Chocolate orange drizzle cake
It’s my fifth birthday, and Mum has just ruined everything. It’s a hot sunny day in early May, and we’ve been to visit a cottage in Rosthwaite, Borrowdale, which my parents hope to buy with the compensation money from the car-crash. We’re all here – my parents, my two older sisters – spread out around a tartan picnic rug beneath the Bowderstone. And Mum has just cut me a slice of the offending cake. ‘Chocolate orange!’ she proudly announces, holding out a sizeable wedge wrapped in floral kitchen roll, apparently unaware that it’s impossible to improve upon straight chocolate. She has already mentioned three times how difficult the recipe was.
It’s only been 15 months since the accident which had left her with multiple broken bones, and blind in one eye as a result of the impact of the crash causing the bonnet of the car to travel through the windscreen, and into her head. ‘There’s a child in the back,’ she’d said before slipping into a coma. She was referring to 3-year-old me, who had been wrapped up in a tartan rug along the back seat, which come to think of it rather resembled the one we were currently sitting on, and who was now trapped in the rear footwell where the force of the crash had thrown me.
‘If she’d been sitting up, she’d have gone straight through the windscreen,’ I’d heard my parents say to their friends. Those were the days before seatbelts ‘in the back’, and I was left under no illusion how lucky I’d been to escape uninjured apart from a few bruises, and a lifelong fear of the loneliness, unapproachable whiteness and what at the time felt like the hugeness of hospital beds.
Back in the moment, I try to smile, hoping that Mum will think that my eyes are watering from happiness. ‘Thanks Mum,’ I say. ‘It’s yum.’ In fact, I didn’t tell Mum the truth of my disappointment about the cake that day until two years ago, a year before she died.
Not that these events did anything to dent what became a 40-year (and ongoing) love affair with the Lake District fells, which commenced later that day with a first ascent (by me) of Castle Crag. By aged 16 I’d climbed all the Wainwrights with my Dad, which we celebrated with a can of Fanta each on the summit of Lank Rigg in Ennerdale (my, how my parents knew how to celebrate…) Since that day at the Bowderstone, we’d spent every October half-term holiday at the cottage, plus every other winter weekend until Easter when holiday bookings would start coming in. Many criticisms are rightly levelled at second-home owners, and their impact upon local Lake District communities . Yet back then, Borrowdale didn’t feel like a second home to me. Emotionally, it was my first home, even when I’d become a teenager and most of my peers were occupied with very different things. Being in the hills both then, and now, was when I felt most ‘at one’ with the world; I can still taste the betrayal upon hearing that my parents had sold-up the cottage without telling me, when I was in my mid-twenties. So, when I saw the opportunity to go and work and live in the Lake District through a Creative Writing lecturing job at the University of Cumbria a couple of years back now – well, of course, I leapt at the chance.
So what does this have to do with Scree? Perhaps everything…for doesn’t the story involve elements of everything that Scree seeks to challenge? And that’s my point in telling it. To say yes, I’m implicated in everything that Scree questions – have been since an early age, and continue to be. My parents were only able to purchase the cottage through the car-crash compensation monies, and I’m fairly certain that as a child I worked through my own trauma in the fells, whether consciously or not (the crash is my first memory). As I grew up, peak-bagging became an obsession. First the Wainwrights. More recently compleating the Munros. Then in my mid-thirties I took up fellrunning, and began pitting myself against the fells in yet another competitive form. Perhaps the exception is the notion of being separate from ‘nature’ - an idea which would have made as little sense to a young version of me as it does now. In contrast, I’ve always felt an innate connection to the fells – a sense of one-ness which I experience most keenly when running as fast possible downhill and the boundary between me and the hill dissipates. Indeed, when my Mum died very suddenly last year of cancer, during the first Covid lockdown, where did I most want to be, and what did I wish to be doing? In the Lake District fells of course, running out my grief as fast as I possibly could.
‘I’m going to do this,’ I said to her, as I lay my head on her pillow the night before she died, referring to the ideas I’d been mulling over for some time, which have become Scree. ‘I’m going to be ok, and I’m going to make this happen.’
One of the key early experiments in Scree sets out deliberately to explore the process of writing grief upon mountains, by running up and down one of the worst scars of a path in the Lake District Fells, on Sail, in the Coledale fells above Braithwaite. That morning, setting out up the path towards Force Crag Mine from Braithwaite, I was beset by doubts about what I was doing. Wasn’t I about to do precisely that thing I’ve come to criticise? What was the point of that? Yet if I’ve learnt anything during my years as a writer and artist (and academic), it’s not to resist instinct. Since these were experiments after all, perhaps I’d find out what it meant in retrospect, in the process of doing?
When I reached the bottom of the path between Scar Crags and Sail that morning, there was a fresh layer of snow covering all previous tracks, as if here it actually was – my chance to rewrite everything differently. And the more I ran up and down the zig zags of that path, the more I realized that I really was doing things differently. This wasn’t a writing of my grief upon the mountain, it was becoming a sharing of my experience of it, with it. I felt more aware than I ever had of what I was bringing to and taking from the fells, and left that day feeling a sense of connection like I’d never experienced before. Acute. Attentive. And I suddenly found myself able to write about my grief following Mum’s loss in a way that I hadn’t been able to previously.
I guess that’s what this project is about. These little shifts in thinking. Little changes. Maybe leading to bigger shifts. Maybe even fundamental change. Who knows? But by then I was really hungry, since I’d forgotten to eat all day. If only for some chocolate orange drizzle cake…
PS the below fungus are from a recent visit to the Bowderstone. Now that’s proper growth. I couldn’t help but share them here.
