Eskdale. A walk in the woods of Autumn.

I walked here for renewal.

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Here we go again:

After a digital struggle, I’ve managed to upload the proper version of ‘Green Linnet’. The ebook anthology is free to download until Thursday. A chance to glimpse the curious stories that I write.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Green-Linnet-Harry-Nicholson-ebook/dp/B00AX98UAK/ref=tmm_kin_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1664201599&sr=8-1

I’ve deleted that post about the free ‘Green Linnet”. Amazon appear to have an uncorrected version. I’ll need to re-upload. My apologies if you find you have a poor copy. This publishing lark can be a tedious business. So easy to make a mis-step.

Gone to Sea

‘The Best of Days’ and ‘You’ll See Wonders’.

Seagoing Memoir part three.

Since I published ‘Best of Days’ and ‘You’ll See Wonders’, I’ve been attempting to take the story forward. It’s a steady, but slow job. I’ve reached 60,000 words and 24 chapters. Perhaps it will be done by Xmas.

Some visitors to this blog have written about how much they look forward to the next volume. I’m delighted to read such reassurance – it spurs me on. It will take a few months longer, but meanwhile here is the current opening of the new book: (comments most welcome)

Still waiting for a title to emerge:

Chapter 1

The Bus to Port Clarence

Monday, 23 February 1959.
Mist has risen from the salt marsh — mist too shallow to hide a standing goose. It will soon burn off. Concrete posts poke through every ten yards or so. Twice as tall as a Coldstream Guard, the sentinels stand ready to mangle and smash off the wings of any of Hitler’s gliders should he try an airborne invasion. Other crude structures, blunt and slitted, rise from the white vapour. In case they came by landing-craft, the War Office studded these flat-lands with pill boxes and tank obstacles. The slab-sided, concrete machine-gun posts and anti-aircraft gun positions are abandoned these past fourteen years. They squat here and there — mute, blind, lonely places now, except when whooped through by urchins who play at commandos, or when sneaked into by courting couples, or investigated by bare-kneed entomologists on the lookout for hibernating moths. My insect collection holds a specimen with lilac-grey scalloped wings and orange blotches, the Herald moth, Scoliopteryx libatrix, gathered from just such a place.
The sun has been up for an hour and brightens the steely North Sea. Twenty miles to the south-east, the tremendous sea-cliffs of North Yorkshire stand in blue relief: Hunt Cliff, Boulby and Hummersea, the tallest cliffs in England. Directly south, the anvil shape of Roseberry Topping, North Riding’s little Matterhorn, juts out of the hazed plateau of the Cleveland Hills. There is a lawn of sheep-cropped grass on the summit of Roseberry where Beryl and I sunbathed. Roseberry . . . It’s curious how names drift over time, the Danes who settled at its foot called it Odinsbjarg, the hill of their god Odin. The Danes also gave the name to this district, their new conquest: Cleveland, the Land of Cliffs. The village of Great Ayton nestles in the dale beneath Odin’s Hill. Captain James Cook, the great navigator, went to school there as a boy. The Cook family cottage is now in Australia, rebuilt in Melbourne and clad with its original Yorkshire ivy.
I’m on my way to sign articles for another deep sea voyage with Thos. and Jno. Brocklebank Steam Navigation Co. This time I need not journey from Old Hartlepool on the Durham coast, to cross England by train to Birkenhead; the ship is in Middlesbrough for three days loading, so this trip is a mere ten miles by bus.  After helping with the handover from the relief coasting crew, my boss from Lancashire will say, ‘See you tomorrow, Harry. Get yourself off home to the bosoms of loved ones while you can.’ At least, I hope so.
The clippie works her way along the aisle. ‘Any more fares please?’ It’s Maggie, six foot tall and smart in her United Bus Company conductor’s navy-blue uniform edged in red piping. She’s grown into a handsome woman. I’m impressed how she carries her height proudly now; during our few weeks of awkward courting she would stoop a little so as not to look two inches taller than me. I’ve since seen her walking out with a fellow who matches her height. She’s good at baking: once I was invited to her little terraced home when her parents were out. She’d been making cakes. We sat before a blazing coal fire and ate a few. They had currants in them. She kept her pinafore on all evening.
‘Hello, Harry. Still at sea? I hear you’re getting married. And you’re only twenty. When’s the big day?’

Lindisfarne

Lindisfarne is Just Across

His spirit is there,

And I’d like a few words 

But his bones are adored now

Under an ornate pile of masonry

On a bend high above the Wear.

His spirit is not far. Just over there

Across a couple of miles of mudflat,

Over the singing seals.

There’s nowt between Cuthbert and me

Save the gathering tide of disbelief

That smothers the footprints of Cuddy’s duck

And man, as though they never did exist.

Families of geese bell in

From Spitzbergen, and are pleased

To find a few bits of seagrass, 

But it’s pizza for me.

I’d better switch the oven on,

And give up gazing at stranded sea dragons

And frosted kelp, and seamarks stood about

Like totems of pagan priests.

A tide of change sweeps in and smothers

The tiny twitterings and haunted tickings of black ooze

And the stillborn burrowings of billions.

Now in the dying light across the flood –

The flight of birds, the cries, the beat of wings:

Eider, Sheldrake, Greenshank, Wigeon, Whooper,

Piper of the Sands, the Peewit, and the Smew,

And at the end of it all – calling the night down –

The Whaup.

Harry Nicholson 17/8/22

Howrah Bridge

Indian flagged coal-burner, SS Rayandaman at Calcutta 1957, just below Howrah Bridge. I took this with a cheap box camera bought at Boots the chemist. I was on the deck of Brocklebanks, SS Mahanada, where I was 2nd radio officer.

Ellerburn Bank

A joy of flowers at this nature reserve today (6th August 2021).

From Butterfly Conservation Yorkshire: Ellerburn Bank is a 3 ha. grassland site sloping south-east on oolitic limestone on the southern edge of the North York Moors near Pickering. Despite its modest size, it is one of the most extensive areas of unimproved limestone grassland remaining in the North York Moors . It was notified as a SSSI in 1983 and has been managed as a nature reserve by the Yorkshire Wildlife Trust (YWT) since 1966, having been informally managed for nature conservation perhaps for the previous decade. The flora and fauna of the site is exceptional for the region, with over 150 species of plant recorded including large displays of Cowslip in spring, orchids in early summer and Gentians in late summer . Flowering plants of regional note include Dropwort, Woolly Thistle, Saw-wort, Fly Orchid Ophrys and Greater Butterfly Orchid. The site is noted for its extensive Lepidoptera fauna , including butterflies of regional note such as Dark Green Fritillary and Dingy Skipper Erynnis tages, and the site also supports a population of Glow-worm Lampyris noctiluca. Management of the reserve currently consists of low-intensity winter grazing by Hebridean sheep and rotational scrub clearance.

Scabious

Woolly Thistle

North Yorkshire Moors. Above Sleights.

Glorious sun and still air on this last day of February 2021. Went to the moor to hear skylark, red grouse, peewits and pipits. Took some pictures.                                                               Listening to larks                                                 Ancient grave of megalith builder

You’ll See Wonders

My latest book appeared on Amazon on Sunday. The title comes from advice given when I went to sea: brother-in-law, an engineer with Elder Dempster, cautioned me to never be cynical – ‘You’ll see wonders’, he said. ‘You’ll See Wonders’ is the sequel to my first memoir, ‘The Best of Days’. It has been a pleasurable two years in the writing, and I’ve enjoyed trying to write with the spirit and atmosphere of the time. It is not autobiography, but memoir – which allows for scenes and character to be built where memory gives only snatches and fragments of conversation and visual recall of sixty years ago. I’m now cogitating around a possible book 3, whilst Pieris rapae is out there, in the sunshine, laying her little lime-green eggs on my cabbages. The cover of “You’ll See Wonders” is from one of the last paintings by my old friend and venerable man of the sea, Bill Wedgwood of Robin Hood’s Bay – he did it for the book. Though he did not see it finished, I passed him chapters as they emerged.