How the Heat Broke
by RACHEL SYKES
Grandma Kate lived for 102 years beneath the Shropshire hills. She was raised by her grandma, who lived to a mere 70 in a cottage eked out from the shadow of the Brown Clee, ten miles, or thereabouts, from the border with Wales. Her whole life, she spoke about the bakery next door. Kate remembered how the smell of bread would wake her, how children would dart under the baker’s feet as he tried to keep the loaves from the flames. She remembered the tennis courts over the fence and the rich people she would watch as rapid streaks of yellow bounced between them.
When Grandma Kate was seven, her favourite uncle went to the Somme, though she hoped for some years that he would come back. When I turned fourteen, some eighty years on, she asked me to help her find him. It was only once I was in France, looking for one name in fields of Dover stone, that I felt as strange and as stupid as I was supposed to be feeling.
And, she would add, so brief as to seem casual, it was in the 1920s that Granddad Pointer had died on the kitchen table, when a doctor tried to save him from a strangulated hernia.
But the men in her life did tend to disappear. It was shortly after that Grandma Kate went into service as a parlour maid, at the big hall down the road. She would leave to marry Jim, a local man who preached on Sundays and sold fish during the week. It was Jim who would stop the goods’ train on its way across the border, at a point where the road intersected with the lowest slung rail bridge. Jumping up onto the tracks, the passengers passed down the fish, one piece at a time, and Jim would cart it round the villages to sell where he preached.
Their children, Bronwyn and Griffith, arrived before war came back, but the man who would be my step-dad was born in a snowstorm in 1947. He was a post-war baby, borne in a flurry of winks and nudges. The midwife had to dig her way into their house through the snow. At her 100th birthday we read the clippings of the snowdrift and looked at photos from the ‘60s that betrayed something that we had long suspected: Grandma had always been old.
Kate plucked herself neatly from out of her wheelchair and batted away the help of her daughter. She had prepared her own speech.
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Everyone in England calls their home county “The Shire.” Until we could manufacture something more enigmatic, that’s what Shropshire was too. Yet, in terms of mystery, we had two things that worked in our favour. First, Shropshire is a county that is almost completely empty; so empty that the rest of England forgets its existence. And, second, its western edge runs the border with Wales, a division roughly marked by an earthwork called Offa’s Dyke.
Writings from the 8th century refer to King Offa as a “vigorous” king who terrified the rulers of neighbouring provinces. Offa had the earthwork constructed to intimidate his enemies, forcing his subjects to heave piles of earth that spread, in places, 60 feet across and 8 feet high. Modern guesswork suggests that the dyke never ran the whole of the border. It might only have ranged around the area in which I was born, somewhere south of the direct centre of the Borders, and slap bang in the middle of nowhere.
The Borders are rich in disintegrating earthworks and violent rumours about the Welsh. In 1862, George Burrow, “a gentleman writer,” wrote a book about the Welsh landscape after touring the country. At the Borders, he observed that “it was customary for the English to cut off the ears of every Welshman who was found to the east of the dyke, and for the Welsh to hang every Englishman whom they found to the west of it.”
From kindergarten on, we were told that any Welshman caught within the castle walls after midnight could be legally shot with a cross bow.
A few miles north, they were kinder and would only use a long bow.
The land looked like Wales, in fact, because it was Wales. When Jenny came to stay in the summer of ’09 she began referring to Shropshire as “Welsh land taken by the English.” She would call it nothing else. Jen was born and raised in Baltimore and knew a little Welsh folklore. When she arrived she would barely say Shropshire, would never say England.
Jen liked to take pictures of the road signs, split as they were between English and Welsh. She learnt that “croeso” meant “welcome” and would repeat it to shopkeepers, though no-one in our town could speak any Welsh.
She drew out the border and its long divisions of green and brownish fields onto pieces of fine greaseproof paper.
The land between England and Wales is like everything beautiful and bleak: under peopled, over gorsed, devoid of cities and landmarks. In England, it is typically impossible to reach your arms out without grazing the sides of another town. But from where we grew up, it took hours in either direction, into either country, to reach a city.
We felt far from the rest of England, a feeling made worse by British trains which are incapable of travelling sideways across the country. On the Borders, we have no accent, although at times our voices pass for farmer. But in the belief of our seclusion, we felt rare.
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Poets pour nostalgia into any space that will hold it; A. E. Housman wrote about a half imagined Shropshire in a thirty-three poem cycle, self-published in 1896. A Shropshire Lad fixated on the luxuriness of country boredom, mixed with the idea of Housman’s own fading youth.
In Poem 30, he deals most openly with his sexuality, describing how his “Fear contended with desire” to “have willed more mischief than they durst”. Against the mellowness of the hills, what he named “the land of lost content”, Housman imagined that his troubles might diminish, that his life would begin to seem simpler: “Pints and quarts of Ludlow beer: / Then the world seemed none so bad.”
But though Ludlow was thirty miles from where he grew up, Housman would not visit the area he so idealised until he had written the majority of the collection. He wrote from London, in love or fascination with a place so far from urbanity where he might imagine a seclusion that could make his problems insignificant.
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A tiny Methodist chapel overlooked the bakery where Kate had lived one hundred years before.
“Dad must have owned that field. He’d have planted those walnuts.” Bronwyn was trying to look beyond the trees, to a large house at the right of the village hall. “I remember, there was a tennis court.”
Her hands traced lines in front of her as she drew an imagined court in the air. “It was the most beautiful thing,” she said. “I used to throw the tennis balls back when the rich people missed them. Then I’d run next door to the bakers, get right under his feet.”
The village hall was so old no-one knew which war it predated. The doors had been refurbished a fortnight before the funeral and a tiny siren now hissed whenever you crossed over the threshold.
“WARNING! You are being recorded by a security camera.”
Tweenage cousins in high visibility jackets set off the alarm every few minutes, proud of their duties as parking attendants for the grieving, but addicted to the metallic whispers of the terrible and needless security. Another cousin, slightly elder, dragged them out by their ear. They pulled sullenly at the shoulder pads sewn into her first suit and the new floor bounced lightly underfoot. Each footstep echoed like the knock of a tap shoe.
“I used to dance here,” Bronwyn said, and gently nudged her husband, whose hearing aid was turned low.
“I ran a disco here in ’74,” my step-dad muttered.
As we walked back to the chapel, a cockerel began to crow, fooled by the storm clouds that had so far held off. And now Uncle Griffith remembered the walnut trees, which had grown so tall they entirely obscured the old house. In a voice thick with country, he pointed to the cows standing at the sides of the road. They were eating thorn bushes, he said, not because they felt no pain from the thorns, but because the taste was sweet.
He asked when I could come back and as I said it would be a long time, he smirked and shook his head.
“A boomerang always comes back.”
When we arrived home that evening, the air was thick with burning wood. A thin trail of smoke rose from a garage at the end of our street. Someone was living there, dad said, because he’d been evicted from a caravan that had been towed from the street. When his mum had developed dementia, his sister had sold the house but let him keep the garage for himself.
That night, when the heat broke, the rain came in at 2 a.m. through the crack in my bedroom ceiling. Slow and subtle at first, it leaked through the paint that had tried for years to hide it, and dripped softly on my face so that I woke to hear the storm outside.
Rachel Sykes is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Nottingham. You can find an archive of her writing on This Recording here. She tumbls here and twitters here. She last wrote in these pages about Katy Perry and John Mayer.
"Simone" - Goldfrapp (mp3)
"Drew" - Goldfrapp (mp3)
