winces, utters a curse under her breath. She wafts a cloud of smoke from her face, scowls at the man responsible until finally she stands behind Volker. She reaches out and rubs his back. He turns, wobbling on his barstool.
‘Steady on,’ she says.
He leans back, resting against her shoulder, and gives her an awkward kiss meant for her cheek, but landing on her nose.
‘Happy Birthday, Gisi!’ he says. ‘It’s 1934, and you’ve been on this earth exactly nineteen years today. And how honoured you must be to share your celebrations with the Chancellor of Germany.’
‘Have you been drinking for me or for him?’ she asks, pushing him forward.
Volker turns, pauses, and squints as if trying to do a difficult equation.
‘You, naturally, because you know my feelings for you know who.’
Gisela raises an index finger to silence him. He shrugs, waves a hand around as if to indicate everyone agrees. Gisela grabs his face between her hands and plants a kiss on his lips.
‘You’re adorable when your face is all squished up,’ she says, and kisses him once again.
Volker shakes himself free. ‘And you’re wearing an exquisite dress. Spin for me.’
Gisela obliges. ‘Kaufmann’s’ finest. His wife is quite the seam- stress,’ she says, smoothing the skirt of her navy-blue tea dress.
‘I approve. I love the neckline,’ he says, with a wink.
‘Stop staring at my chest.’ She places a hand to her collarbone.
‘You know your chest would have to be much flatter for me to feel any fire in my loins.’
They laugh. Volker turns to the bar, and waves for the barman’s attention.
Gisela taps the shoulder of man on the stool next to Volker. ‘I think that’s my seat.’
‘Excuse me?’
‘Don’t worry about it, but you need to move now.’
The man sighs but vacates the stool. Gisela sits down.
‘You’re shameless,’ Volker says.
‘I’ve nothing to be ashamed of. Besides, it’s my birthday.’
Gisela takes a swig of her drink, leans her head back, and smiles at the damp ceiling above. She still feels slightly nauseous from eating the giant slice of cake decorated with a swastika a woman in the street handed her earlier. It’s my birthday, too, she had told the woman, but refused the second slice of cake she was offered. Although, she did take the flower from the boy in the Hitlerjugend uniform. A pink carnation, which she dropped into her handbag and forgot about until she got her purse out in Kaufmann’s to pay for her dress. She had felt around the lining for the loose petals and stem and asked Herr Kaufmann if he had a bin.
‘God, I’m glad this place hasn’t been shut down yet,’ she says, moving her gaze to the row of bottles behind the bar.
‘You, me, and every one of these beautiful people,’ Volker says.
‘But it’s only a matter of time, isn’t it?’
‘Don’t get mournful on your birthday, Gisi. You go down, I go down, isn’t that the way it’s always been? Ever since I was six and my mother dragged me away from you because you weren’t our kind of person, and your mother certainly wasn’t.’
‘Well, a respectable little German boy shouldn’t play with girls from the gutter.’
‘To hell with that. Cheers.’
Volker raises his glass and clinks it so hard against Gisela’s that a tiny crack appears in the rim; he runs his finger back and forth over the uneven surface.
‘I almost got caught on my knees in the Tiergarten the other day,’ Gisela says.
He wipes amber droplets from his chin. ‘You need to be more careful, Gisi.’
‘We were behind a tree, hidden by several trees, actually, but they’re relentless. In the end, I had to leap up, wipe my face, push the pervert I was with into action, and feign a proposal.’
‘A proposal?’
‘Yes. He was down on one knee by the time they appeared between trees, and I was professing that he’d have to ask my father for I wasn’t that kind of girl. They nodded and left sharply, which is a relief because when he stood up his limp cock was still hanging from his trousers.’
Volker’s head rests upon the bar now, and his shoulders shake. He still grips his half-filled glass of beer in his left hand.
‘Are you laughing or crying? Because at the time I wasn’t sure what to do either.’
‘Both, I think,’ he says, his voice muffled.
Gisela rests her head on Volker’s shoulder. Even here the band strike up a chorus of ‘Zum Geburtstag viel Glück’ in honour of Adolf Hitler. Gisela and Volker remain silent, but Gisela smiles at the sardonic tone she can detect in the voices around her. Applause fills the room. Glasses clink. A barmaid places a cake on the bar. Gisela sighs.
‘I’ve eaten more swastikas today than I care for. Shall we go?’ she asks.
‘So early?’ Volker says, sitting upright.
‘I’ve got something to do at ten,’ she says.
‘You’ve got someone to do at ten, you mean,’ Volker says. ‘I suppose I could go and see Hans.’
‘Not home to mama?’
‘God, no. I’ll slip in in the early hours and she’ll never know. She sleeps like an elephant. I’ve really no idea how an elephant sleeps but I presume it’s heavily.’
‘I imagine she’s exhausted from all the celebrating today,’ Gisela says, sliding off her stool.
‘Yes, she was feeling rather exuberant when I left. I had to tell her I was going to celebrate Hitler’s birthday with friends.’
‘I’m surprised she hasn’t dressed you in a little brown shirt.’
They step out onto Motzstrasse, and Gisela links her arm through Volker’s. She looks up and breathes in the cool air. She likes looking at the windows above, at the light escaping through cracks between curtains, knowing people go about their lives behind walls: that men kiss men, and women kiss women, and the government cannot stop them all. A car’s brakes squeal in another street. Someone opens a window above and the white noise of an un-tuned wireless seeps out. Volker lights a cigarette, takes a drag, and offers it to Gisela. He holds the cigarette while she inhales. As she exhales, she notices two men walking towards them.
‘We just saw you coming out of that bar over there,’ one of them says.
‘And?’ Gisela says, eyeing up their uniforms. ‘My boyfriend and I were enjoying a quiet drink, celebrating the Chancellor’s birthday. Then they broke into song and brought out a cake. Lovely cake. Swastikas and black icing. Looked just like that band on your arm. We all sang for the Chancellor. Then we ate cake.’
The men look at Volker. Gisela feels a tremor in his arm. She clenches her muscles, attempting to reassure him. One of them loops his fingers around his braces.
‘And now my boyfriend’s walking me home to my mother, so we have to go. Good night.’
Gisela gently tugs on Volker’s arm, and they begin to walk. Volker stumbles slightly, but she holds him upright. The men do not seem to notice. She listens for the sound of their footsteps receding, determined not to speak until they have moved on. She turns her head a fraction to the right, pretending to admire the doorway of an apartment building, and from the corner of her eye watches them walk in the opposite direction.
‘Are you OK?’ she asks.
Volker nods, keeping his eyes on the street ahead. ‘I can’t believe you sleep with men like that.’
‘They pay me well, and sometimes they’re quite gentle. It’s as if they’ve spent all their hatred out here and they just want to give affection in bed.’
Volker shakes his head. Gisela takes his hand and grips it in hers.
‘We must be careful, you and I,’ he says.
He breathes sharply and throws his burnt-out cigarette towards the gutter.
‘We must be bold and beautiful, as always,’ she says.
He pulls her towards him, muffling her face against his chest. She puts her arms around him and breathes him in – aftershave he cannot really afford, cigarette smoke, the tinge of sweat – until the buttons of his waistcoat become uncomfortable against her face.
***
Fragments of a Woman is published by Aderyn Press in paperback £8.99 and is available to purchase from your local bookshop or from the publisher directly. Support independent publishing!
Emma Venables' short and flash fiction has been widely published in magazines and journals. Her short story, ‘Woman at Gunpoint, 1945’ was a runner-up in the Alpine Fellowship Writing Prize 2020. She has a PhD in Creative Writing and has taught at Royal Holloway, University of London and Liverpool Hope University.
“It was a beautiful street. The street of homeless cats, she often thought. She never came into it without seeing several of them, prowling, thin vagabonds, furtive, aloof, but strangely proud. Sympathetic creatures, after all.” – Jean Rhys, Quartet
By Anna Evans:
In the fourteenth arrondissement of Paris, starting from Metro Denfert-Rochereau. On the trail of passages and impasses, courtyards and gardens. With a scattering of notes and addresses to guide us through our route. Wide streets branch off in different directions from the centre, where the great lion looks out. We walk along the Avenue d’Orléans, renamed Avenue General Leclerc after the liberation of Paris. The old street name has been retained only crossed out. Strikethrough: a line drawn through, as though to keep the name still present.
Along Rue Daguerre, past the pink house that was Agnes Varda’s, there are patterns of white cloud where the sun is starting to break through, to dazzle. The elegant white facades of the buildings appear lighter, so that the street seems to open to us, as we absorb the decorated iron balconies, shutters and flowers in window boxes, pavement cafés, and glimpses in shop windows. We like to spot the launderettes and tabacs, the neighbourhood shops and bakeries.
In Place Jacques Demy, in a square shaded by trees, we sit and drink coffee. In the park there are basketball courts and ping pong tables. An old merry go round and tables with chess squares painted over them, a few old books left there for the taking. The sun makes patterns through the trees.
In photographs taken along the way are glimpses in passing of buildings and streets. Compositions of a moment in time. Walking along the Rue des Plantes in search of an impasse. Impasses, the streets that come to a dead end, a cul-de-sac, that most evocative of Parisian place names: a passage with no way through.
The Impasse du Moulin Vert. An enclosed passage, a cobbled street with the feel of a village. There are houses and buildings of different styles, statues and carvings, hidden entrances. Gates conceal gardens and terraces, trees growing tantalizingly across the walls. At the end of the passage, a courtyard with old style lamps and green shutters on the windows. There are pots of flowering plants, pink roses, geraniums, and begonias. An elegant pink and white building with iron balconies and ivy growing up its side. Shadows of trees make patterns on the walls.
The streets of this area, Pernety, have the feel of another time. Narrow streets and smaller houses, shutters and chimneys mingle with Haussmann-style facades. Enclosed gardens tucked away behind trees and railings, with enticing corners to sit and read among grass and sunlight, green and shaded. The village meets the city as people gather with friends or pause to eat their lunch, making use of the space, scattered sounds of music.
A mural with flowers and bold lettering along the wall, the words of Louise Michel, a revolutionary of the Paris Commune: La révolution sera la floraison de l’humanité comme l’amour est la floraison du coeur[1].
Turning the corner to find a passage, the Rue des Thermopyles, a narrow street paved with cobblestones that feels quiet and secluded. There are low-rise houses linked by leafy arches, blue shutters, and red flowering roses. Some of the buildings seem like artists’ studios, the sense of Montparnasse in another time. Climbing vines and wisteria grow across the passage and trail between the houses and branches cover windows. Window boxes and planters, pots of different shapes and sizes, imperfect, unexpected, like a story opening outwards.
On the corner is a yellow house with a black painted door, creepers grow across the building and pots of plants and flowers. We hear music, the sound of a piano through the open window and a voice singing, soaring like a moment in a film. Each day, a reel of moments.
Looking back along the cobbled lane there is a sense of green everywhere, hushed voices from the shared garden. The shade of trees and dappled sunlight, rooftops, and blue sky. Each glimpse is like framing a different fall of shadow and sunlight and sometimes the street seems to lengthen depending on the angle I look, as figures emerge and fade into the space of the passage and around corners. I want to notice every detail, to know the story behind every door.
Cats emerge from behind windows, unobtrusively free, and stroll along the cobbled alleyway looking for a patch of sunlight to sprawl under. I think of the city as viewed by its cats, who prowl its spaces, its hidden courtyards, and enclosed places. For the cats there are escape routes in every dead end, and no forbidden entrances.
We take our time, absorbing every angle, torn between the wish to linger here, and the draw of the blue sky ahead and what comes next; of what other hidden places we might find. The city becomes an endless series of movements, experienced in passing. A passage is made to be followed.
***
Notes: [1] The revolution will be the flowering of humanity as love is the flowering of the heart.
Anna Evans is a writer from Huddersfield who lives in Cambridge, with interests in place, memory, literature, migration, and travel. She enjoys writing about landscape – nature, cities, and all the places in-between. You can read more about Anna and her work on her website The Street Walks In. You can find more of Anna’s contributions to Elsewhere here.
By Fiona M Jones:
The North Berwickshire coast, from Eyemouth along past St Abbs, wanders through hills and cliffs and narrow fragmented shores. The North Sea, cold even in summer, has cut through centuries and rocks and history and lives. Last winter a vicious December storm swept away the whole autumn’s baby seals, and back in October 1881 nearly two hundred fishermen died at sea or capsized on the very point of reentering their harbours.
History doesn’t say much about it: a major disaster to a string of very small communities. The story is kept now by a little bronze statue in the middle of the village of St Abbs: a group of women and children standing staring out to sea. The sea that had brought them food and now had taken their loved ones away.
You are visiting St Abbs on a clear and pleasant weekend afternoon, buffeted a little by the wind and out of breath by the steepness of the path; dizzied perhaps by the vertical heights and awed by the wild beauty of the place. You sense a fierceness of landscape and sky, but it’s hard to imagine the time when fishermen battled the unforgiving North Sea with nothing but sail and oar—and didn’t always win.
St Abbs itself sits in a partial hollow between cliffs that rise up like towers to break the sky and sea. The sea in turn breaks cliffs, serrating them into deep coves and teetering seaward stacks of wind-weathering stone. If you follow the cliff-path to the north of the village, you’ll wind up and down and over and around places accessible only to seabirds and seaweed and seals.
And then you’ll pass an eerie rock formation that seems to echo something. A small ragged group of people, standing and staring out to sea. It looks like a rough cliff-formed copy of the statue in the village. It has to be coincidence, or at most an example of the way that a scene from nature will feed the inspiration of a sculptor. But you can’t quite shake an impression that the rocks are grieving in sympathy with the almost-forgotten people from a century and a half ago.
***
Fiona M Jones writes short fiction, poetry and nature-themed CNF. Her published work is linked through @FiiJ20 on Facebook and Twitter.
During the summer of 2022, Emily Oldfield set out walking the minor roads pushing into the moors around the town of Todmorden, West Yorkshire – many of them traversing and toying with the county boundary into Lancashire. Emily has long-been interested in edgeland spaces, and these roads in particular as routes of intimacy and abandonment simultaneously; built with great intent by former generations, now rarely-used – places that are neither footpath nor main road, where the pedestrian could then be seen as another aspect of the ‘edge’. When feeling ‘on the edge’, to choose these routes can be paradoxically a place of solace, possibilities, even power.
The walks – published here on Elsewhere in a three-part series – are an exploration of intimate abandon, loss and yet the courses that connect us – chiefly, love.
Stones Lane
We step into them every day – human remains. From the pavement underfoot to the paths we take, all are a past push… not a mere trace or fragment, but a site of sheer force and cold sweat.
It is easy to package ‘the past’ as something abstract; an echo in what we say about a place, a sort of ether that runs between the fingers of a hand gesture. Over there. But man-moved stone serves up the past somehow even closer to the present, as presence, an almost-paradox that pulls us further towards it.
This morning I take the lanes heading towards Stones, a scattering of farmsteads situated high on the hills above Todmorden, close to the dark clutch of Dobroyd Castle; a site of Victorian extravagance now scarred-black and haunted by its own intended splendour. So much moved stone still stirs here – from the weathered warp of the buildings I mention, to the lie of the lane. I scatter pebbles as I walk, dust dredging peat-pickled boots as I look at the dark hump of the hills towards Bacup. I wonder whose tread pressed form to fragments before me, who first laid the course, rolled the rock that now is the route.
My musing is interrupted by the fourth tallest standing stone in Yorkshire. A looming bolt of blackened by time, it spears the edge of a farmer’s field –around 12-feet tall and bolstered at the base by a rough ring of hewn rocks. Blasted by factory fumes and the bitter bite of persistent Pennine winds, its dark edges give it the demeanour of a far-flung weathervane. A lightning rod. A question mark with no stop.
But I stop. Perhaps there is an absence in us –an inherited ancestral ache –that angles us to the stance of certain standing stones, how the solo walker finds their body flexing slightly to match its bearing. Falling into those before us. For how many bodies bore this great rib of rock upright?
And when? Surprisingly little information arises about this stone, with no agreed date on when it was set up. Records exist of it being present by 1921, but no known reference before then. Not even a name.
It is a tongue in the mouth of a time we have no words for. It may well have still been standing in previous centuries, erected as a monument to the Great War, even the Battle of Waterloo.
Or older.
Yet the implications of modernity could be seen to stain. Why is that? This stone waits, straddling the border between monument and monolith, track and field, logged and lost. Wavering.
And how when we waver, we reach for rock. The craving to stand in stone seems a human one, time-over: monoliths, buildings, byways, graves. Monuments not only of memory, but for memory. We all become it. I lean against the layers of touch, the sun-soaked rain-rinsed hours of finger-cracking contact, baked into the bulk of the drystone wall. I lean and lean, feel its unknown weight pushing my tissues closer to bone. And still I can’t reach the stone. No human armspan could from here.
Perhaps it is this ungraspable intention, the tactile unknown, that draws us in particular to menhirs; standing stones.
So we keep reaching.
And I keep walking.
Doghouse Lane
Steep slopes draw abandon to the surface. I think about it as I take on the tarmac of Doghouse Lane, a track arching up out of Todmorden and unspooling over the moors to Cornholme. The initial incline is unrelenting, the course quickly gaining ascent as it pushes above the town, as desperate as an outstretched arm. Get out.
Breath builds behind each footfall, arms loosen, and I feel the familiar angst under my ribs dissipate into something else. Each inhalation echoes through the body. I am drawn to walking these minor moorland roads – typically unfashionable and unpublicised routes, often overlooked as the territory of the occasional land-rover, nearby farmer and the lost. Here the walker encounters the road –a craft of human hardship and hiccup in the land simultaneously – alongside the pummelled patchwork of South Pennine moorland. We become the borders, occupy an edge.
Abandon. Mind and body orientate to the undulations of terrain, thoughts fuse. I quickly pass the florid green of cultivated trees above Centre Vale Park and push on amidst the unfolding brushwork of burgundy, brown and off-yellow moorland. Wind hits every exposed angle of my face. I find myself simultaneously an onlooker and an accomplice as the landscape loosens like a shaken sheet, moving with my grasping stare and eager tread.
A few scattered farms fleck the opening aspect of landscape, and the occasional large car passes – somehow cold and impersonal. I keep walking, the interlocking valleys of the Cliviger Gorge on one side and Walsden on the other opening up, spangled by interlocking sunlight and low-lying cloud. Inherited abandon. The very road beneath my feet is a flex of it, forged in a past where it meant more than just an occasional, isolated track. Its name darts between possibilities; Doghouse becoming Parkin Lane, then Flower Scar Road, then Tower Causeway, ending as Carr Road. Furrowed edges tell of agricultural attempts ages back, now wandering half-shorn sheep occupy. They drift into the single-file road in the absence of any fence or wire.
I drift too, body buffeted by wind and warm coils of temperamental sunshine. In these moorlands, the breeze breathes through industrial remains as much as it rolls the cry of the curlew, the pheasants trembling trill. On my left, the hills bordering the East Lancashire town of Bacup push up, their blown-brown backs intersected by turbines, pylons and brooding pine plantations.
And then I stumble into Sourhall. An old row of terraced cottages marks the site of something so much bigger. A public information board tells me of this later on the route, far-flung and stark like the most melancholy of memorials. Out of place. For the cottages, and a rather uncanny estate of half-finished new-builds behind them, tell little themselves of a former factory (Peel Mill), later to become a Smallpox Isolation Hospital in 1874. Industry becomes illness. Exposure becomes isolation.
Inherited abandon. The surge within myself I meet in walking the weave of these moorland roads. And when I wonder of how the ill would have watched the thrashing, flexing moor arch around them, I pull my coat closer and keep the route.
***
Emily Oldfield is a writer especially drawn to exploring landscape, the feel of place and relationships to it within her work. Born in Burnley in 1995 and growing up in the East Lancashire town of Bacup, her first poetry pamphlet Grit (published by Poetry Salzburg, March 2020) explores the history and folklore of the Rossendale Valley of her childhood. Her second poetry pamphlet (also with Poetry Salzburg) is titled Calder and due in 2022, largely exploring the Upper Calder Valley, West Yorkshire - especially around the town of Todmorden, where she currently lives. Emily is now working on a book and probably wandering somewhere in the West Yorkshire/East Lancashire edgelands.
By David Murphy:
Along the very tip of the Olympic Peninsula—
harbored by sea stacks,
washed by the ablutions of frequent rain,
and scrutinized by the salmon-keen eyes of fierce eagles
who sit perched with feathers made wet and salty by ocean spray—
lies a beach spliced by piney evergreens and the wintry Pacific Ocean.
It wears as its mantle a cloak of becoming fog:
wide filaments of thick mist wreathe the beach’s shoulders,
narrow wisps tuck into the crevices of teeming pine,
and, like a stole, that pale brume softly embraces
the necks of the majesterial, protruding stones.
The beach’s curvaceous, serene form lies upon its side
with its back to the land, knees tucked up against the tide,
with its stone lips ever kissing the briny, icy waves.
Water is its heart. In the rain, in the sea and spume,
throbs the lifeforce that begets the beach’s growth and decay,
shapes its projecting stone fingers, and creates its austere beauty.
In the night, the wan moon with its grey craters
beams down on sword ferns glowing nearly phosphorescent
and flashes on the bottle-gold eyes of great horned owls.
The moon turns milky the evergreen forest that adorns
the beach’s hips, and the moon tints the bleached driftwood
from day’s ivory to an iridescent alabaster of night.
That moon casts upon the beach’s cliffs a lustre
that speaks of shining rock, and, with its hushing silence,
it seems to make the surf’s voice boom.
With wind, the beach’s trees move sinuously and with susurrant song.
In the moonlight, upon the beach’s damp and footless shore,
lie whips of bull kelp, washed up and drying,
with algae blades like Medusa’s chaotic hair, their origins
in the marine forests of stone mantlepieces and rocky shelves.
The crows cackle madly in their rookery, the wind whishes,
surf roars, eagles scream, seals honk and bark and cry,
clouds morph then rework their hues, tides ebb and rise,
marshy mushrooms rise and rot with the sun’s circling,
the fragrance of evergreen sap freshens the air, salmon run,
gulls bed their island colonies with bones, osprey preen and fish,
glossy baneberries bear fruit like murderous scarlet pearls,
and purple mountain saxifrage color the cliffs.
In antiquity, the Makah resided here
using yarrow for childbirth, red cedar for dugout canoes,
yellow cedar for clothing, spermaceti for candles,
stones buffed by water to high polish and wound
by withy willows for anchor stones, having halibut for dinner,
sea otter teeth and whale fins for art, cherry bark for basketry—
which tightens as it dries—and bones for awls and adze handles.
They used tides and stones and fences to catch fish,
laid white clam shells on the tidal floor for better contrast
to see the fish in their traps. On a crisp, windy spring night
six hundred years ago, the tribe gathered on the damp beach
after partaking in a feast of salmon, octopus, and halibut
for a sacred ritual conducted to send its rowers and harpooners offshore
in a twelve-seated canoe to hunt whale. A chief chanted,
sang, worked the crowd into a frenzy before the night fire,
and when the throng felt most animated, the chief
poured whale oil onto the fire, so that it soared, crackling to
a crescendo, rose like the wave of a tsunami, and
in the dark night the bellowing and shrieking
of the Makah were swallowed up by the forest.
Over this desolate beach there is a kind of peacefulness:
gently lapping waves, the soft pattern of rain,
the rustle of a crow’s wings. It appears desolate, Shi Shi,
here in winter.
***
David Murphy was born on Easter Sunday in a small town in northern Oklahoma. He attended public and private schools in Oklahoma and Louisiana. He graduated from Oklahoma State University and Kansas State University, and he studied abroad on scholarship at Lunds Universitet in Sweden. Later, he worked in Afghanistan during the war as the Administrative Director of a project funded by The World Bank. He worked in Riyadh, then he won two English Language Fellowships from the U.S. State Department’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs. He was posted to Mexico. He then worked for four years in Washington state government as a Program Supervisor for Title III funds. Now he lives and writes full time in a small Mexican pueblo near the Pacific Ocean.
During the summer of 2022, Emily Oldfield set out walking the minor roads pushing into the moors around the town of Todmorden, West Yorkshire – many of them traversing and toying with the county boundary into Lancashire. Emily has long-been interested in edgeland spaces, and these roads in particular as routes of intimacy and abandonment simultaneously; built with great intent by former generations, now rarely-used – places that are neither footpath nor main road, where the pedestrian could then be seen as another aspect of the ‘edge’. When feeling ‘on the edge’, to choose these routes can be paradoxically a place of solace, possibilities, even power.
The walks – published here on Elsewhere in a three-part series – are an exploration of intimate abandon, loss and yet the courses that connect us – chiefly, love.
Todmorden Old Road
It starts out as reach into the hills, around the back of a housing estate in Bacup. Known in my childhood as ‘Back Lane’ or ‘Dark Lane’, idioms abound suggesting a push to the edges. Todmorden Old Road rises as a single-file flex of rough tarmac, initially bordered by brambles on one side, a stretch of wall weathered into various states of moss-strewn disrepair on the other. There is the perpetual tang of wet bark and wood rot, exploded open through summer and into autumn by the florid fizz of somehow never-quite-healthy blackberries and a density of dandelions.
Follow the road up far out of Bacup enough and a walker can reach the crest at Sharneyford where Lancashire slumps down on one side whilst West Yorkshire arches up on the other. I stand at that intersection now, the personal points of childhood and adulthood split by a glistening grey belt of hills and the ripped-up course of the road. This is a route rarely travelled by vehicles now – other than the occasional shuddering tractor and red shock of the mail van – and yet once was a key link between two counties; though the county boundary itself a contentious blur of argument, artifice and echo. I imagine it hovering and drifting like a buzzard buoyed by the muffled prospect of prey, now fought over by public propaganda and irregular footfall.
These minor moorland highways are alive with prospect and past potential. On Todmorden Old Road, I’m walking through what could have been, as someone now. There’s that wrench in the chest, a burn that the books of both childhood and adulthood would have a word for. A whole genre. A human heave I can feel at the edge of my eyes, in the skittering beat behind ribs and the roll of cold sweat between fabric and skin as I walk.
Yet part of me doesn’t want to write about walking these roads at all. For in the aftermath of personal pain, why don’t I push off through wild upland and well beyond the mundane, the mechanical? Reflect on fumbling away from the footpaths and meeting the bite of bogland between my toes? Because I’m ashamed. Ashamed of my own assumption that the landscape equates to escape. Ashamed of my tendency to want to fall into the revered narrative of walker meets wildness. Ashamed too, of the hurt I have caused and the ways I have reacted, acted, reacted.
And I’m coming to terms with, as readily as I will wander over hill and dale… most of all, I am drawn to these minor moorland roads; a place where the pedestrian seems seldom, their hard and their hold.
Here, language lies in the cut and thrust of the route, how it writhes through stone and sediment in a surge of gradient that can be felt under foot. A force that seems to take on the lie of the land with a trodden truth.
So much still does. Close by, bumping the edge of my vision on the left is Tooter Hill – a site of ancient field systems, a possible ring cairn burial and traces thought to date as far back as the Neolithic. Touch upon touch upon touch. Now mine pits and pock-marked mounds stubble the escarpment, the bulge of earth enmeshed in yellow-green grass, the picked-out course of a footpath and the marks of a search.
Searching for a hold.
In discussions of loss and heartbreak, John Bowlby posits the concept of ‘searching for the lost object’ as the state of angst and upset the individual goes through, sifting through fragments of the departed, fumbling over a promised future.
Walking these roads has become my way of stepping into that promise, feeing it shift and crack as I tread. Here a sense of place comes through a throb – a heart, a hurt, the human intent that still hums in the course of the route. The lost object forever lies in these roads. And to step out is to hold on in the only way I can.
Allescholes Road
I step into a former thoroughfare, a channel of change and industry, blown by time to a track. The dialectical drawl of ‘the back of beyond’ is a mere breath away – and indeed, this a place now behind the routes we recognise, yet still reaching for something, fumbling further into a time we can’t quite fathom.
Allescholes Road pushes into the Western hills above Walsden, and I stumble onto it as I make my way down from the moorland, having joined a friend for the first leg of the Todmorden Boundary Way. The area where the minor road intersects the sogged strip of footpath is still ripe with the reek of bogland. It is a particular Pennine flavour – peaty loam pummelled through with weeks-old water and sheep shit split open with rain.
Beaten-grey clouds hang low and clot across the land, any hope of horizon blunted by swirling bouts of mist. Moisture moves over my face like a shroud and my chest heaves. The surrounding steep benchwork of hills throw their shadows through the fray; though what initially seems like a landscape drained of its colour, is punctured by the occasional stark shout of a foxglove. Swollen cyan trumpets laugh their colour in a wind that offers no regularity, captures breath with no answer. These plants point to our deficiencies, stirring as a reminder that all personal projections in this place are the past. The present is coarse and hard and rips off any romanticised attachment with the wrench of the wind. It catches in my throat with foam, phlegm and a click.
I crave to locate to Todmorden somewhere to my left, Littleborough to the right, but direction drains away and my body, still hungering for traces, fixes on finding the road from the path. One hand still clutches a found clot of moss like wet hair. Absence arises as an angular feeling under the skin and I snort, sending more water skittering over my face.
Then my foot meets the rubble of the roadway with a shudder. Semi-solidity after miles of ambiguous, uncompromising moor comes as a shock. And yet there is almost an urgency as to how the road – Allescholes Road– takes on the topography of the valley, arching and unfurling with tactile intent. For how many people took to build this, whose hands, and when? I wonder– almost crouching in the body’s coil of relief – over what love and hate, what impatience and angst, what boredom and bitterness and sheer brute force did human hands drive this stone into place? Questions are quashed as the sound of each sogged footfall rises as a shh, shh, shhh.
I drag my feet against saturated stone and look at how the route pushes parallel to the valley bottom, merging into Reddishore Scout. This was once the well-worn packhorse trail linking Walsden with Calderbrook (then towards Summit and Littleborough), and beyond, a linkage forged with prospect and promise, steering clear of the swampy valley base. It was only when the turnpike road was cut through the bottom in the early nineteenth century, that Allescholes Road became optional, then occasional… and now, touched with an air of abandon.
I feel it too. I watch the straggle of settlements below me busy with human hum and bustle, and the raw roll under my ribs rises to meet them. Falls. Rises. Falls. On these minor moorland roads we find the hurt of ourselves in the hills, we trace back to feelings buried and impulses dashed. It is here I walk with a heart soaked open, and as the horizon hazes into the hill – I stop, reach out and watch the wave of my hand become a blur.
***
Emily Oldfield is a writer especially drawn to exploring landscape, the feel of place and relationships to it within her work. Born in Burnley in 1995 and growing up in the East Lancashire town of Bacup, her first poetry pamphlet Grit (published by Poetry Salzburg, March 2020) explores the history and folklore of the Rossendale Valley of her childhood. Her second poetry pamphlet (also with Poetry Salzburg) is titled Calder and due in 2022, largely exploring the Upper Calder Valley, West Yorkshire - especially around the town of Todmorden, where she currently lives. Emily is now working on a book and probably wandering somewhere in the West Yorkshire/East Lancashire edgelands.
by Lori Mairs:
Uphill from the chilled dark of the cedars and into the warm light of the desert scape above, it is here on this parapet that the formations of hoodoos begin and end and where the prickly pear cactus grows. In some parts of Woodhaven there's a visual and temperate signature where distinctive bi-zones intersect, where the crossing from one to the other sometimes happens within eight or ten feet. This is one of them.
The air is still cool from a surprising mid-March storm that thrashed down from an angry black sky. Window-rattling booms of thunder, sheets and strips of lightning ripped beyond the width of the horizon with a wall of hail pelting anything unsheltered below it.
I like to walk after big weather. Mostly the walk is driven by curiosity and a pull to witness the affects of a wild that can't be tamed. This part of the dry interior is a desert knoll and the highest point of the trail system inside the fence line. It's a sheer drop, sixty feet or so in some places, to the forest floor. Steep-sloped honeyed-grey grasslands are still flattened from a winter dump of snow. On the forest floor, dirt changes from mottled grey-rust to a thick reddish brown where the bio-zone switches from fir-cottonwood to cedar-cottonwood. The first has sparse and evenly-spaced trees while the latter hangs with a thick canopy darkened above and sheltered underneath. I'm eye-level with the tip-tops of new growth fir and pine and I can see a third the way up gnarly old cottonwood right into the habitat holes. If I stand here long enough the squirrels will show up and put on a Cirque de Soleil show, but today is for seeing what the storm brought in or brought down or brought over and what it left behind.
Where the trail sign marks the junction, I go up along to the old flume where fir branches are broken and scattered on the ground from the wind. I reach down, grab and throw, grab and throw, at least a dozen times, winging the fallen ones into the underbrush. I cross over the big fir root that makes a step on the path then dips under the old flume on the far side. This mess of gnarled tin and wood is all that's left of what was once a water carrier for the apple orchards in the Lower Mission. It's corroded in some parts and the wooden frame that held it up at chest height is mostly on the ground and rotting. In a few places the half-hoops of galvanized steel that braced the whole thing from underneath are lying about and poking through dirt especially where the wooden frame and the metal half-pipe are mostly disintegrated.
Next to this mangled mess of a flume sits the whole story of Father Pandosy, the mission priest who sailed to the “new” world to settle 'untamed' land. Father Pandosy planted food in rows and people in pews. He carved a path for Indian agents and land surveyors who would divide the place into parcels for grazing cattle and growing apples. The good Father and his flock missed the part where the land had no need of taming, the part where the effortless and obvious way in would have been to ask the people already here and thriving. The Syilx people have been in the Okanagan Valley for over ten thousand years, they could have been, and in the earliest times were, in easy partnership with European settlers. Father Pandosy did what new world priests do.
Sometimes this crippled flume is a memento mori to the courage of the settlers and their child-like trust of the vision that inspired long and treacherous walks across barren lands. It was a certain ingenuity required to survive as they were accustomed to surviving. But on days like today, days after a storm and strange unheralded weather, I only have a desire to want to reverse what was done and untangle it from the mess. I want to clean it all up and supplant this settler mentality with a little grace in a world that once was new and make room for the efficacy to ask about how to be in this place from the ones that already knew. A simple task: ask.
My dad picks me up and sits me on the metal edge of the ship's railing. My mother has the baby and my other brothers and sisters are standing below on the wooden deck and waving. We're all waving. My mother, without turning toward him, asks my father if he can see the Hendersons. He finds them in the crowd and points out their position so my mother can wave in their direction. There are coloured streamers going from the boat to the wharf where a crowd has gathered and when the streamers run out the people on the pier throw toilet paper rolls all the way up onto the boat decks. It's a celebration and wall of grief all tucked into the leaving.
Where the metal and wood lie abandoned along the trail, broken and forgotten, are remnants of ice balls scattered about and melted puddle-dregs of a brutal sky-fall that was the storm. Ice balls and puddles, it goes from one to the other and I imagine it will eventually go all the way back up again, after it's saturated the earth. The plants will cast it off into the wind and the wind will deposit it into particles that will carry it to the sky and become cloud again where it will rain or hail next season. These are the cycles that live in the flume.
I find a spot where the moisture has stayed well beyond the drift upward and it's here that moss grows luminescent green and glowing. The moss isn't a sign of the broken; it's a sign of the staying and reaping. There are teensy brown umbrella tops lurching out of cushioned pads, miniature capsules and splash cups all gathered into a Lilliputian garden to be savoured for those who venture to squat for the inspection. We don't get close enough sometimes. I want to see beyond the broken today, find the rich and nutritious in the cycles. Today I want hope and somewhere to pull back the tides and erase what keeps tugging at my midsection.
There's a Maori troupe on deck and they begin to sing “Now Is The Hour” and my mother starts to cry. She is broken. She doesn't want to go on the boat like I do. I can see them both, my mother and my father, because I'm up on the metal railing. I look away and look down. The water below is a long way away and it's black and swirling like a whirlpool. I get scared all of a sudden that my dad is going to forget that he's holding me and if he does I'll drop into the water and be gone forever. I grab at his arm to remind him I'm there and see that he's crying too. A roll of toilet paper whizzes by our heads. The Hendersons have spotted us and they're waving and jumping about to make sure we've seen them in the crowd. The streamers and toilet paper rips and floats away into the whirlpool. The captain comes over the loudspeaker and tells us to cover our ears then the big horn sounds loud and long and low, a final bellow as our ship pulls away into the harbour.
There's always a time after a storm when the little things flourish. The battering of hail has fallen to silence and if my ears were like the deer or bear I'm sure I could hear water being sucked up through the dirt. I move along up the flume until I get to where I can cross over it safely and make my way to a fallen log that's been placed on the hillside for watchers. I come to this spot when I need to have a think. It's mid-March and these are days and nights when I spend time with my mother. Her birthday is March fifteenth, she died March thirteenth.
As of today I've been a motherless daughter for 24 years. Seems like a long time when I think the words but it doesn't mean I can't still smell her. She would have loved this part of my life. She would have loved these days in Woodhaven at the in-between times of the season and she would have been here talking to the trees along with me. It doesn't matter how long ago something was, what matters is how much it mattered. Sometimes what mattered is the thing that purrs softly and cozies into a place in your heart that gets most remembered. Sometimes the most remembered is the unspoken agreements and all the un-saids that find a harbour in my midsection waiting it out for after a hail storm. March bites like that for me. It reminds me of the broken parts.
***
Lori Mairs (1961- 2021) was born in New Zealand and lived most of her life in British Columbia, Canada. From 2002- 2017, she lived in the forest as the caretaker of the Woodhaven Nature Conservancy in Kelowna, British Columbia. She completed her BFA and then an MFA in Interdisciplinary Studies at the University of British Columbia Okanagan. She was a sculptor and installation artist, using natural materials as well as fabric, metal and beeswax in her work. She also participated as a lead artist in several eco art projects in Kelowna. In the last few years of her life, she began writing essays and poetry. In all her work, her primary concerns were the relationships we have with each other as humans and the deep and often reaching relationships humans have with the more-than-human world. For many years she wrote a blog, “The Land of 7:30.” She also practiced as a personal growth consultant until her untimely death. She is greatly missed by her friends, family, clients and fellow artists, as well as the neighbors and other-than-human beings of Woodhaven where she wrote and made art for many years.
