Maps in Sand

By David Lewis:

My family has passed through any number of forgotten towns and cities, losing languages and leaving our dead in overgrown graveyards.  What connects us to time and place?  Unless attachments are actively preserved, the connections become fainter with each generation.  

My grandfather William Eyton Jones was born in Llangollen, north Wales.  My grandmother Janet was born in Glasgow, but Llangollen became very important to her, and for my mother it was a second home.  When I was a child we visited the town to tidy the family graves and visit my mother’s cousin.  I felt that we belonged and did not belong; we ate ice cream in the sunshine with the other tourists, yet we had graves in the hillside cemetery and family on quiet back streets.  

I returned to Llangollen before lockdown to walk the streets and refresh the memories.  Strengthening these connections between memory, family and landscape is like maintaining maps in sand, retracing the outlines of a story to revitalise it, but what I am really strengthening is how my family feels about this town.  This was a landscape we knew for 160 years – windows, brickwork, chimney pots, the endless roar of the river; things of no importance, the secret elements of our lives unknown even to ourselves.  What stories took place on these streets? In thin sunshine I walked through love stories, family walks, chance encounters, laughter, funerals.  

I stopped at the war memorial.  The granite glinted in the sunshine, awaiting its moment of importance in November.  My grandfather knew and served alongside these Great War dead, the Hugheses, the Griffithses, the Lewises, above all the Joneses.  Family history is an emotional spotlight of memory and narrative that illuminates some people and hides others.  Many of these Joneses would be family who had faded from my story and become important in others.  Perhaps my grandfather joined the Royal Welch Fusiliers on the same day as these Joneses, the lost cousins from the hill farms.  Is it irreverent to think of this war memorial as a monument to unknown family?  Perhaps.  

The steep road to the cemetery was still narrow and quiet, but new houses were creeping up the hillsides, building on what was open farmland and a shaggy, gloomy playing field.  But the little cemetery was still a quiet place of yews and damp grass, wild-flowers and benign neglect, with superb views over the town and the distant hills.  My Llangollen grandparents are buried there.  This was the focus of our visits, the maintenance of their resting place; even today all my Llangollen excursions end at the grave. 

These maps in sand refresh family story and family history, but there is only so far back in time I can travel.  My most valued family connections to Llangollen are two battered 1930s photograph albums; my mother and her older sister at Plas Newydd, an uncle playing with his dog in the sunshine.  Yet one album is unlabelled, marooning the family in a permanent unknown past, their names forgotten.  Some I recognise, most I don’t.  For all the time spent reaffirming old stories, here is a bridge I cannot cross; I cannot travel back any further, and here the past cannot be reached.  

***

David Lewis has written five books of history/landscape/psychogeography about his native Liverpool and Merseyside. He posts urban/rural images on Instagram -davidlewis4168 and mutters about the world on Twitter -@dlewiswriter

Watch: Wanderlust and Memories of Elsewhere

In a discussion based a series of essays published on Elsewhere: A Journal of Place earlier this year, Sara Bellini, Anna Evans, Marcel Krueger and Paul Scraton talk about wanderlust and belonging, what it means to be home and what it means to be away, at the end of this strange and anxious year. Thanks so much to everyone who attended and took time out to spend a Monday evening with us. This was the first ever Elsewhere online event, and hopefully it won’t be the last… but equally, we hope to see some of you in person in 2021 too!

The essays:

Plateau of the Sun, by Sara Bellini

The Road to Skyllberg, by Anna Evans

La Fleur en Papier doré, by Marcel Kruger

The White Arch, by Paul Scraton

Hoyggja: Harvesting grass in the Faroe Islands

Photo by Stephen Pax Leonard

By Stephen Pax Leonard:

(You can listen to an audio version of this essay, read by Stephen Pax Leonard, at the bottom of this post)

July is the time of the hoyggja which refers to the cutting of the in-field (bøur) grass and harvesting it for the sheep’s winter feed. Families are outside; their cheery voices drift in the wind. Children’s laughter sweeps across the fields. There is noise everywhere. Flies hum heavily. I hear the haunting curlews, the ghosts of dead boys, on the horizon. The air tremours with their distinctive call. High up on the mountain ridges, skuas defend the spines of the hills. A woman’s brassy voice can be heard jabbering from a nearby window, her sentences shrinked to disconnected words. There is the sound of scythes being whetted. Radios are perched on the stumps of fence posts. Their aerials waltzing in the wind. Music plays. Dogs bark. 

Leaning on two-tined pitch-forks, elderly men with creased brows stand around exchanging gossip. Their voices dangle in the light breeze. The farmers nod as they listen to an account of a wet harvest two score years ago. They square their shoulders and lower their tones as the lay-reader shuffles by, his shoes grinding on the gravel. Then the conversation turns to lawnmower designs. They all swear by a certain liver-shaped Italian brand that is used to negotiate the very uneven ground of the steep slopes. But first the long grass has to be scythed. With scythe in hand, I cast a glance over the hills and see elderly men scything grass with obstreperous grandchildren at their feet collecting the grass. This rural scene, this summer idyll could be from a hundred years ago. Further up the bank where Gudmund and his extended family are at work, Stein from Hvalba talks endlessly about the huldufólk (‘supernatural, elf-like spirits to be found in the Faroese countryside’) of Lítla Dímun (the uninhabited island without electricity where sheep are taken to graze in a smack). His conversation turns to the intertwining of the visible and the invisible, the material and the spiritual. The places where the stones speak to the ocean. Families battled over ownership of Lítla Dímun, this tiny nipple of basalt in the mid-Atlantic, for many years. In the end, a cooperative of 48 farmers from Hvalba bought the island and still keep their sheep on this mysterious, unsettled outpost. The talk turns to politics, parliamentary squabbles, fishing quotas and the dead. Telling stories seems to be an essential part of hoyggja. It is a time to meet with friends, laugh, pass on memories from previous harvests and of course prepare the grass. Then, orders wrapped in a shower of expletives are barked at Stein and it is back to work. The people of Suðuroy are known for their expressiveness, their sometimes crass language and the way they wave their arms around when they speak.

It is a dry summer’s day and we are busy raking the grass and placing it on long drying racks (turkilagar) that line the hilly pastures running from top to bottom. Flocks of starlings feast noisily on clews of worms that are revealed as the rake drags across the earth. Covered in nets, the grass is left to dry on these racks in the wind. It is imperative that the grass is dried as much as possible before the rain comes which can be taxing in the Faroes. More than the rain, the farmers fear fog and windless days. Providing there is wind, the grass normally dries even if there is the odd shower of rain. This summer has been rather dry and the farmers are hopeful that we will have a good harvest of hay to feed the sheep over the winter. Sunshine has been forecast for the whole week and all going well the grass should be sun-bleached in ten days or so. If the grass gets very wet, it turns into a soggy mush, a useless liability and a rotting curse. Nowadays, it is less important than it was before. Almost no farmers are dependent on just sheep anymore and some now have silos to make silage. Previously, a wet harvest could have had disastrous consequences. This is the last day of harvesting the grass to make silage. Everyone is helping out to make sure the job is done. Aside from the grass that is being dried the old-fashioned way, this grass will be stored in airtight silos and fermented using formic acid and water. Men tread the grass in silos as if it were grapes; they try to squeeze out as much of the air as possible. There is little baling here for the ground is so uneven and the slopes are so steep. That must in part explain why farming methods are barely unchanged.

After a long, hard day in the fields, we are fed ræst kjøt at Gudmund’s house.  Ræst kjøt is lamb that has been air-dried for several months and then braised for 7 hours. With few trees and no salt production due to adverse weather conditions, the Faroese were not able to smoke or salt meat to preserve it. The pungent smell of ræst kjøt, somewhere between a veiny cheese, lamb and wool hits you as you enter the kitchen. The meat is served with root vegetables. The meat comes from the sheep that were slaughtered in September. Gudmund sells the meat privately to local people and distributes the rest to his extended family. Almost all the meat is eaten air-dried, the way the Faroese love it. 

Dinner finished, we stand outside on the veranda. The air is crisp and fresh. I used to tell visitors to the Faroes ‘when you land, stand on the tarmac for a minute and just breathe in the air’. It feels so clean and perfect. Tonight it tastes of the sea. The view over the green slopes and the principalities of sheep that border the fjord could only be the Faroes. The gullied hills, the vestiges of a glacial age, wrinkle the bare lead-coloured rock. Houses, painted the colours of the rainbow, hug the bay. As is often the case this time of the year, the colours of the fuschia-coloured sunset have invaded the sky by the rounded peaks that cradle the fjord. The Trongisvágur valley looks like an oil painting with the evening glow gushing across the horizon. Gudmund tells me repeatedly how he loves this view. The Faroese take great pride in their country. Elderly women in the village would often be seen photographing their landscape even if they had spent their entire life there. They never tire of its beauty. Late in the evening, we retire under the scattered light of the fading sun to homes warmed by the summer sunshine and to kitchens alive with radio noise.

***

Stephen Pax Leonard is a writer, linguist and traveller. He is the author of six books on the Scandinavian and Arctic region. In total, he spent nearly a year living in the Faroe Islands. He is currently compiling a book of short travel stories which focus on the poetic memory and acoustic experience of his travels in northern climes. Wherever possible, he travels with his 3 year old spaniel, Stan.

Memories of Elsewhere: Westcliff Parade, by Dan Carney

Photo: Marc Pether-Longman

In these times when many of us are staying very close to home, we have invited Elsewhere contributors to reflect on those places that we cannot reach and yet which occupy our minds…

By Dan Carney:

It’s a number of things that will keep Westcliff Parade in memory shortly after you’ve left, when venturing further than 500 metres from home will become an exotic and reckless act, and your mind will be constantly occupied by the newly inaccessible.

It’s the curious way it can feel windswept and deserted here even when the air is still and there are people all around. It’s the grand old Westcliff Hotel, brilliant white and offseason-empty, as well as the Cliffs Pavilion theatre just beyond, a strange but compelling blend of art deco and brutalism, a 1950s Butlin’s building imagined as a cruise ship from the near future. It’s the gentle decline, on one side, to the seafront between Southend and Westcliff, and the Cliff Gardens, a multi-tiered Edwardian pleasure garden set into the slope and stretching all the way along to the Adventure Island amusement park. A tastefully verdant point from which to take in the not quite unending view of the never quite empty sea; the first widening of the Thames Estuary, and the Isles of Grain and Sheppey. The Canvey Island skyline to the right and, to the left, Southend Pier, the longest pleasure pier in the world.

The gardens were designed by the renowned architect Sir Edwin Lutyens, whose other works include the palatial Rashtrapati Bhavan presidential residence in New Delhi, the Memorial to the Missing of the Somme at Thiepval, and the Cenotaph in Whitehall. Lutyens was also responsible for the memorial to Southend’s own Great War dead, a freestanding eleven-metre obelisk of Portland Stone that also resides here, further along at Clifftown Parade. His daughter Elisabeth, a prominent composer, had a similarly diverse career, pioneering her own technique of serial composition – an approach involving the equal usage of all twelve notes on the chromatic scale – scoring a number of 1960s Hammer horror films, and drawing admiration from Leonard Bernstein, Truman Capote, and Stravinsky. 

But what will make this short stretch linger, more than its panoramic views, impressive landscaping, or aristocratic architect-composer bloodlines, is the thing that has brought you here. Dad died two days ago, fading away peacefully – and expectedly - in a nearby care home, following a long period of illness. You’ve been here since, staying at the Westcliff Hotel, helping Mum with death administration and trying to provide general support.

Between you, you’ve been working down the list – getting the death registered, cancelling the pension payments, transferring the joint account into a single name, going through the production line notification of friends and relatives. There’s a bleak humour in how mundanely procedural a lot of it is, how the infrastructure of eight and a half decades of unbroken existence can be so easily dismantled or reassigned. There isn’t much humour, however, in how nothing either of you do or say seems enough to fill the new gap, a vast, weird expanse it’ll take time to explore and understand. For now, it’s less complicated to collect the certificates, make the appointments, and sign the forms, all rituals which - at this moment - seem to exist solely to enable the deferral of the more ambiguous stuff.

Even so, you spend a lot of time while you’re here wondering what’s going on. Even when death is foregrounded by decline and inevitability, a release when it finally comes, it’s still a punch in the chest. You’ve been standing on the track watching the train approach, able to do pretty much anything to prepare for impact, except get out of the way. And if it’s hit you hard then Mum, after 55 years of marriage, has been hit harder still. What it leaves is more than just simple sadness or loss. It’s a disorienting blend of the fluid and the fixed. Panic and permanence, everything rising and spinning around a monolithically immovable core. A contradictory thing which won’t settle or be made sense of, leaving you feeling like a switch waiting to be flicked, a punch yet to be thrown.

As if to reflect this, Westcliff Parade dissolves and reforms daily. In the mornings it’s a marvel of Edwardian seafront elegance, the gardens stately and welcoming, the timber- and glass-fronted houses inviting unhurried admiration. It’s not hard, in the bright mornings - even months before the summer crowds will arrive at the beaches below - to feel the energy and possibility that must have crackled through here in the 1800s and early 1900s, when Southend was an exclusive seaside resort, the destination of choice for well-heeled Londoners.

In the evenings, however, the desirability and bustle of years past are nowhere to be seen or felt, overwritten by darkness, dread, and decades of affordable overseas holidays. Westcliff Parade is the chilly precursor to hasty Wetherspoons meals, eaten late and alone in the cavernous converted post office off Southend High Street, before the trudge back to the hotel. It is yesterday’s place, shuttered and embalmed, offering no restorative views or palatable metaphors for death and grief. It doesn’t want you here, and it makes sure you know it. It watches disapprovingly, tallying your steps and keeping track of every minute you stay.   

On the last day you are here, the duties are mainly done. The morning is clear and crisp but the answers, unsurprisingly, are still to appear. You check out of the hotel and find yourself standing at the top of the Cliff Gardens in the rising wind, surveying the choppy estuary. You look across to Canvey, then down at the couple on the bench. In the months that follow, you’ll sometimes feel like you’re on your way through, but more often like an engine sputtering quietly to a halt, a box boarded under the floor.

***

Dan Carney is a musician/writer from north-east London. He has released two albums as Astronauts via the Lo Recordings label, and also works as a composer/producer of music for TV and film. His work has been heard on a range of television networks, including BBC, ITV, Channel 4, HBO, Sky, and Discovery. He has also authored a number of academic research papers on subjects such as cognitive processing in genetic syndromes and special skills in autism. His other interests include walking, hanging around in cafes, and spending far too much time thinking about Tottenham Hotspur.

Holding Homes

By Amy Doffegnies: 

Believing that there is no place like home is akin to my belief in fate; it brings me comfort, but I stop short of certainty. After almost a decade away, I thought that moving back to my native Cumbrian village of mossy dry-stone walls and black winter branches would be simple. Like the Herdwick sheep that graze the highest fells, I have long been hefted to this home. I have strayed far – making homes in Australia, Thailand and Myanmar  – but never letting go of the secret wish to return. When I arrived back I felt the glee of homing and of finally being stationary. But in past months my mind has remained in flight. It flitters far, even as my body, clambering up the deep fells, has willed it to slow, and stay. 

Some days I see only symmetry. The other days it is more difficult to write and I breathe at the surface. I am a wanderer amongst people who have their place. For people here, home is unambiguous. The snow-haired gent who, with a craned back, ambles past our house, bickering with Dad about the Labour Party and the broken northern rail service. They share the autumn fruits of the tree beside the beck, taking apples at their respective heights. Then there’s the damson-eyed boy from school. In a yellow puffer jacket, he reads Japanese manga comics on his train home, as it laces across the sands of Morecambe Bay.  

The question of whether there is still no place like home loiters around my heart. I wonder if I am the only one – was I mistaken in hurrying back for ‘home?’ Across the countertop, a young woman I went to high school with serves coffee to pay for her next flight. I met with a fellow Cumbrian in Myanmar last year, lanky and handsome, a farmer’s son and now part-time model come English teacher in Yangon; his students speak English in a thick northern accent. 

Wherever I have been, I look to poems to steady me. Alongside poems I have taken to carrying other things, fragments of collected homes, physical symbols of vast parts of me that exist, invisible. I hold on to these proofs my other homes, bicycles and blankets. I orient myself by larger, more containing things than before; I follow the phases of the moon, the very same that hung over me in other places.

Opening a freshly acquired copy of the New Cumbrian Anthology of Poems, I come to Robert Macfarlane’s question, which resonates:

“What do I know when I am in this place that I can know nowhere else?”

Nowhere else do I know being a daughter, at home, by the whip of the hearth, it’s different. Nowhere else do I know the pair of white egrets, homing in the evening to the field’s trees. Nowhere else, the grandfatherly brown buzzard patrolling or, by the level crossing, the wink of a deer; or standing in the rust strewn stream, the glint of an eel (or was it?) 

And still, there’s something other than here that I cling to, on strolls past square hedges, down green lanes. What of those things I knew of other homes? Am I to know them nowhere else? 

*

Sitting on my single bed, under a charcoal fleece and the winter half-light, I hear Pay Pay’s voice at the end of the phone, the rain hammering on his tin roof and the infrequent thud of a mango dropping. Pay Pay (‘Dad’, in Burmese) recently moved back to a small town in Myanmar’s Irrawaddy delta region, where he grew up. From the comparatively modern Thai border town of Mae Sot where we met eight years ago, Pay Pay’s home for a quarter century, it’s a shift. Our life circumstances and the places that we have returned to are worlds apart, but we both find ourselves plunged back into places that we once called home.

This gloomy afternoon, Pay Pay asks with a hint of rascal, “Thamee (daughter), what do you think about fate?” his voice emphatic, accented. My adopted (additional, essential), far-away father is an erudite and graceful rebel. Pay Pay is a former member of the Burmese Communist Party, ex-political prisoner and teacher. 

On my days off in Mae Sot, usually on Saturday mornings, I would make my way by bicycle to my Burmese teacher’s front room. His small classroom, like an open shop front, doubled as Pay Pay’s kind-eyed wife Ei Ei’s tailoring business. At the front of their home sat a line of carefully nurtured pot plants: rosella, yellow roses, a small papaya tree, and Pay Pay always standing to greet me, hands on hips. He taught me the basics of Burmese language and though I didn’t yet know the colours of the rainbow, the vocabulary list he gifted me across the desk included ‘democracy,’ ‘demonstration,’ and ‘election,’ – start with the essentials. 

Quickly, I learned that Pay Pay was a poet, a fact that sang in his speech. In that Thailand life, Pay Pay woke at dawn to teach a full load of classes. He drove an old motorbike and stayed up late at night, busy with translation work and absorbing international news. As my friends played a weekly women’s football match across from Pay Pay’s house, I’d stop by. Over tealeaf salad he told me of the letters that he and his wife wrote to each other while he was in prison, and the story of his exile to Thailand, away from the regime that had imprisoned him. In the place where Pay Pay became my family, I grew my first home away from home; home expanded and was added to. Silently, the place was taking hold and nestling deep within, made of slowly forged connections. 

Jolting me back to the moment, “Do you believe in fate, Thamee?” Pay Pay asked again. “I think so,” I say. It’s something I want to believe in, but in truth, I’m not sure.

*

A year on from this phone call, I’m back again in the Cumbria of my school days, time suspended. The pandemic struck and I bolted from the city to the shelter of space. But being back here last year, after so much time spent away, I had learned the difficulty in coming back to a place where I once belonged, having since belonged in other places, and still belonging elsewhere. A jigsaw piece grown huge from holding other homes, my heart sways here perilously between disquiet, loss, and deep love of this place. The paradox that my (former?) home can be the loneliest place is something I didn’t anticipate. 

Some days, the fields have been a tonic. The first days back I lived that phase that always comes first after returning: every corner is alight and for a time I fully draw in the air: half-sea, half-mountain. Nettles, jagged-edged stamps of spring line the verges, and bluebells shine in the woods, an uneven amphitheatre. One day, a red deer, this time in full view, an injection of bandy limbs vital after a day inside. More common, but still my favourite sight, is my Dad’s sheepdog plaining through the shallow stream, part-seal, part-collie, her black tail a thick, white-tipped whip above the water. 

The questions have not left, they swirl around stubbornly still, questions of my place and purpose, and where I fit, and where is home? I sometimes feel far, far from my other homes. I won’t give up my anchors set down in disparate spaces, spread far across continents. 

Sometimes, coals of knowing glow, in unexpected moments. Walking out on the cold sands surrounding Humphrey Head, bare feet, careful to step where it’s firm enough to tread, Dad’s lone figure is metres ahead – yes, this is home.

Sitting on my bed, again, I watch a video clip of Yangon during the pandemic, its streets are naked now, but it’s the same jungle city, masses of trees and silver skyscrapers, scattered through with golden pagodas – yes, this is home.

And appearing in my dreams, the luminous backyard wattle tree I could see from my Canberra bedroom window, a kookaburra too, on lucky days. Out the front bony bicycles slumped against our resident Terrence pine, its needles treaded into the ropey rug inside – yes, this is home.

As my chunky Aussie boots feel through the grasses of Morecambe Bay, I know, in the space that bodily movement allows, that home is everywhere I have been long enough to love. I know these waves of comfort will not stay, skimming in like sheets of water over sticky sands. For home to be amorphous is not straightforward, but it’s the only way I know. 

I used to think that fate might eventually fix me to one place. Now I don’t know a fate that will show me where to go and where is home. On good days though, I think it shines light through my way, from home to home, through bluebell lit woods, and on.

***

Amy Doffegnies is a writer and poet currently living between Cumbria and Oxford. Her work has been published in Mekong Review, New Mandala, Frontier Myanmar and Kendal Mountain Festival Review. She has a PhD focused on human rights and Buddhism in Myanmar. 

Memories of Elsewhere: The Road to Skyllberg, by Anna Evans

In these times when many of us are staying very close to home, we have invited Elsewhere contributors to reflect on those places that we cannot reach and yet which occupy our minds…

By Anna Evans:

I can picture the house where we stayed, my grandmother’s house. Painted yellow and white with steps up to the door, and a balcony above. Walking up the steps and opening the front door, the smell of wood and paint. Inside the feel of wooden floors warm and solid under my feet. The kitchen with its green painted wooden cupboards, like being in a ship’s cabin. Together around the table in the evenings eating crispbread and cheese, and boiling water in the saucepan for tea, always served in big cups with saucers, the tea light and delicate. Unwrapping the tea bags and trying not to let the paper get wet. Sitting on the wooden bench at the table, darkness falling and a lantern in the window. The feeling of being away from home, everything is cosy. I plead to be allowed to sleep in the little wooden trundle bed that is made up downstairs so that I can hang on to the feeling of being in a story; and so I become Heidi, tucked up in the little attic room, far away in the mountains. 

Sometimes unexpectedly, the feel and smell of a Swedish summer day will appear from nowhere. In this landscape, with its red-painted wooden houses, its forests and lakes, wildflowers and meadows, I spent long summers. It is a place I have never lived but that I visited frequently as a child, my mother’s hometown of Askersund, at the top of Lake Vättern. 

It is a place I associate with a feeling of space, and of openness. This feeling I have framed, from a trip back to Sweden, in the archipelago where we walked. The road ahead bridges, stretching out into the seemingly unending blue horizon. 

For me, this place will always recall the sense of time and of space I felt there, of the hours spent riding my bike and the sense of freedom it gave me; something like the allure of childhood memory and its summer skies. I think of time outside by the lake, and long summer nights. The rocks covered in moss, and adventures outside; the forests like a picture book. Arriving in Sweden, it is the rocks I look for first - those great expansive rocks which seem to be everywhere. Gathering blueberries in the forest, which tasted so fresh and alive. And the time we picked wild mushrooms and cooked them, the most delicious thing I had ever tasted. Swimming in the lake and walking to the harbour in the town to look at the boats. If you continue walking, you can cross the bridge out to the island. 

There is a peacefulness and gentleness to the forest, the suggestion that there might be places to get lost in, and places where people have never set foot; but it is not a place to feel afraid in. The feel of a world co-existing and of non-human habitation. The forest provides a refuge for all kinds of creatures, not often seen by human eyes; even quite large animals like the mysterious and majestic elks. I am entranced by the lily pads, and the tiny frogs that can be found everywhere along the ground, that are given life in the picture books we read together; for the small creatures have as much value as the larger and more powerful ones. In these books there are trolls, the kind of trolls who watch over and protect the forest and its inhabitants. To look around the landscape, it seems to make sense that they are there, in the skies, the rocks, and trees; in all the hidden places of the forest. They are caught up in my mother’s journeys to England and in the stories of her childhood growing up on the farm. Her artists eye for detail, finding magic in the everyday. 

On a trip back to Sweden, we stay in a house in the forest and it rains for a week. I am looking for summers spent by the lake, the boats and the harbour; the light which brings openness and a sense of space. Every day we drive past and see the sign enticing, as divergences often are. From the house in the forest, we turn off the road and find a hidden valley and meadowland, fresh and bright after the rainfall; wildflowers growing by the side of the road. 

The road to Skyllberg is the turning we take off the main road on the last day of our trip. Not just a location on the map, but a symbol, found somewhere between the past and present. Each recall of memory is like a draft worked over and over. Each time I want to recreate the moment when we turn the corner and find the lake hidden behind trees. 

***

Anna Evans is a writer from Huddersfield in the north of England, currently living in Cambridge. Her interests are in migration and literature, cities and movement, and she has completed an MA in ‘Writing the Modern World’ at the University of East Anglia. She is currently working on a project on place in Jean Rhys’s early novels, and you can follow her progress through her blog, And The Street Walks In.

Memories of Elsewhere: Plateau of the Sun, by Sara Bellini

In these times when many of us are staying very close to home, we have invited Elsewhere contributors to reflect on those places that we cannot reach and yet which occupy our minds…

By Sara Bellini: 

The first thing I think about is the rain. The sound of a summer storm beyond the window pane just before going to bed, no other noise in the room. And then the petrichor, the smell of water on the grass slope behind the house the morning after, the earth still dark in the daylight. The first thing I think about when I think about the mountains is heavy rain on a summer night.

I cannot tell exactly when we stopped going to my grandma’s holiday home in the mountains. It must have been sometime before my teens, after my grandpa died, but I can say I went there every summer during my childhood from when I was six months old. My mum’s mum lives down in the valley, half an hour by car, and used to spend the whole summer there when the weather got too warm. My mum and I, and later my little brother, would join her, my grandpa and his sister (and the occasional guests) for a few weeks.

The second thing I think about is the smell of the pine cones burning in the little wood burner in the bathroom, their soothing crackling keeping me company during the shower, the stove’s warmth cosy and earthy. The pine cones and kindling were fetched during trips to the nearby woods, usually by my grandma and her sister-in-law (her partner in crime), both wearing skirts and comfy old-fashioned shoes. 

My grandparents’ holiday home was at the edge of a village on what is called the Plateau of the Sun, right behind Monte Altissimo, the mountain visible from my grandparents’ kitchen. They bought the house when my mum and aunt were in their teens and used it mostly during the warm season. The garage on the side was added later, and the old one on the ground floor was turned into a spacious kitchen/dining room/living room. I remember opening the house for the season, the big heavy key turning into the glass door and behind it a wall of peaceful darkness, heavy with the smell of wood panelling and sofas and cold stone fireplace.

The third thing I think about is the food. Like any Italian woman that had grown up during the war, my grandma’s main concern was that we were all well-fed, and happily fed too. This idea practically translated into all of her signature dishes: homemade lasagne, polenta with mountain cheese, pasta fresca with ceps, risotto... We would get fresh bread from the little stone bakery every day, and ice cream from the gelateria on the main street. And then of course there were the blueberries and mushrooms we picked in the woods, and ice-cold water magically pouring out from the mountain side. My own idea of a mountainscape is located very precisely in those experiences and in those places. Even now whenever I enter a forest my sensorial memory unleashes images of my childhood there: smells of pine trees, wet soil and wild strawberries.

My mum told me that one of the first solid foods I had were grapes. Once when we were on holiday in the mountains and I was about one year old I disappeared and everyone searched the whole house and went as far as the street looking for me. They found me quietly sitting inside a kitchen cupboard enjoying some grapes. I was too little to remember this, but my mum and my grandma have told the story so many times that I consider it a memory. And it’s the same with the many photos of me taken there in my early years: holding my great-uncle’s hand, playing with fresh mushrooms picked by my mum’s cousin, sitting on the dining room table while entertaining the grown-ups.

The fourth thing I think about is the old deck of Trevisane we used for the card games: briscola, scopa, Marianna. It had been handled so many times that the cards were almost soft, their laminated slipperiness worn away by time. We would all play – me, my mum, my grandma, my great-aunt and the regular guests. That’s what we would do on rainy afternoons or after dinner, for hours, chuckling and strategising. We were never bored. I think that’s where we got the habit of playing cards after eating, and even now, in the rare occasions when I see my mum or my grandma, it feels like a deeply familiar thing to do. 

A few years ago my aunt mentioned in passing that my grandma had sold the house in the mountains. My mum had probably forgotten to tell me. My grandma was just too old to be there by herself and all her holiday companions were dead. I hadn’t been there in a decade, but I was utterly shocked at the realisation that the possibility to go there was lost forever. And after the first instinctive shock came a second one when I thought how it must have felt for her to touch every familiar object and have to decide on its fate, to disassemble each room piece by piece, one memory at a time, and then leave the house for good.

When I think about the wooden house in the mountains I think about family and home. When I think about the mountain I think about my grandma.

 ***

Sara Bellini is an editor of Elsewhere: A Journal of Place. She lives in Berlin, the place she calls home at the moment.

A week in Orkney

By Tim Cooke:

One summer, my father took us, Rob and I, to the Orkney Islands, to see the Viking burial sites, Pictish and Neolithic ruins, and to do some fishing. I was still in primary school – year five, I think. The first evening we arrived, we watched three locals unload their catch from a small motorboat onto the boggy shore of the lake we were staying on. We ate dinner in a barn, or outbuilding, with stuffed fish mounted on the walls, gawping over our shoulders at our food. Dad drank Guinness, as he would each night for the coming week, while me and my brother sipped ice-cold cans of Irn-Bru. I don’t remember what we spoke about, just that Rob kept repeating Will Smith’s line from Independence Day – Let’s kick the tires and light the fires, Big Daddy.

We fished most mornings, Dad steering us out to the silky deep, but didn’t catch a thing. He’d choose a spot, kill the engine and cast our lines, then wait quietly for a bite. Every so often, one of our wires got snagged in the weeds. My lack of experience meant the first few times this happened, I flicked up my rod and shouted, I’ve got something, only to reel in handfuls of mulch. After every twenty minutes or so – not nearly long enough – Dad broke the silence by announcing we were to move on, because the fish were surely basking in that pool of sun over there, or whatever. Reflecting on our failure one night, he blamed the seal apparently stalking the boat and stealing our trout. He’s stuck to this story ever since.

We’d travelled to Scotland a number of times before our week in Orkney. I’m not sure how many trips we’d made, but they’ve all sort of amalgamated into one in my mind. I recall, for instance, a murder of crows alighting on the roof of Edinburgh Castle, and that very same day, as far as I can tell, driving beside Loch Ness. I was obsessed with the monster mythology and told everyone I was going to see it. And then I did. I had this pamphlet with a condensed history of the beast – a few grainy black and white shots dispersed between paragraphs – that I must have read a thousand times or more. I loved the ‘Surgeon’s Photograph’ – categorical proof, if any was needed, that some time-evading horror lurked below us and would, on occasion, rise to the surface. 

I held on tight to this leaflet as we drove along a narrow country road. There was a screen of lush green foliage to my left, beyond which the water bobbed and chopped. I longed for a breach, and sure enough it came. I’d only been looking at the loch for a matter of minutes – ten perhaps, without averting my eyes – when two humps broke the crest of a wave, followed by a third and fourth, and finally the pointed tail, the last bit to disappear back into the sloshing abyss. It was over in three seconds flat, only ripples remaining – working away from the site of incision like lights on a radar dial.

There – I saw it! Look, over there! Look at the water!

My parents were enjoying my burgeoning interest in cryptozoology and had told me they, too, believed in the creature.

Well there you go, Mum said, you’ve seen it now. You can tell Nan when we get back to the hotel.

Did you see it, though? I was bouncing in my seat.

They smiled at one another and Dad confirmed he had, indeed, seen something.

Nearing the end of our time in Orkney, we visited Maeshowe, a Neolithic cairn and passage grave constructed around 3000 BC. From the outside, it looked like a small hill, a place a hobbit might inhabit. The entrance tunnel, which runs to the central chamber, is only three feet tall, so we had to shuffle through on our hands and knees. As I crawled along, I was struck by the smell of the damp earth, far stronger than that I was familiar with. It left an almost bitter aftertaste. We’d been told there were bodies here and, despite the likelihood of this information being false, I could feel them. I paused in the passageway, unsure as to whether or not I should go any further, but Rob was gaining on me, so I had to keep moving. It was as if I was being sucked into the ground.

Stepping into the chamber was like stepping out of our world and into a different dimension, a time capsule. While the guide talked about dates and architecture, man-hours and angled buttresses, I zoned out and heard sounds and voices swirling in a maelstrom around me. I’d been thinking a lot, at night, about death and heaven. Dad tried to comfort me with words of God and eternal life, but to be honest the idea of forever scared me more than anything else. I couldn’t get my head around it.

I stood facing the wall, looking at an image of a dragon scratched into stone by a Norse graffiti artist in the twelfth century. As recounted in the Orkneyinga Saga, a group of Viking travellers broke into the tomb and left more than thirty runic inscriptions, the world’s largest collection of such engravings. It occurred to me that this dragon I was staring at might, in fact, be skulking in the depths of Loch Ness. Had they seen him too?

I flinched at something wet and warm moving along the back of my skull. I turned around to see Rob grinning. He’d taken, lately, to surreptitiously chewing a tuft of hair protruding from my crown – he loved that I hated it so much. What’s the matter with you? 

Back outside, in the fresh air, we walked along the coast. It could have been a different day, I don’t know. We paused by a farmer’s field and watched a woman delivering a foal, her arm inserted deep inside the back end of the horse. Rob touched the fence and jolted backwards. 

It’s electric. He touched it again. Whoa. That’s so weird. He turned to me. You have a go.

I placed my finger on the wire. Shit! It felt as though my bones were being pulled from their sockets. 

Dad caught up and joined us. 

It’s an electric fence, I explained.

Don’t be silly.

The woman in the field looked up. It is actually. I wouldn’t touch it if I were you.

His hands were already stretched out – it was too late to retract them. Strewth! Bloody hell. The woman shook her head.

We continued walking along the cliffs. The wind was blowing hard now and the sea writhed like a snake pit. Always full of energy, Rob ran on, sidestepping knots of couch grass, skipping over divots and molehills. He was straying dangerously close to the edge.

Robert, get away from there. Dad was holding my wrist ten or fifteen metres inland. Come back here with us. The wind is very strong. Rob strolled over, his mouth twisted into a smile.

What would you do if I fell?

I’d grab your brother and jump off too. The words startled me – I looked up to see if he was joking, but his face was stern, almost angry. I could never go back to your mother with just one. Where was she, anyway? Why hadn’t she come with us? I looked out at the ocean, at the thrashing waves, and felt unsafe.

***

Tim Cooke is a teacher, freelance writer and creative writing PhD student. His work has been published by the Guardian, Little White Lies, The Quietus, 3:AM Magazine, New Welsh Review and Ernest Journal. His creative work has appeared in various literary journals and magazines, including The Shadow Booth, Black Static, New Welsh Review, Foxhole Magazine, Prole, Porridge Magazine, The Nightwatchman, The Lampeter Review, Storgy, Litro Magazine and MIR Online. He recently had a piece of creative nonfiction published in a Dunlin Press anthology on the theme of ports and is currently working on a collection of short stories. You can follow him on Twitter @cooketim2