Recently, a friend from Essex came to visit me in the Lake District. I was staying at my Dad’s house – the place where I was born and raised. It’s a remote, rugged spot, an old Westmorland cottage above a river, surrounded by mountains and moorland. “Oh, wow,” said my friend, getting out of the car, “you make more sense now.”
I felt a bit like a predator spotted in its natural habitat. But it’s fair enough. Aside from some orthodontics and a better hairbrush, not much can be done about those wildish qualities your natal landscape instils. I wasn’t raised by wolves, but I did grow up raking around outside, overnighting on the moors, swimming in fell pools and interacting with, probably, more animals than humans.
Cumbria is big, but isn’t home to a lot of people. There’s dissonance between the image of this particular territory, its elegy and artistic inheritance, and its contemporary realities. It’s been perceived, in turn, as badlands, brutal country, and most beautiful. Dissonance, conundrum, simulacrum, can help create a writer.
Perhaps because invented Lakelandia and actual Cumbria seem to form an exotic wing of England, the search for signature qualities in my writing has been common practice too, as if books could literally be lopped off a vine. Here are some of the critics’ tasting notes from over the years: flinty, muscular, liquid, gloomy, clear, cold, lyric, mythic, combative, agricultural, evocative, feral, miserable, capable, radical.
I’m a first generation Cumbrian. Mum and Dad came up in the early 1970s from the south. Being local, but not really, in a place where families can go back hundreds of years, and farmers use words from an “extinct” language, puts you on the edge of things. That’s a good prospect for a writer – looking over, acknowledging un-belonging, feeling you want to belong, that in some part you do, and in other ways you don’t. A focused, sensualist, political interest in your place, in any place, and the relationship between people and place, seems a very Cumbrian trait.
Half of what I’ve written has been set elsewhere – America, Mozambique, Finland, Turkey. But, of course, my first location made me, 18 unbroken years’ worth of influence. Here are a few of my own tasting notes. Fragrances – moor grass, gorse flower, rain, peat, minerals, riverweed, horses, dogs, bracken, smoke. Loneliness. Freighted names on the signposts – Viking, Saxon or Celtic. Conflicts – historical, border, school and animal. Community celebrations. Almanacs. Hard weather. Unabashed, tearful men singing in the pub. Women hauling slippery lambs out of ewes. Dad driving to work through snow over the highest road in England. Mum walking over the moor, across the river, past fighting rams, to get to the bus stop, before she learned to drive. Mountains opposite my bedroom window.
In some ways I feel so profoundly and primarily formed that I’m truly pegged. But, out of curiosity or belligerence, or that old uncomfortable question of belonging again, I did an ancestry DNA test this year. Do I make more sense to myself now? Aye, mebbe.
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