is no limit to their pervasiveness, no clearly defined contours. You can feel it seeping into you; trading off with the algae in the water and the mud between your toes like nourishment. You can feel the shuddering of the water making everything on your body reach out in reciprocity, every hair a tentacle. Half submerged in the hot spring; in and out; half still and warm, half cold and lashed; ears under, eyes out; the patter of rain on the surface, the gasping of the spring.
Thilda’s story gives me a feeling like recognition, a sense of inevitability and completion, a slotting into place. Like finding an object you never noticed was missing until you found it and realised its lack had been haunting you all along. I recognise it by knowing its antithesis; my own home and environment. See, where I am from there is not this boundlessness. The outside that I know is broken to pieces and scattered.
Our cul-de-sac is on a suburban estate built on the site of an old power station that had been running up until the eighties. All the houses look the same with neatly trimmed rectangular lawns and faux-Tudor beams, no weeds (there are sprays for those), and the streets are named after famous ships. Our town was typical of Midlands industry because it is well connected to the canal and river systems. There was a power station, a vinegar factory, a sugar beet factory, and several carpet factories, one of which my mum worked in as a secretary while I was in her belly. The power station was coal-fired and archaic and the factories moved to China so they knocked it all down and built the suburbs and a giant Tesco. My mum and dad got jobs a thirty-minute drive away, closer to the city, and no one could grow anything to eat in their yards because the power station left radon in the topsoil.
The outside that I know is pastoral, a grid of owned and regimented spaces, moderated for production. Some people think the English countryside is pretty but that is the tragedy of it. It is a result of the way our small country was built, when a bunch of rich men parcelled up what was once shared land to make it easier to go about ploughing and producing more crops. Our common wilderness became a commodity. On an island so small the mark of this is hard to not see: a monotonous quilt of rectangles divided by hedgerows. Especially in the Midlands, where there are not many mountains or bogs or other bits of stubbornly unprofitable land, and where the remains of failed industry create a graveyard landscape, the stumps covered over with prosthetic suburbia.
The peregrine quarry was the one place I knew that had a semblance of wildness to it, of richness and possibility. This is an invisible kind of poverty, this lack of all of the complexity that Urla and her mother are born from.
Gudrid lived in the days of longboats and raging seas. She travelled to what we now call Newfoundland, which is my own first port of call in Canada. This was before lucky-lost explorer Christopher Columbus, and Thilda proudly points out that although the Spanish like to think that the sagas are make-believe, Icelanders know who really found the New World. Gudrid was the first European mother in the western hemisphere.
She had a son; they called him Snorri. But with their small clan and without the guns the Spanish had, they were driven away by the natives. Or savages, as Thilda called them.
She concludes her story by saying, ‘Gudrid travelled further than all of her husbands, who died one after another and proved early in our history that you don’t need a penis between your legs to make you a great adventurer.’ I look up at the bulking hills and think about how Gudrid personifies them, and the geysers and the winds, and the looming, enduring volcanoes, the shifting ground. And how so much of Thilda is in Urla, and Gudrid in them both. And it feels kind of feminine, all this entering. It feels like pregnation.
It is this harsh softness. Of a landscape that is fertile and hostile. And it takes on this significance for me and for my journey so that I have to squeak into bubbles under the water, because I feel like for the first time ever I know exactly why I am where I am right then in that moment.
GO WEST, YOUNG MAN
Our plans for Greenland have undergone sudden and fantastic developments. Urla and Thilda had been plotting the whole time to put us on a boat with Urla’s uncle Larus, who is a whale scientist. Larus has his own research boat and is intending to go out into the Denmark Strait, the channel in between Iceland and Greenland, to survey a pod of long-finned pilot whales. They hadn’t told me in case it didn’t work out, but it has and we leave for Greenland in four days’ time.
It is against protocol because the boat is only supposed to carry two people, but Urla threatened to stow away if her uncle took me and went without her. She will come with me as far as she can before she has to get back and work her summer job, so we will be in the double cabin and Larus will sleep in the steering room on the floor. Urla will then carry on through Greenland with me until I find a way to follow in the wake of Gudrid on to Canada. It is perfect because she can translate for me in Greenland, and she said she would write up the subtitles for the Danish when I edit the footage for the documentary. Because her uncle Larus still has to do his research it will be a slow journey of five days but we get to go whale watching and learn about the behavioural patterns of the long-finned pilot whale.
It jarred how easily Thilda let Urla go across a foreign country with a stranger so soon after they reunited after so long. I suppose we will be with her uncle and then her family friends in Nuuk once we find a way to reach the west coast, so the prospect seems safe to her. Maybe also she is used to Urla leaving, what with her being at university and having spent half her childhood away at her dad’s because of the separation. But the contrast to my own parents’ response is stark.
Why can’t you just be simple like other girls your age, get a job somewhere in town and work your way up, or at least go away to go to university, make something of yourself?
What did we do to you that made you so determined to leave us?
We won’t sleep until you return.
We won’t sleep ever again.
I could not make them understand that my breaking-away-from is inevitable and keeps the history of the world in motion. The young always leave. At least the male young of the species always does. My leaving would have been a casting out, an initiation ritual, had I been a boy. Women who leave always abandon. Imagine the pinnacle form of this, the mother who leaves her children to her husband. Unnatural! Monstrous! And the man who does it? My bet is he ends up smug with a younger wife, paying minimal child support.
Urla does not need to lurch away from Thilda because Thilda lets her go. The two of them are twinned in ease, in their mannerisms, in a way that makes them seem more like sisters than mother and daughter. I prefer to be definitive about my being, where it ends and what its characteristics are. I have my dad’s nose, my mother’s green eyes and dark brown hair. I have his stubbornness and her impulse to over-empathise, weeping easily. But I try hard to also not be like them.
Peregrine; chaffinch; woodpigeon.
Field; hedgerow; river.
Mother; father; me.
THE CHEMICAL WAR ON THE GYPSY MOTH
Larus has given me Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring because ‘it is one of the most important books you will ever read.’ In 1962 Silent Spring was published to tell of how different chemicals invented for killing people in the world wars were being used for killing pests on food crops and were then having unexpected repercussions, like the death of birds and children. This is in the sixties, so everyone was doubly pissed with the government for also putting them in range of nuclear weapons that might come at any time without warning and telling them they would be
