West

A Journey Through the Landscapes of Loss

Jim Perrin

• Publisher: Atlantic Books
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN:
  9781843546122
• eBook ISBN:
  9780857895608
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Science Biographies
• Index: Social Sciences

West tells the story of Jim Perrin's life against the lives and deaths of his cherished wife and son, and the landscapes through which they traveled together. It is a complex and sensual love story, a celebration of the beauty and redemptive power of wild nature, and an extraordinary account of one man's journey towards the acceptance of devastating personal loss.

BOOK FOUR

Life, dismantled

10

Carity

Though Jacquetta to me was the best of women, she was certainly the worst of patients. She had no truck with invalidity for herself, every sympathy and concern where it was demanded by others – a compassionate quality of which many took ceaseless and selfish advantage. I picked her up, carried her into the house concerned that any movement might worsen her injury, and laid her down on the big white sofa, propping her up with cushions into the most comfortable position.

‘Let me take you into casualty,’ I pleaded.

‘No you fucking don’t,’ she snapped, pain giving rare liberty to temper and sharp language. ‘Do you know what they’d do? They’ll X-ray me to find out what I already know, then tell me to go home and take an aspirin – they don’t even bother strapping ribs up any more in case it causes pleurisy and pneumonia. And for that we’d have driven sixty miles there and back. What I need…’ the colour and animation were back in her face, and the impudent grin she’d always wear when she’d decided that the best fun to be had was to twist me around her little finger ‘…is a fucking big brandy!’

There was none in the house. I ran across to Glenda’s and bought a large bottle of Martell, fresh ginger and lemons.

‘What’re you doing?’ Jac asked as I busied around back in the kitchen.

‘Fixing you a drink, sweetheart – won’t be long.’

Into a glass half full of brandy I grated the ginger, added a squeeze of lemon juice and a teaspoon of honey and topped it all up with boiled water.

‘Try this – special recipe of my grandfather’s!’

She rolled her eyes at me and sipped, and as it cooled she gulped it down, sticking her finger in to pluck out the ginger and chew on that too.

‘Good! Worth a tumble for a tumbler of that.’

I made her another: ‘One for each rib…’

After she’d finished that one she stood up, walked stiffly over to the table, filled the wine glasses I’d brought back in and left there, and turned to me:

‘Come on – give me your arm…’

We walked slowly back down into the churchyard and sat on our usual stone at the base of the tower. I’d brought a fleece and put it around her shoulders – around this indomitable, uncomplaining woman who was still shivering with the shock of her fall.

‘I’m going to have to put this skirt in to soak when we get back – red wine’s such a bugger to get out.’

‘I’ve already got all the information on what you have to do – it’s in Jacquetta’s Book of Household Tips, next entry after “how to get candle-wax out of a carpet.”’¹

‘So you have been writing them all down.’

‘No – they’re in my head, being preserved through the oral tradition…’ This vein of amiable bickering had been going on between us for weeks. She was convinced that a man had no idea how to run a house, and I was gently playing up to this not-entirely-false notion whilst teasing her into a role of domestic science teacher, dispenser of traditional female knowledge, and all-round wise woman who was descended, she gravely informed me on several occasions – the implication being that I’d better watch out – from the Pendle Witches.² So in all of this I pretended to be her scribe: ‘…and you’ve already told me how to get port stains out of my pinafore as you insist on calling it, and the principle’s bound to be the same. So give me your skirt and I’ll put it to soak. In cold water, of course…’

‘No – this stone’s too cold to sit on just in my knickers; and anyway, someone might see.’

That set her off giggling, which in its turn made her gasp with pain.

‘Oh-oh – laughing’s out for a while…’

Sex wasn’t. I was astonished when she initiated lovemaking that night. The principle of making up for lost time apparently still obtained whatever the circumstances.

‘Won’t it hurt?’ I asked.

‘Just be gentle, and try to keep your weight off me. We’ll have to do it like this – I won’t be able to support myself on top. And once we’re into it, I won’t feel the pain, will I? Sex as anaesthesia…’

In the morning I was dispatched to scour the local gardens and hedgerows for comfrey.

‘Knit-bone,’ Jac lectured, never one to pass up the opportunity for a quick exposition of herbal lore, ‘that’s what I need.’

The lore was clearly extant in Llanrhaeadr. Frances produced a pot of comfrey ointment and Claire told me to help myself from a dense growth along one side of the drive at the back of her house: ‘And tell Jacquetta to come in and use the swing seat in my back garden any time she wants – she can let herself in by the side gate. It’s not locked. You can come too, if you want a private spot for some outdoor canoodling.’

She flashed me a sly smile that intimated both personal acquaintance with the need for privacy and village interest in all things romantic. I went off to Oswestry to buy arnica ‘for the bruising’, and painkillers, leaving Jac installed on the sofa with more of the brandy concoction and a pot of comfrey leaves stewing on the stove. I was away for perhaps two hours. It was the longest time we were to be apart for the next two months. I had never in my life been together in so prolonged and intense a way with another human being, and though at times it was difficult, being by nature solitary, I think with anyone other than Jacquetta it would have been impossible for me. She simply took it in her stride and adapted to each new day and situation as it arrived.

The difficulties began almost immediately. Jac’s accident happened on a Sunday. On the following Tuesday I had an eye operation in St Asaph, sixty miles to the north of Llanrhaeadr.

‘I’m coming with you,’ she pronounced.

‘You should stay here and rest.’

‘I’m coming with you, so that’s that – and I’ll drive.’

We reached a compromise – that she would come, with the seat reclined and pillows under the seat belt to stop further damage to her ribs, but that maybe driving a big car with heavy steering was not a good idea. In the hospital, to the amusement of the nurses, every five minutes she hobbled along the corridor to the treatment room where I’d been taken, to check on my progress. On the way back to Llanrhaeadr she picked up things from her house for the weeks ahead, including a kiln for her glass work that we installed in my kitchen, and she settled in with a good grace to a period of convalescence. My ruse initially was to keep her quiet by continuing the medicinal brandies and laying in a stock of videos for her to watch from the sofa. The brandy treatment proved acceptable, a bottle a day and Guinness at night keeping her relaxed and taking the edge off the pain. In parallel she kept assiduously to a regime of dosing herself with comfrey tea – unpleasant-looking, vile-smelling, thick and green. But the first video proved a disaster. It was the Coen brothers’ O Brother, Where Art Thou? She sat through it holding herself, rocking back and forth and making a peculiar stifled wheezing noise of suppressed laughter whilst belabouring me for deliberately and sadistically trying to give her hysterics. After that, comedy was edited out.

There were other problems. In the first week, I came into the house one morning and found her crouched on the floor weeping, helped her to the sofa, asking her when she’d calmed a little what had happened. She’d tried to do press-ups.

‘I just wanted to keep fit,’ she told me, between spasms of tears.

The pain must have been excruciating. Even sitting by her I could hear the broken ribs crunch as she shifted position. After this incident, I kept discreet watch, stayed close, helped as unobtrusively as I could, and she bore all the attention with wry humour and patience. She had a stained-glass summer school to teach in Deeside, at the country park centre in the grounds of Basingwerk Abbey. The weather was good and, typically, she’d planned to sleep out in the woods whilst she was running it. I persuaded her to let me drive her there and back each day, and took work to do myself, sitting under a tree in the sun whilst she supervized students nearby. Day by day we got through. In the evenings at Llanrhaeadr she’d sit on the bench outside the house in the late sun and I’d head off – barefoot, to scoldings from the villagers that I might step on glass, which were preferable to the scoldings from Jac if I showed signs of wanting to don footwear and hide the fairy wings toenail varnish she’d painstakingly applied – to the pub at the top of the village, The Plough,³ and return with a pint of Guinness in each hand and fierce concentration divided between where I was treading and what I might be spilling.

Her broken ribs continued to cause her intense pain. She resigned herself to a restful routine of reading in the sun in hidden nests she made in the long grass between the tombs by the river at the bottom of the churchyard. Occasionally we headed down to the Horseshoe Inn at Llanyblodwel in the evenings, or took picnics to nearby riverbanks and easily accessible hillsides. I had readings to give in August – one to a course at the National Writers’ Centre for Wales in Llanystumdwy, delivered in the room where Lloyd George had died. I love doing readings here. The acoustics are uncannily perfect – a whisper at one end of the long room transmitting with absolute clarity right down to the other: which is where Jacquetta sat, on a sofa with another red-haired minx, Helen Burke – a sharp-witted and savagely irreverent performance-poet from York who’d been on several courses I’d run and was a good friend of mine. So the reading I gave had a comic-critical subtext, all acutely audible, by way of running commentary, and one that left the audience perplexed, kept careful watch over the minutes, and included loud whispered hints about the amount of drinking-time left in the village pub.

The second reading that August was at the Edinburgh Book Festival, held in large tents erected on the grass of Charlotte Square Gardens in the Old Town – a small park with tall trees and wrought-iron railings in the centre of an elegant Regency square. The events are always sold out, the audiences as keenly attentive and intelligent as you expect of Scotland – and for the trip Jacquetta had again painted my toenails and confiscated my shoes. The evening atmosphere in the Gardens that year was a mellow blend of wine, starlight and velvet air. We walked back barefoot to our hotel through the night streets of the city, had a midnight feast of sandwiches, Guinness and drams of Edradour sent up on room service, for we’d not eaten, descended to breakfast next morning and were joined by Rob Macfarlane, whose first book, Mountains of the Mind, I’d just reviewed. The conversation over scrambled eggs and smoked salmon and coffee flowed – two hours skipped by as we played ducks and drakes over the surface of a bizarre range of subjects. One of them – that matter has memory – came back strongly as Jacquetta and I made our dawdling return journey to Wales over the following few days.

We’d gone for a walk – a month on from her accident she was assertively more mobile – on the Berwickshire coast. I’d wanted to show her a place I’d visited and talked to her excitedly about over thirty years before when we’d first been together – the ruined promontory stronghold of Fast Castle on the coast above Coldingham. After leaving Edinburgh we’d slept out under the stars at the margin of a wood close to the path leading over the moor to it. In the morning we were discovered there by the farmer, Ian Russell, who merely raised his eyebrows on happening upon us cooking our breakfast on his land, remarked that he’d not seen anyone camping here before, sat drinking coffee with us and talking about the state of agriculture in Scotland and Europe, about communities and cooperatives, setaside, comedy on the Edinburgh Fringe and local history, before presenting us with a packet of home-made herb-flavoured sausages and heading off in his Land Rover to gather samples of the organic barley he grew. We wondered how many young farmers on whose land we’d been found ‘trespassing’ would have accorded us the same treatment, and ambled off under a bright morning sun along the coastal path to find this ruin that had exercised my imagination for more than three decades.

The curious thing was, that I had no visual memory of the place, could remember almost nothing about it apart from a vague sense of its defensibility – of the ridiculously narrow isthmus above a sea arch that connected the plug of dolerite on which it’s set to the mainland, and the plunging cliffs all around. I’d gone there with a view to exploring the rock climbing potential of the latter with a particularly loud magazine editor one Hogmanay at the back end of the 1960s. It had been one of those louring East Coast winter days. We’d flogged for miles through heather and rain from a minor road that ran seaward of the main A1, taken a brief look at the castle and at the nearby coastal stack of The Souter, then headed north for Aberdeen. Climbers, I’ve long maintained, are of all groups of people among the least aware of their surroundings, and in those days I was one of them. To arrive there with Jacquetta, it was as though I’d never seen the place before. We climbed the shoulder of the hill above Dowlaw Farm, descended by paths through fragrant heather in bloom, and suddenly below us the most dramatic ruin. Scott’s romantic description from The Bride of Lammermoor of the crumbling towers of Wolf’s Crag, last possession of the ruined Master of Ravenswood, is based on Fast Castle and captures its atmosphere perfectly. What I retain from the novel (and the Donizetti opera, Lucia di Lammermoor, derived from it) is an overbearing sense that when love and fate are at odds, the former will not necessarily conquer and the forces of antagonism and unreason sometimes tragically prevail – all this reflected and bodied forth in this elemental setting. What we encountered in the landscape – fanged remnants of masonry hanging at crazy angles over fearsome cliffs, thick chains to protect the crossing rusted through, a polished slab of rock to be climbed – beggars imagination. You could not conjure up a more rugged and exotic fastness than this.

So Jac and I made our way in, peered down from the promontory’s end at cormorants hanging their wings out to dry on dragon-scale rocks two hundred feet below, watched the white spume of the tide surge rhythmically in through savage, dark slits in the reefs, with me hanging on to Jac’s heels as she craned giddily over the drop, and when we’d had enough of all the excitement and drama, we made our way back, picking through baileys and wards and roofless rooms until we came to a hidden enclosure mattressed with soft, springing turf and bowered with thrift and daisies, and there we lay down and chattered dreamily about the theme of matter’s memory. We’d read that Margaret Tudor, daughter of Henry VII of England, had stayed here in 1503, on her way to marry James IV of Scotland and by that alliance maintain the peace that ended so bloodily ten years later on Flodden Field. What must the thirteen-year-old princess have thought of these surroundings, would she have found them rough and terrifying? we wondered, as we lazed on silken grass the comfort and ease of which no marriage bed of hers could have surpassed. Tumbled top of a tower, pink-sandstone-revetted, sheltered us from a cool stream of air flowing from the north. The sun warmed our stretched and naked limbs. An occasional walker bustled past along the coastal path. When had children last played within this curtilage, or man and woman made love within the walls? we mused. What names had they borne? The sea’s whispering them maybe, we laughed, as it sighed up to us repeatedly: ‘Morag, Hamish, Morag, Hamish…’ My own memory so apparently unreliable, why should not that of the rocks be as quirky and selective too? These shards of dolerite, these blocks of sandstone, have written into them the heat and glitter of the sun, the surge of waves from aeons past. In the crook of my arm my lover, a smile playing across her lips. A decayed incisor of masonry tilted perilously at the drop, impendent, its base cracked and shifting, its gravity askew, its tenure at the mercy of old mortar frail as memory. One winter soon, the north wind’s blast would consign it to the sea, like old Caleb in The Bride of Lammermoor breaking chipped crockery on the flagged floor in vain pretence of solidity. We, in the joy of our brief present, in sunlit embrace slept and dreamed, unaware in our moment of recaptured glory of what fate had in store for us.

We drifted on southwards, crossed the border and towards evening, just upstream from a fine sandstone bridge at Ford in Northumberland came upon a bend in the River Till, that flows down from here to join the Tweed three miles from Norham Castle, subject of the most optimistically visionary of all Turner’s works; his Norham Castle, Sunrise, painted between 1840 and 1845 and now hanging in the Tate – a shimmer of carmine, cyan, yellow and palest lilac in which all points of reference glow out from teasing proximities to definition, their promise as much that of our lives as of the dawn. It’s a painting that realizes and defines th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Contents
• Book One: The Aftermath
• Book Two: Pre-histories
• Book Three: Chiaroscuro
• Book Four: Life, dismantled
• Book Five: Hidden Lord of the Crooked Path
• Acknowledgements
• Notes