The forty-one miles of motorway featureless, a hard swathe of white concrete unreeling endlessly over the rain-drenched December countryside, and the angry afternoon gale-wind lashing and buffeting south-west to north-east at right-angles straight across it. The car at sixty persistently gliding out of the fast lane, across the middle, veering into the slow, then lunging violently back towards the fast in the temporary haven of cuttings through hills, and bursting out once more at the end of them back into the noise and shove of the wind. Mud spray from the mumbling clusters of overtaken lorries straggling up the long climbs, wipers steadily whirring and clicking, sweeping the windscreen clear, obscured, clear. Flash of headlights from behind caught in the mirror, a hooting black Jaguar swamping past, ripping importantly on into the distance through its own accompanying cascade. Direction signs huge as posters, white on blue, chronographers of distance and of time: Brompton thirty-five miles, twenty-six miles, fifteen miles, nine.

Eventually at last the count-down markers before the junction: three hundred yards ahead, two hundred, one. A sharp swing off the wide carriageway, round and down through the group of artificially landscaped hillocks and into the trunk road, the swishing stream of traffic overhead high on the motorway fading away at the back with the recession of the embankment. A pleasantly quiet road now, the wind less difficult and the rain blowing in light curtains across the ribbed brown earth of the bare winter fields.

Slowly through small villages, past an old country church and a derelict wooden barn. On past two petrol pumps deserted in front of a combined grocer’s and off-licence and post-office. Right at the next cross-roads, then left in two hundred yards at the wooden finger-post pointing to Fardale. Half a mile further on, and left again into an unmarked by-road almost concealed with high hedges: unmetalled, wide enough most of the time for one vehicle only, winding falling rising for four miles like a piece of string dropped over the undulations of the land. Foliage overgrowing both sides, an unbroken thicket of hawthorn, brambles, wild privet, ivy, willow bushes, holly, pollarded stunted limes, rotten paling fencing held together by rusting strands of barbed wire. A tiny meadow on a hairpin bend at the bottom of a hill, a lightning-struck tree naked in the middle of it, bare branches against the black-clouded sky, an arthritic hand. Steep rises and bends, puddles and potholes, mud and loose gravel at dank corners unpenetrated by the pale daylight….

A twisting lane, long, unused, and nearly unusable, going nowhere.

But suddenly over the crest of a small hill it widens and comes out into the open past a line of tall copper beeches, running straight on to the narrow gravel path that neatly fringes Ambergrove Green. An unexpected community of twenty houses and a shack for the village store. Total population thirty-four. A scattering of dwellings irregularly grouped round half an acre of smooth grass, some of them visible only as smoking chimneys behind wattle fences and wooden gates, a few more with flat roofs, plate-glass picture windows and well-kept open lawns set with miniature spruces and standard roses, with white-washed rocks as frontage marks. In the summer a modest beauty spot, not quite worth a special visit, but known to a few off-track wanderers. Here and there a house to let in August perhaps for someone wanting a quiet simple holiday. But through the winter the inhabitants mostly keep themselves to themselves. Elderly people nearly all: a retired headmaster and headmistress in ‘White Gables’ with their retired schoolmistress daughter, a lady in the big red brick bungalow called ‘Flanders’ with only eleven Schipperkes as companions.

Unnoticed at first along the east side of the green a brief terrace of two-roomed cottages, farm-labourers’ homes once, with low front doors opening straight into the downstairs room. Sitting in a fireside chair in Number Five, prodding the logs in the grate with a poker to bring up a blaze, a man turning his face sometimes to glance out of the window at the dark blue rainfull sky, the glitter of the flames catching his glasses at an opaque angle then and giving him two huge round crimson eyes. An aquiline nose, thin lips, the age-lines carved deeply down his cheeks from temple to chin; a high domed bald head fringed with a fluff of grey hair round the back and sides. Straight-backed and upright, a wiry body in a roll-necked canary yellow pullover, long-legged whipcord trousers, soft brown leather casual shoes.

Speaking quietly, from time to time lapsing into silence and staring motionless into the fire. A former area manager of the National Coal Board, and after a lifetime’s work now pensioned and retired. Russell George, expatriate Lancastrian in a strange southern county, a widower living alone and keeping himself to himself mostly: now seventy years of age.

*

—It doesn’t look like it’s going to stop raining this side of Christmas does it? And they say the south has better weather than t’north! Well, I don’t know, ever since I’ve come down here it’s been bloody awful it has. Like ruddy Manchester all the time it is, winter and summer, rain rain rain, I’ve never seen nothing like it, seems to do nowt else. Well I suppose it’s got to leave off sometime though, hasn’t it? Have you finished your tea, will you have another cup? A biscuit then?

All right I’m ready to make a start if you are. See how far we get, shall we? You’ll not want to stop too long each time, I know, you’ve a long journey back haven’t you? If I ramble too much you must stop me, because there’s not a lot of people you can talk to down here.

Well I was born in 1898 in Lanarkshire. But I’m not Scottish, my parents were English people, my father was working up there in one of the mines. I was the fifth child, there was a brother and then four sisters before me; Malcolm, Elizabeth, Joan, Mary and Eileen – though for some reason she was never called anything else but ‘Lena’. There was about two years between each of us, more or less: and then four years after me there was two more girls again, Dora and Barbara, but that wasn’t till later, after we’d moved down into England, I’ll be coming to that of course at the time.

I don’t remember anything much before I was about five. My father had quite a decent job for those days, he was a mechanical engineer, what used to be called the ‘engine-wright’. I know in Scotland we used to live in a sort of big block, more or less a tenement place it was, up on the fourth or fifth floor, with only three rooms if I remember, and an outside washplace at the end of the stone landing. And then there was this wide spiral staircase with like an iron balustrade round a courtyard in the centre of the block. You had to go out on the landing to the wash-house when you got up in the mornings and at night before you went to bed: in the open it was, not protected from the weather or anything, and very cold in the winter. Not much else I can recollect about it I don’t think – oh yes I remember the bed, my mother’s and father’s, one of those sort you fold up into a recess like, in the wall of the living-room during the day.

Chiefly I remember things more clearly from when I was five or six onwards, when we’d come down to live in Northumberland where my father had got a new job. They were all privately owned, the coalmines in those days of course: and he went to work for a man who owned the mine in one of the little villages in those parts. He not only owned the mine but all the houses as well, there’d only be about twelve of them, little cottages in a terrace very much like this, grey stone with slate roofs, then the mine-shaft a few yards away up at the top of the street. And then, at the end the other way, three bigger houses standing on their own; one for the owner, a smaller one for the pit-manager, and then a smaller one still for the chief engineer, which was my father.

Mind you, it was quite a big house for those days you know, four rooms downstairs and the same again on top. I don’t suppose what my father earned would sound much to people now, I expect it couldn’t have been above five pounds a week – but with the house thrown in rent free and a new suit every year from the company and things like that, he’d be considered well off. He was a strange sort of man my father, at least I always found him so; very remote and austere, never had much time for people outside, and never much to say for himself at home either. When he was younger, he’d had some kind of an accident, fallen getting off a moving tram in Glasgow and banged a nerve in his head or something, and it’d left him with a very bad speech impediment. Perhaps that’s why he never talked much, because it was difficult to him.

My mother she was more or less the same sort of person too as he was, another very quiet one. A rather gaunt, sallow-complexioned woman, sewing or dress-making in the evenings, one bottle of stout with her supper on Saturday nights, and that was about all she had in the way of excitement. A strange pair altogether when I think back on them: one thing for instance, when you went to bed no one ever came up and tucked you in or gave you a kiss, it was just ‘Off...