The Wild Places (Penguin Original) (9 page)

Down in the half-light of the slit trench, Murray sorted through his pockets and destroyed anything which might be of use to the enemy: his prismatic compass, his identity cards, his cartographic notes. He found his address book and glanced through it. Most of the names were of mountaineers. At that instant, Murray later recalled, he was overwhelmed by a sudden access of memory of the mountains and moors over which he had ranged, and the people with whom he had done so. The memory came to him ‘whole, in an instant’s flash - the mountains . . . charged with a beauty not theirs pouring through them’.
The first wave of German tanks struck an hour later. Dark bulks on the top of the escarpment, twenty of them abreast, their tracks whisking the sand into ochre clouds. The shells from the two-pounder guns glowed in the dusk, and made short red arcs through the sky. The tanks fired their machine guns, pouring white tracer into the backs of the Allied trucks, and down into the trenches and the gun emplacements. The slaughter was swift and almost total. Again, Murray escaped harm. He was taken prisoner, and flown 600 miles to Campo 21, in the province of Chieti in north Italy.
Conditions in the Chieti camp were onerous, but not appalling. There were books, and there was food, though never enough. Brutality was expedient rather than gratuitous: prisoners were clubbed with rifle butts for misdemeanours, but nothing worse than this. Most importantly, there was a view: away and up to the west, through the wire mesh of the camp’s perimeter fence, Murray could see the Abruzzi mountains. Those mountains became, during his months of imprisonment, the home of his hope. When winter arrived, the first snows settled on the Gran Sasso, the highest of the range, and it appeared to Murray like a blue and white ghost floating in the sky, the embodiment of ‘a freedom of spirit’ that could not be constrained by fence and hut and sentry.
Ten weeks after arriving at Chieti, Murray began to write: about the wild places he had known before his incarceration, about the Scottish mountains, moors and ridges he had loved and explored.
Paper was scarce. At first he wrote on toilet paper, but the diet of the camps meant that there was little to spare. Then Murray’s mother sent him via the Red Cross a copy of Shakespeare’s
Complete Works
, ‘printed on the finest India paper’. He bartered pages of the book - pages whose firmness and texture were much appreciated by the men of the camp - for sheets of blank toilet paper on which he could write.
The writing Murray did there was a kind of dreamwork: a casting back and a summoning up of the open spaces of Scotland, its ‘rock, snow and ice, as well as the high plateaux and long ridges and wide moors’, from within his confinement. As his stamina waned, his imagination grew stronger. He thrived on the recollections of openness and freedom. The book that Murray began in Chieti,
Mountaineering in Scotland
- ‘a book written from the heart of a holocaust’, in his phrase - must stand as one of the finest expressions of the power of the wild to act, even in retrospect, even remotely, upon the mind.
In October, Murray was moved to the Moosburg camp in Bavaria. Prisoners were housed in wire-fenced compounds, in jam-packed bunkrooms, ‘like rats in a slum’. Fleas and lice proliferated, and at night bedbugs swarmed from the mattresses. Still he wrote.
After a short time, he was moved again, this time to a camp in Bohemia, the westernmost province of Czechoslovakia. The prisoners were searched on arrival. Murray’s thick wad of toilet-paper manuscript was found, and he was interrogated by Gestapo officers, who believed it to be a coded account of troop movements. They took the manuscript from him, and destroyed it. Even to a man of Murray’s mental resilience, it was a severe blow.
During the years of his confinement, Murray’s health deteriorated. Towards the end of the war, Red Cross parcels were prevented from reaching the camps. The inmates of Murray’s camp had to survive on black bread and minimum rations of potato and turnips. When possible, they would catch and kill dogs and cats, and eat strips of their flesh. Tuberculosis was rife. ‘I am literally a skeleton,’ Murray wrote in a sad letter to a friend. His fingernails became corrugated through vitamin deficiency. His hair had thinned. He could not walk ten yards without stopping to rest, could not walk at all without dizziness. He assumed that, even if he were to survive the war, he would never again be able to climb mountains.
But through all this, the dreaming continued. In Bohemia, in secret, Murray restarted the manuscript that had been taken from him on his arrival. Weak from lack of food, he became imaginatively uninhibited. ‘I shed,’ he remembered, ‘any reticence about feeling for beauty.’ When he closed his eyes, the mountains and glens sprang to mind, vivid in every detail. He dreamed of the violet dusk of moors, of the green water of the sea lochs in which he had once swum, and the beaten-gold sky of dusk seen from the Buachaille’s top, and then he wrote of these things. During the last year of his confinement, he recalled, ‘I had not once thought of myself as imprisoned. I lived on mountains, and had the freedom of them.’
On May Day 1945, Murray’s prison camp was liberated by American troops. A month after his release, Murray returned to Rannoch Moor. Weak and emaciated in body, but exhilarated in spirit, he climbed the Buachaille again and on its summit he stayed, looking out over the Moor, in the space of those wide skies.
By the time I set out to cross the Moor in November, Coruisk’s rich summer light had ceded to autumn’s browns. The air was cooler, and in place of the long evenings of July and August were quick dusks.
I had hoped for an early onset of winter, because I wanted to make an ice-bound traverse of the Moor, following its frozen waterways from one side to the other, on skis or even ice-skates. This was something which I knew had been done once before, in the 1950s, and I greatly liked the idea of keeping to a single element for the crossing, of using only water to cross such an expanse of earth. But my father, who had agreed to accompany me on the crossing, pointed out two minor problems with my plan: neither of us could ice-skate, and the weather was damp, so we would sink. I acknowledged the force of his logic; walking it would have to be.
We caught the sleeper-train north together from London. The romance of the train, its Edwardian miracle of conjuring you to a different land while you sleep, was still perceptible. We left Euston Station - fast-food outlets, the tannoy’s squash-ball
bing-bong
, crushed beer cans in corners, the shifty body-mass of the crowds - and woke to chilly air, white mist and a stag disappearing into the drizzle. Fog pooled in the low ground. At Rannoch Station, we stepped down from the train and on to the Moor.
That morning, we began to learn the habits and the obligations of the Moor, its resistance to straight lines of progress. As Murray knew, going on the Moor is slow, to be measured in hours, not miles. Much of the Moor is loch, and much is peat hag, and between the lochs and the peat hags bog streams wriggle, their water dyed black and shiny as oil.
We leapt from hag to hag, jumped peat crevasses and picked our way through the maze-work of stream and tussock. Later, crossing a nameless river, I saw a big trout arrow across its pool and set chevrons rippling out over the surface. Here and there, sunk in the peat, we came across the big swooping roots of ancient pine trees, thousands of years old. How I would love to have climbed one of those great pines, I thought. Peatbogs are so preservative of wood that, during the Second World War, the US Navy used 3,000-year-old white cedar logs, recovered from sphagnum bog in New Jersey, to build the hulls of their motor-torpedo boats. From one of the stumps I took a loose dolphin-shaped fragment of wood, stained a deep brown by the peat. In another black bank, I found a white stone, bedded like an eyeball. I brushed it clean, and turned it in my hand as I walked.
The Moor’s vastness and self-similarity affected our perception of distance. Objects and movements showed more clearly in its spareness. So extensive was the space within which we were moving that when I glanced up at the mountains west of the Moor, to try to gauge the distance we had come, it seemed as though we had not advanced at all: that, like explorers walking against the spin of pack ice, our feet fell exactly where we had lifted them.
Hours into the day, we stopped for shelter in a ruin named on our map as Tigh Na Cruaiche. A rusted iron brazier stood in one corner. Otherwise, the interior was empty. It smelt green. We sat on stones, and looked out through the doorless entrance. Beyond the series of wooded islands slung across the centre of Loch Laidon we could see the Black Corries - the high holding grounds of deer, snow and fog - and the air which gathered in them had a deep cold blueness of tone. I thought enviously of Murray, who had returned after the war to cross the Moor on a hot August day, with only his dog for company. Halfway across, he had taken off all his clothes, put them in his pack, walking naked for the rest of the day, bathing here and there in pools and loch bays. Perhaps, I daydreamed, on the right winter day - bright sun, no wind - it might be possible to combine the traverses, and ice-skate naked from one side of the Moor to the other . . .
Later, on the top of a fifty-foot-high knoll, we sat and ate black rye bread with cheese, watching rain fronts gather miles away in the mouth of Glen Coe and then billow towards us over the ground. Velvety rags of lichen hung from the rocks on the drumlin and rippled as wind passed over them. My father pointed west: a kestrel, hunting fast over the ground. Then it stopped, hung, collapsed its wings and dropped hard into the heather.
That far into the Moor, the vast space we were in resolved the land around us into bacon-like bands: a stripe of sky, a stripe of white cloud, a stripe of dark land, and below everything the tawny Moor. The Moor’s colours in that season were subtle and multiple. Seen from a distance it was brindled; close up, it broke into its separate colours: orange, ochre, red, a mustardy yellow and, lacing everything, the glossy black of the peat.
It took us all that day to reach what I had come to think of as the Moor’s centre, the Abhainn Bà - the point where the River Bà flows into Loch Laidon. We stopped there, for dusk was spreading over the Moor, and pitched a small tent. We lay talking in the dark: about the ground we had covered, the ground still to go, about the odd mixture of apprehension and awe that the Moor provoked in us both. Our sleeping-place was cupped in a curve of the river, on a miniature flood-plain that the winter spates had carved out and flattened: a shelter in the middle of the Moor’s great space.
In a land as densely populated as Britain, openness can be hard to find. It is difficult to reach places where the horizon is experienced as a long unbroken line, or where the blue of distance becomes visible. Openness is rare, but its importance is proportionately great. Living constantly among streets and houses induces a sense of enclosure, of short-range sight. The spaces of moors, seas and mountains counteract this. Whenever I return from the moors, I feel a lightness up behind my eyes, as though my vision has been opened out by twenty degrees to either side. A region of uninterrupted space is not only a convenient metaphor for freedom and openness, it can sometimes bring those feelings fiercely on.
To experience openness is to understand something of what the American novelist Willa Cather, who was brought up on the Great Plains, called ‘the reaching and reaching of high plains, the immeasurable yearning of all flat lands’. To love open places - and they have, historically, not been loved - you have to believe, as Cather did, that beauty might at times be a function of continuous space. You have to believe that such principalities might possess their own active expansiveness.Anyone who has been in an empty sea, out of sight of land, on a clear day, will know the deep astonishment of seeing the curvature of the globe: the sea’s down-turned edges, its meniscal frown.
Open spaces bring to the mind something which is difficult to express, but unmistakable to experience - and Rannoch Moor is among the greatest of those spaces. If the Lake District were cut out of Cumbria and dropped into the Moor, the Moor would accommodate it. The influence of places such as the Moor cannot be measured, but should not for this reason be passed over. ‘To recline on a stump of thorn, between afternoon and night,’ Thomas Hardy wrote in
The Return of the Native
, ‘where the eye could reach nothing of the world outside the summits and shoulders of heathland which filled the whole circumference of its glance, and to know that everything around and underneath had been from prehistoric times as unaltered as the stars overhead, gave ballast to the mind adrift on change, and harassed by the irrepressible New.’
For Murray, it was not even direct exposure to the spaces of moor and mountain that consoled him during his prison years, but the memory of that experience. He knew that these places continued to exist; this was what sustained him.
In 1977, a nineteen-year-old Glaswegian named Robert Brown was arrested for a murder he did not commit, and over the course of the following days had a confession beaten out of him by a police officer subsequently indicted for corruption. Brown served twenty-five years, and saw two appeals fail, before his conviction was finally overturned in 2002. When he was released, one of the first things he did was to go to the shore of Loch Lomond and sit on a boulder on the loch’s southern shore in sunlight, to feel, as he put it, ‘the wind on my face, and to see the waves and the mountains’. Brown had been out on the loch shore the day before he was arrested. The recollection of the space, that place, which he had not seen for a quarter of a century, had nourished him during his imprisonment. He had kept the memory of it, he recalled afterwards, ‘in a secret compartment’ in his head.
We have tended to exercise an imaginative bias against flatlands: moor, tundra, heath, prairie, bog and steppe. For Daniel Defoe, travelling in 1725, the moors above Chatsworth were abominable: ‘a waste and a howling wilderness’. Reactions like Defoe’s occur in part because of the difficulty of making the acquaintance of flat terrains. They seem to return the eye’s enquiries unanswered, or swallow all attempts at interpretation. They confront us with the problem of purchase: how to anchor perception in a context of vastness, how to make such a place
mean
. We have words we use for such places, half in awe and half in dismissal - stark, empty, limitless. But we find it hard to make language grip landscapes that are close-toned, but that also excel in expanse, reach and transparency.

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