In splendid isolation – the Loch Hotel

By Kenn Taylor:

Just how far out can you go in mainland Britain in terms of isolation? With a journey many miles down a long, empty, country road, an owl flying low at the windscreen at one point, and a long, single track road before you reach the destination, this place certainly felt like a candidate.

At the end of that private road there’s a luxury hotel. Not for the likes of you and me. I am here not as a real guest, but because a friend had bagged a job there.

Adjacent to a mighty loch, it is as rural a Scotland as you could possibly imagine. Scenery flowing off into the endless distance. Dramatic landscapes in every corner of your vision: mountains, forests, streams filled with huge glacial rocks. Orange highland cows. Even the multi-coloured moss seems dramatic.

In isolation, in a vast landscape, things seem to have greater visual power. A strikingly white solitary house. A lone, worn-out boat. A fallen tree. At this altitude, and with few buildings, the slightest change of light or shift in the clouds that touch the mountain tops is instantly noticeable. 

The hotel itself offers luxury in such seclusion. Old red leather chairs, worn but in the way that loos classy, not knackered. A roaring fire in a grate, the size of a small car, surrounded by dark wood and polished brass. A table lamp in the shape of a stag. The hotel itself looks ancient, but in reality is a fake. A Walter Scott image from the Victorian era.

What’s it like to live out here? I fear that the quiet and lack of stimulation would drive me mad. But there is plenty to do. Walk. Swim. Climb. Build. Read. There’s television and the internet but even then, my friend tells me, you do feel distant from everything. Terrible things happening on the news feel like dark fairy stories from far off lands, rather than things that will reach you here.

This has an allure, like some Arcadian fantasy of times past perhaps. But then this place is predicated on selling that. Charging an astronomical amount for the experience of ‘proper Scotland’. The staff, while they may also appreciate the fresh air and idyllic location, have to labour most of the time while those paying to be here can just enjoy it all. Hike the hills, fly in helicopters, drive fast cars, drink expensive whiskeys. Though labouring here is, my friend assures me, much better than some of the other places we had both laboured.

Of course, we can’t afford to even eat in the hotel. Instead we go over to the nearby inn for a pint, before driving the long way back to the nearest town to truly catch up. Nevertheless, I can see the attraction of this place, of going out to the furthest reaches. If you really have the money, you can pretend the world is not like it is. And forget, perhaps, the role you played in making it that way. 

***

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. Kenn’s website.

Bitter Meadow – January in Bochum

By Marcel Krueger:

There are many bridges in Bochum. Sadly they never cross any water, but only ever rails, concrete and motorways. 

I've been in the urban sprawl of the Ruhr area since early December. My wife has started a new job here and we've rented a small apartment in the center of the city, planning to divide our time between Ireland and Germany in the coming year. I came here when the last lockdown in Ireland ended, with plans to go back to Ireland in January. But now the renewed lockdowns in both Germany and Ireland have prevented me from returning and spending January in my crooked house from 1875 by the harbour in Dundalk. So for the last weeks I've been strolling around Bochum, which is a completely new place for me. 

As I always do to get a feeling for a place, I sought out destinations that would link me to the past of the city in the 20th century: honorary graves of people who died during the upheavals of the Kapp Putsch and in the Red Army of the Ruhr in 1920, disused railway lines, former coal mines all over town. It is almost impossible to walk around Bochum and not encounter leftovers of this former main industry of the city: overgrown slag heaps, ventilation shafts, metal towers and red-brick buildings of former collieries are everywhere, and even if they  have been dismantled the former pits are still indicated by street names, subway stations and memorial plaques.  

But mainly I tried to revisit tragedies of the past. I really couldn't say why I always tend to do this. There is a certain level of escapism and horror, learning more about the terrifying things that humans had inflicted upon them by other humans as a privileged white European with a certain conviction that I'm safe from these horrors. Yet there is also an aspect of comparison to today, always: of how easy it is for totalitarian and populist regimes to lure people in and make them willing collaborators, a thing that is worth constantly reiterating. And it is also always revealing to see what a city choses to remember and honour officially, and what it chooses to forget; like the swastika on the helmet of a statue on a war memorial that had been erected in the central city park in 1935, only toppled by activists in 1983.

Some of these locations and sites I chose deliberately, upon others I just stumbled by coincidence, like the memorial dedicated to the men from the Hamme suburb who went and died in the wars of 1866 and 1870/71 in side street: Carl Hake from Hamme joined the 2nd company of the 53 infantry regiment, marched off towards the south and died fighting the Austrians in the Battle of Königgrätz on the 3rd of July 1866, far from home.    

On another walk I came upon a small park, one that seemed deserted. Paved trails and gravel paths sneaked around small hills on which thorn bushes and small trees grew, under the arms of massive electricity pylons looming overhead and a forlorn, low-hanging grey sky. I came across what looked like a piece of concrete wall topped with a rusted metal bar, and only as I stood close did I realise that there were words embossed in the metal bar. In German, it read: "A strict regime prevailed in the camp. At night people died in their bunks, then in the morning the living got up and went to work." 

During World War II the Saure Wiese, the Bitter Meadow, was one of 15 forced labour camps of the Bochumer Verein, one of the main steel and arms producers of Bochum and the Ruhr area and one of over 100 labour camps for forced labourers in Bochum and neighbouring Wattenscheid, a suburb today but a town in its own right back then. The people incarcerated here were mostly so-called Ostarbeiter, Eastern Workers, deported from the Ukraine and Russia, who had to work in the ironworks across nearby Essener Strasse, still in existence today as the Thyssenkrupp Steel Europe Bochum plant. In 1943, the camp had 765 Ostarbeiter and 290 "various foreigners" according to the records, who had to live here in subhuman conditions: they worked in 12-hours shifts seven days a week, and daily rations mostly consisted of watery turnip soup and 150 grams of bread. Viktor Schmitko was deported as a 16-year-old and brought to Bochum, where he worked from 1942 to 1945 and talked about his experiences 50 years later:

"We went to sleep and woke up only thinking of food. We went to sleep hungry and got up hungry again. That was hard to bear. I worked in the forge at the hot press with hot metal, that was hard work, on Sundays we also had to work, doing repairs, unloading wagons, that was hard too."

When Allied troops approached Bochum in spring 1945, the camps were dissolved and the surviving workers taken away in death marches and rail transports. The Gestapo shot 20 forced labourers in their headquarters, a confiscated villa at Bergstraße 76, just a few hours before US troops marched in, and buried their bodies in bomb craters in the city park.

Reconciliation with the fate of the Ostarbeiter and the camp at Saure Wiese did not happen immediately. First the remaining barracks were used for people whose houses had been destroyed in bombing raids, or German refugees from the eastern provinces. And then the area was buried under poison. The site had been used as landfill already before the war, but with the increased reconstruction and industrial output of Bochum after 1945 it was again used as a dumping ground for industrial waste. This continued until 1973, when it became clear that heavy metals and cyanides had reached the groundwater and almost completely polluted and killed nearby Ahbach creek.

The site remained a wasteland for the next decades, and only in 2007 was remediation work carried out. 45,000 cubic metres of contaminated soil were replaced, and at the same time the Association of Persecutees of the Nazi Regime approached the city of Bochum and informed them of the history of the site. It was then decided to turn it into a memorial park that commemorates the camp and the fate of the forced labourers, but also invites visitors to actively engage with the fascist history of the area.

In 2012 the park I first discovered was opened: 10,000 plants and trees had been planted and a park of 65,000 square metres created. The ground plan of a barrack is reconstructed by stone blocks and several information boards document the history of the site; dotted around the park are parts of the artwork entitled "Laute Stille", Loud Silence, created by Bochum artist Marcus Kiel: the pieces of concrete and metal I encountered. Quotes from former forced labourers are cut into rusty steel strips, the harsh quotes intentionally contrasting with the quiet landscape.

When I visited it, the site of the former camp seemed eerily misplaced. Even though I found myself in one of the most densely populated areas of Europe, surrounded by millions of people and with one of the largest steel plants of the state just across the road, under the grey winter sky filled with sleet that crackled on the lines between the electricity pylons it felt like a much more remote site, like a former camp of the Moorsoldaten on the heath in Lower Saxony or place of long-lost tragedy somewhere in rural Brandenburg.  

I came to be immediately fascinated by the site, and have returned there a few times now, always discovering new paths, new leftovers of history: half-buried tracks leading nowhere, blackened and cracked concrete foundations in the undergrowth.  Maybe I return here because the setting and the emotions I project the former inmates to have left here correspond to my mood these days, constantly slightly on edge, constantly mistrusting my fellow man. But then I also discovered that the park is never really deserted, and encountered dog walkers, joggers and mothers pushing buggies through the gloom, all keeping their social distance while doing the same thing as I do, exercising outdoors. I wonder what the park looks like in summer: it is surely not shunned by the people from the nearby estates, and even if they bring blankets and beer and sandwiches, and play frisbee on the largest of the hills on a summer weekend it would not be disrespectful but appropriate.    

***

Marcel Krueger is the Books Editor of Elsewhere: A Journal of Place. His writing has been published in numerous places both online and in print, and he is the author of Babushka’s Journey: The Dark Road to Stalin’s Wartime Camps (I.B. Taurus, 2017) and Iceland: A Literary Guide for Travellers (I.B. Taurus, 2020). You’ll find him on twitter here.

Winter in Den Wood

By Ian Grosz:

There is little light in northern Scotland in mid-winter, and as we entered a new lockdown, everything seemed to get that little bit darker. Like most people, the freedom of the daily walk once again took on new significance as our worlds shrank back. We had been living in our village for over ten years and felt we knew almost every inch of it, but looking online for new places we could explore locally, I happened on Den Wood. The only Woodland Trust managed site in the North East of Scotland, it is a humble patch of mixed ancient woodland stretching to just eighteen hectares, but hosts a diverse mix of trees including pine, oak, alder, ash, rowan, hawthorn, hazel, silver birch, lime and beech. A thriving habitat for insects, birds, foxes, red squirrels and roe deer, it also retains the almost extinct wych elm, on which the equally rare, white-letter hairstreak butterfly caterpillar relies. 

The wych elm has been decimated by Dutch elm disease, caused by the fungus Ophiostoma novo-ulmi and spread by the elm bark beetle. The fungus blocks the tree’s vascular system, causing wilt and eventual death. It first appeared in 1910, and quickly became an epidemic that spread across Europe, killing up to forty percent of the European elm population through the first half of the twentieth century. The disease abated by the 1940s, but a second epidemic beginning in the 1960s with a much more virulent outbreak was far more destructive. Arriving in the UK on imported elm logs from Canada, it killed tens of millions of trees, leaving the elm an endangered species on these islands. 

The Woodland Trust is the UK’s largest conservation organisation set up to restore and conserve Britain’s remaining ancient woodland, now covering just 2.4% of the landscape and fighting for survival against development, agriculture and the mono-cultures of forestry. Supporting a greater diversity of plants and animals, ancient woodland represents the living memory of our lost habitats and the visible reminder of our old relationships with nature, once characterised by sympathetic husbandry more in tune with the seasonal ebb and flow of the land and its life-cycles. We took care of the land and the land took care of us. Only now are we realising the benefits of smaller scale farming and the greater diversity it supports, the importance of mixed woodland management to our plant and animal ecologies. I was looking forward to experiencing Den Wood: what we would find there, how we might feel. 

We set out on a cold January Sunday, negotiating the ice-rink-like back roads. We eventually found the small car park that allows access to the wood, tucked away down a country lane amidst the dips and folds of the land. I wasn’t surprised that we’d missed it up to now. A notice board revealed a mix of short trails we could follow. The paths were muddy and icy, the trees bare, but still, it felt as though we were entering a special place as we made our way into the woodland through a narrow tunnel of comingling branches. 

The air was still. Our feet crunched noisily through the trail in the snow, the branches hanging over our heads and the weak morning sunlight beginning to brighten the slab grey of the sky. Though certainly a cold, bleak day, our spirits were immediately lifted as we trudged along the trail, here and there robins bobbing amongst the bare branches and blackbirds foraging amongst the still frozen leaf-litter. We met a couple walking their dog and stopped to chat when their young puppy jumped up on us. 

‘It’s a bit skitie today,’ the man said, meaning slippery. ‘But it’s a great place in the summer when the trees are full.’ 

He told us we could walk a circuit that would take us over a low bridge across a stream and then up onto a rise in the fields where we would get a good view of Bennachie, a popular hill which dominates the local landscape.

In a guide-book published in 1890, the locally born Scottish mountaineer and author Alexander McConnochie wrote that: 

There is no mountain in Aberdeenshire – or indeed in the north of Scotland – better known, or more visited that Bennachie. This is easily accounted for. Its graceful outline; its standing comparatively alone, and being thus discernible and prominent from all points; its magnificent mountain and lowland views to be obtained from its summits; and its easiness of access – all contribute to render Bennachie familiarly known even to those who are not given to mountain climbing. [1]  

This holds true as much today as it did in McConnochie’s time, and Bennachie remains, in many ways, the perfect mountain: accessible and easily climbed, yet giving that sense of elevation and escape that the high places bring. 

We thanked the couple and continued on along the track, soon finding the low bridge that forged the stream running through a shallow gulley, before climbing steeply over a knoll into more open ground filled with, surprisingly, newly flowering gorse. Eventually we climbed up into a grove of tall wych elm, beyond an old estate boundary wall covered in moss and lichens and slowly submerging into the land. Here the woods felt dead and still, almost sacred in its silence; the trees, with their dark silhouettes against the flat light of a cold sky, waiting to come back to life just as the world was. 

Staring up into the bare canopy of the elms with their ghoulish, finger-like branches knotted above us, it was difficult to imagine the woods in full bloom, filled with life and vibrancy. It spoke to us of the pause we all felt in life, somehow more poignant now in mid-winter than it had been in the summer. Then, many of us welcomed the change of pace in life, noticed the birds singing as though for the first time, appreciated our parks and gardens, felt that we were learning something of the importance of the simple things in life again. But now that stillness felt like purgatory, our lives shrinking with the light, the cold days and the inability to travel. Just at a time of year when we need human contact the most, it had been taken away. 

Yet these seemingly dead woods were only dormant, and would surely come to life again. It was simply a matter of time; something this little patch of ancient woodland held like sap in its branches: slow and viscous now, but soon to rise and flow freely. That first lockdown showed us that to be dormant for a time, to be still and to reflect, is a great gift, and the woods seemed to be reminding us of this.

As we crowned the low hill at the centre of the elms, we could see the distinctive shape of Bennachie rising up out of the landscape beyond the woodland boundary. Covered in snow, it seemed much larger than it normally appears, its boulder-strewn summits strung out like small volcanic archipelagos across its long back. Too far away for us to be able to travel to under the lockdown, it looked more inviting than ever; but we knew that it wasn’t going anywhere: that it would still be there, signalling home to us, whenever this virus had been beaten, and that like these woods, life would return in abundance. We turned to make our way back to the car, quiet but happy, and silently resolved to keep a sense of the promise of the dormant wych elms with us through the long months to come. 

***

Ian Grosz is a writer based in Scotland. He draws largely from the landscape for his work and is published across a range of magazines, journals and anthologies both in print and online. He is currently working on a non-fiction book project exploring how landscapes help to shape a sense of place and identity. 

Notes:

[1]  Alex Inkson McConnochie, Bennachie, (1890, repr., Aberdeen, Aberdeenshire Classics Series, James, G. Bisset, 1985) p. 10

Here, Under the Eaves

By Rebecca Smith:

Our house martins are back. They are rebuilding their nest, having already scraped last years’ mud and feathers away. Repairing and strengthening seems like good practise. I watch them as they swoop and tumble with complete control in the strip of sky between the houses. I live on a young street, only five years old. I count at least twenty houses, here from my front window. There is more brick than branch. More road than grass. But, I remind myself, the street is still in its infancy. We have a lot of growing to do.

I have planted a rowan tree and a red acer on the front lawn, a birch, an apple and a pear tree in the back garden. Every day, I study their progress, note the extra space they take up, expanding their green leaves. For so long nothing seemed to happen, but of course it did. Winter can feel like an age. 

There is no chorus in the morning here yet - the trees are too small, their branches too flimsy for the birds to settle on. I remember, last year, hearing the chirps of the newly hatched house martins in their nest under the eaves and how they chimed with the cooing of my own baby girl. The birds are back, the baby ones now fully grown, and my daughter is saying whole words. 

One day the trees will be big and if I stand here and look out of the window, I’ll see green. Not the rust coloured brick of the mirror image house opposite, or my neighbour silhouetted in the window as he walks from room to room. I look at the rowan tree and wonder what is happening beneath. What is it like down there this time of year? Is there a fuss, a rush, a ‘let’s get on with this’ kind of attitude? I hope we have not made it too hard for things to flourish up here. I plant more lavender and sow bean seeds.

The woods that line the edge of the estate are full of creatures. Woodpeckers skip round trunks of trees (my daughter shows her Dad at home, nod nod nodding her head). We find tadpoles that are high and dry, small clumps of them with only the smallest wiggle left in their tails. A robin, who I swear I knew in a previous life, follows our step through the trees. I want them to follow me home, like Disney’s Sleeping Beauty. A trail of birds, insects, mammals hoping and jumping up the curb.

Among the houses, nature knows there are different rules. Maybe the house martins are the pioneers. They are showing the rest that it is possible to make a home here. The trees are growing, I promise. I’ll plant more lavender for the bees and make beds for the snap dragons. I’ll leave a gap in the foot of the fence for the hedgehogs. It’s the least I can do.

***

Rebecca Smith is a writer, podcast maker and teacher based in central Scotland. Find out more on her website.

Sedgeland (rara avis in terris)

By Rebecca Dempsey: 

From a lookout above the marsh I had my Black Swan event. 
I was a child where life felt unchanging. 
It wasn’t the case. The wetland was seasonal, precarious, great birds pushed through phalaris. 
Amongst cutting grass and bulrushes, paired swans nested and fed. 
Random as dragonflies darting over the broken surface of brackish water, I was the outlier. 
Swamped in a sea of dead bracken, growth spirals stalled, perched upon a stranded dune and, undone by unknowing the why of me where everything had its place. 

Undirected, seated where an ancient ocean once lapped before withdrawing, nothing indicated my arrival to run grey grains of sand through my fingers, watching swamp harriers quartering the sky. 
White ibis, shelducks, the brolgas belonged, like the swans. 
Never inevitable, yet I was there with those fly ins, those long distance, faithful returnees from northern climes to the southern hemisphere.
However, I was wrong to believe we were similar: I was the rare bird. 
I was the one passing through. 

***

Rebecca Dempsey is a writer. She was born in Adelaide and grew up in rural South Australia. She lives in Melbourne, Victoria. Her poems, short stories and reviews have been published around the world in a variety of outlets. She can be found at WritingBec.com.

Delamere Forest Midwinter

By David Lewis:

When I was a child in 1970s Liverpool we sometimes bought our Christmas tree from Delamere Forest, a commercial woodland in Cheshire and the remnant of a vast medieval hunting forest, a place of dense woods, open water, fens and bogs.  

I was a bookish child.  My reading was enriched by my experiences of landscape and my awareness of landscape was informed by my reading.  Delamere took me to a European forest-land of giants and ogres and child-eating witches, and on the maps the darkness was visible – Black Lake, Hunger Hill, Dead Lake.  I did not feel that other people took a pleasure in these connections.  

The Delamere visit was a day for heavy coats and wellington boots, because the forest car park was a muddy field and the sales area was just a clearing in the trees, ringed by coloured lights.  The frozen ground had been trampled to icy mush, and pine branches had been laid down to make the paths safer.  Chalk-red and powder-green huts, decked with pine branches and fir cones, were built in the trees for Father Christmas and the sale of trees, hot food and drinks.  Chestnuts roasted on a brazier, slightly-burned-sausage smoke drifted through the trees.   Shivery elves took donations for local good causes, and the Salvation Army brass band played carols from a wooden stage.    

And yet the visit to the Forest was a very different Christmas activity from the school Nativity play or the carol service.  The felled trees were arranged in flopped, loose rows on the ground, rough finger-jabbing, resin-scented spikes, sharp, unfriendly, essentially defeated, and the heavy twinkle of gaudy lights moving in the thin wind was unable to hold back the Forest’s innate gloom.  I half-knew that there was nothing Christian about visiting Delamere at midwinter, that it was a cold pagan celebration of muddy folk tales and encroaching darkness.

Northern England in December is grey if rarely bitterly cold, but one year, in the countryside outside the city, about two centimetres of snow fell.  Drained of colour, the Cheshire hills and fields were sharpened to blacks and whites and snow-greys.  Once we had bought the tree we chose to go for a walk, away from the lights into the sighing trees and crisp wind.  Here the year was dying, silently and without warmth or light - the gloom of mid-afternoon was shadowing the dusk, and it would be dark early.  And I loved it.  I loved the sharp wind on my face, the snowy tree-fields receding into the early dusk.  I loved the silence after the brash tinny music, the grey light after the gaudy bulbs, loved the fact that nobody had walked the paths since the snow had fallen overnight.  

There are moments in childhood when we catch a glimpse of those things which will enrich our adult lives.  The forest paths were deserted on that late afternoon because most people take no pleasure in cold and snow and darkness, but for the first time I realised that I did not share this opinion.   And more importantly at that time I began to realise that I had every right to think differently, about this and about many other things.  I was right to love the cold, right to connect storytelling with landscape, right to love maps and place-names.  My feelings about the forest walk on that long-ago afternoon were a step to creative adulthood, and ultimately a step towards my shadow-life as a writer.  

***

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

The Path of Least Resistance

By Kenn Taylor:

– I never thought I’d live in the countryside.
– This isn’t the countryside, it’s the edge of a city.

In Yorkshire though, the rural and the urban have a more indistinct relationship than elsewhere. Something not always appreciated by those born there. For those of us who moved in though, the ability to walk in an hour from Bradford city centre to, yes, up on a wild and windy moor, is not taken for granted.

The place that meant most though, was the Leeds-Liverpool Canal. I’d known the same waterway at its other end too. Liverpool though, is a river city, dominated in every way by the huge estuary. The canal there is an afterthought, just another body of still water amongst the many docks.

In West Yorkshire though, the canal has a central function, having helped define the districts and towns that it passes through. The shape of the cities too. When I shifted once more in my life, this time from London to the outskirts of Bradford, the Leeds-Liverpool became, by accident, hugely important to me.

Another canal, the Regents, had played a significant role in my brief time living in London. The dense urbanity of East London was exhilarating. To the point when I sometimes had to grip to manage the intensity of feeling. Like it had been in Liverpool too at its absolute best, but that was a deeper, more personal feeling of shared experience, communal understanding and expression. In London, it was an external force and you knew you were just a tiny cog spinning in it, which had its own allure. The canal represented calm in London. A long straight place to head along without a particular purpose. Somewhere to burn off energy when collected fears and ghouls and ideas threatened to overwhelm.

Moving from Bethnal Green Road to Bradford district meant no longer trains to Liverpool Street thundering past the front of my flat, instead expansive fields and skies. The canal though was a rare constant and still a place for mental space. In London, this had meant a deep walk through every shade of urban life, in that city now mostly polished to within an inch of its life. In West Riding though, it was a walk through increasing ruralness, striding into ever wider, open spaces. All along the way, the black and white mile posts at various angles of lean, reminding me that my origins in Liverpool were just a, long, walk away.

Without needing a car, the canal was a place to head where tension could be felt lifting from the shoulders, often with every step. Where tasks, troubles and frustrations could be put aside to go deeper about ourselves and everything else. On the surface, a straight graded route next to the murky mirror shimmer of water which required no thought or strain to navigate. Really though it is a winding, up and down route through the path of least resistance. The idea of this once deeply capitalistic functional waterway, now vintage leisure route, as a way of working out a way through lives which had involved some wandering and some extremes, was not lost on us. The passage of time felt slowed and so better to consider it. 

It helped. Both of us. Not having to think about the direction helped us to figure out where we should be going. Sometimes, breathing in as we passed further out with nothing around but fields sweeping away in the distance into hills, that same exhilaration again. Where you almost need to grip something, but now, sucking in fresh air rather than the dense electric hum of the city.

There have been more moves since, but I find somehow the canal keeps coming back. A much needed place to pace along the path of least resistance and think about then, now, the future, nothing at all. 

***

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

Exercise Hour

By Oz Hardwick:

I/

Monstrous ships slump in the harbour, waiting for the Town
Hall bell. The lanes leading down are already choked with
blossoms, and the cuts we once ran down hand-in-hard aren’t
wide enough for foxes. Where last week were squares and
markets, makeshift waiting rooms wait in uncertainty, the
weight of their brutal cleanliness more forbidding than
reassuring. Already there is graffiti blaming elite conspiracies,
proclaiming the return of the Seven Sleepers, demanding
urgent but unspecified change in tortuous letters not quite the
colour of blood. What Anglican hymns parroted in school halls
didn’t teach us, we learned from B-movies and pulp Sci-Fi; so
we know that, behind one of these neatly painted doors,
something is growing, mutating. The Town Hall bell will ring,
the ships will leave, and foxes will whelp in disused waiting
rooms. For everything else, we shall have to find new words,
remind ourselves how to speak.

II/

While one door opens on wedding flowers, another opens on
raised musical instruments, each a tableau vivant representing
celebrations as we once knew them. There are flags
everywhere, and homemade bunting disgorges from beneath
porches and gables. Children have painted signs and posters
for windows, with exuberant colours standing in for misspelled
slogans they’ve borrowed from the TV, and the smell of baking
is so thick you could cut it with a silver filigree cake knife and
serve it in moist slices before it has even cooled. Every garden
has a wind-up gramophone and grandparents with tartan blankets
across their knees, nodding to Vera Lynn on 10-inch shellac. One
door opens on winking candles, another opens on champagne
stippling a picture-perfect sky; each a photograph in a History
textbook or a PowerPoint slide in a recap of our progress so far.
We stand in discrete family groups, eating hot chestnuts and
revelling in familiar details until, one by one, every door closes.

III/

So, tired of walking the same prescribed routes, I have taught
myself to fly, fashioning wings from beeswax and Marvel
comics, copying strokes from the common stock of myth. It’s
easier than you’d think: easier than ignoring the nagging
tickertape of unreliable figures, easier than falling asleep with a
head full of voices. From the quayside to the trig point, people
are still stranded in their gardens, fumbling with musical
instruments that have been gathering dust for years, and
buffeting the air with every unfocused but untamed emotion
that can only find voice once we abandon the notion of
language. I wave at weeping pensioners, blow kisses to bright,
clapping babies, and they sing back to me, songs from stage
musicals and Disney favourites. The TV people want to know
everything, from my inspiration to my insights into the current
pandemic, but my phone’s on silent in a house I can’t pick out
from here, in the pocket of a coat I’ll never need again this
close to the Sun. Wedding flowers wilt and the Town Hall bell
rings

***

Oz Hardwick is Professor of English at Leeds Trinity University, where he leads the postgraduate Creative Writing programmes. His chapbook Learning to Have Lost (Canberra: IPSI, 2018) won the 2019 Rubery International Book Award for poetry, and his most recent publication is the prose poetry micro-novella Wolf Planet (Clevedon: Hedgehog, 2020). He has also edited or co-edited several anthologies, including The Valley Press Anthology of Yorkshire Poetry (Scarborough: Valley Press, 2017) with Miles Salter, which was a UK National Poetry Day recommendation, and The Valley Press Anthology of Prose Poetry (Scarborough: Valley Press, 2019) with Anne Caldwell. www.ozhardwick.co.uk