The Carhullan Army (7 page)

Jackie had tightly cropped hair, a lopsided face, and a broken jawline. Her eyes were the blue of the region’s quarried stone. If she’d had a softer appearance she would have been called bonny perhaps. As it was she was handsome, arresting. In the picture she was wearing a tank top and army surplus trousers. She looked both slim and stocky at once. The second photograph, taken five years later, had her turning away from the camera. Her hair was slightly longer, she was much leaner, and there was a deep frown on her face.

Both picture cuttings were tucked into a metal box of possessions in my backpack, with my identification card and a few other personal effects. They were faded and creased, but I had kept them. If she was still alive, it would be her I’d have to address when I reached my destination.

And I could feel it already, that I was entering her country, her domain. It was a raw landscape, verging on wilderness. The thick green vegetation overrunning the lowlands was now behind me. Rock was beginning to show through the grassland; the bones of an older district, stripped by the wind, washed clean by fast-flowing becks and rain. There was heather, bracken, and gorse.

As I walked upwards on the scars I thought about her. In the early reports Jackie had always been depicted as a typical Northerner; obdurate, reticent, backlit. She seldom went on the record about anything, personal or otherwise. When she did, it was curtly expressed. Anyone coming to the farm needed good shoes, she said – boots, trainers – books, and nothing else. They should get their wisdom teeth removed first. Rarer still, she spoke about her beliefs. ‘It’s still all about body and sexuality for us,’ she was once quoted as saying. ‘We are controlled through those things; psychologically, financially, eternally. We endorse the manmade competition between ourselves that disunites us, striping us of our true ability. We don’t believe we can govern better, and until we believe this, we never will. It’s time for a new society.’

When it was suggested that she might be offering an empty alternative, a formula that had already been unsuccessful, she directed scorn at the governing politicians, asking if the environment they were creating was acceptable. She was often asked what it was that she had in her, making her do what she was doing, as if she were somehow afflicted. Interviewers commented on her impatience, her furious suspension of the conversation if the wrong questions were asked.

Jackie and Veronique were given plenty of titles, called plenty of things by different people in the years of Carhullan’s publicity. But as they had it they were simply libertarians. As they had it, theirs was a culture moulded from necessity, formed, as Jackie described, to spean the lambs before they became sheep.

And Carhullan was Jackie’s idea, that much was apparent. Her family were from the area, so she knew it like none of the other women ever would, though they worked the land every day, moving sheep and cows, panting across the rough terrain to break the eight-mile hour. This was her home turf. Her territory. She had either bought the place outright or taken it over because it was lying empty. Already by then people were heading into the town, driven out of rural habitations by the transport problems and the steepening fuel prices. Farming was considered a dying industry.

The buildings sat in total isolation, far from any conceivable thoroughfare. I knew I had hiked near there in the past, but I had never seen it. It was the highest farm in England, almost inaccessible, impervious to the flooding that would come in the years to follow, and the shifting of the water tables. It had a massive Westmorland kitchen, a cast-iron range, and any number of ramshackle outbuildings that would become dormitories. Until they wired it up, there was no electricity. It could be reached only on foot or by four-wheel drive via a convoluted upland route.

The land belonging to Carhullan covered hundreds of acres and took in moors, woods and fields. No one knew who originally enclosed it, but it had always been a private steading, not a tenanted farm belonging to the local lord. It was a vast, self-contained, workable place. Jackie had grown up in the valley below, and she must have wondered about its history, maybe trekking up the mountain and climbing in through the windows as a girl, lighting fires on the iron grill and sleeping there overnight. Finding the bones of martins and swifts buried in the soft floors of the byres.

Years later, looking at the photographs of her under the phosphorous Mag-lamp of our quarter, I imagined that she was visionary, that she had foreseen the troubles and the exodus from the villages and hamlets long before it became reality. She had sidestepped the collapse, and the harsh regime of the Civil Reorganisation. Every time I opened a tin and transferred the gelatinous contents into a bowl I thought of the farm’s bright vegetables on the market stalls the decade before. I imagined the taste of Carhullan’s crisp peppers and yellow lentils, the delicate flavour of the lavender ice cream the women made and sold.

At work in the New Fuel factory, with the noise of the conveyor deafening me, I had often imagined the benefits of being up there with Jackie and Veronique. The tedium of my job was excruciating: eight hours of standing on the concrete factory floor watching metal bolts roll past, knowing that the turbines were not being installed offshore, they were just being stored in the warehouse, cylinder upon cylinder, their blades fixed and static. There was a dead comb of them now built against the walls. I could get inside each grey shell, take out the lock-pin and turn the rotors smoothly with my hands. There were enough units to power the whole of the Northern region if they had been installed in the estuaries.

But for reasons unknown to us, there had been no green light for the operation, no deployment of the technology yet. Authority agents arrived at the factory and took inventories from time to time, as if about to ship the turbines out to the sea platforms constructed years before above the brown tides. The evening news bulletins broadcast still-reels of the New Fuel products, as if proving the recovery’s protocol was working. But it was all a bad joke. Every day the pieces were manufactured and assembled, then left defunct. And like drones we added to the vast metal hive.

At first I had been glad of the placement. Work at the refinery was much worse; the manual labour was filthy and jeopardous. Those at the vats quickly developed breathing problems, shadows on their lungs. There were complaints from them that the credits earned were not as high as they should be. But they were higher than anywhere else. And the products were being used – the unconventional oil, and the bios – if only by the government.

I had quickly realised our efforts at the factory were for nothing, and I hated the redundancy of it all. There was a pervasive mood of despondency in the hangar, joylessness. In the restroom the men and women taking shift breaks removed their face guards and tried to sleep for ten minutes before resuming work. Some went into the washrooom and cracked open ampoules of flex. They came back onto the factory floor with wide pupils and no coordination. There had been several accidents. The previous year I had seen a man’s arm torn off in the heel-blade of a machine. No one heard him shout out. He had simply picked the arm up with his other hand and walked towards the door of the factory, leaving a wet red trail. I saw him walk past. He stopped before he got to the exit and sat down and placed the amputated limb across his knees. I went over and knelt beside him. ‘I was a teacher,’ he said quietly. ‘I was a teacher. A teacher.’ There was a look of shock in his dilated eyes. I knew he could not feel a thing.

There was something better out there. I knew what it was and where to find it. Even if it meant looking behind me, to a venue that had long been forgotten in the aftermath of catastrophe, and the desperate rush to subsist. Like those who had brought pictures of better times to their workstations and tacked them up on the panels of machines, I had kept Carhullan in my mind throughout the recovery’s dark years.

It had never been built with the outside world in mind. It was of another age, when utilities and services were unimaginable, before the light bulb had been dreamt of. They must always have known its potential, Jackie and Veronique. Within a year of it being inhabited the women had installed a waterwheel, harnessing a nearby spring. A year-round garden had been planted, and a fast-growing willow copse. There were sties, bees, an orchard, and a fishery at the beck shuttle of the tarn. There were peat troughs, filtration tanks. It was all grandly holistic, a truly green initiative.

It was, and had always been, removed from the faulted municipal world. It sat in the bields, the sheltered lull before the final ascent of the High Street range. There was a panoramic view of the surrounding valleys; it was the best lookout point for miles. The Romans knew it and they had raised a fort there that Carhullan’s byres and pens were later built around. And before the Centurions, the Britons had a site nearby; five weather-pitted standing stones which leant awkwardly towards each other, west of the paddocks. The Five Pins they were called. It was a place for pathfinders and entrepreneurs, empire builders, priests, and survivalists; those with the determination to carry stone thousands of feet up, over rough water and inhibitive ground, those who could rear livestock then slaughter it, those who had something so true in themselves that they were willing to dwell at the edge of civilisation for the sake of it.

That was what Jackie Nixon had had in her. It was a spirit bred from the landscape I was now treading. And, as I ascended the brant slopes, I wondered if her ideas had first been formed around the farm, all those years ago when she lay beds of kindling in the sooty range and drank water from the cold stream. It must have been put into her head early on, that after technology and its failures, after the monumental mistakes of the industrialised world, human beings could still shelter and survive in rudimentary ways, just as they always had. Independent communities were possible. Alternative societies. Something durable and extraordinary could be created in these mountains.

*

By the time I reached the lower bields I was exhausted. I had never carried so much weight such a distance before. The straps of my bag were making my skin raw and tender and my feet felt as if every tiny pliant bone in them was broken. I stopped briefly and put my damp vest and jacket back on. Immediately I felt cold. I walked on again. The water I had brought was gone now and my saliva was thickening up; when I cleared my mouth, it looked like cuckoo spit on the ground. I’d been expecting a clear fast-flowing stream or a gill from which to fill up the canister but had not yet come across one, and I didn’t want to wander off the thin sheep track. In the last hour, without really realising it, I had been talking softly, telling myself that it would be all right, telling myself to keep going.

The fell was covered with stiff gingery grass and droves of heather. Here and there my foot sank into small brackish wells, then sucked back out covered in mud. Every step was harder than it should have been. The smell of the grassland and peat was all around; open and bloody, burnt and aromatic. I’d been keeping the dry-stone wall I thought signified Carhullan’s land on my right as I climbed, and it had led me through bogs and swales, up over outcrops of rock and loose bluffs.

My father had told me as a child that it was the Vikings who originally built Cumbria’s dry-stone walls, and they had been more determined with their corridors than even the Romans. Here, now, I could believe it. In places the structures ran almost vertically upwards; each stone held tightly on to those surrounding it. They were modest, impossible feats of engineering. Over the years, while the district was occupied, they had been repaired and tended by farmers, shepherds, and hired hands, but some sections must have dated back a thousand years. A couple of times on the climb I wondered whether I’d been following the wrong wall, whether I might end up on the broad windy summits of the range, lost as the night came in. Now and then I thought I could hear the bleating of sheep, Carhullan’s hefted flocks perhaps, but each time the sound was fainter, and further away.

Looking ahead I judged that there was perhaps just one final hill to scale and then I would be able to see the farm and its outer fields. I decided to stop and rest, and think about what I would say when I arrived. Suddenly it seemed stupid that I had not considered a speech, some meaningful words of introduction that would secure my welcome. I shouldered out of my rucksack, lay it down on the moor, and sat on a broken lip in the wall. I had gained considerable altitude. Below me was the tapering valley, and beyond it, in the next dale, I could see the sleek corner of Blackrigg reservoir.

All around, the wind stroked the tawny grassland; the veld darkened and lightened in waves as the air coursed over its surface. There were belts of dark yellow underneath the parted clouds, the oblique late light of autumn evening. I could smell gorse, blossoming sweetly against its spines. After the confinement and industrial stink of the town, the factory metals, human secretions, the soots and carbons of the refinery, this harsh and fragrant expanse was invigorating. It was the smell of nature, untouched and original, exempt from interference. For all my weariness, it made me feel a little more alive, both human and feral together, and somehow redeemed from the past.

I would tell Jackie and Vee the truth. I’d say nothing more than I felt. That I believed in what they were doing, now more than ever. That I felt there was nothing for me in the society I’d left behind. I couldn’t condone it. I couldn’t live within it.

Suddenly there was a burst of movement at my side. Three deer bolted past, almost silently, their heads held erect, their hides the colour of the surrounding moor, white rumps flashing. The hooves became audible on the wind for a few seconds, a dull thudding on the ground, and then they were gone over the brow of the hill. Their swiftness was astonishing. They had broken cover only because of their speed, as if pieces of the ground had come loose in a rapid landslide. A few seconds later I heard the hollow barking of a stag behind me, and then it flowed past after the hinds, darker and broader against the terrain, its antlers cast high, its neck thick and rough with fleece. I stood up to see if I could catch sight of it rising over the next hill but there was no sign, just patches of October light drifting across the moor. They must have heard my approach, or scented me as they grazed, I thought.