Chapter Two
With a sweet tongue and kindness, you can drag an elephant by a hair.
(Persian proverb)
Imagine, if you will, a place as far away as you can get from the hedonistic fleshpots of Hollywood, California, USA. And from the salads.
We are not just talking miles here. We are talking lifestyle, outlook, ambience. We’re talking culture, politics, attitudes.
We are talking rain.
So much rain.
Somerset Maugham, who believe me is quite a character, a bit prickly at times, must have been here in England’s Lake District when he wrote that eponymous short story of his.
Alright, Rain all took place in Pago Pago or somewhere, which even I’ve never been to, and I’ve covered the waterfront.
But maybe he came here as a child. I can’t believe it rains in double Pago as much as it does here in Rough Fell, the Lake District, Cumbria, UK.
But does Noreen Millburn give a shit?
Every day she is out here, walking her beloved Cumbrian hills. Every day, come rain or – rain. And come mud, sludge, soggy cowpats, flooding ditches and leaking gullies, you name it, she’s shlepped in it.
Here she is, this sturdy, rough-hewn, Lake District Englishwoman, bad teeth firmly clenched, lagged like a trusty boiler in so many crudely home-knit woolly cardigans and scarves that pretty much all you can see of her face, under her faded red and extremely bobbly hat, are a couple of weary yet strangely wild and burning eyes and a drippy nose.
Of course, the industrial-strength waterproof walking boots, an inheritance from her late mother, aren’t home-knit, but the heavy-duty socks keeping her gnarled little northern feet toasty inside them most certainly are.
She could be any age from fifteen to 106, but I know for a fact that Noreen Millburn (Miss) is exactly forty-five.
The aforementioned eyes, when they’re not obscured by her unfetching but functional headgear, are an unusually pale yet vivid blue, which is the only blue around these parts, except maybe for the odd vein, as the sky is a glowering, moody grey, warning her and the world that there’s plenty more wet stuff where this all came from.
Yet Noreen Millburn is not alone as she squelches across the sodden but beloved property bequeathed to her on these moor-covered hills. There is no man with her this afternoon; of course there isn’t, nor indeed in her life. She has no need of such distractions or frivolities.
But there is Geoffrey.
“That’s it, Geoffrey; you’re doing really well, petal. We’ll be home very soon.”
Geoffrey doesn’t understand a thing the woman is saying.
And it isn’t just the accent, which to be honest is as weird as they come, unless of course you come from round here, but even then, it has to be pretty weird.
Geoffrey is a young, black-faced Herdwick sheep, local to these parts and tough and hardy as they make them.
Or as we make them. A native of these high grounds, Geoffrey can take anything a merciless nature cares to throw at him or drench him with.
He can even take his name. Fortunately for Noreen, he can also just about manage the thickly woven rope lead she has slung around his neck, so that he doesn’t go wandering off in search of other sheep or other Noreens, although to be honest he’d have to search far and wide for the latter.
The one thing, other than the lead, that might distinguish this sheep from his fellows, is that his front left leg is in a tiny, homemade splint.
He is clearly not too uncomfortable with this, so whatever was going on with the poor, damaged limb is fortunately healing.
We have, however, no way of knowing the state of his embarrassment or inner mortification, as thankfully there aren’t many of his fellow black-faced Herdwicks around and right now he is making a pretty stoic fist of it.
Through the rain that is coming down so thick and fast you’d need only the Maid of the Mist to complete the picture, they can see a small, two-roomed, slate stone cottage not too far ahead of them.
Totally isolated, just off a poorly maintained dirt road, it stands as it must have stood for generations, four-square in its stubborn, stoical greyness, against the slings and arrows and absolute pissing-downs of outrageous Cumbria.
There is a small garden surrounding this extremely modest structure, a plot utterly bereft of flowers or beauty, save perhaps for its shabby window box, but fulsome in the robust, earthy produce that Noreen Millburn cultivates in order to survive and sometimes even to sell.
When, that is, she is not giving it away in basketfuls to people more needy than herself, which is another story.
Although actually, when you think about it, it’s very much this same story, but I’ll save it for a bit later.
I don’t want to run ahead of myself, as it’s getting dark, we’re almost home now, and we need to get out of this fershtinkeneh rain.
Of course, there is no electricity in Noreen’s remote little homestead, with its thick stone walls and tiny windows.
Nothing so comfortable or self-indulgent.
So, when Noreen pushes open the peeling old door – it’s never locked – she can only use her other, admittedly heightened, senses to guide her to the kerosene lanterns propped all around the place.
Even a person without such sharp senses, even a person with lousy hearing and a seriously stuffed-up nose, even Helen Keller with a cold, would, however, get what’s going on here.
Such a person would recognise in an instant, from the stench alone, that there is a virtual menagerie inhabiting this tiny dwelling.
Actually, no virtual about it. There’s a zoo here, and these guys are alive and shitting.
In fact, deaf ears and a loss of smell would be a blessing, considering the almighty ruckus and the overpowering reek of dogs, rabbits, at least one goat, a hare, a brace of ferrets and God knows how many cats.
Not to mention the rats and the mice. It’s still too early for the badgers, but the back door is open and they know the way.
As the warm light gradually unveils the welcoming squalor of the tiny living room, the animals greet their owner in an ear-splitting frenzy of ravenous self-interest. A visitor gazing around (not that there ever are any and not that they could stay more than a couple of seconds without retching or passing out) would notice the ancient and extremely basic furniture.
They would spot an old, wooden rocking chair with a broken rocker and a single, fraying cushion.
A tiny single bed in a poky room at the rear of the dwelling.
A badly framed sampler that reads ‘Home, sweet ho’ because her mother died weaving it.
Dominating the parlour is a small and battered table, strewn with skeins of rough wool, unidentifiable half-knitted objects that won’t look any better when complete, some curious-looking bars of pure-white confectionery in bright-blue wrappers and relentlessly savaged feeding bowls made from cheap tin.
The ash from last night, and a whole lot of other nights, lies greyly in the grate of the fireplace, above which sit fading, old photos in black and white: Noreen as a child, with her equally craggy parents; an assortment of now-deceased sheep and sheepdogs; the cottage at a time it didn’t rain, which must have been taken with a pretty fast film.
If you discount the animals – big if – the items you’d probably notice pretty swiftly, because they’re scattered all over the place, are the collection boxes.
Dozens of them, maybe more than dozens. Scores!
Could be a hundred. Some people still call them tins or cans here, but they’re all plastic now, with identical slots in the top for coins and, they should be so lucky, paper money, the only difference between all of them being that each one is decked out in the glaring colours and logo of a particular charity or organisation.
One look would tell you that this solitary lady is either a serial mugger of charity workers or that she herself collects like crazy. Just read the boxes and weep. Help the Aged, Help the Lame, Help the Helpless, Save the Children, Save the Whales, Save the Planet.
Then there are the boxes for all the usual suspects; horrible ailments you most probably know – cancer, of course, MS, Parkinson’s, motor neurone, heart failure, leprosy, etc.
– and even more cans for bad stuff you might just have heard of, if you’ve been studying medicine most of your life, but really wouldn’t want your worst enemy or possibly even your mother-in-law to catch – Arizona swamp fever, porphyria, Moebius syndrome, black urine disease, Rasmussen’s encephalitis.
Look further and you’ll see the organisations – Red Cross, Blue Cross, Red Crescent, Greenpeace, Sue Ryder, Cheshire Homes, St Luke’s Hospice, Samaritans, Mind, UNICEF, UNESCO, UNWRA, CND, JNF, PLO, UTI.
You name it, this lady’s got a box for it.
The only puzzling thing is that she doesn’t have one specifically for osteoporosis of the neck, because that’s what she’s all lined up for after years of humping all these boxes around.
And the only lucky thing for her is that most of them are still pretty empty, even after a long day’s rattling, but it doesn’t stop a girl from trying.
“I suppose you’ll be wanting your dinner now?” says Noreen, idly snapping off a white chunk of something from one of the already opened blue packets and popping it in her mouth.
“What do you sodding think?” say all the animals, in their own language.
She hardly has time to fill the bowls before the gang are hitting the table in a feeding frenzy, jaws, paws, tails and claws in ravenous action, not always sticking to their own especially tailored menu.
Noreen Millburn would be hard-pressed to explain why she is forcing her ‘flock’ to eat at the table, but it was something her late parents always insisted on, and what was good enough for her old family is good enough for her new one.
Only Geoffrey, currently impeded, is unable to match the speed of his fellows.
Fortunately, Noreen is on hand to slip him a morsel from one of her many voluminous pockets, a practical feature of the sagging, soggy wool, which the limping sheep grabs gratefully and takes to his own little corner.
Staring around with a maternal and only slightly demented grin, our homeowner notices an envelope on the floor. Paw prints aside, it is gleaming white and looks pretty important. Especially with the words APEX HOLDINGS printed on the top right and VERY VERY URGENT stamped just above the address.
Noreen picks the letter up with a sigh. “Another one for you, Sebastian,” she says, without bothering to read it – and feeds it to her goat.