Place Holds by Emily Oldfield

What does place mean Now ?

Many us may be thinking of place in terms of ‘loss’ at the moment, particularly in reflecting on the Covid-19 pandemic and recent lockdown. The places we suddenly could not access or were prohibited from. Places of work shifting; some jobs jolted into the interior spaces we call ‘domestic’, distinctions blurring. Other jobs lost altogether, some continuing with staff learning to situate themselves in a whole new way. Words such as ‘distance’ still abound.

Predictions offer us to attempt to plot a place… yet waver and scatter in their graphs, charts and flickering figures. Like a kind of flux that runs through our fingers, many of us have been scrolling through ever-changing statistics online, fumbling to find our place. We can’t.

*

For what is place? Place holds. It was the same day my grandad died, October, the same day the phone call came through around 4am; the hospice nurse and the close contours of her voice, the hills and moors between Rossendale and Burnley my dad drove us through, the black x-ray slide of the sky with its webwork of stars and dust­ – those nebulous intricacies of the body that come to surface.

*

The same day, later, we walked the moorland we had driven over, afternoon rendered as meaningless as yesterday’s clothes rough against skin, the tang of countless machine coffees clotting our tongues. Mist smothered the saturated grasses and roughly tarmacked lane like a damp duvet, a possible comfort turned bad.

Dad and I were heading out on Burnley Old Road, starting directly opposite his cottage in Broadclough, and curving up over Step Row; its course rollicking over the dense and difficult moorland like a determined old vein. Gouges and gulleys, embankments bastioned with dry-stone walls and weather-lashed wire.

Place holds. And we grasp back – sometimes at moments where a whole collage come together and almost overwhelm us in their closeness. A miasma of moments and memory locked into location. A sudden intimacy yet innately known. Walking was the only thing we seemed to know how to do that day.

 As I walked in-step with my Dad, I saw the Waterfoot kitchen with my grandparents’ array of owl trinkets, the almost mosaic-like arrangement of fridge magnets. The dusty Manchester streets we walked one dry afternoon, Grandad gesturing to his ‘spending money’ with a glint in his eye, followed by the warm, soy-heavy fug of a China-town basement buffet; our messy scoops of cold coloured ice cream that made us feel like kings. The rugged, ruin-scattered sides of Cowpe Lowe: his favourite hill where I walked with Hannah – our friendship forged in a battered Industrial Estate flung out from Burnley, those early adulthood years of office work where a chill creeps in. Hannah who drove us down to my grandparent’s as soon as the clock struck five, back over the moor, the place on the front room rug where we shared pan-scorched beans and floury potato. Her hands round my back as we stood years later in the hospice corridor, two stones frozen in its flow of aqua-tinged downturned lights.  The same hands that had waved goodbye to my grandad moments earlier in his allocated room, the hours of watching his wildlife footage on the DVD player, his fingers pulsing with a kind of insistence, this is, this is. The shock of a woodcock revealed in the black bead of an eye. The place of a smile on a face.

Hands on a hymn sheet.

The place of hiking boots on a coffin lid.

*

But when Dad and I were walking the old road, the funeral was still a future ceremony neither of us could grasp. Rain slicked down in heavy folds like the sky dropping its dress, yet still the clouds thickened. I watched water run down my Dad’s shaved head, slip round his ears in beads… the geography of body immersed in the moment. In place.

He flung out an arm as the road arched and a wider vista of moorland came into view, its scrubby yellow-brown patchwork punctuated with half-hacked walls and the twisted carcasses of fences. Rossendale’s ritual jewellery, barriers beaten into strange submission by the elements.

“He grew up all around here.”

I nodded, reached out with my own hand  –  its mottled geography of stunted circulation and over-washing – and clung to the side of his coat. We stood like that, watching past, present and future fumble into each other… soil, turf, stone and wire surrounding, suspending. What were we seeing? What was he seeing, I wondered, looking up at his pale face fixed resolutely on a point on the moor. Wind working its way across in brushstrokes.

The sudden battered cry of a sheep.

And again.

On the second sound we both turned, turned to scattering[DC13]  of footfall on loose soil, a flock of sheep moving in that spooked way, eyes still straining for a better view. One didn’t move.

It bleated again.

“…head’s stuck right through the fencing,” my Dad said as we drew closer, now just a deep gulley and the fence itself between us and the animal.

 The sheep strained and juddered, a black face bulging through a warped wire square, the metal digging deeper into its neck as it struggled, the mud seeming to creep up its soiled white body.

My own cry was lost in movement.

Without a word my Dad picked his way over the gulley, up the embankment and towards the fence, his body angling for a break to the other side. None to be found.  The sheep wailed, this time a throaty, almost meaty noise, raw and awful.

“Hold careful Dad!”

He was on the fence, six-feet-four of man suddenly atop a line of wire, body arched, a strange image framed by a black sky. There seemed a kind of muscle memory to his actions, a deftness so separate from the preceding days of  throbbing slowness, waiting, ebbing.

“Dad!”

Watching him, one daring hand pushing the metal down so the barbs skimmed just below his boot, my ears popped... that sensation of carried weight condensing, echoing in the chambers of the body like memories.

Memories of the parallel main road, Burnley Road, about a mile from where we were stood – the same point on its course where our ears would pop in the car at the rise in altitude. Journeys made sandwiched between a smaller brother and sister, the waxy squeak of waterproof against waterproof, Grandad and Dad in front. Promised sweets shining like costume jewellery, warped in the heat of the glovebox. Sometimes there were nets in the back, kitchen sieves on the end of sticks, for the predestined task of ‘pond dipping’. The tang would crawl over the back seats, marine-like mixed with a kind of peaty sweetness, sitting almost solid in the nostrils. Sometimes Dad and Grandad would go out by themselves, sieves and all, starting out on Burnley Road to head to Cheshire – Gowey Meadows. Grandad continued to refer to it as ‘Gary Barlows’.

We find ourselves attaching different things to place… my Dad, for a moment mixed with wire, held by hills… then off and over towards the sheep. Unable to see him, but aware of the motion, the animal struggled and kicked, the wire worked deeper.

For a moment Dad and I were separated not just by this strange fence, the body of the sheep, but something in his stare, a position somewhere else. Then he folded his body onto its haunches, like an illustration of primal man about to fight, and clasped deep into the wool.

The sheep’s face froze.  Complete stillness in a breath-space, then a scatter of legs, hooves akimbo in the utter abandon of pure panic. My Dad’s grip warped white as he pulled up on the fence with one hand, pulled the body of the sheep towards him with the other.

The closeness of the moment.

The way both pairs of eyes seemed to strain towards a mutual point.

Then the burst and clatter of release, the pop of water, the gush and rattle of wind through cleared space, the breaking of surface, the freeze-frame of a man stumbling backwards, a sheep springing upwards.

It stood, shocked and blinking in the time it took my Dad to gain his balance, and then ran.

We clutch life until it moves away from us.

But place holds.

My Dad, arms to the sky like a gesture.

“Brian would have done that,” he cried, spinning on the spot, the rain pounding the moor purple.

*

So, when people ask what place means to me in 2020, I actually think back to last year – 2019 – back to the day my Grandad died, back to a point and a place that still holds something in me.

Right now, we carry versions of the past, people, moments, within ourselves… we wander through memory, the written page. Place holds that.

And this is place.

 Need to change title. How about ‘Place Holds’ by Emily Oldfield.

Over the past year,  many of us have been thinking of place in terms of ‘loss’. There have been places we could not access and from which we were prohibited. Places of work have shifted too: some jobs have been jolted into the interior spaces we call ‘domestic’, distinctions blurring; some have continued with staff learning to situate themselves in new ways; and others have been lost altogether. Words such as ‘distance’ have abounded.

Predictions offered us an attempt to plot a place . . . yet wavered and scattered in their graphs, charts and flickering.