MORE THAN ENOUGH by Helen Mort
I am running up to Easedale Tarn, a morning so cold and bright everything seems to stand proud in its own outline: the unruly hair of the grass, the sullen Herdwick sheep, the grey and unforgiving rocks and the quick silver of the water. From a distance, it must seem as if I am entering a seam in the mountains, becoming one with the stream I follow up the hillside. When I near the top, breathless, the tarn lies flat, a caught fish, something dragged from another element and placed here. I cannot stop. I am running and running, faster than my legs can carry me, back towards Grasmere, the shadowy path below Helm Crag. I am running with my feet sore and my legs caked in glorious mud.
No. I am not. I am in Sheffield, letting the sofa fold around me, listening to a bird as it imitates a car alarm outside. I have not run in weeks. We are in lockdown: me, my partner, his teenage children and my straw-haired, flint-eyed toddler Alfie. The house is either resigned silence or overwhelming noise. But I am clutching Dorothy Wordsworth’s Grasmere and Alfoxden Journals, and in quiet moments my inward eye - the one her poet brother attributed ‘the bliss of solitude’ to - is focused on the simple freedom of movement through landscape, of observing what you find around you, however close to home you have to stay. As a writer, I’ve learned so much from Dorothy’s journals and they’ve influenced the way I record the details of my own daily life too. Now more than ever, I think I need her guidance.
As a poet, I’ve always admired William Wordsworth. Like me, he loved to compose on the move, his poetry shaped by the rhythm of his footsteps. But if Wordsworth helped me trust my writing methods, it was his sister Dorothy who taught me how to navigate my surroundings, how to notice, how to record. Perhaps she even taught me how to walk. In her Grasmere Journal, kept when she lived with her favourite elder brother in her own home, her first real home since she was six, she wrote unselfconsciously of people, objects, injustices and all the mundane, vital stuff of daily life. In her notes, everything is alchemy, all things contain the possibility of others: ‘the moonshine like herrings in the water’ ‘snow….like smoke’, ’the moonlight…like snow’. It is impossible to live a static life when you have metaphors. Reading is an invitation to shape shift. Most of all, her diaries are structured around walking.:
Thursday 4th September - we walked into the black quarter. The patches of corn very interesting.
Saturday 11th October - After dinner we walked up Greenhead Gill in search of a Sheepfold…..the colours of the mountains soft and rich, with orange fern - the cattle pasturing upon the hill-tops, Kites sailing as in the sky above our heads - Sheep bleating and in lines & chains & patterns scattered all over the mountains….
Friday 17th October - On my walk in the morning I observed Benson’s honeysuckles in flower, & great beauty.
Sometimes she covers miles, on other days she only gets as far as the field beyond the house. It doesn’t matter. Any journey can be noteworthy.
In the first days of lockdown, my fifteen-month-old son Alfie took his first confident steps. He had teetered and wobbled at Christmas time, spent weeks hauling himself up on furniture, but as Spring began to show itself, he was propelled by instinct. We set about our daily exercise together, armed with snacks, inspired by the spirit of Dorothy, always alert, always curious.
Monday 20th April - heat and langour and silence in the air. I set Alfie down on the path in our sloping garden and he stares up at me, bemused, small in his yellow checked coat, the colour of yolk and daffodils. He looks like a miniature lumberjack. He pauses, his mouth set with determination. Then he lifts his left foot and sets off - improbably fast, almost at a run - down the wonky stones, through the vegetation. When he reaches some gravel, he’s delighted by the crunch of it and stamps his feet like a flamenco dancer, grinning with glee. He hares back up the path to do the whole circuit again. Sometimes he falls, ungainly, palms flat on the ground, face red, but these setbacks are momentary and he is soon moving again, limbs stiff, almost like a marionette. I follow him and follow him, up the slope and down. I am learning to find joy in this repetition, the way I rejoice in the patterns I can make with words, through rhyme, through the restriction of form.
In Dorothy’s Journal, the days often blur with monotony. Time melts.
Sunday 18th. I have forgotten.
Then:
Wednesday 28th. The Clarksons came.
Thursday 29th. Rain all day.
Friday 30th. Rain all day.
Monday 2nd. Very rainy.
It is possible to write of nothing, to record even these non-events. Suburbia is not my natural habitat. The compass of my body points to the hills. Now that I live near Derbyshire, I’m happiest when last light catches the moors and the gritstone edges seem to rear up from the heather. I’m most content when I’m climbing or running. I don’t like being confined. But when I first read Dorothy’s Grasmere Journal, I marvelled at her stoicism and patience, her dedication to charting the minutiae of each day.
Tuesday 21st April - We leave through the front door and try a wobbly circuit of the neighbourhood. We pass through the flats with their sheltered duckpond and illuminated walkways. Alfie points at the lights as if they’re planets. He grips my hand. We veer drunkenly out onto the pavement and follow the slope down to Oak Hill Road. Alfie has recently learned the word ‘car’, so now everything is ‘car’: the vehicles parked on the roadside, but also the trees, the houses, the Siamese cats, even the sun. It is a kind of poetry.
Wednesday 22nd April - We are becoming bold now. Walking is a daily triumph, a containable adventure. We try the small, steep sided park nestled under Brincliffe Edge, a place where children sledge in winter, careering too fast towards the trees. It is a warm day and we smell of suncream, of holidays. Alfie charges downhill, seeking out tree roots, the path of most resistance. He’s obsessed with transitions between surfaces, marvelling at the place where the grass stops and the tarmac begins. We make slow progress, zig-zagging and pausing, stumbling and heaving. I love the permission he gives me to explore without any other purpose. I’m thinking of Lauren Elkin’s book Flaneuse, her account of the female flaneur, women who dawdle in urban places. The word flâneur conjures up visions of Baudelaire, boulevards and bohemia and seldom makes us think of women, who often have a more charged, more reticent relationship with public space than men. But Lauren Elkin proudly defines her as ‘a determined resourceful woman keenly attuned to the creative potential of the city, and the liberating possibilities of a good walk’. Am I a South Yorkshire flaneuse? Or am I just an anxious mother, roaming with her child, following his lead? I’m thinking of the freedom Dorothy Wordsworth found in walking, how it positioned her as an observer, remarking on the different people she passed and the social conditions they found themselves in:
‘A little girl from Coniston came to beg. She had lain out all night - her step-mother had turn’d her out of doors. Her father could not stay at home ‘She flights so’.'
Her style is confident, authoritative, always without judgement. Dorothy was no urban flaneuse, but she was determined and resourceful and she placed her faith in the redemptive power of walking.
Thursday 23rd April - We go in search of a bigger park, choosing the huge expanse of grass and woodland off Ecclesall Road, the paths that lead out eventually to the Peak District, to wildness and promise. There are dog walkers, couples hand in hand and more runners that I have ever seen, all giving each other a wide berth, plugged into their headphones. Alfie finds a bank to scamper up, railings to grab. As I follow him, a shadow passes over us. It’s a heron, silent in elongated flight, wings a broken umbrella.
After a wasted journey to Ambleside one drizzly day, Dorothy recounts a similar vision:
‘As I came past Rydal in the morning I saw a heron swimming with only its neck out of water - it beat and struggled amongst the water when it flew away and was long in getting loose.’
A heron sighting redeems any day. On the afternoon before Alfie was due to be born, I stood at the traffic lights in Nether Edge, chatting to my friend Nicky at the crossroads. As we spoke - she clutching the handles of the pushchair which cradled her granddaughter, me stroking my huge belly - a heron swooped from nowhere, sailed low over the crossing and settled on a chimney breast. It was incongruous, stately, the sudden lord of suburbia. We were far from any water. This was not heron territory. We gaped at it, how it camouflaged with the grey sky, how commanding it seemed there on the rooftop like a weathervane. Then just as suddenly as it had arrived, it was gone. Herons are known as birds of transition, one foot in the water, one for in the land. That night in the bath, I spoke to my unborn child. The heron seemed like an apt motif for his journey from one element to another, from my body to the world. I went into labour the next day. Ever since, herons have been Alfie’s totem bird, a sign of luck. Seeing one in Endcliffe Park is comforting, lifts my spirits.
Friday 24th April - In the mornings, our neighbours have coffee in their front gardens and talk to each other across the divide. A kind of socially distanced tea break. Alfie and I go to join them, dragging his blue scooter along behind us. Delighted with his audience, he traverses the road with scuttling movements, only stopping when he hits a kerb. He ranges away from me, exploring walls and hedges. ‘It’s always interesting to see how long the elastic is,’ says my neighbour Irene. Alfie’s elastic is long, his confidence in the world growing. The street is a clamour of voices, everyone raising their voices to be heard.
I used to think that my creativity, my capacity to write depended on solitude. I feared even the constant presence of a child, dreaded the ‘pram in the hall’. But I am learning to listen to my own thoughts in the presence of others, to crave proximity. Dorothy’s journals describe William Wordsworth and Samuel Coleridge’s creativity as something which is often communal, poems shared around the table, ideas thrown back and forth, lines written in snatched moments. And her own writing feels relational too, her gaze so often trained on others.
Saturday 25th April - We spend almost half an hour circling the same felled tree. I become an expert in its texture, its reptilian bark, the violet-blue of the flowers that surround it. And surely it becomes an expert in us too. At the very start of her Grasmere Journal, Dorothy parts with William and observes:
‘the lake looked to me I knew not why dull and melancholy, the weltering on the shores seemed a heavy sound. I walked as long as I could amongst the stones of the shore.’
When I first encountered those lines, I misread them as ‘the lake looked AT me, I knew not why.’
In my first novel, set in Sheffield, I let parts of the city speak, observing the characters. This tree trunk is surely sizing us up. I wonder what it sees. A sturdy child in jeans with dirty knees, his mouth pursed in a rosebud, never still for long, propelled by the urge to touch everything. A tired woman with her unwashed hair tied in a scarf, impractical shoes, hands in her pockets, face creased with worry.
Sunday - We walk our favourite loop through the clutch of trees on Brincliffe Edge, down the steep bank to the allotments and up the other side. Alfie is tenacious. For weeks, I have been struggling to write, doubting my poems and my ideas for them, afraid that everything I might say has been said before, that I cover the same old ground. But Patrick Kavanagh was right: ‘To know fully even one field or one land is a lifetime's experience.’ Dorothy had Rydal and Grasmere, Loughrigg and Ambleside. She never tired of evoking them:
On Wednesday 18th November 1801, she wrote of a nocturnal walk: ’A storm was gathering in Easedale so we returned but the moon came out & opened to us the Church and village. Helm Crag in shade, the larger mountains dappled like a sky - we stood long upon the bridge.’
A simple change in lighting and Grasmere is new. I always feel that Dorothy never tires of looking at the same scene. Walking with a toddler is an exercise in the joy of circling the same ground, a challenge to the myth of progress. Perhaps this is all I have, this tended park, these drooping leaves, this sprawl of almost-Northern England. Perhaps this is my ground. And it is beautiful, it is more than enough.