A Book of Silence (43 page)

There are advantages to large families in times of death – the burden and the loss are shared, and if the members of that family are halfway decent people (and it turned out that we were) a kind of disciplined care for each other imposes order and contains self-seeking indulgence. However, there is also necessarily a great deal of chatter and negotiation and compromise and planning that has to go on; no decisions can be taken without hours of consultation.
My daughter, flying back from the USA for the funeral, said perceptively, ‘The trouble with you [me, her aunts and uncles] is that there are always too many chiefs and no Indians, but it is worse than usual at the moment because all the chiefs are trying to pretend to be Indians.’

We did well, I think. But death shattered a lot of the silence that I had been trying to develop and live within. The following few months were without question the most difficult time I have had since I started looking for my silence. I learned a bit about the strengths of self-discipline: how to hold back, how not to speak my mind. I learned the comfort of a practice of silence, a habit of meditation. But that was not enough. I felt thrown from my path and without the right to blame anyone, even myself. I did often think that if I had stayed in Weardale I would not have had to endure all this, but I also knew that it was good and useful that I was there. It is the only time in my life (except when I have to change a double duvet single-handed) that I have felt the lack of a partner, felt lonely and different. I have no inclination to be the ‘oldest daughter’ or ‘big sister’ and yet, quite simply, I was. That was the reality and without choice I had to accept that death pulls us back into patterns laid down, usually unspoken, unexamined, un-negotiated – silently – throughout childhood.

That autumn, as I moved away from the immediacy of death and the closeness and warmth of my family, I found myself increasingly impatient – to find a house, to get settled down, to get back on track. I spent hours on the web and hours in my car looking for my house. I had decided that in the Highlands the winters were just too long, there was too much darkness for too much of the year, and in most cases the mountains were too demanding, so I was searching mainly in the southern uplands, in what is now the Border Region, and in the Galloway, Ayrshire and Lanarkshire hill country. But I could not find a house that called to me, that did for me what his first sight of the Inner Mountain did for Anthony, a place that said, ‘Here. Here you can be happy and silent.’

I knew what I wanted. I wanted a small house with a big room: I wanted to integrate living, working and praying into a single whole and I did not want any rooms that I did not use. I also wanted this house to be in a very particular landscape.

Landscape seems to be particularly important to solitaries. The word landscape did not originally mean the shape and look of a view itself – but a picture of that view. Until the eighteenth century a landscape was – like a portrait, conversation piece, still life, narrative painting and so on – a painter’s technical term. Quite deliberately, stressing their emphasis on design rather than nature, the new ‘landscape gardeners’ of the eighteenth century claimed the word to describe their
art
. They made nature into pictures (at that point pictures as like a neoclassical landscape painting as they could contrive – Claude Lorrain was a popular model). All views are seen in the mind as landscapes. The landscape of my silence had become very clear to me. It is high moorland: a long view across rough grass and an unbroken line where the hill meets the sky. It is not being tucked in under a steep mountain, or in a wood, but open to the wind. Equally, it is not about dramatic and challenging peaks. It is a huge and silent nothing of peat bog, rough grass, bracken, broken walls enclosing no fields and the harsh cry of curlew on the wing.

One day, driving fretfully home from inspecting yet another impossible house, I had a sharp consoling memory. Once, years before, on holiday in Italy with my family, we had had lunch near Arezzo and in the afternoon had walked up a steep path in the Apennines, through pine trees dappled in sunshine, and had come out of the woods to the monastery at Camadoli. The Camadolese Fathers, founded by St Romauld at the very end of the first millennium, was the order that Merton thought he might join when he found that the Trappists could not offer him the solitude that he craved. The Camadolese monks live as hermits – each monk has his own hermitage separate from the others. Their Rule instructs them to:

Each hermit-monk has two rooms – a room for living in, for praying, studying, eating and everything else, and a bedroom – and, opening directly off the cell, he has his own little walled garden, sheltered and completely hidden. (The monks do not need a kitchen because the meals are prepared separately – by the non-hermits in the order, often novices who are awaiting their opportunity to become hermits – and brought to the cell ready cooked, where they are ‘posted’ through a hatch in their front door.) I recalled it with vivid precision, the sunshine, the scent of pine trees, the walk from cell to church, the children’s fascination and the great quiet. That, that was what I wanted – except I would need a kitchen and a bathroom. My would-be asceticism does not run to cold-water strip downs in the washing-up bowl, even in my most self-inflated fantasies. Nor, I suspect, would Planning or Health and Safety regulations permit it.

Somewhere in all this I began to think about self-building. It is a dream that a lot of people seem to share – to make our own house. The popularity of television programmes about doing just this suggests that it catches at a very specific desire. My friends Will Anderson and Ford Hickson were doing it in south London – building their lovely house, based on their passionate eco-aesthetic.
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This was encouraging. Discouraging, on the other hand, was the non-silence that would be involved; the very proper difficulty of getting planning permission to build on a green site; and the cost, which rumour warned would be astronomical.

I was mulling this over when something that retrospectively feels magical, even graced, happened. I had been to look at a (totally unsuitable) house in the Machars, the more easterly of the two Galloway peninsulas that stick down into the Irish Sea towards the
Isle of Man, and later in the day had an appointment to view another (also, it turned out, totally unsuitable) house near Girvan in southern Ayrshire. It is hard to imagine any other pair of locations that would have caused me to notice that on the map there was a tiny little road that ran north from the A75 to Barrhill. I thought it would be a short cut through pleasant rural countryside, pretty and convenient. So I headed up the Luce valley. North of the village of New Luce I entered a new world, one that I had not known existed, a swath of moorland and, moreover, one that had not been taken over by modern forestry plantings. Here the high hills only a few miles further east, which I had walked in two years before, were ground down by the glaciers of the last Ice Age, leaving the undulating peat and granite moors of my dreams stretching empty for miles. The land here is so infertile that it was left alone in the nineteenth century and is still liberally scattered with Bronze Age remains, which elsewhere were obliterated by enclosures and agricultural improvements. The road, single track with passing places, wound its way up over singularly decrepit cattle grids and little bridges; the upper reaches of the Cross Water of Luce, somewhere between river and stream, bubbling over stones or lying in still long pools, wound serpentine down the shallow valley. And there was the huge nothing.

Here, here was where I wanted to live. Like Anthony, here was the place that fed my ‘appetite for the absolute’,
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that would place me, as his wood and pond had placed Thoreau, in a ‘naked condition in front of the universe’ and in front of God as well. But when I got home and started asking around it became clear that the chances of my finding a place to live up on that moor were effectively non-existent. There were very few houses in any case, and almost all of them were tenanted farmhouses and the Stair Estate, which owned it all, had a policy of not selling land – they preferred levelling unused homesteads and expanding the few remaining hill farms. I tried to shrug my shoulders and I went on looking.

Just over a month later, for reasons that the local population still
do not understand, the Estate put two sites on the market. One was a substantial old farmhouse and the other was its derelict little shepherd’s house nearly a mile away. In the days when hill farming was profitable, most of the old farms had a farmer and probably a couple of workers, but also a shepherd, who lived further up, where the sheep roamed freely. It gives me a special joy that the last person to shepherd here was Jock Welsh, the international sheepdog trial champion and judge. The house was collapsing even when he was an apprentice, and when he got married he and his wife Christine moved first into a caravan behind the house and later off site, but it seems a noble heritage and gives me encouragement in my rather different ‘trials’.

Of course I bought it. The house had been empty for nearly half a century. It had no roof, no working water supply; it had two feet of cow and sheep manure on all the floors and a tree growing out of the front wall. This was not a conversion job; the works were done as ‘new build’ but it was enough of a house not to run into trouble with green-site building restrictions. It was sufficiently derelict for me to do whatever I wanted; its situation and the long view down the valley were the landscape I craved, and it even had an attached barn, roofless but with its old stone walls intact that would be my Camadolesian walled garden.

Building a house is not a silent activity – the pause in my silence seeking extended itself for another eighteen months, during which I experienced some of the highest levels of anxiety that I have ever had to endure; more meetings and conversations and negotiating with strangers than I could have imagined; and a very great deal of fretful activity. But always, running like a thread through the difficulties and complications and delays and expense, and the unnerving awareness that a great many people – from my brothers to the surveyor – clearly thought I was slightly deranged, was a strand of absolute certainty. This was my house, my hermitage, my home.

I built my house as I wanted my house to be. I wanted it to sit in its landscape as it has always sat, four-square, solid, like a child’s
drawing of a house, two windows with a front door between them and a chimney pot at either end. Driving up the road from New Luce you can see the house from over two miles away; I wanted nothing in that seeing to change and it makes me happy when people tell me how lovely it is ‘to see lights in Dirniemow again’ as they had stopped hoping they ever would. Neither the inhabitants nor the landscape itself would have welcomed a contemporary design. But inside there is one big room that is kitchen and study and eating place and sitting room, open plan, and behind it there is one bedroom. The bedroom has french windows, which open directly on to my walled garden – which at the moment I confess is still two feet deep in cow shit awaiting ‘development’. Visitors can sleep in the attic – this is illegal and none too comfortable, but it suits me – and, yes, there is a bathroom. There is a proper cold larder too and an open fire and underfloor central heating.

I was impatient to get settled. I finally moved in on 16 February 2007, although at that point there was no kitchen sink and no bath; I still had to balance up a plank to get through the front door; the Internet connection did not connect; and I was broke. It took the rest of the spring and summer to get the work finished. It was not a peaceful or a silent time.

But I had learned a lot in the previous decade.

After her twelve years in the Tibetan mountains Tenzin Palmo, the British Buddhist nun, commented:

I want that ‘pressure cooker’ and that means that I need to look at the practicalities with a certain caustic realism.

I am learning not to be too sentimental about silence. The glorious intensity of those six weeks in Skye is not, in the long term, sustainable. You can, of course, get more silence than I have, but only at the price of less solitude. In any case you can do a surprising number of things without speaking; one of the seldom mentioned advantages of supermarkets is that you can shop without exchanging a word, smiling at the staff ’s mechanical greetings and fixing your eyes on your list in order to avoid eye contact with anyone. But for me, in the end there is something bogus about that, and rude. I am walking, say, alone and high on a narrow track, the day has been silent except for the sound of streams and a distant caw from a crow – and lo and behold, coming towards me is a group of cheerful walkers. I know they will say ‘hello’ and what do I do? Duck behind a rock, although I know they will have seen me? Pass by on the other side, with a haughty expression? Increase my pace and smile swiftly as I pass? It is less ‘noisy’ and more rational to say ‘hello’ back.