In winter there’s no danger of falling into the sky
Our bodies anchored to the ground by the weight of the light.
The earth hides secrets.
The land is silent.
The drains & canals will freeze and be covered in snow.
The snow will come fast in the night and
block the roads & drains and leave
nothing
but whiteness
(all lines & textures concealed).
The land giving back light to the sky.
back
In spring the sky is all these colours. Spring comes
gradually here.
Broad beans & early wheat break through the surface of the soil.
Pale green buds squeeze out from dry branches
while the sky fades to light grey & white & finally a faint blue.
The air cleanses itself is cleansed, with by
a warm wind from the south
bursts of sparkling rain
The sky lifts away from the ground.
those arms lifted
up to the sky.
The horizons draw apart
and stretch the sky taut and
space & light flood back into our lives.
that arching back.
back
This is the time when change
is a daily force:
woodlands smeared green overnight
fields purpled with lavender behind your back
wives & mothers & daughters pregnant by dawn
This is the time when the floods come
and the ditches and barriers have to be built again,
a little deeper
a little higher
But still, with all this life bursting up towards the sky,
(the earth holds secrets)
(the sky watches)
back
The hills having eyes means nothing here.
The land is level and all we have watching over us is the sky.
back
This place I’ve grown up in is a landscape of lines,
a world of the parallel & perpendicular.
The straightest line of all is the hard blur of the horizon.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
A single unbending line which encircles the day.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
When I was As a child I would spin around
with my eyes on the horizon trying to catch the place where
the line turned or bent but I never could
back
the mystery of the straight, encircling line.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
(All the) other lines find their way to the horizon sooner or later
back
High lines, (Years ago, playing in the
connecting lines: telegraph wires furrows while your father
railway tracks watched, you looked up +
canals saw a line of boats gliding
drains through the sky. The fear
rivers you felt, seeing those
boats above your head.)
Low lines,
boundary lines: ditches (No hedges or walls
roads between fields here,
paths only the ditches + roads.
Ditches to stop the sea
reclaiming what it owns.)
back
The lines of this place are sometimes washed out by floods.
Obliteration.
Water erasing the (Cornelius the Dutchman
manmade geometry digging his way through
restoring this place the 17th century.)
to the sea it once was.
Sometimes it will be rain, swelling the rivers until they break
through
and rush over the fields,
settling across hundreds of acres for weeks at a time,
sky below as well as above, clouds & seabirds gliding overhead
sky above as well as below, clouds & seabirds gliding overland.
back
Or snow will cover everything, blocking drains & roads,
……….
Mothers forbidding their children to leave the house.
Lost children in the fields.
You said you don’t remember your mother telling you to go out,
but you would have been too young to remember/to go out.
back
Sometimes the fog
will
come in with
the
floods and
our world
will
become
unmappable, alien,
precarious.
I didn’t say you said it was my fault
back
These same floods that obliterate bring life to the land, make
our soil the richest in the country.
At ploughing time the smell of the earth hangs in the air,
a smell like apple bruises and horse chestnut shells.
A smell of pure energy.
back
Your father claimed this ground
would grow five-pound notes
if you planted a shilling.
That I would like to see.
back
Flatness | straight lines | a manmade geometry.
The sound of metal on soil // the sky above
This is the landscape you I we grew up in.
This is the landscape which grew us which made us.
back
The sea wants to be here. we shouldn’t be surprised when
will give to that
Our engineering gives way before the sea’s desire.
back
You didn’t say that. That’s not what you said
back
to name these places
The words we’ve been given by our ancestors have no poetry.
Our waterways are called drains,
not rivers or streams or brooks or burns:
Thirty Foot Drain
Sixteen Foot Drain
(and the closest to grandeur, this) Hundred Foot Drain
our farms named for anonymity: Lower Field Farm
Middle Field Farm
Sixteen Foot Farm
People don’t come here because they’ve been
People are not drawn here by the romantic sound of the place.
People don’t much come here at all, and so the landscape
remains empty and
retains its beauty and
the beauty of this place is not in the names but the shapes
the flatness / hugeness / completeness of the landscape.
Only what is beneath the surface of the earth is hidden
(and sometimes not even that)
and everything else is made visible beneath the sky.
back
When the dawn comes
when the first light slides in from the east
the sky is the colour of marbles.
A thin, glassy grey.
Everything is dark away to the west,
silhouettes & shadows clinging to the last of the night,
but at the eastern edge of the horizon there is light.
And If you have the time to stand and watch,
you can trace the movement of the light into the morning.
The lines of fields & roads creeping
towards you and then away to the west
until the whole geometry of the day is revealed.
And The water in the drains begins to steam & shine.
And you’ll notice The workers start to arrive,
stepping out from minibuses and spreading across the fields,
shadows crouching & shuffling
along the crop-lines lines of the crops.
back
When the mid-morning comes
the sky is the colour of flowering lin
seed
a pale-blue hint of
the full colour to come
back
Sometimes there will be clouds, joining together to form arches
from horizon to horizon
stretching
tearing
scattering patterns across the fields.
Sometimes these clouds bring rain,
and the sky will darken
But the rain will pass
the sky be brighter clearer
back
The workers more visible,
returning to their trays & boxes after the rain,
lifting food from the ground,
sorting
trimming
laying down
moving along the line.
Occasionally one will stand, lifting cramped arms to the sky before
returning to the soil.
Those lifted arms, that arching back.
back
When the noon-time comes
(when there’s a moment of stillness and silence)
the sky is the colour of the summer noon:
a blue with no comparison
the pure deep blue of the summer noon in this place.
No clouds
no movement
you hold your breath and turn and follow the circle of the
unbending horizon line horizon’s circle.
back
The workers eat their lunch in silence, gathered beside the road,
looking out across the fields
the way fishermen watch the sea.
back
Celery &
spring onions &
leeks &
lettuces &
fragile crops which would be ruined by machinery.
back
When the late afternoon comes
(when the light is only beginning to fade from the day fall)
the sky is the colour of a freshly forming bruise.
The workers are slowing their pace
pausing more frequently to savour
the warmth of the soil in their hands
aware now of the slight chill in the air
waiting
for the word that the day is over.
back
- - - - - - - - - - - -- - - - - - - - - - - -
What placement can do.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
back
When the evening comes
(before the embers of the closing of the day)
the sky is the colour of your father’s eyes.
A darkening, muddied blue,
hiding shadows
turning away. Awake, still;
alive, just;
but going.
Going gently.
The workers have left the field and collected their pay,
measured by the weight of the food they have gathered.
The marks of their footprints are fading,
dusted over with soil blown in by a wind from the sea.
back
What he thought he’d find.
There is no history here.
No dramatic finds of Saxon villages.
No burial mounds or hidden treasures.
No Tollund Man.
Only the rusted anchors our ploughs drag up,
left when these fields were the sea.
back
Those rusted anchors have been sunk in the soil
ever since before it was drained, and sometimes
the turning of the earth brings them closer to the surface
and sometimes
it will sends them further down.
Buried out there at the edge of the field.Butyouwerethere
The sound of plough metal on soil, the roar
of stones & earth.
As he/it Tumbles further down or is hauled to the surface.
break the flat surface
back
That field. In that field. Down by that field.
The floods have come, again,
the road like a causeway
across the sea.
back
T h e w a t e r s t r e t c h e d a s f a r a s t h e h o r i z o n
t h e
h o r i z o n
l o s t
i n t h e
t h i c k
f o g.
back
Telegraph poles dotted
across the water
like the masts
of sunken boats.
The cars marooned. High & dry.
Piercing red lights suspended in a long line through the fog.
back
The mists of yesterday have disappeared,
the sky reflected clearly in the flooded fields
the sky reflected clearly in the flooded fields.
back
The day is broken open & clear:
the great ship of Ely Cathedral
just visible
across the water.
And we were there.
back
Acknowledgments
‘In Winter The Sky’ was first published, in a different form and under the title of ‘What The Sky Sees’, in Granta 78, 2002.
‘If It Keeps On Raining’ was first published in the BBC National Short Story Award 2010 anthology, by Comma Press. It was also broadcast on Radio 4 in November 2010.
The title of ‘Fleeing Complexity’ is taken from an interview with Richard Ford conducted by Tim Adams, published in Granta 99, 2007.
‘Which Reminded Her, Later’ was first published in Granta 99, 2007.
‘Close’ was commissioned by the Cheltenham Literary Festival, and first broadcast on Radio 4 in October 2007. It was first published in The Sea of Azov, a World Jewish Relief anthology published by Five Leaves, 2009.
‘We Wave And Call’ was first published by the Guardian Weekend magazine in 2011.
‘Supplementary Notes To The Testimony’ was inspired by stories I was told whilst on a trip to the Nuba Mountains of Sudan, and uses the very broadly transposed outlines of those stories as its unseen background. Many thanks to Carbino, Anil Osman and Mahamud Ismail for speaking so openly with me; and thanks to Médecins Sans Frontières and the Sunday Times for organising and supporting the trip. I also drew on an interview with Mark Argent, a demining engineer working with Danish Churches Aid in the Nuba Mountains (any errors in the section about landmines being my own, of course), and on a 2001 Observer article by Burhan Wazir.
‘Wires’ was first published in the BBC National Short Story Award 2010 anthology, by Comma Press. It was also broadcast on Radio 4 in September 2011.
Thanks, variously, for support, insight, reading and inspiration, to the following: Kathy Belden, Tracy Bohan, Katie Bond, Cassie Browne, Sarah-Jane Forder, Helen Garnons-Williams, Peter Gustavsson, Pippa Hennesey, Chloe Hooper, Erica Jarnes, Maggie and David Jones, Anne Joseph, Kirstie Joynson, Tam Laniado, Elena Lappin, Éireann Lorsung, Carrie Majer, Colum McCann, Maile Meloy, Nottingham Writers’ Studio, Richard Pilgrim, Mark Robson, the Society of Authors, Craig Taylor, Matthew Welton, Oliver Wood, Writing East Midlands, John Young.
And thanks, for everything, to Alice, Eleanor and Lewis.
A Note on the Author
Jon McGregor is the author of the critically acclaimed If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things, So Many Ways to Begin and Even the Dogs. He is the winner of the Betty Trask Prize and the Somerset Maugham Award, and has been twice longlisted for the Man Booker Prize. He was runner-up for the BBC National Short Story Award in both 2010 and 2011, with ‘If It Keeps on Raining’ and ‘Wires’ respectively. He was born in Bermuda in 1976. He grew up in Norfolk and now lives in Nottingham.
By the Same Author
If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things
So Many Ways to Begin
Even the Dogs
First published in Great Britain 2012
This electronic edition published in 2012 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Copyright © 2012 by Jon McGregor
Linocuts © 2012 by Paul Greeno
The moral right of the author has been asserted
All rights reserved
You may not copy, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise
make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any means
(including without limitation electronic, digital, optical, mechanical, photocopying,
printing, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the
publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication
may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages
Bloomsbury Publishing, London, Berlin, New York and Sydney
50 Bedford Square, London WC1B 3DP
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available
from the British Library
ISBN 9781408811290
www.bloomsbury.com/jonmcgregor
Visit www.bloomsbury.com to find out more about our authors and their books
You will find extracts, author interviews, author events and you can sign up for
newsletters to be the first to hear about our latest releases and special offers