Rufus keeps a journal the way he keeps the barometer: every day, whether or not anything has happened. It is a private book, set down in fountain pen at the kitchen table, and more candid than he is aloud — about the work, the weather, his father, and nearly everything else.
Wednesday, 23rd September 1953
Glass 29.8, steady · Wind west · Mild and grey, cold by night
Equinox. A west wind, and the kind of mild grey morning that lies to you about the evening. By the time I came up the lane tonight it was properly cold: the first night this year I have wanted the fire for its own sake and not for company.
The swallows have gone. Twenty-two of them on the wire by the gate yesterday morning; none tonight. I never see them leave. I only ever see that they have left, which I suspect is how most things happen to me.
A long day at Chadderton. Last week’s figures were better than anyone expected, which means a great many men will now expect them every week. I was congratulated in the corridor by a man who told me in March that the thing would never fly. I thanked him. One learns.
Letter from Mother. Sugar comes off the ration on Saturday, and she proposes to mark it with a fruitcake “the like of which this family has not seen since 1939.” I am to fetch it on Saturday morning on the Thunderbird, which is a responsibility I rank somewhere above the delta. I read the letter aloud to Charlie. He has not left the kitchen door since.
Penny at six, wet through, returning a pen she maintains she never took. It was not my pen. It was a better one. I have decided not to raise this. She left a sketch on the back of an envelope: the lane, the cottage, and a small cross in the top field marked here be dragons. After she had gone I went up with the torch. Sheep.
Why did I go up with the torch? I have been asking myself that for an hour, and the pipe has gone out twice.
Before the frosts:
The fallen length of wall in the top field (eleven yards, near enough).
The chimney on the east side, which smokes.
Find out what Penny meant.
Friday, 25th September 1953
Rain all day
Rain. The delta. Bed at ten.
Saturday, 26th September 1953
Glass 29.5, falling · Rain from three · Clearing by evening
Part I
Sugar off the ration. A great day for the nation and a disastrous one for Charlie’s figure.
Rode to Oldham first thing for Mother’s cake. She had wrapped it in greaseproof paper, a tea towel and, I suspect, a short prayer, and it came home over the tops on the carrier at a steady twenty-five with the dog’s hopes riding on every bend. Father walked me to the gate and said of the Thunderbird what he has said every time since I bought her: “She’ll be the death of thee, or the making.” He has not yet said which.
The glass was still falling at eleven. I told Penny at eight, before I set off, that we should have rain by the afternoon. She said the parish hall had a roof. It began at three and has not stopped.
She came in at four, soaked, and kicked her boots off by the hearth as though they had offended her. “Positively atrocious,” she said, and then, before she had even untied her scarf: “What is this one? A very expensive tin opener?”
It is a stress-relief recess for a high-load spar fitting. I have been drawing it for six weeks. I told her so. She said I had spilled tea on the margin. It is an ink stain, it dates from 1944, and I told her that too, though I cannot think why I expected it to help.
I had poured the second mug four minutes before she came in. I will not set down here how I arrived at four minutes, because I set it down aloud, and once was enough.
Charlie slept through all of this until I touched the lid of the cake tin, when he came to life like a Merlin on a cold morning (one cough, then all of him at once) and sat down between us. Penny gave him a corner. He ate it without troubling his teeth. Three years of bed and board, and he throws me over for a sultana.
Part II
At some point the fitting was abandoned. I notice that I cannot say when. I have a clear recollection of Penny on the hearthrug, explaining to the dog the errors in the Ordnance Survey sheet for this parish, and none whatever of deciding to stop work. This is unlike me.
She made supper. She knows the larder better than I do: the white bloomer from the baker (white bread again, after all these years, and it tastes of 1938), the last of the week’s Cheddar, and the sweet pickle. She buttered to the edges, which is most of a week’s butter and very nearly a declaration of war. She said I build a sandwich like a bridge. I said a bridge is a perfectly good thing to build a sandwich like.
She asked if I wanted mustard. I said no.
When the rain cleared we took Charlie up the top path. Everything smelled of wet bracken. Penny says the path is wrong: the tithe map of 1840 puts the boundary a quarter of a mile east, and the village simply wore a new way into the hill because it was quicker. I said that was engineering. She said it was a nightmare. I said something about nothing staying rigid, however carefully you map it, which I should like back.
Charlie came out of the bracken with a stick the size of a pit prop, took her feet from under her on the wet stone by the stile, and I caught her.
That is all that happened. I write it down so that I remember it accurately and do not, in a week, improve it.
(Later.) She said the reflexes were good for something other than catching drawing pens. I have been thinking about that for longer than it deserves.
(Later still.) Half a cake remains. The dog is asleep on the hearthrug with the look of a man who has done well out of the day.
Wednesday, 30th September 1953
Glass 30.2, steady · Not a breath of wind · Clear, slate-coloured sky
Not a breath of wind all day, and a sky the colour of clean slate. Stone weather. Home from Chadderton by half past five and up in the top field by six, with an hour of light in hand.
The gap is eleven yards and one foot. I have measured it three times and it has declined to get smaller. It came down in the March thaw and I have been stepping over it since, as have the Lonks, who treat it as a public right of way. At a ton of stone to the yard, near enough, there are eleven tons lying in the grass, and every piece must be lifted at least twice.
Method, since I spent Sunday drawing it: take the whole length down to the footings. Sort the stone along both sides by size, throughs and copes apart, the small stuff in a heap for hearting. Set up a frame at either end, with a batter of one in six, and run string between them. Then build both faces at once, a course at a time. Father’s rule, which he had from a man who walled at Grains Bar: two over one and one on two. Cover every joint. A wall that doesn’t cross its joints is only a heap that hasn’t happened yet.
Penny came up the field at seven with her bicycle clips still on and looked at the drawing on its board. She said it was glorified connect-the-dots with a sheep in the corner, and asked if the sheep was to scale. I said it was not. She said that was the first honest thing on the sheet. Then she picked a stone out of the pile I had passed over twice, turned it once, and set it in the footings, where it sat as though it had been cut for the place. I had been walling an hour. She had been walling four seconds.
Charlie assisted by lying in the hearting.
Two yards of footings by dark. At this rate the gap closes about the middle of October, provided the weather holds and nobody else helps.
(Later.) The cross on her envelope, in the top field. I went up with the torch to check the frames, and it came to me that it is within a yard of the gap. She has never marked anything on a map by accident in her life.
Sunday, 4th October 1953
Glass 30.1 · Still · Mist on the water at dawn
Still. Castleshaw at six: mist on the water to the depth of a man, forty-eight degrees by my reckoning, eight minutes by my count. A heron got up at arm’s length and we were both put out. Ned came, having said he wouldn’t, and told me about 1939. Bicycle track in the yard when I got home.
Thursday, 8th October 1953
Glass 29.5, falling · Rain from the west all day
Rain from the west all day, the kind that does not fall so much as stand about.
The six o’clock news: Kathleen Ferrier has died, in London, at forty-one. A Blackburn lass. Mother first heard her on the Home Service and talked of nothing else for a week.
I got the 78 down from the shelf, Blow the Wind Southerly, and took it out of its sleeve, and put it back. Some things want leaving where they are for a night.
Charlie has the good chair. I have let him.
Wednesday, 14th October 1953
Glass 30.0 · Wind north · Clear until four, then grey
The wind gone round to the north in the night, with the thin clean edge to it that you feel first in the knuckles. Clear until four, then grey.
Fieldfares. Thirty or forty came in over Standedge at a quarter to eight, as I was wheeling the Thunderbird out, chacking like a tin of stones being shaken. Grey-headed as the men at the works, and with the same air of having come from somewhere colder and not thinking much of this. The first of the winter, a week earlier than last year by my book. They went straight into the rowan by the top wall and set about it.
Letter from Florrie, answering my postcard:
“Dear Rufus, thank you for the view, which is now pinned up for the children as an example of what happens when an engineer is let near a paintbox. Thirty-one of them, and every one asked why your sky is a better colour than ours. I said it was Lancashire, and they believed me. I will come over for Bonfire Night, if Mother can spare me. Tell Penny I shall hold her to it. Your loving sister, F. P.S. Whose glove?”
I do not know whose glove. Charlie is not saying.
Accounts. The Thunderbird, January to date:
Petrol, 64 gallons at 4s. 5½d. — £14 5s. 4d.
Oil, a gallon and a half — 15s. 0d.
Rear tyre, fitted myself — £2 17s. 6d.
Chain — 18s. 6d.
Plugs, two — 7s. 0d.
One fruitcake, conveyed whole over the tops — no charge
£19 3s. 4d. Something under four thousand miles, so a little over a penny a mile, not counting the licence, the insurance, or what Father says she is doing to my nerves. The bus would be cheaper. The bus would not wait for me at the gate with the frost on her tank.
(Later.) Thirty-one children in Yorkshire now know what the sky over Dobcross looks like. I am more pleased about this than is reasonable.
(Later still.) Penny up after tea, on the bicycle. She found the Ferrier where I had put it back on Thursday, and put it on without asking. I let her. Told her the wall would be done on Friday.
Friday, 16th October 1953
Glass 30.0 · Not a breath of wind · Walling weather
Not a breath of wind. Walling weather, and the last of it, I should think.
Took the day the works have owed me since August. Since the clocks went back the wall has been a Saturday and Sunday affair, and I wanted it done before the weather turned.
Up at seven. The last of the top courses by eleven, a sandwich on the through-stones, then the copes, set on edge and tight, each one knocked down with the mell until it stopped answering back. Copes on by three.
Done, bar one. Eleven yards and one foot, both faces, a batter of one in six, every joint covered. I went along it with the string and the level and could find nothing to say against it, which is unusual in a wall and unheard of in me. Charlie walked the full length of the top, which I had expressly forbidden, and it held him. That is the test Father would have used.
One cope stays off for the present, about a third of the way along. A matter of drainage. The ground is wetter there than I allowed for, and I want to see how it takes the first proper rain before I close it.
Penny, told on Wednesday that it would be done today, said she would believe it when she saw it. She is coming up tomorrow to see it.
Three weekends and a Friday. Eleven tons of stone, every piece lifted at least twice, as forecast. I have not been so tired since 1944, nor so pleased with a thing I can’t bring indoors.
(Later.) From the back door at dusk the top line runs clean to the end, all but the one notch. I keep looking at it. Drainage.
Sunday, 18th October 1953
Barometer 30.3 · Wind south, light · Warm and gold
St Luke. The wind in the south, and warm enough to sit out on the step with the pipe at nine in the morning, which in the middle of October is very nearly indecent. Mother calls it St Luke’s little summer. I have stopped arguing with Mother about weather.
A red admiral on the ivy flowers by the woodshed, spread out in the sun among the wasps and the flies, as bright as anything painted in June. It will be the last butterfly of the year, very likely.
The wall is finished. The fieldfares are in, and the rowan is bare. Nothing in the top field wants doing, and I found I did not know what to do with a Sunday that had nothing in it, so I went to Diggle Brook.
Trousers rolled to the knee (the old tweeds, my Sunday best in 1937) and nothing on the feet. The brook was colder than it looked, which is the whole principle of brooks. Charlie went in to the shoulder and came out looking at me as if it had been my idea. It had.
(Later.) Sat on the bank until the sun went off the water at four. I cannot remember the last time I sat anywhere for two hours without a pencil.
Tuesday, 20th October 1953
Barometer 30.1 · Not a breath of wind · Fog on the tops
Not a breath of wind, and the fog down on the tops from first light. I went out before the works to draw the view from the gate and drew the gate, which was all the view there was.
To Chadderton at twenty miles an hour behind a coal lorry, and glad of him. The day itself was figures.
Called at Werneth on the way home, as promised, to take Mother’s photograph for Florrie, who wants one for her classroom wall so the children will believe she had a mother. Mother had been warned on Sunday. She said she was not ready. She had changed her cardigan twice and moved the aspidistra. I put the exposure at a full second, the light being what it was, and she held as still for it as for the Last Judgement. Father timed it on the trench watch, unasked.
The Christmas cake was made last night: the first since 1939 with all the sugar it wants. The butter has been going into a basin at the back of the pantry since August, an ounce at a time, and Father has been told it is not for him. It is wrapped in greaseproof in the tin under the stairs, to have a spoonful of brandy every Sunday until Christmas. I was allowed to smell it.
She counts today as the first fog of the month. She holds that every fog in October is a snow in winter, and keeps the tally in pencil on the calendar by the back door. One, so far.
Home by Lees and Grasscroft, following the kerb, the lamp lighting nothing but the fog in front of it. Charlie was at the gate when I came up the lane, exactly where the drawing left him.
She had more to say about the fog, and about what walks in it on the tops. I said I would hear it another night. She said I would hear it whether I liked it or not.
Wednesday, 21st October 1953
Barometer 29.9, falling · Wind backing south-west · Clag on the tops by dark
Trafalgar Day. The wind backing south-west. The little summer is done. It went the way it came, without asking.
Four sides from Mother by the first post, all of it on the boggart that lives on Harrop Edge, the edge above this cottage. She has told it by the fire since I was small enough to believe it, and she has written it out now, she says, because I would not stop to hear it on Tuesday. It is the same story it always was: the weaver coming home late over the tops, the fog, and the hand that takes his in the dark and is not a hand. She has underlined the parts that are true. They are most of it.
I have put it into verse, which she will say is cheating, and left out the parts she insists are true. I shall send it on Sunday and take what comes.
The clag was back on the tops by dark. From the gate you could not see the edge at all, only the place where it ought to be. I shall keep to the wall.
Saturday, 24th October 1953
Barometer 29.8 · Wind north-west · Showers, bright between
Showers, bright between, the wind north-west. The sycamore stripped.
Up on Harrop Edge with P. after a boundary stone. Found, fifty-two yards north of the packhorse track; both maps wrong. Clag came down along the edge at three and lifted at four. Came off on a bearing of 220°, three hundred and twenty paces to the stile, a yard to the left. Down to the top wall.
Tea. She told me about a stone at Diggle that walked.
Sunday, 25th October 1953
Barometer 30.0 · Still · Fair and cold, the first frost
Fair and cold, and the first frost: white on the top field at seven and gone by nine. I went up to look at the wall in it. Frost finds every hollow in a field and none in a good wall. None.
Twenty-one years ago yesterday, Kinder. I got the old Oldham notebook down from the shelf to see what I had made of it at fourteen. More than I remembered, and less than I thought. I may copy it out one of these evenings.
Tuesday, 27th October 1953
Barometer 30.0, steady · Still · Mist on the reservoirs till nine
Not a breath of wind. Up to Castleshaw on the Thunderbird before the works, the mist lying on the lower water to the depth of a man. Seven whooper swans where I swam on the 4th, two of them still grey: this year’s young, over from Iceland with their parents. Necks held straight as posts. Then they called, and I was late for the works.
On the mat when I came in tonight, a long buff envelope, On Her Majesty’s Service, from the Ministry of Supply. Would I care to come to London to discuss an appointment. It does not say what appointment, in the way of letters that already know you will come.
I have read it four times. It has not got any longer.
It is in the drawer of the bureau, under the Thunderbird’s papers. I shall think about it when I know what there is to think about. That is not the same as not thinking about it, as I have just discovered, at eleven o’clock, with the pipe out.
Told nobody. There is nothing yet to tell.
Wednesday, 28th October 1953
Barometer 29.9 · Wind west, light · Grey
St Simon and St Jude. The hedgehog has gone to ground. There is a heap of dry leaves and grass at the bottom of the woodstack that was not there on Sunday, with a little of him showing at one end, and I have put a board over it to keep the rain off. I shall take my logs from the other end until spring.
All Hallows’ Eve, and Nutcrack Night to Mother, who will have had the doors bolted since tea and the poker by the fender, for the coal. The wind south-west and mild for the time of year, the cloud high and thin.
Up the edge at dusk with Charlie, the lamp and the notebook, to count what makes the noises. Particulars in the notebook. No boggart.
The bracken is the colour of an old penny now, and lies flat where the wind has had it. The Alderman was calling from the sycamore as we came down, and another answered him from somewhere behind Holy Trinity.
Home by half past six. I drew the curtains, for the first time this year, and lit the lamp, and the room came in round me the way it does in winter. A handful of hazelnuts on the bars of the grate, for Mother.
Mother says the dead walk tonight. If they do, I hope they come up Woods Lane. There is a fire, and the kettle is on, and I should not mind the company.
Sunday, 1st November 1953
Barometer 29.7 · Wind west · Wet and grey all day
All Saints. Wet and grey from first light and no sign of mending. Candlesnuff on the logs at the bottom of the woodstack, little black antlers tipped with white; I took mine from the far end, as promised to the hedgehog. Hood recited to the dog, as every first of November. He sighed in the right places.
To Werneth for dinner by the bus, in the charcoal suit and the trilby, because it was Sunday and because Mother would have asked. Beef, the week’s ration and some of next week’s, with the Yorkshire pudding first, as is proper.
Over the pudding Mother said they would be reading the names at church next Sunday, and Father said nothing, which is what he says about France.
Afterwards, with Mother in the scullery and the band on the wireless, I showed Father the letter. He read it through twice, the way he reads a drawing, holding it at arm’s length because he will not admit to the spectacles at the table. Then he folded it along its own creases and gave it back.
“They’ll not have asked for nowt,” he said.
He asked what I should say. I said I did not know. He said that was the first sensible thing I had said about it, and filled his pipe, and we sat with the clock until Mother came through with the tea and looked at the two of us as if she had walked in on a committee.
Home on the last bus. The rain had not stopped.
Tuesday, 3rd November 1953
Barometer 29.8, rising · Wind west · Showers, clearing by dark
A short-eared owl on the barbed wire along the intake at a quarter past seven, hung up by one wing, the way they are when they come low over a fence in the half-light after a vole and misjudge it. It had been there some time. It did not struggle when I came up. It turned its head right round and looked at me with those yellow eyes, as though I were the one in difficulties.
Coat off and over it, and the wire cut with the pliers from the Thunderbird’s tool roll. The wing is torn along the trailing edge, two primaries gone, and nothing broken that I can find. A tea chest in the outhouse, straw, a sack over the top, a saucer of water. Late for the works for the third time in a fortnight. Schofield said nothing, pointedly.
Penny came up at six. She looked in at the owl for a long time without saying anything, then went and found the old broom in the wash-house, sawed a foot off the handle with my tenon saw, without asking, and nailed it across the chest at the height she judged an owl would want. It was on it within the hour. She knows a man at the museum in Oldham who will say what it should be fed. Until he does: mice, if Charlie can be persuaded to take an interest, which he cannot.
Charlie has been to the outhouse door four times and been looked at through the gap each time. He has taken it personally.
(Later.) Still on the perch. I have been out twice with the lamp to make sure.
Wednesday, 4th November 1953
Barometer 29.9 · Still · Dry and cold
Mischief Night. Dry and cold. Bangers going off down in the village from the time the school came out, and a good deal of laughter in the lane after dark that stopped whenever I opened the door.
The coal shovel, the bucket and the owl are indoors, or as near as makes no difference. Everything else they are welcome to try.
Black peas in to soak for tomorrow, by Mother’s card: a pound to the big pan, a pinch of bicarbonate, cold water over, and leave them be. Florrie comes on the afternoon train.
(Later.) Charlie went under the table at the first banger and came out at the last. He considers tonight a rehearsal.
Thursday, 5th November 1953
Barometer 30.0 · Still · Dry and cold, the best that can be asked of a fifth of November
Bonfire Night. Dry, still and cold, the best that can be asked of a fifth of November.
The yard gate gone at half past seven. Found by Wilf, who was delighted, standing on its end in the mill lodge. PC Broadbent had it out by a quarter past eight and kept it from the fire by a quarter to nine. He has a list.
By Wilf also: a second letter from the Ministry. Wednesday, the 25th, at eleven. A railway warrant, return, made out in my name. It is behind the clock.
Florrie by the afternoon train, with Mother’s parkin, as though I had not one of my own in the tin. She let herself in and had the peas on at four, because the card says four.
The fire in the field below Holy Trinity at seven, higher than a cottage, with a guy on top in somebody’s father’s trilby. Half of Dobcross round it. Mrs Whitehead with treacle toffee broken with a hammer. Penny there before us. She and Florrie had me surveyed in a minute and a half and discussed me thereafter as if I had gone home.
Penny is to walk the whole of the parish boundary for the archive, at weekends, until the spring. I am to carry the tea.
A rocket from behind the church at seventy degrees or so, leaning into the wind off the moor. The stick came down in the beck behind the vicarage, as I said it would. Florrie said it was the best fire since 1938, which is what she said last year. She also called me a fool, at the fire, on the subject of the peas, I think.
The gate carried home up Woods Lane between us, wet through and twice the weight, and hung by lamplight. It shuts.
Charlie under the kitchen table from two minutes to seven until twenty to eleven, by my watch, and declined to discuss it.
Florrie, going up to bed: “Tell her yourself.” Eleven stairs. She made it twelve.
Sunday, 8th November 1953
Barometer 29.9 · Still · Grey
Remembrance Sunday. Grey and still, the smoke from the chimneys going straight up and then not knowing what to do.
Wound Father’s watch before I went out, as I do on this one morning of the year.
Holy Trinity at eleven, in the greatcoat, with a poppy from the tray on the post office counter. The Vicar read the names from the board, the old names first and then the new. The two minutes. A sheep somewhere up the hill, and the church clock, and nothing else.
I stood at the back.
Afterwards PC Broadbent helped old Mr Kenworthy down the steps, as if it were part of the duty, which I suppose it is.
Home by the top path. Charlie, who does not go to church, met me at the gate, which is back on its hinges and has not been anywhere since.
The poppy is behind the clock, with last year’s. There is getting to be a good deal behind that clock.
Tuesday, 10th November 1953
Barometer 29.7, falling · Wind south-west · Rain from dinner-time
The wind gone round to the south-west in the night, and rain by dinner-time that has not stopped since.
Dylan Thomas is dead, in New York, at thirty-nine. The paper gave him a column and a photograph that made him look like a man who had slept in a hedge. I have Deaths and Entrances on the shelf, bought in 1946 for the train and read on it twice. I read Fern Hill again tonight. It is about being young in a place, and not knowing that it would stop. He was three years older than me.
(Later.) Got the station books out of the tin trunk under the loft bed, where they have been since 1946. I meant to look for one date and read the whole of 1941 instead. I have copied some of it out, as it stands. I was twenty-three, and wrote like a man filling in a form.
From The Station Journal. 1941.
August, the 28th. Weather clamped to the west all afternoon. One Spitfire in, unannounced, A.T.A., and gone again at five in the taxi aeroplane. Pilot’s report on the boost gauge correct. Mine was not.
September, the 18th. A.T.A. again. Same pilot. A Spitfire with nothing whatever wrong with it. I looked for an hour to be sure.
October, the 16th. Fog. Nothing flew. Read the same page of Wells four times.
November, the 6th. A.T.A. in at dusk, weather. She stood in the crew room with both hands round a mug and told the Squadron Leader his windsock was in the wrong place. It is.
November, the 7th. Windsock moved.
December, the 31st. Entries this year, forty-one. Of which, by my count, nine concern the same pilot. I shall have to be more careful.