Yorkshire

June 2004

I will never be able to hear a low-flying fighter plane again without going right back to the afternoon J. and I spent at Malham Cove. Right back to the pebbly path we walked on, a pale ribbon curving through the green of the grassy terrain. I liked those paths, with their little double spring-gates, so neat and orderly without requiring even a hint of cement about them. They were everywhere we went in the countryside -- running on over hills and around rocks, into shady little forests, crunched underfoot by the thousands that walked them and had walked them and enjoyed the land and the open sky all the way to the horizon -- or just as far as the next hill that obstructed the view. A path is only a path until you understand that such public paths, carefully mapped and maintained, do not exist everywhere. And indeed, one reason why we were able to go to several places was, no doubt, because the paths were there and nobody could have stopped us walking on them; as J. informed me, we could have walked right through Madonna’s estate and she would have had to let us do so, as long as we stayed on the path.

If I liked the paths, I liked the wayside as well -- not least the eccentricity by the roadside as we had walked up towards Malham Cove. In the wooded area by the roadside, the only wildlife we observed was all of papier-mache -- a snake and a horse, painted to look astonishingly like durable reincarnations of somebody’s carpetbag. Their cousin, according to what I had been told a few days earlier in Bath, stood alone in a field somewhere in the south of England -- a camel.

Misplaced installation art apart, it is hard to exactly define my feelings about that day. It was, I think, that Yorkshire was beautiful that day without being terrible, but without being superficially pretty or welcoming either. There was nothing around us that would have made it to the top of a chocolate box, unlike some Alpine pictures under blue skies, with many-coloured flowers in the meadow and sun blazing down. It was a dour day, the sky as grey as the coarse, weathered stones that were packed together to make the dry stone walls that irregularly criss-crossed parts of the landscape, living feats of practical engineering.

It was quiet in Malham Cove, despite the chatter of the people who were there, walking through and peering through telescopes at the peregrine falcons that nested on the cliff. No human voice could fill that vast hollow; only an imperceptible whistling whisper hinted at what it might be like in high wind and heavy rain. The high limestone cliff curved around one corner, stony ledges cascading in grey-striped striations towards the ground, like a petrified waterfall. As I later learned, it was indeed a waterfall that had crashed and gushed over the edge to shape the cliff’s contours after the last ice age, and the cove had actually been a cove so many thousands of years ago.

At the foot of the cliff, past the little stream that flowed out alongside the path, among great boulders, all sound was sucked away. Birds wheeled in the sky over the cliff, screaming through the unquiet stillness that lay in the shadow of the great crag. From below, I had to crane my neck to look up at the sky, beyond the plants growing in clumps out of the limestone. Minutes later, as we were walking back along the path, a low rumble started in the distance from the sky, and one fighter plane after another flew through the thick grey cloud cover. Their roars boomed through the cove, and it seemed to shudder slightly with the reverberations, almost as though the water that had seeped through the porous limestone had broken the bounds of the cliff and was rushing towards us -- but of course, it wasn’t. It was a pleasant walk back the way we had come, the path twisting under a few trees, disturbed by nothing more remarkable or terrifying than a cheerful tan Labrador.

I am still not very certain why I kept hearing Bach in my head all the time we were in the Dales. His “Air on the G String” seems to suggest some restful place, gentle, with blue sky and white clouds, free from all rain or storms, and I have no doubt that the loudly complaining sheep penned up at the side of the road leading back to the village would have asked for a place unknown to shearers. Nothing before my eyes reflected that suggestion. Yet, Bach’s calm pastoral scene repeated itself over and over in musical notes, even if the landscape didn’t seem entirely appropriate. The only possible reason is that the undulating terrain, grassy banks rising and falling unevenly on all sides and into the distance, trees affording shelter here and there, reminded me oddly of the mounds and lines of a cupped palm. The universe in God’s palm? I can’t be sure. Perhaps it was merely because the only day I was there was a day on which the weather held, and I didn’t see a day of miserable rain and wind.

Nevertheless, it made me think that the appreciation of a warm, safe sanctuary would be tremendous for anyone in the Dales, especially in the worst of weather -- and that such a haven would always be there, somewhere. The peregrines found it on the cliff, and I could imagine the sheep finding it under boulders and crags that were nearly caves. Plants seemed to have rooted themselves steadfastly at the foot of stone walls. This was a place that would love home as much as it loved the great wideness thrown open unto the skies -- but that thought was probably just my own restless urban self delighting in the first real countryside I had seen in a very long time. It could have just been the parched Indian yearning for green surroundings and rain. It might even have been all James Herriot’s fault!

So, at any rate, I heard Bach. His music was no louder at Malham than it had been at Bolton Abbey earlier in the day. Bolton Abbey certainly connoted rest and peace. In fact, given a warmer day and a thinner cloud cover, it could have positively been a cliché. With ruins by a river, it was both picturesque and civilized. The view from across the river is easy to recall—glimmer-glass with brownish tints flowing through, bridge and square-shaped stepping stones to cross, sandy strips on either bank, and the ruined section of the Abbey only a few metres above with a few rows of faded gravestones to the right.

Long after Henry VIII’s actions changed yet another priory into a half-crumbling, roofless set of beautiful greying old walls, in what must have been a sudden violent destruction, the ruined section of the abbey was lovely and mellow in its decrepitude. A large arched opening on one wall that must have once held the largest stained glass window was empty, and who is to say that the stained glass was even half as perfect as the view across the River Wharfe that it now held? As I told J., it was actually a wonderfully romantic spot for a wedding; I ended up getting another taste of British madness when she remarked that it would have been, if not for the law that made it illegal to have a wedding without a roof overhead.

Part of the old church was complete and still in use, and to my Portuguese-church accustomed eyes, it seemed rather bare, all in brown tones. At the door was a boot scraper, a novelty for me. In the churchyard lay some of the stones marking where the walls of the priory buildings once stood. The sheep in the yard were placid; the buildings behind and to the side, belonging, like the Abbey, to the estate of the Duke of Devonshire, were neat but distant. As we walked back, I was still looking at cloud shadows.

I know it was a revelation for J. when she realised that I could not get over what to me was the miraculous beauty of what I called “cloud shadows” but were really abrupt moments when the sun shone brightly through gaps in the clouds. For a few precious seconds, the light would change the hues and shades of the land on which it fell, a sudden high trilling of notes of colour and brightness in the simple sameness of sombre green reflecting grey above. The gap in the cloud above would move as the wind blew and then it would close—below, every possible shade of green and yellow would mix themselves together kaleidoscopically and move across the ground before fading or swiftly vanishing altogether, the standard deep green appearing again. You could rub your eyes and miss them altogether -- these moving Impressionist paintings.

I could never have seen them in Bombay. They need clouds that are high enough with different parts moving at different speeds, clouds that remain without necessarily raining down. They need gentle hills, so that you can see them, because they would not be visible on flat ground unless you were on a higher level. Most of all, they need open land and great depth of field, a place where you can easily see into the distance without obstruction. I had seen actual shadows of clouds moving across the hills at home, but never anything like this. I watched them play and dance not just in Yorkshire, but under a setting sun, bringing on twilight later that evening in the Pennines, and the next week, for one achingly beautiful minute, one of them painted the Cairngorm in glowing, moving colours amidst a landscape of otherwise unmitigated grey as I watched from Aviemore in Scotland. They were part of the magic of the trip, and life could never be quite the same after such magic.

Thus, I was enamoured by clouds moving at Bolton Abbey. There were cows in the foreground. They were black, white, and brown, plump and minus their horns, looking stupidly docile in comparison with the often gaunt, sharp, highly intelligent-looking cows I was accustomed to at home. They were all standing, some grazing, and then within a blink, they were moving. I have never seen cows behave like that, and neither had J., for we were both laughing helplessly by the time the next few minutes passed. The cows started by chasing each other around, galloping furiously, stopping and starting again. Then some of them tried to push some of the others down, leaning against them with heavy shoulders pressing one to another. It was, in fact, pandemonium in the herd and if any of them had their horns, it would have been bloody murder too. They were all quite evidently cows, so it couldn’t have been rough foreplay -- the only explanation that we could find is that they were bitch-fighting for some reason best known to themselves. The pastoral mood had been effectively dispelled before we departed for Malham.

Outside, in the village, we had bumped into J.’s friends, whom we had visited the previous evening on their narrowboat. I had a feeling of inexpressible delight when I spotted them—who doesn’t feel that way when in a strange country, if they bump quite by chance into someone they know? And it had been an extremely pleasant evening we had spent on the boat with them, the sun lowering itself outside lazily, the evening gleaming golden in reflections on the canal’s green water. Inside, it was cosy, and coming from someone who has seen homes smaller than that boat, “cosy” is not derogatory. It was obvious that they took great pride in the boat, and I was impressed to see it fitted up with a bathtub! As J. chatted and dinner was brought out, I was thinking about caravans and boats as opposed to “proper houses.” We had dawdled -- and then we had to run, J. driving along towards Haworth, where we were to spend the night.

Apart from running up and down the cobbled road up the hill to the parsonage in the dark, and peering at a few shops windows in the dim light, we did nothing of note in Haworth, except find ourselves surrounded by teddy bears at the bed-and-breakfast. Some rain had put paid to the idea of walking on the moors, and we had gone instead to Bolton Abbey. After Malham Cove, we did again dawdle, true to form. We took a train from Settle to Appleby and back, on one of the routes that is described as one of the most spectacular in the British Isles. But it was the first and last thing I did on the entire trip that underwhelmed me completely. Perhaps we had driven and walked in prettier places that day, or perhaps it was that I automatically compared it to the truly magnificent train journey through the Sahyadris at home, in the monsoon, a journey I could never tire of. Perhaps we were just tired by then. But I looked out and thought it was lovely, though not spectacular, and reinforced my admiration for the Dales, rolling away into the distance, dotted with trees, sheep, and the occasional houses, as the train moved on and stopped at red-brick stations. The most astounding feature of the entire journey was our realization that the quaint sloping-roofed station buildings opposite each other at Settle possessed niches that housed figures of Mickey and Minnie Mouse, for no better reason than because they had been dug out of a snowdrift. We never did find out how they got into the snowdrift in the first place.

The next time I did hear a fighter plane, I was smack-dab in the middle of an area of Bombay that I know and love. The sound made me feel bizarrely homesick, and in a flood of nostalgia, I ended up buying a book I didn't really want, just because it was set in Yorkshire. Yes, that James Herriot has a lot to answer for. And so does J.