Chapter 2 – Before

The slim brown fingers carved out the maple with shreds of yellow white wood curling up from the iron blade. The bottom already shaped smooth and the hole ready now to accept its crew of winter worn acorns and catkins. A sail of a single leaf pressed over white lollipop stick weaved through a thread of sticky sugar and child spit ready to be implanted. ‘Remember what grandad said, cut away into air not into your body’. Grandad’s knife, folding iron blade that could be pressed into its safe hardwood case, a knife that had come across continents, cut pomegranate skin and parcel string, fishlines in Udaipur, cargo rope in Cairo, opened boxes of tea, peeled yams and apples, severed cotton threads and opened yarn bales. Safe use learned when safety was never certain.

The finished boat was admired, placed in the soft grass, the leaf sail blown gently by a warm May breeze across the hill and down toward the blue grey rush of water. Sobia applauds with soft palms and smooths her daughter’s hair, feeling the sun warmth in the soft strands. ‘That is the greatest boat I have ever seen, Rabia. You are so clever’, Helen says reaching for the lemonade.

“Her grandad was a craftsman, I think he made the knife, when he was a boy, before here, maybe this is the best work it was meant to do’, Sobia’s voice quietened.

The boat is lifted and Rabia lowers it gently into the still water at the edge of the river, pushing rushes down to make a soft jetty where her knees pressed into bank mud. ‘Lisa, bring yours here and they can go together’ she chirps over her shoulder. Timid steps follow down the bank, crouch beside the jetty and Lisa’s own bark and fern craft is pushed into the pool, slender arms dipping into the cold and giggling with the shock. Then off, a firm shove breaks from the quelled torrent. A communion of launched craft and summer work takes to the wilder water and bobs out and away. Every inch down river brings more rapid movement and then both boats hit the ripples and seem to fly. The knife crafted wood and tied bark vie for a lead neither cares for, bumping into each other and then sideways and backwards and barged into rocky islands, leaf sail and fern bows finding crazy reckless acceleration. On the bank, two bouncing, leaping running bodies chase the escape of their labours and laughter tinkling out of each of them joins the sound of water racing away and down. The union of the boats and bodies, of water rushing and blood pumping and breath and ozone caught in zephyrs of perfumed air.

‘Careful!’ two voices shout in synchronised concern. Two figures on a blanket respond with almost silent laughter and a flash of green to hazel crinkle above smiling mouths.

Four people and two boats by a flowing river coursing through green meadows of wild flower and new grass. Pressing down on green carpet and daisy rings is a blanket, a rucksack, luminous pale blue plastic box shrouding grease paper packages, and a lemonade bottle that prisms sunshine to reveal another world of unknown colours. Close by, a blackbird waits for crumbs. Above all of this, a blue sky wiped across by clouds ballooning in warm winds. In each body the sensation of the invisible warmth of the air draws deeply, voicelessly, and tells them this is good, this is perfect.

On the horizon, a dozen funnels of black brown smoke snake upwards.

The water continues to rush but the bodies lay now, digesting, resting. Slow breaths and sky stares and birdsong smooth the moments into an eternal now. The banks of the river climb up on both sides in a gentle movement of rolled earth, shaped by wind and rain and broken only by wandering histories of feet tramping scars of lost purpose. The forever broken by a question, ‘what’s them stones for,mam? Lisa asks and walks over to a collection of partially submerged rocks.

Rabia is there in a shot and the two of them circle the encampment. Helen breathes deeply, ‘it’s a mystery, one my grandma told me about when I was little, just after the war and we came up here’.

The introduction of mystery was always enough, to give a tale the edge, to stop it being school certainty and to welcome in the curious. It worked, both pairs of child eyes now wider and looking back towards this storyteller, this mum made uncanny with the promise of the mysterious. Helen walked over, stretched her arms out and shook out the languid moment, crouched bythe rocks and her face melted into a storyteller’s smile. ‘What kind of a mystery?’, Sobia asks, crawling towards them, encouraging the drama to unfurl.

‘This was once a little palace, a place built by things that live beneath us, in the underworld. A palace they had for when they would come up and make spells, spells that gave the birds their songs and the flowers their perfumes. All gone now’, Helen relaxed, pleased with her opening that may well be the end of it too.

‘What happened?’ Rabia asks, first mouth on the hook. ‘Well, according to my grandma, these things had come up forever, before the river even, and they made it all, the river, the rushes and the weeds, the dragon flies and the voles, the daisies and the forget-me-nots and all kinds of things. They played in the river, they sang and they rode on the wind like birds. They brought up secrets from inside the earth and shared them, and made spells and created new colours and danced by sunlight, firelight and moonlight. Then they were gone.’

Silence. River rush returned, then breath, then curiosity. ‘Gone where?’, Lisa on the hook now too.

They went when the canal builders came. Navigators they called them, hundreds of years ago they were right here, so many of them. They built a huge camp, built fires, chopped down trees to burn and to build, had tents and had fights down by the river. They dug out a dirty square and fought for money and they lived wild lives. They fought and sang by firelight and dug in puddled clay by sunlight. The men brought darkness, nothing was here then but heavy tools, dark beers in hard wooden barrels, hard liquor in thick glasses, loud songs of wealth and rebellion and fights at the end of every week, fires raging and madness in the mud. They worked hard, with strong arms and closed minds they cut a line in the land and gorged their way through these fields for a hundred miles or more. They stopped here because of this river the ones underneath had built, it was in the way, but they could not get rid of it. It was too strong, the water rushed and the land said no more and used the river as a shield. The army of men stopped and built a camp and other men came, with tall hats, clean collars and long frames on horseback. They made a plan, and they took the river underground, under the canal. It’s down there now, where we walked up before. The tunnels and the etched marks on the stone they left, guides to others of what to cut and were to lay the stone. And more men came, and they cut huge blocks and they blasted out rocks and built a drop in the land that took the river from the sunlight and under the earth and passed it out the other side. And there, they used this new river to make factories for paper. And there it is, right down there and through those trees, the paper mill, still, to this day’.

‘Tall hats on horseback, I can picture that’, Sobia says, caught.

‘They’d not have lived here, no way’ Helen says, picturing the characters in her own story, now caught on her own deep hook. Her green eyes now back with grandma’s stories and long winding memories of this landscape and the people made by it. Of nomadic men of purpose and accumulation, men drawing wealth and arrogance across villages of survival and sustenance. The stories of them still survived, Helen’s line hooked her belly first. The stories of these pasts a heavy bruise that grew from the vicious slice of The Cut, bringing ordered water to corral people into brick chimney prisons. The past that Helen felt right now, the story too deep and starting to ache. Escaped but brought back, the stories always fall back to this darkness. Their place in those same factories, on the same streets.

‘What happened to the underground people?’ Rabia halts the descent with a curiosity parachute. ‘Oh they were never people, Rabia, they were just beings. But they knew, they could sense this was going to happen, so we think, grandma says they just felt it coming. They knew these armies were cutting away the earth, not changing it with spells, but smashing it with pick axes and shovels. Everywhere was too far away from everywhere else, the men who ordered these menthought. They were tightening the ropes to squeeze us all together. Tightened with new ropes and chains. Water first, then iron railways and next there’ll be roads everywhere, doing the same’.

Helen stopped, breathed, felt her pulse racing and knew she was going too far, felt it. The rage, the rising crimson bursting in her belly and her brain and the bitter energyof it all. This is a story, this is a story, this is a story, the mantra soothed and settled slowly.

‘So they decided to take the palace down themselves, before the men came, that’s how it all happened’. Helen softened.

‘And then they went, all the men. Although some of them stayed, fell to love, or to drink or to work in the factories and others moved further down the line, cutting the canal all the way to Leeds’.

‘And the men in tall hats they did not stay, Sobia. They rode on to other places, far from here’, Helen smiled, looked at her friend, knew they shared the energy that had just burned.

A new calm came now, softer than before and Helen felt herself return to the now of this place. “Then, when they had gone, the land healed. The fighting dirt turned back to grass and the blood soaked into the ground and the flowers grew and birds sang again. The bull rushes shot upwards, and new greens and browns and voles and otters, all crept back and they healed the earth and the wind breathed new perfumes and everything remembered the time before and everything breathed deeper and things warmed in sunshine and grew over the scars. Even alongside the canal, new flowers came, fish and herons and geese and swans and more reeds and more bushes and the world claimed all that too’.

The four of them looked around, at the green world and the beauty and felt the healing that had taken place. Here, the miles of walking to get from out of the dirt and the tangle of others. Here, the edge that was the centre, held in calm gentle beauty of warm winds and dancing grasses. Each thinking they were glad they had come now, after the healing had fixed everything.

Rabia stroked the edges of the grey rock poking through red earth, ‘I wonder why they broke up the palace though, and why they dd not tell the canal makers to be more careful?’

Helen smiled, looking out over the horizon and the smoky columns, and brushed her hand over the moss on the biggest of the stones. ‘They knew, I think, that it is better to be a mystery when you create beauty. If the men knew they were here, they’d have made sure to dig them out. People driven by money and power can never leave the dancers alone’.

Silence. The only sound of iron on rock as Rabia drew her knife over the rock and etched a flower deep into the last ramparts of the lost palace.