Chapter 6
We went north of York. We went near the coast, a few hours’ hike to the sea, a day’s journey into Scarborough, a long, blind
step into winter.
We went under our blankets, under silence, under snow, under the abandon of the land—quieter than those early days in Greenwich,
quieter than antinoise, than fog, than snow, than deer breathing out but never in, just out, their curly steam one vast exhale
we swam through, all alone for weeks at a time.
It’s a miracle we didn’t freeze to death.
It’s a miracle that actually I consider this time to be the warmest I’ve ever been in my whole life.
Being mapless was liberating and evened the playing field.
I had no idea where we were. Simon had no idea either.
I had been to York, once, years ago when I was a child.
I had been to Leeds and Manchester and Scunthorpe to see my old aunt.
I assumed I had driven through the Moors at one point or another, or cut across it on a train, or maybe not.
It took me months to stop doing this—refer to future-spam still in my brain—and admit that any memories that were there (or would be there?) were useless to what was needed now, which was fresh water, more blankets, food preserves, firewood, warmth and dryness, fixed roof, rot avoidance, animal management, that sound in the night, that crack in the forest, a critter?
A mouse? That man we saw. A neighbor? A tradesman?
There were no neighbors—the concept of them.
There were only people and when one of them was in a place that was yours you tensed up, you looked around, listened, stared until their footsteps faded away or they hollered a friendly greeting and you remembered the concept of community.
Sometimes it was just water and your imagination anyway—the snowmelt!
Dripping through the pines! That stream overstepping the banks! It would all need fixing in spring.
OK, there were maps, technically. There were beautiful ones, drawn with more detail than my twenty-first-century fool-self
could have expected. We had relied mostly on caravan crowds and traveling merchants for directions for most of our journey,
but by the time we arrived at York, we were truly on our own.
We arrived exhausted in the town hall, in the cathedral, where a giant map was rolled out big and gilded with a blue-painted sea, and I realized I held no intellectual superiority over these people.
The map had no perspective or considered ratio to speak of (no satellite assistance), but things were more detailed: the squiggles of the river seeming childlike and crude until you counted the bends and inlets and realized that that’s what was really there; and the astonishingly observed species of foliage, rocks, roads, cliffs, and hamlets that had all been drawn exactly as what they were: stacks, sticks, little tome-like boxes.
A warden reached a long brass pointer across the map to indicate where Simon’s uncle’s smallholding was located.
It lay in between a crisscross netting of forests and meadows awash with invisible claims of borders, our land included, which OK wasn’t technically our land, yet somehow the manorial system felt more equitable than the rent system I was used to. Scrolls were stamped. Though
illiterate, Simon signed his name. We paid three pieces of silver for a pocket-size copy of the map and I hoped this was all
a good deal.
The endless journey north, the cold, the sudden snow—the snow that fell around us like powder, then sawdust, then like a thick
lather of cream, the earth suddenly covered in it and trying to find our house underneath it all—we had a house, right? We
had a roof over our heads? Simon assured me we did, his nodding head growing weary and delirious with each step, until finally,
look! There.
Where?
White on white—what am I looking at?
Simon was already running ahead, opening a door in the middle of a blinding whiteness. A space revealed itself, a house. Darkness
came alight, dust awash, critters all furry and leggy screaming and scattering from what we were going to call home. When
I say house I mean hut.
I have to say I ceased to be human, or at least how I thought a human was meant to be. I worshipped fire, I melted snow, I
ate once, maybe twice a day, placing rocks of roots into my frozen stomach, massaging my guts to ease their digestion. I vomited
often. I drank milk from an ancient goat, I feared my neighbors, I developed a putrid, chronic cough.
But it felt exhilarating to be so baseline, to feel my body take advantage of every shift in temperature and calorie.
If I had it in me, I had it in me, and it was queued up and spent.
I finally figured out what year it was. It was December of 1300, then it was January of 1301.
For the first time in my life, I knew what it meant to toil and to freeze.
“In the future, there’ll be electric heaters,” I told Simon. We were watching the fire in the hearth in our hut house. Despite
my worsening cough, I inhaled its smoke like sniffing a warm summer breeze, grateful. Even as far out in the country as we
were, smoke was inescapable, wafting in from neighboring homesteads, big swells of it from villages in the valley, and of
course our own hearth, which we kept roaring day and night as long as winter lasted. I explained a radiator, underfloor heating,
hot water taps.
“How can you know all of this without knowing how to make any of it?” said Simon. “What good is that?” We were huddled close
together. We shared a bed, made from rope and wood, the mattress stuffed with hay and old wool. The fire was right next to
us—coals and embers the most tempting blanket.
“There’ll be electric blankets someday,” I said.
“Then go make one, right now.” He tried nudging me out of the bed with his knee, laughing. “What do you need to make one?
Wood? Mercury? Copper?”
“I need . . .” I paused. An account? A mum who had one stored up in the loft? All I could do was laugh and nudge Simon
back, tempt him to put another log on the fire.
By February and into March, the sun slipped into the picture more frequently.
I gave little weather reports as we went about our daily chores, tilling the land, skinning rodents, milking goats, sorting sheep, and I’d estimate the change in degrees—the numbers meaning nothing to Simon of course, and nothing, ultimately, to me either, but the sun was unburrowing itself and I had never been so aware of it.
Our smallholding was on a slope, and when the snow melted it caused flooding and puddles to form anywhere we had attempted
to tame. Whole crops were washed out, there was mud and awkward spinoff streams that ran counter to the actual stream that
had broken its banks. The puddles attracted the wrong kinds of wildlife and the land rotted, turning brown before an approaching
spring could think of turning anything green. I set out one morning to do something about it—that was how easy it was to live
out here, you just woke up and decided to do something.
Like all mornings I woke up and grabbed the kettle (or what I called the kettle) off the coals and fed the hearth a new stick
of wood, then went outside. I mixed hot water from the kettle into a larger basin of cold water and used this to wash myself
as best I could, grateful there was no more frost or ice at least. Then I went back inside and ate/drank a cup of perpetual
stew/gruel of roots, grains, and old bones, which mixed nicely with eggs (when our chickens laid any) or fish or what have
you, which we didn’t have any at the moment, despite Simon’s best efforts. Simon was good with the animals (three chickens,
two goats, eight sheep) and an apt tradesman, but I was still mostly useless. Everything I could do (read, write, execute
Excel formulas, manage streaming subscriptions, unsubscribe from newsletters, make pasta salads) I could only do well in the
world I had come from, not this one, and I was always in search of ways to prove my worth.
I grabbed a shovel and trekked down the slope to the dip in the land where the puddle had formed a muddy trench and a refuse catch. Birds scattered and flew up into the trees, which were just starting to hint of buds. Simon’s footsteps came down the slope behind me.
“So what’s your plan?” he asked. He was leaving for Scarborough for seeds, supplies, and a donkey. He touched my back and
moved around me, almost slipping.
“Don’t fall in,” I said. “There’s too much water to do a straightforward canal, but if I dredge this and feed it into a smaller
system of switchbacks, that will divert any future runoff away from the house, like a funnel. Then I can feed it into the
creek down the hill, and if I’m lucky enough, it will reach as far as the mill at Wykeham, which would be a whole other thing
to deal with. But think of how nice it would be to have that mill running all the time next winter.”
Simon nodded in approval. He looked at the slope of the hill and how it washed out into open meadow. “If it’s able to maintain
a steady current, we could use it as transport. Float things downstream. We could sail a barge down it.”
“Don’t get too ambitious. That would have to be pretty wide.”
Simon smiled and winked. “You’d better start digging.”
“You’d better hurry home and help,” I said with a laugh that tripped over my throat. I cleared it.
“Be careful with your cough. Don’t overdo it and have another fit.”