I Am Walking Into the Snow

“I am walking into the snow. I can do this because I am well prepared and have food with me and have trained and know the direction. So long as I know exactly where I am and stay in control and regularly check where I am I will stay alive. The voice in my head keeps telling me what to do and I am careful and determined and deliberate and this is all part of the essential momentum. I can even see myself during this journey and so in a way there are two of me. I can see myself planning all this and getting things together and at the same time I am here in the event itself. The snow is so dense that it is a world of its own, capable of totally changing the terrain. If I do see Evans I will tell him that everything is OK.”

“I am walking in the snow. I have given up running. The snow changes each hill and each tree and I can no longer see where the river might be. The river is important to me because if I am on the wrong side they will shoot at me. There are landmines as well. The snipers look out for children and women. They have a good idea of what brings you here and when you come into sight they make up their minds pretty quickly.

Sometimes they pick you off as you get nearer where the river is. If they are very drunk they shoot at once and often miss you. If you are one of those who have to get across the river you will find dead bodies there, faces peering up through the ice, blood turning to ice. If the sniper doesn't get you the cold will. I have run for miles and will freeze to death if I wait long. I am waiting for my brother to appear.”

“I am walking in the snow because there is nowhere else to go. I am waiting for a hot air balloon to land and pick me up and as I rise above the snow fields I will be able to look down at the hospital and perhaps be able to see the fire still alight. I will be able to tell the angels on board the balloon about the years I have spent in the hospital and how ever since I first saw them last summer I have waited to escape. And about the letters that I sent. And about the plans and setting the ward on fire and about the male nurse called Spender who tortures us. And about my friend called Annie who ran away last winter. I still have her big umbrella. Because of the snow it will be hard to see the white hospital building and the staff rushing about in their white uniforms but the fire will be visible I am sure. Spender took my shoes away and said that he would cut my toes off. Spender said God was not at home. Spender said they would operate on my brain if they thought I had one. Spender told the African male nurses to get back inside when they ran out to see what snow was like. They picked it up to taste it. They rolled in it. Then they had to go and cut down Mr Rose from a tree. When the balloon comes I will be able to tell the angels about the disappearing numbers and the dead birds and the room full of old newpapers. Then we will fly off to where nobody can see us.”

“Mrs Priddy tells the vicar that she wants to give her husband some blankets because it is very cold now. She tells him that she asked her son to see to this but he did nothing. She says her husband feels the cold terribly and that this winter more birds than ever before are dying each night. The birds head for the evergreens earlier and earlier and the trees are stuffed full. She says God knows how many there are in every tree. She says she asked Paul Bates to see to this as he looks after the graves and things. He had done nothing about it. She says her husband needs the blankets now or it will be too late and she will supply the blankets and it isn't going to cost anyone a thing but it is urgent. She can supply the blankets at the drop of a something or other.The vicar tells her that she should not worry about her husband and that he is warm enough as he is already with the Lord and that only the living need blankets. The next time he sees her she is laying out blankets across the grave. The grave even begins to look like a bed. Then she lies down and it begins to snow again.”

“I am walking into the snow because there is nowhere else to go. I have done this before in dreams and sometimes when I have just woken up and it is often a return to childhood. I enter the classroom and there is Baggy Bottom waiting for me to get the words out. And they will find a dead tramp in the summer house at the Manor. And the rooks cling to their territory waiting for more wars. And the pig houses become igloos and the vicar can only visit some people on horseback and when nobody responds to his shouting he has to tell the police and say special prayers and the evergreens in the churchyard utter low groans and somebody said they saw Cyril Cooke running along The Ridge stark naked at lunchtime. At least he wasn't cycling.”

“Dead owls. Old foxes. Ice moans. Big branches giving way. Church shut for a month. The very old staying in bed. A green sky by mid-afternoon and telephone wires down. Tap tap of bright stars and a feeling that we are all falling back in time. No post. Then rain. The rain like wire. Some pet animals lost and the fields clamped. Too hard to dig a grave and the pigs shitting ice. The sun with bloody scratches and somebody sleeping in the church porch. Silent rooks. I write a letter to a dead friend because it seems the best thing to do. It begins and ends with exactly the same words.”

Dear Robin,

I miss you slightly more each day. I have been trying to complete the concerto I devised just for you but there is ice in my mind and I need to take a long walk and hear your voice and have a talk with you about how it is where you are and how on earth I am meant to survive. During a long spell of snow I have attempted to make some noise and get into the heads of other people in extreme circumstances in places like Bosnia and somebody fleeing from a mental institution and there is always a boy in the snow who may be you or me and I think this is all about being alone in the snow and you being quite somewhere else. I mean what on earth am I doing creating some mad old lady who wants blankets for her dead husband? Or a man running along The Ridge in the nude? Or?

The concerto is about the seasons and begins with winter and a long spell of snow and there are trees stuffed with sheltering birds and the silence of the old who stay in bed and the brittle moaning silence of things bound in ice. The first movement is very long at the moment with kettle drums and bursts of brass and muffled voices which I have never attempted before. And there should be animal sounds if I am up to it.

If there was a fine day even if it was still very cold we could walk and talk but even The Lamb is closed. And the church. In fact our world.

I miss you slightly more each day. I remember other snows. I hear your voice in some of the silences and even answer back.

The piano says so many things about the snow. Sometimes I am amazed. This boy in the snow who seems to have the mind of an explorer for example; where does he come from? What is his meaning and where might he take me? And the mad man in the hot air balloon with the angels and Spender snarling on the ground. What is it that they are doing in my head?

I miss you more. Sometimes I begin to make two cups of coffee and then remember. Sometimes I think of a gift for you. Sometimes at the piano the notes begin to enter another composition which has already been written and it is as if you are talking back; remember me, remember this? Remember all of it.

The bloody snow has nowhere to go. The phone line is down. No post so how will I send this to you? Except I know that you already have my messages. If I recover from this particular composition it will need to embrace the floods that will surely follow and the recovery of the land and all that work on the land and the immense revival of foxes and owls and rooks. Can you imagine the silence of rooks? Drum stick clusters and long pauses.

Last Sunday the church was to function again but the vicar never turned up so we all took it in turns to say a few prayers and read the lessons and then I was called upon to give something in place of a sermon. About music, creativity, wonderful sounds, based on the fact that I was a successful composer. So I told them about the days when no music came. I told them about Elgar seated at the piano in a silence that only his wife could break. About Elgar's self-doubt. About the music not coming. About the long movements of silence. Of course I concluded with an account of the glorious, the sublime, the time of angels, the rising sun. And they thanked me. They wondered where it all came from. They found it all had meaning as they listened in their heavy overcoats surrounded by portable oil heaters. The local music man's story about another music man.

I think that's it for now. Thank God you were cremated. Thank God you are safe. Thank God you are still here in the music. Thank you. I miss you slightly more each day.

Simon.

“I am walking into the snow. I discover a dead pigeon beneath the bench.It has no head. There are small pricks of yellow poking through the ground and I can see Evans coming towards me. We do this quite often when the snow changes everything and I become an explorer.”

“I am walking into the snow. I keep looking towards where I think the river might be. I cannot even make out an outline. There will be some dead bodies beneath the ice and for some reason bits of plastic bags and rags and even shoes. There will no be fish. I keep looking because when I can see my brother I know that he will bring a message from the other side and I may hear about the family who are also running and hiding and sheltering in other people's places and all I want to hear is that they are alive; somehow they are alive. I will wait for my brother until it is too dark to see. I will wait until I begin to lose feeling in my feet. I will wait until there is no longer any point and ice begins to enter the mind and I begin to feel like a mad person who is about to scream. Or do they utter a scream that has no sound because the scream is beyond meaning? Or has the snow filled the mouth of the person who would scream? Or is there a fear, a terrible fear that the scream might be met by somebody screaming back; a mother, a sister, a father, a brother? Or the scream of a person who is not actually there, here, anywhere? Lost in this world of white that makes people invisible. Silent. No birds. The sound of a silence so high the human ear cannot hear it.”

“Spender says God is dead and prayers are for the mad and when bathtime comes I will be lowered slowly into either boiling water or water that is so cold it burns just the same. Spender says there is no end to this and if they ever cut open my head there would be a nasty little thing inside, all bent up and wild. Spender says that windows are lies and doors deceive and we can't die because we are not alive. When the God Man comes on a Sunday once a month Spender takes a day off. Once when the African nurses began to play in the snow they made a snowman and a snowwoman and two snowchildren and then stopped because Spender said nobody did this. He said they had to knock the woman and the two children down and that there could not be a snow dog or a snow pig and or snow cat. Nobody did this. Spender didn't have a father. He told somebody this. Once.

Spender always took us out when it snowed, when it rained razor blades, when the sun was a forgotten thing. He called it “walkies” and lined us up like school kids and we all wore other people's coats and hats. We walked into the old walled- in garden and into the woods that were silent and round and round the chapel and the black lake and Spender shouted a lot and laughed at jokes he told inside his head and only Billy The Kid laughed back and kept looking for his enemies. We walked until we staggered and longed for a hot drink and wondered what Spender was up to keeping us out so late and sometimes why we didn't kill him. Kill him. Trip him up and smother him with snow. Knock him out and hurl him in the river. Rush at him and snowball him to death. But people like Spender do not die, do not get killed, do not let this happen. They go on and on in a world of shit and nettles and killing bright things and breaking up silences and quiet corners. He must have had a mother; even Spender.

I do not want you to tell anybody this but once when Spender found Ricky playing a piano in the big hall he demanded that Ricky make up music to suggest wind in the trees and dolphins and horses running and clouds and a priest running across something or other and then he thrust down the keyboard lid thing with such force that Ricky went to scream but no sound came out of his mouth. He told me that. It wasn't the pain in his fingers but the terror of what Spender would demand next. What would he do next?

Then Spender sat down on the floor saying it wasn't right that loonies and mad buggers and people with no brains could play the piano and make music and do any beautiful thing.

Then he pushed the piano across the hall and straight through the glazed doors and over the paving and onto the lawn and left it there in the falling snow. It soon went white in the snow I expect. White and silent. Spender; bloody mad.”

“The composer is sitting at the piano waiting for the event of a sound or sounds that will become music. There will be silences as well and ideas within the silences. Sometimes this happens in a hurry and his wife tells him not to go to the horse racing because there is a tune in there somewhere and he must catch it. If he does not do this something will be lost for ever. The sound of spoons. The sound of a rocking horse. The sound of the view from a window. The sound of a room without people. The summer house sound and the tennis court sound and the sound of memory in the library.The sound of the eyes of dogs at the start of the walk onto the hills. The sound of fields of snow and the mysterious point where the land and the sky seem to meet in the mind of the eye. The moment when the flow of the notes catches another sound and there is this rolling momentum when all had been woven and now there enters another hue. Who put it there? To become what? Meaning what?

“And is it better than a day at the races and who will listen to it and who will admire? What, what, what is this all about and to what purpose? A cycle ride on the Malverns would be better. A good win. The glance of a young woman.”

Dear Robin,

What does the dead owl become and a tree of dead birds means what and if the church is shut for a week does the God care? I am reading a book about all these things, these lives and deaths, these seasons and it is to do with what we cope with and how we escape and how those who have lost their minds step into something else and sometimes up flies a bird that we have never seen before. When the snow goes there will be floods of course and then we will gradually begin to see the old things again and I will stop writing these letters to you. They are I think more like stories and have become something else in these last weeks of snow.

Can you still hear me? Is the news getting through? Where is our love taking us? I will play you the entire first movement later this evening.

“He was here a moment ago. Evans was about to greet me. Then ...”