Ghosts

Photo: Lukas Becker

By Emily Richards:

4th November 2013

Glasses clink. A black dog flits by my feet into shadows. On the island, there’s no light tonight but stars. Yet in the castle, it’s a summer evening. The ballroom is lit up, just at the edge of my gaze. The dead stags have wary, wild brown eyes. They look at me as I move quietly through dark rooms, wandering time’s corridor to the days where they were alive and running, out on the rainy hills; and where a maid, her face veiled in the past, carries trays from drawing room to kitchen, past the billiard room. Sounds of laughter echo behind her, words just out of range. I wonder what stories would be told if I could hear the words clearly, not just the echoes. If I could be the ghost inside their house.

*

I am walking down a narrow corridor. Tall cupboards line the walls, so close that I sometimes have to turn sideways as I pass. A green emergency light burns steadily against the darkness in its little box, and the carpet hushes any sound but that of my own breathing. I can feel the weight of the castle pressing against the flaking, yellowed ceiling above me, the heavily papered walls closing in like a blanket wrapping me in the familiar smell of old wood, old mould, old paint and that unnameable scent unique to this very particular place. 

Coming up on my right, there’s a darker space: the open door to the empty ballroom. If I were to step through it, I’d just be able to make out the fading silver stars painted on the high blue ceiling; it’s only three o’clock in the afternoon, but here on the Isle of Rum in the north of Scotland, it’s already too dark for any light to make its way through the stained glass windows. And even if the days were longer, you’d still see nothing but the sky. When the castle was built, the windows were placed so that no-one could see in. Monica and George would have danced here; servants would have stood at the hatch in the corner to pour champagne or, for Monica, lemonade. The rumours say all sorts of things about Lady Monica Bullough, George Bullough’s wife, but they don’t tell you that she was a teetotaller; there’s a lot they don’t tell you. Up in the gallery, moth-eaten curtains cover another space, where the tiny orchestra from George’s yacht, the Rhouma, played Strauss or swing-time. There is a sprung floor, so that you can dance more easily, and I know already, just two months into my life in the castle, that when I step onto it, it will creak. 

I am not afraid, exactly. 

Low to the ground, a golden, fishy eye looms up suddenly; the stuffed tarpon, or half of it at least, hangs in its glass cabinet, its silvery scales glittering in the shadows, its gaze turned always to the left. There it hangs, motionless in its imaginary Caribbean sea; perhaps this was the one that Monica caught. In the photograph, she stands triumphant, barefooted on the wooden deck of the Rhouma, her Edwardian dress hitched up to her knees, a bearded sailor helping her to winch the fish up from the sea. 

I’ve reached a little hallway, at the bottom of the back stairs; a place nearly at the end of the castle, where another emergency light illuminates George and Monica’s relief map of the Isle of Rum: brown lumpy mountains, green moorlands, a child’s blue sea. White painted writing labels Kinloch Castle, their summertime home, at the head of the bay after which it is named. To my left, cold rain is hammering on the glass door where really, the castle ought to end. But just ahead of me, there is instead another doorway, its frame drooping, and then another, half-blocked by a heavy black pedestal and its door jammed at an odd angle. I make my way carefully across the gaps in the floorboards, squeezing past the pedestal, and manoeuvring my way around this final door. And now finally, I’m here. Inside the library. Now I can settle into the sagging chair where the pile of the velvet has been rubbed away over the past hundred years or so, and tell a story. Are we sitting comfortably? Then we can begin.

Photo: Lukas Becker

But can we?

Alone in George and Monica’s library, where even the sound of the rain is hushed, I’m suddenly aware that I have set out to tell their story, but I’m thinking about my own. I came here to join my wife because she’d found a job here, looking after the castle. But I’m not sure what I’m doing here. Nor is anyone else. They’re not sure, really, what I’m for. With just over forty people living on this island, the question matters. 

There are still not enough houses to go round, no roads, one shop, a few ferries a week in winter if you’re lucky, when the storms allow for them to arrive at all. Though it’s only seventeen miles away, the mainland, with its huge extended families, cosy knitting circles, West Highland Railway, Highland dancing competitions and tourists, has become a remote world; a world of communities, names, signs, directions, possibilities. 

Here, although it’s officially still a few hours to sunset, the library’s already full of shadows. The sun doesn’t get above the mountains in winter, and winter comes early to Rum. The stuffed eagle, raising victorious wings, and his victim, the white hare, are just outlines against the turret window; when you come in you get a shock, wondering what they are. Here, dimly, is the faded chaise-longue in the middle of the room; here the chipped clay warriors eternally wrestling each other; and an alarming portrait of John Bullough, George’s millionaire, patriarchal papa, said to have been kind to his workers but cruel to his wife; John Bullough who is buried alongside George and Monica on the other side of the island at Harris; John Bullough whose remaindered Speeches, Letters and Poems fill the spaces behind George and Monica’s books in the library in their dozens. He’s everywhere; but he never saw the castle. 

Kinloch Castle was George Bullough’s dream (‘a dream in stone, glass and gadgets’, as Alistair Scott has put it), built from 1897 to 1901 after George inherited the island and, at the age of just 21, become one of the wealthiest men in Great Britain, though his grandfather had come from the Lancashire slums. His family’s story was a rags-to-riches fairy-tale, with a darkness never far from the surface; and like a fairy-tale castle, Kinloch Castle stands at the edge of the sea, seeming to warn off invaders. Or perhaps it’s inviting them in for a party? Built of pink Arran sandstone at George’s special request, the castle is not only a dream but a fantasy, constructed not to give battle, but to house stories. 

And so it did. The Great Hall proudly displays a giant bronze eagle – said to be a gift to George from the Emperor of Japan – together with photographs, lion skins and ivories from Africa, knives from Borneo and shells from Madagascar from the world tour George undertook in the 1890s. In the mahogany-lined dining room, another, darker story unfolds; the unsmiling portraits of George’s father, grandfather and grandmother stare across the room at a portrait of George himself, vulnerable at fourteen, hinting at the poverty and violence that haunted the family’s life. Beautiful, adventurous Monica, born Monique Ducarel, whom George married in 1903, filled the castle with her own story of who she could have been if her family had not been exiled from France in the Revolution: pictures of Napoleon (rumoured to be a distant cousin), delicate Sèvres china, books about the Empress Josephine. Together, the Bulloughs introduced hummingbirds, miniature alligators, a Japanese garden; telling a story of pleasure, as if to defy Rum’s inhospitable, stormy coast and their own pasts. 

The hummingbirds and alligators are long gone, the garden is a wilderness. Yet I still share my space with these stories. They press against me when the room is quiet, bright dots at the edge of my consciousness. Like ghosts, you might think. But not in the sense that people mean when they say, ‘Is the castle haunted?’ 

Places, like human bodies, age and have histories. We form bonds of love with them, as we do with people. But while we live in them or visit them, we’re usually too caught up in our own story to pay proper attention. Yet when we come to tell that story, later on, we find that the place has taken on a life of its own, and we’re just another story in its history. 

*

In the winter of 2013 and for two years thereafter, the place I lived was Kinloch Castle. My own story at the time was undergoing huge shifts, even disasters, and I filled my diary with the sense of utter alienation I felt on the island. But when I tell the story now, it’s the castle and its owners, George and Monica Bullough, and the people who worked for them, that I talk about. At first, they seemed more real to me than any of the living people on the island; more real than myself. Like friendly ghosts, they folded me into a community that I desperately needed – the community of a shared place.

Photo: Lukas Becker

That same winter that I first came to Rum, an island baby was born: the first for many years. From the castle, I watched as the helicopter descended in sheets of rain and a tornado of noise, wind slamming the trees, to take the expectant mother off to Inverness. And in the days that followed, where we didn’t know if the baby had been born safely or not, I realised that I didn’t want to be a ghost. I wanted to do something, however small, to play my part on the island. There was just one thing I was qualified to do; and at that very particular time, I was the only person who could do it. I could tell the story of the castle, and make those voices, that I could so nearly but not quite hear, audible again. I could link the past to the present, help create the community I longed for.

It’s only recently that I realised my story about the castle is also my story about myself. More importantly, it’s a story that lets other stories be heard: of the factors, visitors, contractors, teachers, castle staff and gardeners who came to live or work on Rum over the years; of delayed deer sent by train from Kings Cross to the island in the 1920s; or, for example, the story of John Stewart and Catherine Murray. One day in 2015, a middle-aged French woman arrived on the island to show us a photograph of this beautiful couple, her grandparents, who had worked as footman and housemaid in the castle before their marriage. The image shows them on a day out with their colleagues; there they sit, smiling yet serious, by the burn that rushes down from the mountains in the winter. It is a romantic picture, in a sense; but it also tells a story of the future. At George’s wish, the power of the burn was harnessed to provide electricity, just as it still does today, over one hundred years later; it was one of the many technological inventions and innovations George brought to the island.  

And while George looked forward, imagining the future, I look back to the past, trying to imagine his and Monica’s lives on this island, at that time. In this space where our imaginations move backwards and forwards, in the underground roots of our different stories communicating with each other, past and present meet. Not as ghosts, but still, as a kind of haunting; a kind of community. 

***

Emily Richards is a writer and translator who grew up in Canterbury, UK before moving to Berlin in 1992 to discover her German roots. Since then, she has also lived in Yorkshire, London, Lyon and the Isle of Rum in Scotland, where she began to write seriously about the impact of places on our narratives. She is currently completing her memoir about the Isle of Rum, The Castle Captured Me, which was shortlisted last year for the inaugural Nan Shepherd Prize

The Quarantined Photographer

By Stuart J. DuBreuil:

Nature is impersonal, awe-inspiring, elegant, eternal. It's geometrically perfect. It's tiny and gigantic. You can travel far to be in a beautiful natural setting, or you can observe it in your backyard...
– Gretchen Rubin

My time in Yellowstone and Grand Teton National Parks was inspirational. The abundance of wildlife, in their own unique habitat, far exceeded this photographer’s expectations. Now, like most of us, for the last several weeks I’ve been in self quarantine with my wife at our townhouse in the west end of Richmond, Virginia.

So, what’s an amateur wildlife photographer to do? I found that while I couldn’t venture out to find the animals, they kindly came to me. Or rather, I discovered that they had always been around, but that I just hadn’t seen them. Isolation has taught me to slow down and observe my surroundings. As it turns out, the backyards, front lawns, and surrounding grounds and airspace in the neighborhood is teeming with wildlife. 

We have a bird feeder on a pole in our backyard, just beyond our deck. We fill it with black oil sunflower seeds, approved by the National Audubon Society – you know, the good stuff, that the birds love. It attracts cardinals, robins, finches, sparrows and other birds I haven’t identified yet. It also attracts squirrels and chipmunks, who can’t get to the feeder directly because we have a conical guard on the pole that prevents them from climbing up.  But the birds are generous. While they are feasting at the feeder they also flick out seeds onto the grass and deck so other creatures can share in the banquet. 

I witness this activity daily from inside the house, behind the sliding glass doors that lead to our deck. I will peer through the vertical blinds so I won’t frighten off the wildlife, and then take my photos through the glass door. Recently, I’ve found that I can walk out onto the deck, and if I walk slowly with no sudden motion, I can photograph the creatures without scaring them off. 

My next door neighbor, Scott, is also a keen observer of wildlife. He is working from home, but seems to have plenty of time to look out the window and spot interesting things going on. He will text my phone to let me know when he sees something that I may want to photograph. He told me about the  robin’s nest under his roof gutter, nestled on top of the curved section of the down spout. I was able to get some shots of the mother robin feeding worms to her baby chick. 

He also texted me about two other baby birds that were on his back lawn. One managed to fly up onto the brick wall that divides our yards. I carefully followed this tiny creature’s journey as he plopped down onto our deck and walked across towards the other side of our yard. I was outside, taking lots of photos, until he disappeared into heavy foliage. I spotted him squeeze through a small hole in the wooden fence leading to my other neighbor’s yard. Looking over the fence, I could see him meet up with a larger bird, who I assumed was his mother. I’m not sure what type of birds they were, but it was rewarding to see the reunion.

This is only a sampling of the drama that plays out daily in our yards. Sometimes it is life or death. I once saw one of the neighborhood cats on top of the brick dividing wall staring intensely at something on the other side of my deck. There was a chipmunk backed up into the corner against my house and the other neighbor’s brick dividing wall. Suddenly the cat pounced, and in the blink of an eye he had that chipmunk trapped in his jaws. He hesitated for a second and then bounded straight up the brick wall, prey in mouth, and was gone. 

By far the most amazing spot by my neighbor, Scott, was outside his front door steps. He texted me to look outside at his front steps railing. There, perched on the black wrought iron railing, I saw a magnificent hawk. It must have been 15 to 18 inches long including the long gray and black striped tail. I had never seen one like it before. I later identified it as an adult Cooper’s Hawk, with it’s reddish-orange barred chest and legs and gray back feathers. The head was capped black, and the eyes were bright red. I grabbed my camera and starting snapping away, hoping he wouldn’t fly off too soon.

Turns out he was not skittish at all, like the backyard feeder birds. In fact, it looked like he was poising for me. With his extremely flexible neck, he moved his head to see in any and all directions, while keeping his body perfectly still. He looked left, right, up, down, and behind and down so the head disappeared completely!  When he got bored with that, he flew off the railing onto my front lawn, startling me, so I stepped backwards. From there he pranced across the grass like a runway model, as I snapped away, hardly believing my good fortune. Then in an instant, he flew off.

My neighbor and I would also scan the skies for large birds flying by, like the Turkey Vulture or Blue Heron. Capturing birds in flight with the camera can be challenging, but I’m getting better at it with practice. Scott noticed that a Blue Heron flies over our houses twice a day, in the morning and in late afternoon, going and coming from somewhere close. I’ve been able to get a few good photos of the bird passing overhead. 

The life and death struggles of wildlife can remind me of what’s going on outside our little oasis. My wife and I are among the lucky ones. We’re healthy, retired senior citizens and we’ve so far been able to escape the harsh reality of getting sick, like so many others all around us. Just a few blocks down the road is an elder rehab center that has lost over 50 people due to the COVID-19 virus. We try not to forget them, nor the brave medical professionals who care for patients every day while putting themselves at great risk. Quarantine time has given me the chance to slow down, observe, and reflect on what’s important in life; and for that I am grateful.

***

Website for Stuart DuBreuil and Yoko Gushi

Beside and beneath the water, Hamburg

By Paul Scraton:

We walk through the Speicherstadt between red-brick warehouses, home to trading companies dealing in carpets and tea, as well as record labels, new media start-ups and advertising agencies. We are not alone. On the bridge a tour guide tells his group the story of this port city, and the outdoor cafes by the bridge linking the warehouse district with the city centre are packed with every table taken. In Berlin the return of visitors has been slow, and it appears they have all come to Hamburg. 

Socially distanced queues lead up to the entrance of the Elbphilharmonie… no concerts today but tours and visits to the terrace with its views of the Elbe and across to the cranes and ships of the port. On the raised promenade beside the elevated Baumwall U-Bahn station, hundreds of people move back and forth, in search of the perfect photograph of the new concert hall or perhaps a late morning fischbrötchen and an early glass of Astra beer. At the St Pauli Landungsbrücken the piers are also busy, as people move between ferries and trains, take their seat at a restaurant with a river view or find their land legs after disembarking from a harbour cruise. 

We escape the crowds by going underground, taking the stairs until we reach the bottom of an eighty foot high entrance hall. Somehow we missed the entrance to the lifts, manned by guards in facemasks, bringing the cyclists and pedestrians down to the start of the old Elbtunnel. No cars are allowed down here right now, as renovations continue, and there are not so many of us making the crossing to Steinwerder on foot or bike. It is cool and calm in the tunnel beneath the river, although hard to imagine that giant ocean-going vehicle transporter, bound for Morocco, that would have passed over our heads had we been down here just a few hours before.

At Steinwerder we take the lift back up to the surface, wandering around the building to a lookout point with its kiosk selling fish rolls and an ice cream van. People use the tunnel to go to work or get home, but on this Monday in July it felt like most had made the crossing for no other reason than its novelty value, to look at the city from across the water. And, perhaps, in these strange, distanced times, to get away from the crowds above. 

***

Paul Scraton is the editor in chief of Elsewhere: A Journal of Place and the author of Ghosts on the Shore: Travels along Germany’s Baltic coast (Influx Press, 2017) as well as the Berlin novel Built on Sand (Influx Press, 2019).  

Liverpool and Wales: Longing and imagination in city and country

By Kenn Taylor : 

The relationship between Liverpool and Ireland is well documented. The relationship between Liverpool and Wales less so, yet just as deep. At one point, Liverpool had the largest urban settlement of Welsh speakers. From teaching to building to retail, the Welsh were a key part of the region’s fabric. The National Eisteddfod was held several times in Liverpool and Birkenhead. Relations were not always cosy though. In particular when Liverpool Corporation constructed the Llyn Celyn reservoir over the Welsh speaking village of Capel Celyn, helping fuel Welsh nationalism in the 1960s. Liverpudlians too, were also part of Wales. From the earliest opportunities the working class had for holidays, Wales represented open space, clear air, leisure and countryside.

Even now, Liverpool may no longer represent the economic powerhouse for Wales, especially as Cardiff has grown, but it’s still the closest major urban settlement to North Wales. A place to study, to go out, to shop. While, despite the advent of cheap flights, Wales remains popular for holidays and days out. And both still hold a pull to each other, particularly for the young of each place, long after cars replaced paddle steamers as the quickest route between the two. 

Possessing dramatic landscapes and cultures fired with passion and poetry, they are places separate but intertwined. Hills and tall buildings just visible through the distance on brighter days from up high. For populations with experiences so different, how each viewed the other was and is so much about perception, projection, longing. The Welsh idea of Hiraeth, is something many from Merseyside are also familiar with even if they couldn’t put a name to it. A bittersweet longing for homeland, for a lost golden age, even by those who never knew it or never left in the first place. A yearning to return to something which no longer exists, or maybe never did, but is a feeling which always remains.

In urban Merseyside, Wales is a place to escape to. Peace and space and blinding light. The intensity of openness. A bucolic place of nature, of school outward bound adventures, as much about crisps and kissing as mountain climbing and canoeing. Cheap, accessible holidays and golden if chilly beaches. The romantic weirdness of Portmeirion. Steam trains that go from nowhere to nowhere but at least the landscape looks pretty. This though, of course, ignores the vast holiday industry driven by Merseyside, Manchester and Birmingham, the undulating, boxy sea of caravans along the coast. There are the pseuds too who pretend they’re not tourists, that claim they come for the ‘real Wales’. What is real North Wales though? There’s the real of lakes, mountains and beaches, but also the real of intensive agriculture, nuclear power stations, Japanese factories and RAF jet bases. The holiday parks too are just as real.

In North Wales, Liverpool is a place to escape to, especially for the young. Noise and density and blinding lights. The intensity of urbanity. The possibilities are bigger in London of course, but also much further and harder away. Good times, clubs and music, different people and alternative cultures. Freedoms away from small town oppression. Anonymity and maybe even opportunity. A life closer to the edge, even if it’s easier to fall off. But of course, what is the ‘real Liverpool?’ All of this but also, pleasant suburbs, vast parks, technology hubs and polished shopping centres, like so many others. What both places have is a fierce awareness of themselves and their cultural uniqueness, but that sometimes blinds to what is more universal and what is shared. As well as that, living in cultures so strong, can create a drive for some to escape from it. 

The city in the distance. The hills in the distance. The distance is what matters, near but far. Something to daydream of, to work towards, to long for. A projection in the back of the mind, both real and unreal. The closer you get, the more the longing fades and you begin to think what you saw in the distance was a chimera. The longer you stay, the more you think back to what you have left and realise, maybe it wasn’t so bad. Maybe. Fresh eyes. Hiraeth again. The intangible feeling.

And it is everywhere. Strive to break from hard lives or particular places and we find we always take them with us. When we achieve our escapism, we find it’s just another different reality. What we’re looking for has never existed and it never will. Yet we still always look for it. In the distance, just out of sight. 

***

Kenn Taylor is a writer and arts producer. He was born in Birkenhead and has lived and worked in Liverpool, London, Bradford, Hull and Leeds. His work has appeared in a range of outlets from The Guardian and CityMetric to The Crazy Oik and Liverpool University Press. www.kenn-taylor.com  

Pewenche - First Harvest

By James Kelly:

Late that summer in the evening sun, pausing to ask permission from the spirits before entering their forest. Climbing the hillside, feet kicking up clouds of dry, powdery soil, the dust hanging in the air. Emerging out into the clearing to survey the trees around us, sizing up the giant seed-cones with their bounties of fruit. Climbing again, this time just one, a lone figure dexterously scaling the tree, the nimble body intuiting the path, instinctive, without hesitation or fear, unfazed by the rough armour of foliage, hard and sharp, unforgiving yet giving to those who know how. Then the sound of rustling from atop, the figure trying to prise loose a seed-cone, premature perhaps, the first of the season. The tree resisting, unwilling to give up its treasures without a struggle. Time passing, the last golden rays of sun fading, the shadows creeping up the mountains across the valley, submerging the rocks and forests and leaving a coolness in the air. Gazing up at the tree in anticipation, scanning among the thrashing branches for the source of the noise. Then suddenly, prised loose, sent sailing through the air, the seed-cone falls to Earth, round like a football, heavy like a stone, landing with a dull thud that shakes the ground.

Later, as the evening begins to fade and the first stars appear in the boundless Chilean sky, we prise one of the seed-cones open to reveal the bounty inside. After giving thanks to nature and its spirits, we boil up some of the pine nuts and place them in a bowl on the table: warm and steaming, sweet to the taste. They are the first of that year’s harvest, the fruits of the pewen, or Araucaria araucana, the lifeblood of the Pewenche, whose name quite literally means the people of the pewen.

***

James Kelly is a writer and translator with a strong interest in landscape and time. His work explores interactions between different timescales, from the human to the geological, and what we can learn from the cosmovisions of other peoples in our relationships with the land. More of his work can be found at www.geosoph.scot/writing/.

These streets are life: Withington

Photo: Gursh Nijjar

By Andrew Edgeworth:

Borders are many things; physical, lines on a map, constitutional, binding. But most are psychological. There is a contrast where borders are concerned and while they may not all be manned by armed guards and Government backed, society ensures they remain in place.

In a springtime induced fugue I set out to clear my head, a walk through a neighbourhood I’d come to know over the past twelve months or so. Leaving Ballbrook Avenue I headed on to Palatine Road; the birthplace and home of that great Manchester institution, Factory Records. A blue plaque of commemoration is hidden from all but the most observant. You can still see the spectre of the irascible Tony Wilson on the squalid balcony, gazing down at you, fag in hand. 

In the grounds of one of the horrendously named apartment blocks, (Mottram Manor, Barry Court) the corpse of a cat lies in the undergrowth. The locus delicti unknown, but it had undoubtedly come to rest here in its final moments. In fairness there are worse places to call it a day than under a juniper bush. Had it been run over or poisoned? Who knows? It was not a time to tarry. 

It is here that the Christie hospital seeps into Didsbury gradually, like expanding foam. Every new piece of it is shinier and grander than the last. Progress is signposted by disinfected metals and floor to ceiling strip lights. At one of the many entrances are groups of smokers waiting for death on the pavement, their chemotherapy drips in tow.

The Christie is a non-smoking site

I struggle for a collective noun, the scene neither suburban nor hospice, presents a moral dilemma which forces me onwards. 

Adjacent to me, residents of an anonymous halfway house patrol the pavement in various states of unease. Cigarettes and alcohol hold sway.

Just beyond them the inmates of a nursing home stare on blankly from secure balconies. A vast complex with hourly blue light visits. 

St Cuthbert’s Church stands on the corner of Marriott Street and its foodbank is now just as much a source of salvation. Money is tight and time tighter.

CONFESSIONS: Saturdays: 11am-12pm

The penitent queue stretches back down Palatine Road every Monday lunchtime, and seems to get bigger by the week. In years gone by it would have made the front page of a national newspaper. Now we all put our heads down and shuffle past it on the opposite side of the road. 

Cross over the road my friend, ask anybody but the Government for a lend. 

But the faex populi are not welcome in Didsbury. The needy are an unwanted nuisance in the Tory version of Chorlton. They want their upcycled tables made from unwanted pallets. Just as long as there is still sufficient parking for Range Rovers outside of hipster brunch establishments. Withington is now a little too close for comfort. 

The crossroad with Wilmslow Road and Burton Road mark the unofficial, official start of Withington. An open air theme park for all walks of life, tightly crammed into a place that is different things to different people. Mamucium begins here!

The former White Lion pub is now a Sainsbury’s Local where kind students often sit on the ground outside with the local indigents sharing fags and sandwiches. Long-term cash machine tenants asking about that bizarre concept – spare change. Contactless payment now limits reward. 

The old Scala theatre has been demolished and replaced at the behest of Britannia Group and is now a vulgar set of flats complete with an out-of-place Costa coffee shop on the ground floor. 

Like all apartments they are mandatory luxury – you are no longer allowed, nice or mediocre apartments. No definition exists however. Opposite is yet another set of luxury apartments, balconies affording uneasy viewing for overpaying residents. A strategic reinventing of the local is underway. Old shopfronts have been replaced by bike rack balconies. In Didsbury blocks of apartments (never flats) are given names that couldn’t be further from reality; Alpine Court, Didsbury Gate, Larke Rise. Not so in Withington – they are only allowed a number.

On the main drag a commotion ensues at the bus stop by the now derelict municipal building. A hugely obese man is destroying his walking stick by repeatedly smashing it against the bus stop pole whilst shouting “BASTARD BUS DRIVER” at the top of his voice. The local pedestrians and motorists, despite being at very real risk of injury from flying pieces of cheap timber that are now flying around at all angles, remain oblivious to his protest. The 43 bus adds insult to injury by stopping at the pedestrian crossing a few yards further on. With no stick left he furiously shakes the handles of his wheeled walking frame. The obscenities continue.

Withington high street (Wilmslow Road) is much the same as many others that have suffered in recent years. There is not the spendthrift clientele of the South Manchester ‘villages’ to make it fashionable. The retail sector look is eclectic-poverty, trapped between eras and demography. An Eastern bloc supermarket peddles super strength lager, while charity shops appeal to the classier end of the market. Other businesses have been there since time immemorial and cling on like barnacles to a sea wreck. A laundrette that still runs on 50p pieces, the locksmiths with less life than a deadbolt.

The former bank is like all others in similar locations – derelict. Above the shop fronts, boarded up windows are strewn in graffiti, while at ground level slum dog estate agents prey on low income renters and those in full-time higher education.

Side alleys are not to be ventured down without purpose, the realm of backstreet MOT garages and taxi companies, a permanent haze of oil and cigarette smoke. It’s back-street traditional. Big men in dirty overalls. Big doors and big dogs.

And no ‘High Street’ is complete without boozers. The Victoria is your classic pub where anybody may be unwillingly plucked from the street at any given time to take part in karaoke. Leopard print and lipstick. Flat caps and vapes. Pints of cheap lager and even cheaper bitter. An eternal happy hour where nobody smiles. 

Albert Wilson’s is a more eccentric place altogether. A Sillitoesque corner bar with ceilings seemingly lowered by the weight of time and an uninviting doorway. Mysterious but not to the point of curiosity. 

Students and young professionals choose instead to seek out the safety of familiarity. A vegan café and a hipster bar with monosyllabic names where there appears to be a requirement to dress as if you’ve fallen through the sale rack in TK Maxx to be accepted (my generation of student was nowhere near as adventurous. We were just boring).

The street is now dividing slowly. To the East runs Egerton Crescent with its record store cum coffee-shop and post office. To the West is Copson Street. Another border is slowly materialising. 

The initial impression of Copson Street is one of pound shops in stiff competition, their wares taking over the pavement, an industrial scale operation for entire families each morning. The constant battle of tat outdoing tat. An entire oceans worth of non-recyclable plastic.  Plant pots, shopping trolleys and reusable food containers in a battle for passing trade attention.

More commotion. A man stood by the open door of a scaffolding flatbed truck energetically screams into a phone while inexplicably pointing to the directions he has taken to what is clearly the wrong address. 

I went right down there and then left back there…

I move on in exasperation, passed the mandatory mobile phone repair shop and bookmaker, complete with its FOBTs (fixed odds betting terminals) promising to ruin yet another life. 

The hub of the street in question however is undoubtedly the location of greasy spoon which sees the denizens of Withington flock daily for a bonne bouche. Come rain or shine the locals huddle at bolero style tables on the pavement, most of whom appear to the victims of widespread hypodontia. A sea of shipwrecked mouths pleading for a willing ear. 

At the various grocery shops care workers of African descent fill shopping trolleys and suitcases on wheels with groceries. Students count change in their hands with a lamentable decision to make over one avocado or a packet of rice. 

Behind the retail sector, Victorian terraces run parallel to the main thoroughfare, gated alleyways act as a honeypot for fly-tippers. Six to a house or split into quick-fix flats, MDF warrens that give fire safety officers sleepless nights.

Nearby, on Mauldeth Road West, a ghost-bike is chained to a lamppost in tribute to Harry Sievey. A local musician and son of Frank Sidebottom creator, Chris Sievey, who perished when his bicycle collided with a car in 2017. 

But these streets are life. Withington is real life, not the show home façade of its snooty neighbour which looks down its nose at it from behind electric gates.

Withington is slowly evolving. High house prices have meant that the people who once fled it are now buying up property. No matter how ugly the new facades of apartment buildings are, investment is there. Once thriving, it hopes to thrive again while Didsbury watches on uneasily.

***

Andrew Edgeworth is a former journalist who has been writing fiction since 2013. He was awarded the 2017 Origins flash fiction prize was runner up in the 2019 Splash Fiction competition. His work has also been published by Fairlight Books. He lives in Manchester with his dog, Orwell.

Notes from a Frontier Town: Some might say, secrets interred

By J. Miller: 

Standing atop the dunes of Echoing Sands Mountain (鸣沙山). At the dunes’ base sits Crescent Moon Lake (月牙泉), where some say that at some point in history flying dragons paraded around the shadowy pond where hidden dragons lurked in the depths. That nearby, a monk translated and hid thousands of religious documents. That it was at this geographical point where Christianity and Buddhism mixed. Some might say that it is speculation. 

Off into the distance, an ancient-looking portico unburdened by a building directs its gaze northward towards Dunhuang (敦煌). Camels jockey at the portico, and off-season 4x4s await riders that never come. Snow blankets the dunes. A narrow path leads up the tallest dune. A rope ladder, a staircase that lifts travelers and tourists up the dune. These dunes composed of grains of sand appear sturdy yet transient. The traveler, a temporary pause. A footfall compresses the sand, leaves an indefinite footshape, and sand granules tumble down the dune leaving sunken lanes.

Coming here from faraway I sink into thoughts that travelers’ desires shape their experiences, that experiences can become a form of folkloric experience, and that writing about these experiences is a chance to grasp dead time, or the past.

I find myself unaware that my feet were sinking into the shifting sands. I find myself imagining others that visited here before, who let their feet sink into the sand. Shifting like the sands, the landscape is recontextualized by a traveler’s desire. Wandering throughout the buildings attached to Crescent Moon Lake – a history museum that reminds the viewer of the lake’s impermanence – is a reminder that through these shifting sands the dunes act as a natural barrier for Dunhuang.

I am grateful that I have the museum and park mostly to myself, and that I can come from faraway to visit Dunhuang, if even for a moment.

It’s imaginable that some of the sand also came from far away. That sand was carried through the thin desert air, and it is imaginable that the crescent lake is always threatened. Most of the time the threat comes from some unknowable force. For a time, I tried to let the dunes speak for themselves. Some might say Echoing Sands’ name comes from the sand that whips across the dunes. What language can they speak, where human-language does not factor into the conversation? At one point in time, Dunhuang along with three other cities were frontier garrison towns. Jiuquan (酒泉), another of the garrison towns, is neighbor to a fortress called Jiayuguan (嘉峪关), which some point out has a gate where the exiled and the travelers passed through on their way into the Gobi Desert.

Exiles that passed through this gate carved a note as ritual commemoration, an attempt to internalize the place while at the same time casting it out from memory. The Gate of Demons or the Gate of Sighs. I could not find it. Some might say that it is the gate wishing not to speak with me; that it is an attempt of the fortress to maintain its secrets from an outsider. Checking every gate and tunnel for etched farewell notes, and desiring to interpret contemporary scrawlings for ones thousands of years old [1], I reached an impasse. As one of the travelers visiting a site and trying to create their own narrative to a place, I was a traveler attempting to navigate the fortress’s physical space: the building, arrangement of rooms and entertainment theatres, the angle and height of its ramparts and bastions, and the labyrinth of its corridors reconfigured for a tourist. At the same time, this fortress contained the secrets and shadows and imprints interred in the building.

Writing down my thoughts in a coffeeshop turned barbecue lamb restaurant, a sense of disquiet pervades me. Pictures aside, this written document is the only tactile item that I intend to bring back from this trip. Even then the pictures are just digital relics on a memory card. It’s proof, like a selfie posted on social media, that at one point in time I visited this place. 

I went to a place that on the map said coffeeshop, but instead it sold different variations of the popular Chinese grain spirit (白酒, baijiu) and the owner told me to turn the corner and walk 200 meters, and when I arrived at that location, the restaurant advertised barbecued lamb and served hot water infused with white sugar and soluble coffee-powder. At some point this document will be an attempt to reclaim something, to resuscitate my immediate present with an experience already passed.

Sitting in the barbecue restaurant, the religious grottoes and fortress’ architectural designs protect their secrets in different ways. Thinking about the material and imaginary facets of places: why do certain facets take precedence over others with some aspects of a place declared irrelevant [2]? What makes my search for coffee in a once-garrison town irrelevant compared to looking for scrawlings in stone by exiles? Each place and person is a relic grasping at the tendrils of dead time. In a time of mass consumption, it is imperative to remember that through consuming articles about place, the writing is an act of commemoration. That commemoration is an act of bidding farewell. That it is a ritual practice to forget, and to welcome that place in folkloric history. 

The tourist is not content to let things lie as they should. An imposition of personal narrative always shines through, where the tourist transforms their experiences into an experience that defies any process of linear time. Each traveler reorganizes geographical space and dead time to co mingle with a sense of commemorating the past and leaving with a sense of relevant story, to share with friends, family and other loved ones.

***

J. Miller is a bicyclist and educator based in Wuhan, China. His writings can be found on A South Broadway Ghost Society (2019) and A Dozen Nothing (2019) with a broadside from Chax Press (2020). J. Miller is a lecturer at Central China Normal University, where he is constantly clipping branches from the Osmanthus trees. He is the founding editor of Osmanthus which has collective focus to publish reflexive poetry and prose chapbooks and related objects. As tea drinker and bicyclist, find him in the Osmanthus branches, or here on Twitter, @yawn_sea

Notes:

[1] Cable, Mildred. The Gobi Desert. London: Readers Union Limited, 1942. pp.13-14

[2] Mbembe, Achille. “The Power of the Archive and its Limits.” In Reconfiguring the Archive, eds. Carolyn Hamilton, Verne Harris, Jane Taylor, et al. 19-26. Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2002. pp.19-26. 

Zadonsk – a poem by Osip Mandelstam

Painting: A Wooded Marsh by Jacob van Ruisdael

Introduction by Alistair Noon:

Between 1934 and 1937, the Russian poet Osip Mandelstam lived in internal exile in the city of Voronezh, roughly half-way between Moscow and the Black Sea and not far from the Ukraine (the local accent shares features with Ukrainian). He was accompanied by his wife Nadezhda Mandelstam, who was to play a crucial role in the preservation and posthumous publication of his late work, including the poem translated below. He had been arrested and sentenced after he had written and read, at a private reading in Moscow, a poem that has become known as the Stalin Epigram. Not long after his internal exile ended, he was re-arrested and transported to the Soviet Far East, where he died in 1938, in a Gulag transit camp.

Constantly having to change their accommodation owing to the acute shortage of housing in Voronezh, the Mandelstams were able to spend the summer of 1936 in a small town nearby called Zadonsk, after friends including Anna Akhmatova and Boris Pasternak had collected enough money for them to do so. The Mandelstams rented a room from a farmer on Karl Marx Street No. 10, outside of which stood a poplar. While there, Nadezhda Mandelstam returned to painting watercolours (she had studied art in Kiev), and news of the first show trials, inaugurating the Great Terror of 1936 to 1938, came over the municipal loudspeakers.

Jakob van Ruisdael (c. 1629–1682) was a Dutch landscape painter.

***

“Zadonsk”

Like a vinyl-thin Gillette
that gently shaves off hibernation,
let's ruffle the memories we've kept
of that summer we lived half-Ukrainian.

Honouring Ruisdael's paintings,
you treetops whose titles are known
give dishevelled woods their saintly
name-days. One bush was a start, alone
in the amber and flesh of red loam.

That land has an upward tilt.
I was glad to see its clear layers,
be lord of the land's simplicity
I grasped in its seven chambers.

Its hills would fly to their target
far off, like loose stacks of wheat.
Across the steppe, the boulevard
laid a chain of tents in the heat.
Hotfoot to the blaze went the willow,
and the vain poplar stood up...
The stubble's camp was yellow,
the frost would steam in the rut.

And the mongrel Don, once again,
was a glittering silver, ungainly,
scooped water by the half-bowl,
then got lost – yes, that was my soul –

when the weight of evening was eased
down onto the brutal bunks,
and we heard the carousing trees
burst, like hawk-moths, from the riverbanks.

15 – 27 December 1936
Osip Mandelstam
Translated by Alistair Noon

***

Alistair Noon's translations of Osip Mandelstam, Concert at a Railway Station, appeared from Shearsman Books in 2018. His own poetry collections include Earth Records (2012) and The Kerosene Singing (2015), both from Nine Arches Press. He lives in Berlin.