Thunderstone, p.1
Thunderstone, page 1
‘Any book by Nancy Campbell has to be worth reading.’
Dervla Murphy
‘A humbling, honest, raw and deeply moving book that reminds us what it means to be alive. What it means to be human, to be ill, to be in communion with all with which we share this earth . . . how we dance through the songs we are given – no matter how dark or troubling the lines may be.’
Kerri ní Dochartaigh, author of Thin Places
‘Such a compelling account of deliberate living, in the best tradition of Thoreau, Dillard and Roger Deakin. Nancy Campbell’s deep knowledge of art, nature and other cultures is completely transporting, even while her story is set over a single year in a small caravan marooned in middle England. She blends the intensely local with the wider world with such skill. I couldn’t put it down.’
Tanya Shadrick, author of The Cure For Sleep
‘One has the rare sense, reading this book, of a work that emerged fully formed. Vivid, intense, wry and clarified, as Campbell steps fully into the frame, she simultaneously makes a case for empty spaces: for the gaps, absences and edgelands through which change first comes . . . If this is a story of grief and illness, loneliness and heartache, one is left with the feeling that here is a writer who knows better than most of us how to live.’
Helen Jukes, author of A Honeybee Heart Has Five Openings
‘Nancy Campbell renders her life through the eyes of a poet from the midst of hardship, in scenes that are by turns humbling, humorous and exquisite. Her words dazzle like mica in the flow of a muddy river.’
Sarah Thomas, author of The Raven’s Nest
‘Peppering her poetic prose with fascinating stories and close observations of the natural world, Nancy Campbell brings us into the woods with her as she wrestles with the practicalities and emotional fallout of living alone in a remote caravan. As Campbell rebuilds her life she explores deeper issues of belonging, friendship and how to live with courage.’
Lulah Ellender, author of Grounding
‘Thunderstone goes well beyond mere memoir. Nancy is a badass, a wild woman corralling experiences of poetry, humanity and the natural world to shape visions of new ways forward for us all. Her forgotten nettle-patch beyond the boundaries of civilisation becomes a resonant setting for what is a work of the richest travel literature, written from a place of deliberate isolation. You carry it with you, long after finishing.’
Matthew Teller, author of Nine Quarters of Jerusalem
‘The terra nova Nancy Campbell discovers in Thunderstone lies close to home – a pocket of overlooked and semi-derelict land alongside a railway line and canal in Oxford . . . This isn’t the city she has known, on and off, for two decades; but from the vantage point of her new home, she can see it, and the world that stretches beyond, through a fresh lens.’
James Attlee, author of Under the Rainbow: Voices from Lockdown
‘Nancy Campbell writes of a world that has been shattered and reassembled, weaving intricate new patterns from the debris of the old. A writer of quiet strength, clarity and empathy, with a traveller’s eye for detail and the precision of a poet, she is the wisest and kindest of guides through heartbreak and beyond.’
Nick Hunt, author of Outlandish
THUNDERSTONE
OTHER BOOKS BY THIS AUTHOR
Fifty Words for Snow
The Library of Ice: Readings from a Cold Climate
Disko Bay
Navigations
Doverodde: Twenty Days in Denmark
How to Say ‘I Love You’ in Greenlandic: An Arctic Alphabet
for Sarah Bodman
comrade and collaborator
all these and most other kinds of stony bodies which are formed thus strangely figured, do owe their formation and figuration, not to any kind of Plastick virtue inherent in the earth, but to the shells of certain Shell-fishes, which, either by some Deluge, Inundation, Earthquake, or some such other means, came to be thrown to that place, and there to be fill’d with some kind of Mudd or Clay, or petrifying Water, or some other substance, which in tract of time has been settled together and hardned in those shelly mounds into those shaped substances we now find them.
ROBERT HOOKE
MICROGRAPHIA; OR, SOME PHYSIOLOGICAL DESCRIPTIONS OF MINUTE BODIES MADE BY MAGNIFYING GLASSES, WITH OBSERVATIONS AND INQUIRIES THEREUPON
CONTENTS
October 2019, and aftermath
June
July
August
September
Acknowledgements
Notes
October 2019, and aftermath
‘Because a thing is going strong now, it need not go strong for ever,’ [Margaret] said. ‘This craze for motion has only set in during the last hundred years. It may be followed by a civilisation that won’t be a movement, because it will rest on the earth.’
E. M. FORSTER
HOWARDS END
What is your name? says the nurse.
Anna, says Anna.
Can you tell me who this is? The nurse points at me. I sit on the plastic hospital chair, my chin sunk into the collar of my coat, haggard after travelling overnight from Munich.
Nancy. Anna pronounces the two syllables carefully. There’s warmth in her voice. No rising intonation, no question. I don’t believe I’ve ever had a stronger sense of what it is to be loved than at this moment. But love isn’t what I want now.
Where are you, Anna? says the nurse.
In the pub, says Anna.
As the first rumours of a virus in Wuhan circled the world, I was sitting on the fifth floor of an Oxford hospital, watching my partner as she slept. Anna’s face was wan, her arms mottled by deep bruises. A baroque arrangement of tubes surrounded the bed, like briars in the fairy tale. Anna’s life had been saved by a rare procedure known as mechanical thrombectomy, which sends a catheter through the blood vessels to siphon clots from the brain. I imagined the surgeon’s intricate manoeuvres. As in the movies when the actor finds the combination to a safe in a race against the clock, turning a dial by torchlight in a dark room.
When Anna awoke monster was one of the few words she could say. Monster! with a look of incomprehension and terror at her own act of speech. What dark forest was she lost in? Did she mean herself or me – or something else? As the days passed she found other words, and strung them together for me to unravel: In the pub. You have a beautiful theme.
Nurses came with tests: first, a piece of paper on which was a pattern of stars. Anna was instructed to draw circles around each of them. Since her right arm was paralysed, she took the pen in her left hand, and scribbled out all the stars. ‘Let’s try again,’ said the nurse kindly, as if it didn’t really matter, presenting Anna with an identical sheet, and explaining the task once more. Anna struck through the stars furiously, as if wishing to obliterate a whole galaxy. When I left the ward, the nurse followed me. Beside the machine where you put in a coin and got a cup of bad coffee, she gave me a leaflet called What is Communication?
She said: ‘You do know, that Anna has very severe aphasia?’
I did know. I didn’t.
I put a coin in the machine, and hesitated.
‘The coffee’s shit,’ said a voice behind me. ‘My dad likes the hot chocolate.’
I punched the button for hot chocolate.
Boiling water spluttered onto the milk powder. I turned to see a man in his sixties, dressed in water-sports shorts and a T-shirt that said Oxford Kayak Tours. He exuded the confidence of a consultant.
‘Thanks for the advice. It looks disgusting.’
He shrugged. ‘You could bring her a Thermos.’
I gazed across a row of beds covered in identical blue blankets. A window ran the length of the ward, and I watched weather moving across the valley, sheets of rain muting the autumn colours of the distant woods. Oxford’s dreaming spires are spoken of more often than the soft hills that hem them in. When I first arrived in the city as a student, a college doctor warned me that my lungs would miss the air of the northern moors: the Vale of the White Horse contains pollution like smoke in a bowl. The doctor could have applied his theory to people, too. I didn’t intend to stay once my studies ended, but however many times I left, circumstances would draw me back. The long chalk range of the Chilterns, to the south and east, and the low scarp slope of the Berkshire Downs were gently but persuasively encircling. Through twenty years of travels, Oxford remained my poste restante.
Anna had allowed me the freedom to travel, but recently she had seemed to care less whether I returned. We were slipping out of each other’s orbit with an ominously steady trajectory. I worked away from home more and more, and when I was offered a fellowship in Germany, I took it. Anna did not come.
A few months later, I was hosting a dinner for a wild cohort of artists in my apartment in the Künstlerhaus, a converted baroque palace beside the River Regnitz. I heard myself talking wistfully about my partner, who being an interpreter was so much better at languages than I was, then making excuses for her absence that did not even convince me as I uttered them. Later, while rinsing the delicate wine glasses, I resolved to travel back to England to have a conversation about The Future, which might mean Separating.
The night before I was due to leave, I received the phone call. The one that comes from an unknown number and rings and rings until you know you have to answer. My suitcase was already packed.
In our basement flat, I begin to unravel the disarray that amassed before Anna’s hospitalisation. The briars had grown until they hid the whole castle. Sca ns of Anna’s brain have revealed that she’s suffered at least one ‘undocumented’ stroke in the last few years. Such a neutral word. Behind it lies an incomprehensible enormity: that Anna experienced brain trauma and did not receive help, that we continued to struggle through the days oblivious to her needs. I flick back through the calendar in my mind, again and again, wondering which moment things changed. I view our lives together in a different light. The behaviour that puzzled and disturbed me: why every time I left for a few days the flat descended into chaos, so that I dreaded returning home; the dishes unwashed, the loose change scattered over the floor, the unopened mail stuffed down the back of the bed and the sofa, inside books; one hundred small tasks begun and never completed; the spice rack that never made it onto the kitchen wall; the escalating library fines; all the mysterious tote bags lying around, each filled with lunches that were never eaten, a banana and a Müller yoghurt and a bottle of fizzy drink – some several months old, a black coagulation of the organic and the almost imperishable. In among the ordure, I find pockets of sanity even more heartbreaking than the mess: notebooks, in which Anna had written out her favourite poems since she was a teenager; her violin case; a box full of beautiful hand-painted wooden cups, the inside lacquered gold, wrapped in a Moscow newspaper from 2002.
As I stand among the junk, the realisation comes to me that Anna has been ill for a very long time. Perhaps as long as I’ve known her. I trace quirks of character back, wondering at their significance. An impatience of background music. That listlessness and torpor, which botched a final stab at romance this summer. I’d booked a boutique hotel in Paris, but Anna didn’t want to get up to catch the Eurostar, so I went alone, to a muted enjoyment of the king-sized bed, the luxuriant claw-footed bath. My annoyance dissolves in horror that I did not see how ill my partner was. Could I have prevented her stroke with better care? I was scrupulous on my travels, precise in my observations of other places, but where had my attention been when I was at home?
During the shortest days of the year, I rattle between the damp Oxford flat and my rooms in the Künstlerhaus, aware that one represents a possible future, and one does not – but which? I put my money and my hopes on the Künstlerhaus, as I must in order to keep moving, although both seem equally dreamlike. The rose garden by the Regnitz a glistening daydream, and hospital vigils a dimly remembered nightmare. No one can choose what dreams they dream, or when they wake from them. I can board a train, but I cannot leave these visions behind.
The howl is an animal that stalks me now. A silent, unpredictable, chest-wrenching, bent-double, dribbling-out-of-a-mouth-that-will-not-close sorrow. Like all illegal and dangerous, unconventional and unsightly pets, like the packs of suburban pythons or tower-block tigers, it needs to be kept hidden away. But my howl won’t stay locked in the basement we once shared. The smallest whiff of nostalgia lures it out. I’m in the ward at lunchtime when the aide brings Anna egg mayonnaise sandwiches, cut into tiny crustless triangles for patients who are in danger of choking on their food. I remember the picnics I made our first summer together. In her honour, I elevated egg mayonnaise to a high art. No dill, no mustard now. No cracked black pepper. No thinly sliced radishes. Anna makes a face, and sends the plate away.
Later that afternoon, waiting in a November rainstorm for the number 10 bus (always infrequent), the howl breaks up and out until I seem to be melting into the oncoming night and torrential rain. I’m ecstatic with grief, oblivious to the street.
The traffic lights turn red. A silver Toyota stops, and the driver rolls down the window.
‘You all right, love?’ I recognise the hot-chocolate man. Headlights twinkle on the gutter. I gulp. The howl is angry to be interrupted. It is far too soon.
‘Yes.’ The lie hurts, my ears ring as if I’m a diver surfacing with the bends. Realising I may need an excuse, I add, ‘I was just in the hospital.’
‘Me too. Where do you need to get to? I’ll give you a lift.’
I drop weakly into the passenger seat, and buckle up. His car smells of Opal Fruits.
The lights change. A vague memory of normal behaviour prompts me to ask: What do you do?
‘At the moment, I’m looking after my mam and dad. But usually I buy and sell things,’ he says mysteriously.
‘What sort of things?’ I ask. Looking sideways, I notice he steers with one wrist on the wheel.
‘Oh, vintage cigars, photographs, all sorts of stuff. I got started with conkers in the school playground. Used to soak them in vinegar so they were invincible weapons. I was making a killing. The head teacher announced in assembly: “Will the little boy who is selling conkers please stop it?” So I had to pack it in.’
‘Fools,’ I say. ‘They should have put you in charge of the tuck shop.’
He drops me at the corner by the war memorial. Then, an after-thought, ‘What’s your name?’
I tell him.
‘You can call me Sven,’ he says, and drops a beat. ‘Short for Svengali.’ With a high yelp, the kind of laughter you hear from those who are desperate or deeply despairing, he hits the accelerator. I have a feeling that Sven and I are going to walk the same road for some time. But I will definitely not share his moccasins.
The definition of shock was unknown to me. I drifted through the days in a haze of bland apathy, missing deadlines, failing to answer emails. In her memoir of the aftermath of her son’s death, Time Lived, Without Its Flow, poet Denise Riley writes of grief as a rupture, ‘this curious sense of being pulled right outside of time, as if beached in a clear light’. To resist those tides of timelessness I kept a new timetable saved on my desktop, so I could track Anna’s relentless schedule in rehab. Physio to help with mobility, and other activities to adapt to reduced mobility. Craft. Speech and Language Therapy. (Someone who had often told me of the thrills of simultaneous interpreting, Anna now seemed to be interpreting herself, reaching deep within to slowly excavate a language no one else knew.) Understanding Your Stroke, a course to build empowerment and autonomy. After a few weeks, Understanding Your Stroke disappeared. ‘Why?’ I ask. ‘Did you graduate?’
‘It was rubbish. The psychologist he. She was rubbish. I did not wish to do it.’
I laugh at Anna’s characteristic hauteur, unchanged by stroke. Thirty minutes of someone lecturing you on your brain injury might indeed be more tedious than the daytime television on the ward.
We sit side by side on her bed. The foam mattress sighs when I settle on to it. Over the winter I’ve got used to hospital beds, articulated like model dinosaurs, their surprise elevations at a button’s touch. For a few months, the nurses locked the sides of the bed to prevent Anna falling out. It is a relief when these barricades – and other safeguards against everything going wrong – start to come down.
We run out of things to say quite quickly. We had so very little to say to each other before, and now that there’s such an enormous event to discuss, there are no words. We never held much store in chit-chat. Besides, Anna gets so tired, and I get so distressed.
Therefore, we only say essential things.
Today I am beating around the essential thing, the thing I’d hoped to discuss in different circumstances months ago – that I consider our relationship over, but I am still here, on her team. I meant to tell her last time, and the time before that. I didn’t have the courage. And I was wary in case the news might affect her recovery. I cannot procrastinate any longer. Now even the kind doctors are asking about The Future. Is our flat adaptable? I point out that we don’t own our flat. We can barely cover the rent, let alone make improvements, if the landlords allowed us to do so. The kind doctors seem surprised to be faced with a couple so unsettled and impoverished and I feel a gnawing sense that I have not done life right, not at all.
Now it looks as though I am going to do it even less right, by casting an explosive device into the midst of Anna’s recovery. But I cannot hide from my heart. I believe in telling the truth, even a hard truth – especially to the people I’m closest to, who are inevitably those I will hurt most. Duplicity is too insulting. When the truth is told, everyone can share equally in a story. As I voice my doubts, I realise that, of course, Anna has long had her own.
