In 1991, aged six and a half, I crossed Springfield Road in Bigrigg, Cumbria - alone and barefoot. Drawn to the mysterious and cold expanse of brushland that stretched so far it both excited and terrified me, I needed to explore. I was proud of the tough skin that was already developing on my heels and big toes from climbing trees and walls down south, and I wanted to make it tougher. I wanted to run scruffy through dirt and rough soil.
Then I heard a holler. My feet left the ground just before they reached the fencing they were aiming for, my entire body whirling upwards, dancing fitfully with calloused hands, to the soundtrack of a passing car horn. "Nobody walks on that land, nobody, YOU DON'T EVER CROSS THIS ROAD!" There was a visceral shock layered throughout this bellowing, then the type of unchecked hiding that can only blossom, in a normally gentle and almost entirely silent man, from a place of blind terror. Later, Grandpa Tom told me the story of Windscale (now Sellafield), the worst nuclear accident in our history, where in 1957 a reactor caught fire and burned for three days, measuring 5 out of a possible 7 on the International Nuclear Event Scale. Yet if you mention nuclear disaster the British think immediately of Chernobyl - not The North. That is what happens when you extinguish a story at its root.
You could see almost the entirety of Sellafield from my grandparents house, on the far side of the empty land that their yard overlooked. The radiation spread all the way to mainland Europe and across the bordering Irish Sea to Ireland, so they simply didn't build on nearby land for decades. But when I 'visited' recently through Google Earth I couldn't see across from street level any more, and my heart broke a little, even though that view had always struck me silent as a kid. It is no longer an edgeland, hundreds of houses having been added to the landscape between main Bigrigg and the coast now, to add to the already existing township of Egremont between the two. But when I was small, even being as short as I was, I could still see clearly all the way across to the enormous grey chimneys from that tiny village, an imposing and frightening sight against the always-moody sky, making the surrounding countryside feel darker than it really was.
I liked the emptiness, and the way the wind howled in lonely booms as it rolled over the flat, desolate nothing-scape.
There is an orchestra who make music out of nuclear. An unstable nucleus needs to give off radiation in order to become stable again, and each individual gamma ray produced in order to achieve this has a characteristic isotype signature, which can be translated into frequencies. Like so much in life, nuclear has the potential to be both beautiful and terrible, all at once. It rides on how we harness it, and whose hands are doing the harnessing.
So we create, and we destroy. Or, “We hope. We despair. We hope. We despair. That is what governs us. We have a bipolar system.” ~ Maira Kalman, in The Marginalian
I had asked about the chimneys before that day, and I would ask again after, but the subject was always changed. The government hushed it up while cases of cancer locally went through the roof - not only this, but the terror-narrative of nuclear warfare had seeped into UK 1950s collective consciousness from across the pond and affected our minds darkly. Under this enforced erasure, Cumbrians knew what was happening but were too quietly frightened to talk about it. Instead they just held each other through illness and grief, pulling together in communities from Workington and Whitehaven through to Holmrook and Drigg and beyond, to look after widows and children when neighbours died long before their time.
That much Grandpa Tom told me, but nothing more. His face always darkened when I mentioned the chimneys, with memories of the whispers spreading down the coast from the wives, mothers and aunts of plant worker men, over the weeks, months and years that followed the fire. The death toll is still disputed, because the horrors of nuclear continues to be something our governments of men distract us from, driven by money and power as they are. Just four days before I write this, ministers were pleading with Scotland to rethink nuclear opposition - this, despite the fact that just two weeks before that, the world watched aghast as Russian warmongers seized Chernobyl and Zaporizhzhia nuclear plants in besieged Ukraine, and their ceaseless, horrific shelling compromised the safety of the latter.
Sometimes
if you move carefully
through the forest,
breathing
like the ones
in the old stories,
who could cross
a shimmering bed of leaves
without a sound,
you come to a place
whose only task
is to trouble you
with tiny
but frightening requests,
conceived out of nowhere
but in this place
beginning to lead everywhere.
Requests to stop what
you are doing right now,
and
to stop what you
are becoming
while you do it,
questions
that can make
or unmake
a life,
questions
that have patiently
waited for you,
questions
that have no right
to go away.Sometimes, by David Whyte
I have no family connection to the North any more, I grew up down South and was only ever a visitor. But I've always loved and longed for Her from a distance, in only the way that a person from one place but raised in another will recognise. I always will.
Walking, as a working-class woman, always feels like a massive luxury - to walk without motive for money or purpose, to walk intentionally and not just because I can't afford transport - to meander, just for the sake of wandering and breathing slowly - can feel like the privilege of the refined, retired, middle-class Englishwoman. But it is this Englishwoman’s privilege too. One day I'll do a pilgrimage, because to walk barefoot as an unremarkable and miniscule extension of the land is to experience salvation; I'll wander, with calloused heels that resemble my grandpa’s calloused hands, along the coast from St Bee's Head all the way to Sellafield. I'll walk on land he feared and I'll sob for it, like I always have, like I always will; I'll hold out my heart as an apology to Her, only for men of money and power to stamp on it once more like they always have, like they always will; I'll do this to acknowledge the soul-split I carry of the damage we do but the endless love we still have for Her; that incessant, desperate kinda love that burns forever, not just for three days. I'll do this to acknowledge the Northerners who did not survive Windscale. To acknowledge my unmoored roots, my homeless, London-born, Northern-reaching soul, my homeland, my home.
To acknowledge the disappeared edgelands of Bigrigg, and the disappeared people of my childhood. I will walk.