A tin of milk part 5: If You’ve got to go, you’ve got to go!8 min read

Don’t think you ever forget anything. When we do something several times it forms a habit. Continue with that habit for a long time, and it becomes your character. Continue with that character and eventually, perhaps in another life, it comes up as instinct. 
― Sri S. Satchidananda, The Yoga Sutras

“Would you settle for boom and bust? It’s a bit less portentous.”

And they left the cove and drove a little way to the first and last hill, parked, opened the gate  and began the stroll to the summit. John had been there many times but still felt its strangeness as they followed earlier footfalls.

As they walked up the hill, past grazing horses which looked up idly and went back to the business of grazing, an elderly couple and a small terrier were coming down towards them.

Bonnie said, “I spy dog walkers.”

“It’s a popular spot; watch what you put your feet, people seem to think it’s not worth picking up what their pets leave behind if horses don’t and there’s no bin in the car park.

As they reached the ancient ditch and vestigial rampart the terrier reached them and stopped to be fussed. They both obliged as the couple’s conversation hung in the still air.

The woman, grey haired and tanned from an out-door life said, “But it was so sudden, that’s what shocks me.”

The man nodded. “Well we don’t know how long they’ve known do we?”

It was her turn to nod. “No I suppose not. I suppose when you get to a certain age?”

“Younger than me by a year or two anyway….” He broke off and smiled at them: “Hello there, lovely day for it. Now where’s that dog got to?”

They smiled back and Bonnie responded. “Hello.  It is indeed.  I think he went that-a-way.” A half-hearted bark came from the track to the left of the main path.

“Honestly, he gets into everything”, the woman said smiling. As the couple moved on she resumed their previous conversation. ”Do you have any regrets? I mean if I went tomorrow or you did…”

And they loitered, pretending to take in the view but much more interested in overhearing a little more. Half a mile away a toy airplane taxied across a ribbon runway backed by sea.

“Do I have any regrets?…..Only one.  I wish I’d married you a lot sooner than I did.”

“Get away with you.”

“What about you?”

“What?”, she asked, concentration lost as she scanned the hill-side for her dog.

“Any regrets?”

She turned and looked him in the eye. “You never got me that Aga.”

“It’s not too late.”

“I couldn’t be doing with all that bending now anyroad.” And then she said resignedly, “We shall have to go up for it though; it’ll be expected.”

“It’s a hell of a drive.  Still you’re right, we’ll have to show our respects.  I don’t know, it seems like only yesterday he was a twenty year-old who couldn’t afford a decent wedding ring and now this.”

“We’ve been there for him every other time something has gone off, we’d better be there for this.”

“Aye.“ And he brightened and said, “ Oh well, at least he can afford a decent wedding reception this time, champagne instead of rough cider!”

She smiled and then pointed, “There he is. Oh look at him, he’s covered in mud and worse; it’ll be all over the car.” And they were gone, voices fading as they wandered and wondered down the hill.

John and Bonnie looked at each other and she said, with a smile on her face, “I thought they were talking about a wake not a wedding. It seems you can’t keep some old dogs down.”

“Going round again. Age and stage is a tricky one though. Do you think we’ll know when ‘Last Tango in Paris’ becomes….’Last Teadance in Eastbourne’?”

“Perhaps it already has”, she responded, “and ‘Escape to the Country’ needs to be ‘Escape to That Nice Residential Home just around the Corner from Waitrose’. ‘I Know What You Did Last Summer’ would be ‘I Know What you Weren’t Well Enough to Do Last Summer’. Do you think maybe they show the same programmes time and time again so there’s a slight chance we’ll remember the plot?”

Then they had reached the hill-top and looked around them at fields and hamlets in an ancient patchwork braceleted with a blue band of sea.

John said, “Here we are; it looks like a steep climb from the bottom but it’s actually no more than a gentle stroll, especially on a day like this. Belerion, laid out below you like a carpet. This hill had a history long before the first Roman soldier stood here – the highest point around and a fortress and holy place from the very beginning. I sometimes wonder how many fighting or trading men  stood here over the centuries and whether they saw and thought the same things. There would be Americans in the 1940s, cavaliers and roundheads before that, Saxons under Athelstan, Celts, Vikings, an Irish saint or warlord or two, Phoenicians come for the tin and before them all, the ancient ones.”

“More ancient even than us? It’s surprising there’s no church here,” she said. “Christians generally stuck one wherever there was a pagan holy place. It is an amazing view; you really can see the for miles.”

“There was a chapel, he said. “and hermits kept a beacon lit for the boats. They built an observation post here in the war and concreted over some things. Needs must I guess.  We are our history though, as well as our present and our future.”

“Stop it you’re spooking me. What’s that over there?”

“It’s not me, it’s the place”, he protested. “That over there, well it depends who’s looking. It’s Lyonesse, the Western Isles, the Cassiterides, the Fortunate Isles or perhaps Avalon, where Arthur found healing or died after the Battle of Camlann? Nowadays it’s the Isles of Scilly but down here nothing is quite what it seems. It’s such an old place that it’s sometimes easy to believe in magic. What’s left here, the standing stones, foggous and dolmens are what was left when most of it had been pillaged for building-stone for a house or a church or destroyed in the mining boom. There must have been so much of it that newer buildings looked out of place.

Looking at it now it’s hard to imagine an industrial landscape. This was the centre of the first industrial revolution, with mine chimneys, spoil heaps and streams green with industrial effluent. Tin was the big one but there was copper, arsenic, lead. Early on it was just streamed, pan-handled from the stream beds, and washed out of the surface deposits and shallow diggings. Early photographs show hundreds of engine house chimneys, mine shafts and tips. Mining and engineering made fortunes for owners and investors and then…”

“Then?”

“After the boom, the bust and a bit more pestilence and famine. The price of tin dropped as lodes were discovered elsewhere and the miners left for the new world and the colonies in a great diaspora. They’re are mining again now though, working through the old spoil heaps too, for elements they didn’t even know existed then. They didn’t know what they were throwing away. But then do any of us?”

“Plus ca change.”

“Indeed. You see over there, once the whole of that side of the peninsula was owned by one man, every farm from the quarry to the Cape.  He was another relic of a bygone age; Chairman of the Bench and Lord of the Manor in what was, before the war, a pretty feudal place. He was an eccentric and paternal landlord who did pretty much as he pleased but looked after his tenants and carried on the great tradition of droit de seigneur – some things have changed for the better. Unfortunately, when he died, his only and very spoilt daughter married the ‘wrong sort’ and he and she sold off farms one by one to maintain their life-style. People got to own the land they worked and I think she died alone in a tiny flat in town.  The house is still there though.  It must have been a fantastic place during the war.  Mary Wesley was a permanent house guest on the run from a failed marriage and the condemnation of society, not to mention the blitz, and the house was a refuge for agents and officers in need of some R&R – which I believe they got in full measure. In those days anything went; rules didn’t really count. Nothing lasts though does it?

“Ozymandeous rules, o.k.?”

“But not for ever. Come on, let’s head back to the car.”

And they made their way back down as the lowering sun shimmered on a cut-glass sea working its timeless magic.

“You know a few years ago I used to run up hills like this for fun. Ageing isn’t all beer and skittles is it?”

“Still we can be grumpy and a bit daft: that’s got to be a bonus.”

“Quite right; we get to say and do all the things we wanted to when we were young and responsible.”

“Like joining a reading group you mean…..”