The forest is always hungry, its nerves are alert. It senses footfall and considers the flavour of spent life. Its rootlets swell in anticipation.

Day one

…then, ’What’s that noise?’ A fang of a sound, salivating icily. Growling, grunting, whining and whimpering. Geraldine does not respond. The noise eases. We slush on through the wet woods. Mud, sleet showers, a damp breeze. Among the trees the voice of the river becomes fainter. Air caresses the conifers, a distant branch creaks as it moves. The seeping of goldcrests fades. Breath mixes with mist from the forest floor.

     Near us a narrow passage leads into the hillside. The rock covered in green moss. Geraldine goes ahead, through rotting leaves and puddles. The chasm goes deeper and deeper into the hill. Now there is dead silence. Eardrums strain in their search for a sound. Any sound. I look at Geraldine. Her green cagoule exaggerates grey-green eyes. Dark hair spills out below her hat. A gentle smile. I am watching.

 

The oak tree 

The great crack in the gritstone hills is hidden among the trees and bushes was an ideal place for outlaws to hide.  One group that used to gather there in Tudor times were religious dissenters, the Lollards. A preacher, accompanied by his granddaughter Alice, was addressing his followers. Nobody realised soldiers were nearby. They heard the congregation singing and followed the sound to the chasm. They ordered the group to cease in the name of the King and the Church and in the confusion that followed one of the soldiers let loose an arrow that pierced Alice’s breast. The distraught Lollards were allowed to bury her underneath an oak tree.

 

Our weekend cottage in the Staffordshire Moorlands is up a long, rutted farm track, hidden among trees. Flag floors, log burner, kitchenette, shower and toilet, one bedroom. I imagine it once being used by a shepherd or a gamekeeper. The owners have left a supply of logs, kindling and yellowing newspapers. I roll a page from corner to corner, twist it into a simple knot and put it on the grate in the stove.  Then I make more spills until I am sure I have enough to get the kindling burning. We sit in front of the fire before I start to prepare a meal.

The wearisome wind weakens and dies and the mist thickens as darkness drifts over the little house. The smoke from the chimney rises vertically. Soft light leaches out around the curtains. A smell of cooking enters the nostrils of the forest.

Geraldine sips a glass of wine and stares into the fire. She wants us to go to bed early. ‘Ah, no. I’ve started cooking now and anyway I’m starving.’ Chopped onions and garlic soften in butter in the frying pan. Dried porcini rehydrate in a bowl. Red wine breathes, ready to be absorbed into the arborio.  I read from a book of local legends.

 

Doxey Pool

There is a mysterious pond that never dries out. There are stories the pond is inhabited by a green-skinned water spirit with sharp, green teeth. A poor woman went to bathe there.  She was seen by a forester as she paddled into the shallow water at the edge and crouched down to wash her hands and face. The forester was distracted by a roe hind breaking cover. When he looked back at the pool, the woman had disappeared. Her companions came looking for her, but she was never found.

           

Geraldine leans further towards the glow between the burning logs. The fire lights her smile.  Where shall we walk the next day? She sees the name Hanging Stone marked on the Ordnance Survey map and is curious. We lie in the chilly bed.

The forest hears sleep creep into the corners of the cottage. It listens to the subsiding crackle of burning logs, and the hum of uncertainty. It moves forward to take a closer look.

Day two

’Geraldine. What’s that noise?’ I whisper into the blind room. Outside, I hear deep grunting and rasping, irregular breaths, growling. There is scrabbling against the wall. I climb from the bed and feel the cold floor on my feet. Geraldine goes to the cottage door and looks out. Then she steps back and steps back again and again. She is silent. ’Are you OK? What the hell…? What’s going on?’ It is nothing. Maybe a badger. I close the door, bolt it and wedge a chair under the handle.

The forest begins to rest now; a stream trickling under fallen branches, a gentle snapping of soggy twigs, ebbing curiosity brushing against rough bark. The night is nearly done.

At the first sign of dawn I cautiously creep outside. I look for animal tracks in the mud, but the only prints I see are my own from yesterday. There is no wind and the sky is grey. Dew drops form on my jumper. I smell the spreading fungi feeding on the woodland’s waste.  There is death in the earth. ­­­­

 

The pony and the coffin

A local young man called William was a notorious rabble-rouser. He was found dead in the snow one winter’s morning with his throat savaged. His parents were ashamed of him and had him quickly buried.  The day after the funeral William’s pony broke free of its tether and crashed through a hedge into the cemetery. It pawed at the loose soil and dug down to the coffin which had not been buried deeply enough, then smashed the flimsy lid. William’s body had turned over and was facing Hell.

 

Hanging Stone. A great rocky slab jutting out of the hill. There is a plaque fixed to the rock in memory of a dog,

“a noble mastiff black and tan
            faithful as woman braver than man”

We climb up the side of the rock and stand on top. Hanging Stone. Hanging. Hanged. I imagine a noose dangling below.

Something in the forest shifts, moves molecules, vibrates the tympanum, quakes the malleus, incus and stapes, sends waves through the cochlea, tugs at hair cells, generates electrical impulses in the nerves. Warns the brain.

We tramp along the rocky ridge then cut down the hillside back to the chasm in the hill. Moisture drips off ferns and gathers on the walls in the dark shade. We listen again to the silence.

     A disturbance comes from outside the ravine. It is muffled, as if by the forest floor. We look at each other and stand dead still. The noise is close, but not getting closer. We wait, not knowing what to do. Then it stops. We clamber out to the woods. The noise starts again. Louder. Louder. All the beasts of the imagination combined. Louder, louder. Screams, howls, snarls, growls, shrieks, wails, bellows.

     “Jesus fucking Christ, run,” I shout and start to sprint away along a track I run until my lungs burn. Now I have to stop, and I look back. Three hundred paces, through the trees. An arrow’s flight. The noise quietens. Geraldine is there, standing where I started. Gazing up at an ancient oak. I am not sure, but I think I see a slight smile on her face.

The trees wait for nightfall, as always. They shudder at the centuries they have suffered, the suffering centuries they have seen, the fires their branches have fuelled, the lives on which their leaves have landed.

Back in the cottage I am shivering. I start to make the fire.  I am cold, so cold. More old newspapers. My hands tremble. I roll up the pages and twist and twist them and throw the pieces into the grate. I pour a glass of wine and read more from my book. The area was once a howling wilderness of wild animals. The old place names – Wolf-low, Wolf-dale and Wolf-edge, Boars-ley, Wild Boar Clough, Bear-stone and Fox-bank.

 

The cave 

There is a cave that was once inhabited by an ancient woman called Bess. When Bess was young her beautiful, dark-haired daughter lived with her. The girl was always lost in thought, with a gentle smile on her face, looking across the hills with her grey-green eyes. One winter’s day, Bess was seen frantically running back and forth in the snow. She said her daughter had gone, then never spoke again.

 

I go through to the bedroom. Geraldine is lying there in her clothes. She looks peaceful. She says nothing. No discussion.

The weather changes. Wind starts to worry the waking trees. Cold air freezes the firs and breathes on the bolted door.  Snow begins to flick the frosty windows. The forest is troubled during the long night.

Day three

I lie awake next to Geraldine, listening. In the morning snow covers the ground. But we can still head back to our jobs in London, because the car has four-wheel drive. I make coffee and toast. Geraldine eats nothing. We pack our gear and drive down the farm track to the road across the hills. The car does well, even on the steepest gradient. False promise.

 

The white mastiffs

A Cistercian abbey was founded near the hills by a powerful earl. The monks made money by selling wool from their flocks to traders and developed their own breed of guard dogs to protect the sheep. These were huge, pure white mastiffs. When the earl died he was condemned to eternity in Hell for his womanising. But the mastiffs  howled so hideously Satan ordered his soul to be released. The breed of dog died out, but when the snow blows across the hills great mastiffs reappear.

 

At the highest point on the road the wind whips up drifts.  Pure, cold and white. The highest point of the road. Drifts. Pure, cold and white. The snow gathers under the front of the car. The wheels cannot grip. Snow wedged under the car. The wheels cannot grip. The sky is white, the ground is white. The wheels spin and the car slides, slowly, slowly down the camber, wheels spin, the car slides. We need a tow. We check our phones. No signal. Geraldine will climb the track to the ridge to make a call.

            I watch her struggle away from the road, a dark shadow in the snow, struggling, until she disappears. She climbs the hill and disappears. I run the engine to try to keep warm, but I feel cold and nervous. Cold.  It starts snowing heavily again. I wait until Geraldine has been gone far too long. I put on my boots and jacket and start up the hill. The path has gone under the fresh snow and the wind blows crystals into my face. I see a figure ahead and shout, but it is another boulder. There is no trace of Geraldine’s footprints.

Ice wind whips crystals on to skin and they cling cold and unmelting in the storm. On the rocks, they pick out layers of ancient silt, as ancient as the shapes that move through the snow. Shapes that leave no marks in the spindrift settling round the sacral stones.

The cliffs are close by on my right. I panic. Shapes move ahead of me, dark figures stand near the cliff edge. The wind screeches across my ears and I hear other howls and wails from the wild hills. Screams, howls, snarls, growls, shrieks, wails, bellows.

     I stand on a rock and look out over the forest lost below the cliffs. I feel something press against my back. I do not have time to resist. Falling. The hills have me.

Ice grows slowly across the pool, creaking as the water molecules slow down and settle into place for a long winter’s wait. Darkling rocks gather round. Curious trees strain to catch the incantations. A new legend is born.

                                           ***

 (Published in Firewords magazine)

The List Maker

 

Every particle of light had been swallowed by clouds, roof slates, stone walls and heavy green shutters. The generator had stopped for the night. I was 11 years old and alone in a black room of iron bedsteads, horsehair mattresses and scratchy woollen blankets. I woke up needing the toilet and was terrified of the naked wooden floor. When the lights were on, I caught sight of silverfish and scuttling cockroaches. Now I imagined a mass of insects being crushed under my feet as I felt my way along the wall to the stairs and down to the door. When I got outside, I could hear waves beating the rocks in the cove. I detected a melancholy hint of dawn as I relieved myself on to the turf. I ignored the blowback caused by the wind from the sea.

          This was Brittany in 1964 and I was on a backpacking trip with my footloose mom. We had arrived on Île de Batz in a storm. The only accommodation was in the auberge de jeunesse and we were the sole guests. Rural France then was a country of quirky cars, trains that picked up farmers in fields, labourers wearing bleu de travail, squat toilets and garlic. Pigs roamed in the woods and children collected snails along drainage ditches. I loved it.

 

When I was eighteen, I hitchhiked to Greece. It was a list-maker’s dream. I went through Belgium, Luxembourg, West Germany, Austria, Yugoslavia and Italy. I became a species of twitcher, a tick obsessive, checking off countries, islands, mountains over the years. I like lists; they help to bring closure when they are completed and they help to bring sleep. Try mentally listing all fifty US states alphabetically as you lie in bed and you will be drifting off in Maine. Compile a list of rivers, one for each letter of the alphabet, and you will be getting zeds long before the Zambezi. Yet a compulsion to visit every country in Europe, then list them in my mind, was starting to keep me awake. How could I get to all the newly independent nations that emerged from the break-ups of the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia and the Eastern Bloc? How do you even define Europe?

          I watched TV as the results of the June 2016 Brexit referendum came in from Sunderland to Bridgend, Boston to Sandwell. I had been blithely crossing borders in the European Union for years. Suddenly the UK had voted to leave. I lay in bed and started listing the 27 countries that would remain in the EU. I did not fall asleep; instead I remembered cycling in Amsterdam, cross-country skiing in Sweden, taking lakeside saunas in Finland, canyoneering in Spain, finding Heidegger’s hideaway in Germany and Tito’s hideaway in Croatia. Despite the smug reminiscences I was surprised at how many of the EU’s twenty-seven remaining countries I had not been to and stayed in – the Baltic states, Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Slovenia and tiny Malta. Now I had a simple list to complete. My trips would have to start and end at airports near home and fit in with days off from my job, which involved three long shifts a week. I became expert at finding cheap and convenient flights, inexpensive places to stay and the best public transport deals. My deadline was the ever-shifting Brexit deadline. The Coronavirus pandemic was still in the future.

         

The challenge started with a £25 one-way flight to Bucharest and little idea how to get home again. I walked in 40°C heat to see “Ceausescu’s palace”; the vast government building established before the former leader was shot dead. I had a cold beer from a kiosk in a park and ate grilled pork in the old town. I took a train to the countryside to walk in forested hills before returning to the capital. That night I found a flight back to the UK from Sofia. That would enable me to tick off another country and get home for £30. The locomotive looked as though it had been hit by shrapnel, the compartments were sweltering and the windows barely opened. The train creaked slowly out of Bucharest at the start of the thirteen-hour journey. We crept through vast fields of corn, wheat and sunflowers.

          Just north of the Danube we stopped in the last village in Romania. Officials boarded the train and collected everyone’s passports and identity cards. Across an orchard I could see a road checkpoint. Queues of lorries and cars backed up. We were about to leave one EU nation and enter another, but this was definitely a hard border. Eventually passports were returned and the train rattled across a bridge over the river. At the first station on the other side, it squealed to a halt and Bulgarian border officials came to take our documents. I finished off my bottled water as we waited in the boiling heat for another thirty minutes.

          It made me recall other cross-border journeys – having to leave a train to walk across “no-man’s land” between Malaysia and Thailand, being stopped at gunpoint north of the Irish border by an army patrol during The Troubles, and being told “no” when I tried to join a Finnish boat trip into Russia.

 

I got a one-way ticket, this time to Lithuania, and nearly missed the connecting flight in Brussels. I sprinted through the airport thinking, “I do not want a night in Brussels. I’ve done that before.” I got on the plane just as they were about to close the doors. My list was critical ‒ it was Vilnius or bust. I wandered around grand squares and boulevards, then visited Vilnius’s self-declared independent republic of Užupis, a hippy quarter where part of the constitution states, “People have the right to be happy.” There was no problem at the Užupis border.

          There was a cheap seat on a flight to Tallinn and I left Vilnius airport on a small turboprop with half a dozen other passengers. It was winter, but the sun was shining. We crossed the Estonian border and entered a blinding snowstorm. The propellers whipped the flakes into a frenzy as the plane lurched towards my next destination. A tram was waiting at the airport doors ready to push through the drifts on its way into the city. Miniature snow ploughs were clearing the pavements as I marched down towards the harbour. Children wearing hats, mitts and boots were playing outside a school. I looked out across the frozen Baltic Sea towards Helsinki in the EU’s northernmost state. 

 

As I arrived at work after days off between shifts, colleagues asked, “Where have you been this time?” “Riga. It’s a brilliant place.” “Just to Prague.” “In a Budapest bathhouse.” Eventually they stopped asking. I ate cheesy halušky in Bratislava, in Valetta I joined government workers buying pastizzi, and in Krakow my pierogi were filled with cabbage and wild mushrooms. Another day, another dumpling.

          Now I was about to complete my list. The final tick. On my teenage hitchhiking trip to Greece, I had slept in forests, on parched scrubland where shepherds and their flocks passed in the night, on beaches, next to roads, and on a bench in the grounds of Ljubljana castle. Slovenia was then part of Yugoslavia – I felt it needed a fresh visit as an EU member state. Number twenty-seven.

          Triglav is a fierce rocky peak in the Julian Alps and the highest mountain in the country. All true Slovenes must climb Triglav, I was told. I joined them, as a true European, and every hiker greeted me with a friendly dobre dan. Hundreds of people equipped with helmets and safety harnesses were making for the top. It was an arduous trek and most climbers stayed overnight in mountain huts such as Planika, 2,400 metres above sea level. I did not know whether it was the altitude or the beer being drunk during the evening that caused the men and women in the dormitory to snore so loudly, but it made me feel wistful about the quiet of that Breton hostel on Île-de-Batz. I needed to get up in the night, although this time there were no cockroaches to worry about. I crept outside. There was a chemical toilet away from the building across jagged rocks. I had nothing on my feet so I decided to take a risk with the chilly wind howling round the mountain. The moon lit up the crags and pinnacles. I could see climbers’ headlamps on the ridge leading to the summit. I was in love with Europe.

(Published in The Wells Street Journal)