What the Sky Sees

The words we've been given by our ancestors to name these places have no poetry. There's no elegance or grandeur in our geographical vocabulary. Our waterways are called drains; not rivers or streams or becks or burns, but drains. And even then they are marked not by old legends but by civil engineering. The Thirty Foot Drain. The Sixteen Foot Drain. The closest our ancestors could bring themselves to come to grandeur was in the naming of the Hundred Foot Drain. Our farms are not named for fancy, but anonymity. Lower Field Farm. Middle Field Farm. Sixteen Foot Farm. Names that give no clue to map readers, outsiders. Names that will never find their way on to tourist maps or guidebooks. People don't come here because they've been drawn by the romantic sound of the place; people don't come here much at all, and so the landscape remains mostly empty and retains its beauty. The poetry of this place is not in the names but in the shapes, the flatness, the bigness, the completeness of the landscape. Only what is beneath the surface of the earth is hidden, everything else between you and the horizon is visible.

The poetry is in the hidden also. In the unseen movements taking place beneath the surface. The cycles of growth and decay which take place in these fields, the nitrates and minerals and salts which come from the sea and crackle life into the roots of the crops. It's the quietness of these hidden processes which so enthrals me, the stateliness of such magical things. This is not poetry which can be named, or fitted on to a picture postcard, this is non-poetry. A secret kept from all except those who have stood and watched the changing of the fields, the colours of the sky, the patterns of the land.

The girl I'd made my journey to that night taught me the words I now use about this place that I love. I think that is why I felt so strongly about her; that, and the promise she held in her fingertips. She talked about the land and the sky in a way that made what I'd always felt make sense. She told me that on a clear day the horizon is about ten miles away and that since the average adult can walk twice that in a day then our landscape is the size of the time from dawn until dusk. She said that ours is the only place so unceasingly flat for this to hold true and that this was a gift. She told me that the flood times are echoes of a past when our land was under salt water and that they're a reminder that we only remain here by the grace of the sea and the sky. She said we should always remember this.

She told me, and I can't remember her exact words because I had her breast pressing against my mouth at the time, but she told me that our sky was so much greater than in other places that it was our reference point in ways that other people could never understand. They say the hills have eyes she said, but we have no hills here and she smiled and I understood.

She said lots of things like this, and I was instantly in love with her language, with the connection she felt with this place, with the way she touched my skin. She made me love this place, and she made me realize why I loved this place, and she made me realize why people from other places do not.

People don't often come here to visit, because they don't understand all this; outsiders don't make their homes here by choice. And people who do stray into these flatlands often get lost, floundering along the roads and tracks from one side of the day to the other without ever reaching the place they're looking for.

(He was an outsider, the man I met that night. I can remember looking at him, into his face, thinking I don't know you, I don't know who you are, I've not seen your face before, you're not from this place, you don't belong here. And that almost took the edge off it, made what I'd done seem a little less terrible. I don't know this man I kept thinking, I don't owe him anything. If he hadn't been dead I think I would have been demanding an apology from him for spoiling my evening. What had he been doing, walking down this road, my road, half-drunk, not looking where he was going? Why should I feel bad for his stupidity? I remember I got it into my head that he was probably from Nazeby, and I remembered my father saying that nothing of worth could ever come out of Nazeby. And so although I felt bad that I had killed a man, and although it is something which keeps me awake in the dark hours, I didn't feel bad that it was this man. And I had my reasons for not doing the right thing that night, on that journey, for doing what I did.)