One-Way Mirror | Brian Lewis

 
26 March 2021. 3.45pm. Everything is as it was. Nothing is what it was. I leave Fargate and turn left onto Leopold Street, the road splits in two, one lane points to Pinstone Street, the other leads to Barker’s Pool. Some years ago, when there was money in the town, a series of secondary signs appeared on streets near the ring road, directing motorists, passengers and pedestrians to the Heart of the City. I wasn’t living in Sheffield when the signs went up and I couldn’t work out if the Heart of the City was a place or an idea of a place, the council’s idea, a developer’s idea, how will I find it, how will I know it. There are no maps of the Heart. The signs are still visible and they still don’t tell me where I need to go. Perhaps this is the Heart, or part of it, Leopold Street is a pulmonary vein, Barker’s Pool is the left atrium. City Hall and the war memorial in one chamber, the town hall and the Peace Gardens in the other, which are the valves, which are the ventricles. I cannot draw a heart from memory. I think of my first heart, in a volume of the Merit Students Encyclopedia, it was made of transparent colour plates, a diagram built up in layers. The heart was divided into two or more sheets and the parts were labelled in small black text. I learned how to take it apart and put it back together. It was a simple matter of turning the pages. I am walking into Pinstone Street, I have Barker’s Pool on my right, the narrow neck, a glimpse of dear dead Patisserie Valerie. I don’t see City Hall, set back from the thoroughfare, the sloping steps, the great portico. The memorial is straight ahead, holding the centre. I see the bare flagpole, a white ship’s mast, aground in the empty plaza. To the south, at the edge of eyeshot, the block facade of John Lewis. A few days ago, the Partnership announced that eight of its department stores would shut permanently, including this one. There is a history to the premises. It started out as Cole Brothers, at the eastern edge of Fargate, in 1847, before moving to Barker’s Pool in 1963. The brand was retired in 2002 and the name of John Lewis, who had bought out the store during the Second World War, appeared on the building. The overhaul was part of the initial plan for the Heart of the City, at the turn of the century, which saw a number of shops and businesses working in partnership with the city council and an urban regeneration company. The council continued to work closely with the store, and bought the lease in September 2020, as part of a new, long-term deal in which John Lewis would reinvest the proceeds of the buyout in the store’s redevelopment. Six months later it closed. It was already closed, of course, the store was non-essential, but now it will not reopen. It is a verdict on the city. There is much commentary online. No-one saw it coming. No-one, now, will get to say goodbye. Everyone has a Cole Brothers story or a John Lewis story. The stories are not so much about retail as they are about time, how it is marked and measured, what it means to make something last. I count the visits that my mother made to Sheffield in recent years, there would always be an afternoon in the city, there would always be an hour in John Lewis. The unspoken purpose of the hour in John Lewis was to slow things almost to a standstill. The movement between floors was by way of escalators and the movement across floors happened imperceptibly. There were purchases, instinctive or considered, but these were incidental. The hour would not seem like an hour. There was an enrichment, not of wealth or status, an enrichment of time, the civic life. It was common ground on private land. It was sustained by public memory and it sustained public memory. It is possible to think that this is everything but it is never enough. Even for the heart.

3.50pm. The city used to be a place for thinking things through. It still is, in a way, the thoughts don’t always go where you want them to go. The storefronts were part of a stimulus, a movement in the mind, taking it all in, the print on the glass sheets, always something else reflected, the displays changing with the seasons. You don’t see it at the time. I am southbound on Pinstone Street, I have the Peace Gardens on my left. I pass Barclays Bank, then Leeds Building Society, then an unnamed ginnel, a vacant unit, another vacant unit. Phoneway, Phix, the Park Hill Shop, all gone, all empty, the windows papered or whitewashed. When I have passed the fifth vacant unit I decide that it is deliberate, it must be, it doesn’t happen by accident. There has to be a plan. The sixth unit is also vacant. The doors, windows and panels are brightened with vinyls that spell out the word S h e f f i e l d across the length of the premises, a grid of flat colours, broken up and baffled by inset photographs, crowd scenes, cycle races, the Q-park car park. A single end panel offers a clean, condensed, text-only version, Heart of the City II, white glyphs in a pink field. It’s been like this for some time, a year, two years. It used to be a branch of Somerfield, then a Co-op, then a temporary outlet for WH Smith during the closure and refurbishment of their Fargate shop. The storefront doesn’t tell me what has happened or what will happen next. Here is the Maplin that used to be a Maplin. The branded white fascia has been replaced with a blank white fascia, the windows are a gallery for the work of Sheffield Care Leavers Union and Sheffield Children In Care Council, two poems framed against a paintsplash backdrop, anonymously and collectively authored, one poem is addressed to society, the other is a praise song for the city. The next unit is shuttered and graffitied. Jones the Bootmaker used to be just here, or perhaps here, I used to buy my shoes there, the same shoes every time, I wore them until they fell apart, I no longer have the shoes, I still have the carrier bags. The Co-op bank is still a Co-op bank, there seem to be more banks than ever, or is it that there are fewer shops, the money has to go somewhere, the branch fills out the corner of the terrace and breaks its fall. I turn left to avoid a red and white barricade that marks both a road closure and a footpath closure. The block plastic barrier gives way to a porous steel barrier and I am funnelled into a mixed-use cycle and pedestrian lane that used to be half of a road. The boundary with the remaining half is marked with black planters and concrete kerbstones. There are no cyclists in the mixed-use lane and most of the pedestrians are using the older pavement that serves the storefronts on the left. I look ahead, past the shops and the people, to where the half-road halves again, the fenced-off surface absorbed by the development on the right, new scaffold and concrete and steel in the sky, twin Euromix mortar silos stationed at the gates. I remember very little of what was there before, takeaways, then pop-ups, then student art displays, then nothing. I can’t put a name to any of it now. The fencing yields to printed hoarding, stock images of aerial views, blue-sky views, the views to come. The mixed-use lane widens and the spread is checked by more black planters, spaced across the width of the lane, measuring and managing flow. I am always surprised to see Midcity House at the edge of The Moor, a shabby white liner, adrift in all this new space. The ground floor retail units are in permanent shadow, the glass tagged in thick black marker, it is hard for light to pass through. The upper levels are offices, what is the occupancy now, half full, nearly nil, nil. There is, or was, a small side entrance with a reception. David Blunkett’s constituency office was on the second floor. I interviewed him there in 2012, that isn’t quite true, Amanda initiated the meeting, it was for a project. She led the interview while I operated the audio recorder. The interview had to do with old space, I remember that, the 1970s and 1980s, the industries in decline, the city in decline, his early years as a councillor and then council leader. Amanda coaxed him further back, to the 1950s, to Wardsend Cemetery, he had known it in boyhood, I don’t know how Amanda knew this. He shared his recollections, the difficulty of navigating the cemetery, the atmosphere, the apprehensions. The project moved on and the interview was never used. It’s still in my house somewhere, unnamed but dated, a 100MB WAV file on a Maplin memory card.

3.55pm. Midcity House had a mirror, an identical block at the top of The Moor, facing it across the carriageway and crossings of Furnival Gate. As the buildings grew older they became more and more unlike each other and I ceased to think of them as twins. The block on The Moor had a canopy for pedestrians, as did its double, a useful shelter in inclement weather. When at last the block stood empty the canopy was secured with panels, taking half the pavement with it, a common passage lost to the building’s footprint. The panels were used to advertise the city’s ideas of itself. The block was eventually demolished in 2018 or 2019 and replaced with a H&M store, of roughly similar proportions to the former building, more angular, perhaps, a large portrait-format electronic advertising screen set in a recess above the storefront, it is currently displaying a Deliveroo feature, declaring their support for the NHS, it has a heart, a rainbow, a Deliveroo logo, a secondary message soliciting donations. I stop reading before it vanishes from the screen. I drift in a diagonal towards Debenhams, left to right, an open space interrupted by steel planters, steel bollards, concrete blocks. The concrete blocks are an afterthought to the design, the defensive design, an unmanned, floating checkpoint made visible by a decrease in footfall. Debenhams closed in early January, everything closed in early January, everything that wasn’t essential, but Debenhams was halfway through closing for good. No-one seems to know if it will open again. There are displays in the windows, apparently unchanged since the year’s end, 40% off, STORE CLOSING, and THIS STORE ONLY, but all the stores are closing, it was announced in December. There was sadness, or a show of sadness, and little surprise. I visited the store a week or two after the announcement. I took the escalator to the lower ground floor and I paced about until I found a pack of cotton rich socks, five shades of grey, size 9-12, 30% off. I joined a short, socially distanced queue, and presented the socks at the till. I thought that I should express a sentiment at the end of the transaction, sorry, good luck, but nothing came to mind, nothing that seemed right, so I said thank you to the assistant, and I meant it, and I tried to look as though I meant it, and sound as though I meant it. I followed the one-way system to the side exit and I knew that I would never again set foot in the store. Debenhams was not a site of reverie or epiphany. Many of the departments had collapsed into franchises or concessions and it was harder and harder to find a way through the levels. Often it was heavy going. But it was not useless. Good, affordable kitchenware, well-made umbrellas and wallets, and socks, simple, unpretentious socks. A decent cafe. The makeup counter was another world. There is no way back to it. A spell is broken. The shops brought back from the brink of death, we can’t bear to see them go, we can’t find the words to say goodbye. The shops brought back from the dead, we thought that we missed them, we thought that it would be good to see them again. We let them die a second death, a worse death, having mourned them once. I walk down The Moor, half-closed cafes in the middle of the thoroughfare, The Light ahead, to my right, the escalator and its unresting ascent, Boots, Lloyds, Bodycare. I hurry past Sainsburys, I slow down for Atkinsons, the last of the city’s department stores, except perhaps TK Maxx, if you can call that a department store. Atkinsons has been trading since the 19th century and its origins, like its clientele, are bound up with Cole Brothers. I was a latecomer, I didn’t set foot in the place until 2012, it was somewhere that I could take my mother, it reminded us of McIlroys, an independent department store in Swindon that sold cotton reels and curtains and carpets. It had a grand staircase. McIlroys closed at the end of the century, due, it was said, to competition from Debenhams. Atkinsons is still open, or rather, it is not closing, not as far as anyone knows. I last visited the store on the day of my last visit to Debenhams, it was quiet, it was Christmas but it was not Christmas, the store has many elderly customers, I thought, they will not want to put themselves at risk, even so. I bought toothpaste and socks. Since the John Lewis store closure was announced, there have been exhortations to shop at Atkinsons, to support Atkinsons, to save Atkinsons. I won’t save Atkinsons with purchases of toiletries once a month and socks once a year. What will we remember, how it started, how it ended, what will we remember from the times in between.
 

‘One-Way Mirror’ is an excerpt from a work-in-progress that draws on an afternoon’s walk around the city of Sheffield. The preceding excerpt, titled ‘Last Collection’, can be found here. 

Brian Lewis is the editor and publisher of Longbarrow Press.

Direction of Travel | Brian Lewis

On 16 May 2022, I posted the first in a series of unnumbered, threaded Tweets, a series that I’d intended as a short, reflective summary of several hours spent staring out of train windows. Four days and 84 Tweets later, the series reached its end, more drift than thread.

The following piece is based on the thread of 16 May and gathers almost all the constituent Tweets, with some revisions throughout, in the order in which they first appeared. Each unit is of Tweetable length (280 characters or fewer).

 
On Saturday 14 May, I travelled to Kent for a performance of Wealden by Nancy Gaffield and The Drift. The first stages of the journey, from Sheffield to Ashford, were by rail. The final leg of the journey, from Ashford to the village of Fairfield, was made on foot.

The journey began at 4.45am when I left the house and started walking to Sheffield railway station with a rucksack full of books. The train was scheduled to depart at 5.30am. The walk to the station usually takes around 55 minutes. This is how every journey begins.

My solution to the scheduling problem was to run 100 yards, then walk 200 yards, until I had made up the time difference, which was somewhere east of West Bar. Fall back, push forward, fall back, push forward. I arrived at the railway station at 5.26am and raced to platform 8.

The 5.30 service to London St Pancras stretched out along the length of the platform. I looked for Coach M. The long train was actually two short trains stapled together with no gangway connection. Coach G, Coach K, Coach D, the letters out of sequence. At 5.28am I found Coach M.

The carriage was quiet, almost empty, one or two passengers settling in. The tannoy glitched and fizzed and the train manager announced that the service would be diverted and delayed due to a broken-down train between Chesterfield and Derby. The long slow slide into the south.

The staff are doing their best, I thought, half the network is falling apart. The train departed Chesterfield on time and then stopped and started and stopped in a series of landscapes that I didn’t recognise and couldn’t place. I slumped forward and fretted about my connections.

I slumped back and fretted about the difficulties ongoing since March, a sense that the joints of my work were broken, or that I had simply lost touch, a fault in the head, or the heart, and seeing no way to start, no way to finish. The train pulled into Derby 31 minutes late.

In less than an hour, the arrival time at St Pancras had been revised from 7.36 to 8.00 to 8.10. I would not now make the connection for Ashford. I hadn’t thought that delay might also be momentum, but it’s there, I can see it, running in reverse. It is not of my own making.

I thought that I should do some work so I picked up a customer query arising from the deterioration in postal services between the UK and Germany since the abolition of VAT exemption on low-value goods in 2021. A package, mailed on 27 April, had still not reached its destination.

I checked another email and then another and realised that there was very little that I could do about either of them. I looked out of the window and stared at a field in what I supposed was now Leicestershire, a field that I should have been staring at 33 minutes earlier.

We were passing through a data mesh, a map that was updating in real time, almost in real time, setting us forward or back to the nearest minute, the status frozen then refreshed. 6.50am. Another field. Mist in the hollows, caught in the early light.

I am thinking of Wednesday’s readings at The Fat Cat, the first Longbarrow event to happen indoors, in person, in company, since October 2019. The audience was neither small nor large. The room had ventilation and an unforced sense of connection. Pete read first, then Alistair.

The poems – Hemisphere, Essay on Spam – touched on the role of emerging technologies in shaping our experience and understanding of the world, from mapping to mailshots, screens to satellites, and what it means to compete for resources when the most valued resource is attention.

I was in a room with people I hadn’t seen for years and we were all listening to the same thing at the same time. At the end of the evening it occurred to me that the only electrical appliance we’d utilised for the event was Emma’s adjustable desk lamp.

I don’t dislike technology. We’ve used laptops, projectors, PA systems, portable stereos, phones and dictaphones in our events. At the very least, it adds another layer to a performance. It also introduces the possibility that something might go wrong. Disruption, delay.

For the online launch of Hemisphere, Pete created a Google Earth folder with the places of the poem, and screen-shared the transitions between these places as one extract cued into the next. With each transition, the software or the signal would lag by a few seconds.

It didn’t seem to affect the reception of the work. We had to wait, all of us, we had to wait for the technology to catch up with the poem. I don’t know if this is what Pete had intended but it made sense. Leicester, this is Leicester, the next stop is Market Harborough.

I gathered up my train tickets and got out of my seat and walked through the carriages in the opposite direction to the direction of travel, which is not natural, and stopped at the threshold of the first class carriage, and raised my tickets to get the conductor’s attention.

The conductor left the carriage and met me in the vestibule. ‘I’m supposed to be on the 8.10 from St Pancras to Ashford’, I said, and left the sentence unfinished. He took the ticket from my hand and took a Sharpie from his pocket and started to write on the back of the ticket.

He was diligent, and slow, we both knew that a thick-tipped pen was not the best implement for the job. After a minute he was done. He handed the ticket back to me and said, ‘Any problems, show them this’. I thanked him and walked back to my carriage, moving as the train moved.

I sat in my seat and examined the ticket on which the ink was still drying. There were four lines of text. The first two lines explained that the delay was the fault of EMR. The third line was a code that I couldn’t decipher. The fourth line had a signature and a service number.

The train stopped at Market Harborough and left a minute later. The delay had stabilised at 40 minutes. I tilted my face towards the window and closed my eyes, light flickering over the lids, is this Northamptonshire, have I ever set foot in it, should I look out or let it go by.

A few people got on at Kettering. After a minute the train set off. Behind me, a hammering at the carriage door and a low moan, I couldn’t see who was making the sounds, his English was limited but his predicament was plain. ‘Door not open.’ The conductor turned and walked back.

The conductor asked the passenger what the matter was. He was supposed to change trains at Kettering for an onward service to Luton, where he was due to catch a flight later that morning. But the door hadn’t opened, and now he was stuck on a train running non-stop to London.

It wasn’t clear why the door hadn’t opened. Where the fault was. Mechanical or electrical or manual. The conductor spent a few minutes with the man, writing out a new itinerary, change at St Pancras for Luton, you won’t need to buy another ticket, you can still catch your flight.

He took it all in and left the carriage. The conductor had done what he could and the man seemed reassured by the guidance but I still felt bad for him as we accelerated through Northamptonshire and Bedfordshire and Hertfordshire, how many stations, how many miles between them.

Belgravia, London, 22 years ago. I am sitting in the reception of a fourth-floor office a few blocks from Victoria station. It is a Tuesday, warm, bright, a little after 9am. I am called into a small interview room. I walk through the door and wait to be invited to sit down.

I am being interviewed for the role of Conference Producer. This is the culmination of several months of posting out CVs printed on a Canon StarWriter 30 in an attempt to get a job in the Creative and Marketing Sector before it is too late. I am 27. It is already too late.

It is a panel interview, conducted by two people, they introduce themselves and then ask the first question. I am unable to answer the first question, or the second question, as the stammer which I thought I had left behind in adolescence has decided to sit in on the interview.

Somewhere around the fourth or fifth question I manage to bring the stammer under control, with a technique I learned at the age of 14, but the interviewers have lost interest in the words before they are out, and so have I. There are no more questions.

I leave the interview room and leave the building. I feel useless, so I walk around Westminster, looking for a place where I can donate blood, then realise that it doesn’t work like that. I walk around in my suit for another 10 hours. At 11.30pm I catch the last train to Swindon.

At 00.15 the train pulls into Didcot and by the time it pulls away I am asleep. I wake up 20 minutes later as the service is leaving Swindon. There are no good options. I could spend the night at the next station, which is Chippenham, or try to walk home, 20 miles without a map.

I disembark at Chippenham and rapidly confirm what I already knew which is that there are no more trains to Swindon tonight. I consider hitching but I don’t know where to start from. After 10 minutes I walk to the taxi rank and enquire about the fare to Swindon. It is £40.

I agree, because I don’t know what else to do, and get in the taxi, and pass the journey thinking about money, money that I didn’t have, spent in pursuit of a career that I didn’t want. It might have been worse, I think, I might have got the job. Years adrift in the same place.

The train passed under a road bridge and then another and the rails switched and locked and I knew that St Pancras was winding us in. I shouldered my rucksack and counted my tickets and I thought of the man at Kettering, he had his work cut out, would he make his flight.

8.19am. A standstill and a long pause. The door panel lit up and I pressed it twice and stepped down to the platform and walked through the open ticket barriers and past a roped-off concourse, a queue without a line, two hundred people waiting to board the train we had just left.

They would be late too. Our delay was their delay. I could see it in their eyes. They knew. I squeezed onto the escalator and spent the descent trying to remember where the Southeastern platforms were and when I stepped off at ground level I realised that I didn’t know.

I turned left and kept walking until I met the first set of ticket barriers and scanned the destination board overhead and drew a blank on Ashford. This was Thameslink, not Southeastern, Brighton, not Dover. The ticket office gave me directions, second left, up the escalator.

I stepped off the escalator and turned right for the platforms, numbered 11-13, the 8.37 boarding at platform 12, calling at Stratford International, Ebbsfleet International, Ashford International, Folkestone West, Folkestone Central, Dover Priory. I walked to the end and got on.

8.30am. I sat down and took from my rucksack a bottle of water and Emma’s iPad Mini, a first-generation model, released in 2012, now discontinued, unsupported, obsolete. I signed into the iPad and opened Gmail and messaged Emma to let her know where I was and that I loved her.

The message hung in Drafts, picked out in red, I stared at it for perhaps a minute then realised that I hadn’t connected the iPad to the onboard wi-fi. I ticked the Terms and Conditions box without reading the Terms and Conditions and the email completed its transition to Sent.

I continued to stare at the screen as the train left the station. My seat was facing away from the direction of travel, I knew that I would see nothing of where we were going, only a little of where we’d been, it seemed appropriate, somehow, to be hauled backwards into Kent.

The train was clean and fast and new and in no time at all we had stopped at Stratford. I understood something of how we had got here, one part north to four parts east, but what came next was a blank. I had walked both banks of the estuary and now I couldn’t put them together.

I didn’t know which side of the river we were on, had we crossed under the Thames at Greenwich, would we be passing through Rainham or Erith. Would it make any difference if I knew. The Apple Maps app would take an age to load on the iPad and we would be somewhere else by then.

The window misted and blurred and as it cleared I saw my features gliding into wire and glass and aluminium. If Ebbsfleet International was actually Ebbsfleet then we were two miles south of Swanscombe Marshes, designated as a SSSI in 2021, and the intended site of a theme park.

Swanscombe Marshes is one of just two places in the UK where the critically endangered distinguished jumping spider is found. A corridor that links Dartford to Gravesend, its grassland, scrub, wetlands, grazing marsh and saltmarsh are habitats for rare plants and breeding birds.

The London Resort application was withdrawn earlier this year, citing various factors, including the classification of Tilbury as a Freeport, the SSSI designation, and the need to re-engage the local community. The company plans to submit a revised application later in 2022.

Opposition to the theme park and resort, led by Buglife, Save Swanscombe Peninsula, and others, remains firm. The campaigns are not over. It must have been 2002 when I last walked out there, Stone to Northfleet, the jetties, buoys and radar station, so much that I didn’t see.

So much that I didn’t remember. The wire and glass and aluminium were swept up and replaced with parcels of development land, some opened, some labelled. I miss Kent, even as I’m going through it, I miss the idea of Kent, my idea of Kent, scrawled on the back of an envelope.

Seventeen years ago, slogging cross-country to Hythe, trouble with the MOD, the camps and ranges, then overnight on the coast, it was still winter, rain, wind and a black bin liner, more trouble in Lydd, and the last 10 miles with a split boot. That’s another story, an old story.

I still had the map that I used then, OS Landranger 189, reprinted with minor changes 2004. I took it out of the rucksack, it was the map of today’s walk, Ashford to Fairfield, a walk I had not taken before. It was not the journey of Wealden. It was a journey towards Wealden.

Wealden is a semi-improvised work in three sections, corresponding to the woodland, wetland and shingle of High Weald, Romney Marsh and Dungeness. The poems developed from Nancy Gaffield’s walks in this landscape, a landscape defined by change, uncertainty, and loss.

The music, created by Amelia Fletcher, Darren Pilcher, and Rob Pursey, was also embedded in the landscape, at times literally, with Darren using bracken and shingle as the basis for his sound loops. The piece would not be permanent but would change with each performance.

Wealden was performed twice in 2019, and recorded in March 2020, shortly before lockdown. A CD and a pamphlet were published by Longbarrow Press later that year. Today’s performance, in a 13th century church at the edge of the marsh, would be the first in almost three years.

We seemed to be nearing Ashford. I looked again at the map and realised that I had only the faintest sense of where the sound mirrors were, somewhere between Dungeness and Lydd, so I thought, or further north, further east, there was nothing in the legend, no symbol, no text.

Sound mirrors were developed in the late 1920s as an early warning system for enemy aircraft. A number of these concrete dishes were built along the east coast, but were never used, due to the invention of radar in 1932. The experiment was abandoned and the dishes left to rot.

The mirrors near Lydd are among those still standing today. While obsolete, they are not useless. They appear in the third section of Nancy’s poem (‘marooned              on a man-made isle’) and in a photograph taken by Rob that resurfaced on the cover of the Wealden CD.

I don’t know if the mirrors were built too late, or too soon, or if they were always out of time. The early radar team acknowledged the contribution of the 1920s experiment to systems planning: linking stations, plotting movements, measuring distance, direction, speed.

9.10am. I folded the map and put it back in the rucksack, along with the other things I’d taken out, the water, the snacks, the iPad mini. We were getting in on time, or a few minutes ahead of time, our arrival in Ashford seemed to take the train manager by surprise.

I knew that I wouldn’t remember Ashford when I walked out of the station.​ I’d measured the distance to Fairfield with a ruler, a walk of twelve inches, ten miles, I knew that I would not be walking the length of a ruler. I knew that I could have taken another train to Appledore.

Appledore station was two miles across the marsh from Fairfield. It was arguable that my motive for slogging from Ashford with several kilos of books on my back was to save £5 in train fare but also I wanted to walk towards the horizon of Wealden without ever quite arriving.

I wanted to walk the work back into the landscape that it was made of and from and for. There would be a gathering and a short talk at Fairfield Church at 4pm, followed by a collective walk across the marshes to Brookland Church, where the performance would take place around 7pm.

This end of this thread is not a walk. We’d never get there. Imagine the walk for yourself. The wrong turns, the unscheduled stops, the miles ahead. Here is the route on Google Maps. It is approximate, see how the line stops dead at the military canal, then starts over again.

Here are some photos from Fairfield and Brookland, taken with Emma’s obsolete iPad Mini.

2.46pm. Brack Lane, looking towards St Thomas a Becket Church, Fairfield.

2.51pm. Dry ditch, Fairfield.

2.53pm. Dry ditch, Fairfield.

2.54pm. St Thomas a Becket Church, Fairfield.

3.29pm. St Thomas a Becket Church, Fairfield, facing ​south-east, towards Lydd.

4.04pm. Altar, St Thomas a Becket Church, Fairfield.

4.15pm. Amelia Fletcher and Rob Pursey of The Drift narrating the histories of Romney Marsh, St Thomas a Becket Church, Fairfield.

4.41pm. Procession from St Thomas a Becket Church, Fairfield, to Church of St Augustine, Brookland.

4.42pm. Procession from St Thomas a Becket Church, Fairfield, to Church of St Augustine, Brookland.

6.51pm. Church of St Augustine, Brookland.

7.46pm. Nancy Gaffield (out of shot) and The Drift performing ‘Wealden’, Church of St Augustine, Brookland.

7.47pm. Nancy Gaffield and The Drift performing ‘Wealden’, Church of St Augustine, Brookland.
 

Wealden is available from Longbarrow Press as a pamphlet and audio CD; click here for further details and to order. It is also available as a digital download here (via Skep Wax).

Click here to read ‘Walking, observing, listening’ – a wide-ranging interview in which Nancy Gaffield and The Drift reflect on the making of Wealden – on the Longbarrow Blog. You can read a further interview with Amelia and Rob of The Drift (conducted by Glenn Francis Griffith) here.

Last Collection | Brian Lewis

 
26 March 2021. 3.25pm.  There are new metal barriers at the main doors of the vacant ground floor office/retail unit on St James’ Row that looks out at the cathedral. The entrance of the unit is set back and elevated and the barriers have been installed to prevent homeless people from sheltering in the recess. The unit, which is advertised as a high profile unit, has been empty since 2018. A recruitment agency, Office Angels, was based there for some years, pink and blue fascia panels, the windows frosted with halo motifs. There used to be another recruitment agency next door, on the corner of Church Street, I forget the name, they moved on around the same time, perhaps earlier, it wasn’t empty for long. The Christian Bookshop moved in. It’s still there, no it isn’t, the fascias and vinyls are missing. White text on a blue field, it wrapped the windows and the boards, I can still see it, if I turn away, the hard, compressed block lettering. I glance back and the lettering is gone. This must have happened when I wasn’t looking. I stare through the windows, no stock, no furnishings, then I stare at the windows, newly papered with contact details. In the months following the move the frontage was bare, just A4 printouts with the name of the shop tacked to the glass, a form of signage, you could work it out from the books on display. They had moved from their old West Street premises next to Carson Stationery & Print. The shops were easily confused as their window displays were unshowy and the exterior decor was a similar shade of blue. I don’t remember when I first set foot in Carsons, it might have been 1996, 1997, I needed some coloured acrylic and they had it. It was a good place for trying things out and thinking about form. It was calm and unhurried. There were trays of Clairefontaine paper, sold by the sheet, loose envelopes of various sorts and sizes, packs of unbranded white card that I used as a base layer for a set of Longbarrow postcards. I picked up other things there, things that were not immediately useful, things that I knew would be useful in time. There was a narrow aisle set aside for wordless contemplation. It became my favourite shop. I went back in 2018 to buy a storage box and found the block under scaffold and Carsons and the Christian Bookshop closed. There was nothing in the window of the stationer to say where they had gone. There was no online sales afterlife. You’d think that it would help the Christian Bookshop to have an address on Church Street, within sight of the cathedral, but it doesn’t seem to have helped them here. The parent organisation is CLC which is short for Christian Literature Crusade. At some point in my childhood I was given a copy of the bible, I don’t remember when, or by whom, I later discovered that I had not been given the bible but a bible, it was a rubbish bible for children. The Evangelicals and their literature were everywhere. I accepted another bible out of obligation. The problem with books that are accepted or bought out of obligation, of course, is that they tend to go unread. You accrue more books in consequence. I don’t know what happened to the second bible. I didn’t spend much time with it. It was hard to know where to start with an unfinished book. Only the front of the cathedral is visible from Church Street, the back end sinks into a slope that levels out at Campo Lane. I understood its position on the slope when I visited the Crypt Chapel and the vaults. I wasn’t alone, I was there with Emma and my mother, we took our time in the nave and the transepts. It has been built and rebuilt many times over and there is no definitive cathedral. There were diagrams and timelines to help us piece it together, the facsimiles and fragmentary versions of itself. We stepped out in soft autumn air, into a flat paved square that I sometimes think of as a piazza or plaza, when the light is in its last flush.

3.30pm.  On Church Street I instinctively turn right for the rear entrance of TK Maxx and then I remember that TK Maxx is closed. It isn’t TK Maxx that I want, I wouldn’t know where to start, I am thinking of the short cut via the shop floor to Orchard Square. The short cut is not a right of way or a permissive path, it doesn’t exist out of hours, it is part of a pattern of use. It can take a minute off a journey. Another cut runs parallel to the square and its shops, accessible at all times, though it is frequently congested with parked lorries and commercial waste bins. It is named Orchard Street but it is little more than an alley. Early in March last year, a few weeks before the city shut down for the first time, Fay Musselwhite sketched out a possible route of a poetry walk with me and Matthew Clegg and Orchard Street was the second stop on the route. We spent a few minutes at the fire exits. The alley had always been of little interest to me but it made sense to make it part of the walk. The act of stopping had changed its meaning. A few weeks later, the walk was postponed indefinitely and the meaning of the alley and the city changed again. I check my instinct and turn left, around the central barriers that divide the tram lines from the bus lanes, and hurry along the old Palladian row, grand buildings trying to look inconspicuous, minimal markings, flagless flagpoles still fixed to the roofs. It was some time before I realised that the Company of Cutlers had its headquarters here. It’s so discreet. I reach the end of the row and skirt the temporary vehicle barriers at the edge of the shopping precinct and head towards Boots, there are several doors, the entrance is now the exit and it takes a few moments to find a way in. The store is not busy. I am here to buy a toothbrush, I quickly find what I am looking for, medium, blue, a pack of two. I think that I should buy something else, as I’m here, but nothing comes to mind. I look for a till. There are no staffed tills in sight and the few staff that I can see are attending to a self-service till that has had to be taken apart. I join a small queue for the self-service tills, the people in front of me are patient and quiet, the people behind me are respectful in turn. After a few minutes a self-service till becomes free and I scan the pack of toothbrushes. I decide to pay with cash so I feed a note into a slot in the machine and the machine does something that I cannot see and then falls silent. It is a judgement. I think that the transaction has failed but a coin appears in a tray and a receipt falls out of the terminal. The receipt tells me that I could have earned 36p in Advantage Points if I had an Advantage Card which I don’t. I leave the self-service area, the terminal screens partitioned by full-length transparent screens, and leave the shop via an entrance that used to be an exit. It is a short walk to Marks & Spencer, a minute on Fargate. The doors are both entrance and exit and I ease my elbow against the nearest one. I make a diagonal path to the greetings cards on the ground floor and look for an Easter display. I make two circuits of the racks but find nothing. I call to an assistant, from a short distance, she guides me to the Easter cards which are with the other Easter things at the edge of the food hall. I thank her and flick through the rack, it is a limited range, I pick out a card with rabbits on the front. I take the card to the payment area and an assistant invites me to step forward. She is friendly and efficient, there is an art to customer service, there is an ethos that I remember, that the service is the same, whether someone is spending £0 or £1 or £100. The card is for my mother. I will post it to her tomorrow. I don’t know when Easter cards became part of our lives, perhaps it started with the move to Sheffield, it was a way of keeping in touch, an occasion without an occasion. Something to remember. The card is left blank for the message and the message is the handwriting, nothing more.

3.40pm. It is only as I step out of Marks & Spencer that I remember the other thing that I meant to pick up in Boots, a pack of assorted plasters, various sizes, fabric, clear and waterproof, there were none in the house when I last looked. I’m not going back for them. I consider WH Smith from a passing distance, on the other side of Fargate, I remember the last time I called in, a few weeks ago, I was hoping to find a book for my mother, for her birthday. I did not have a particular book in mind, I thought that I would stand in front of the books and scan them slowly until a book, a particular book, suggested itself. I walked into the shop and turned left for the first floor book department and stopped in front of a set of blue collapsible barriers at the foot of the stairs. I then made three circuits of the ground floor to see if there were any books on display between the cards and stationery and magazines. There were three books, a cookery book, a fitness book and a slimming book. I picked them up to see if any other books were hidden underneath but there weren’t. The ground floor was empty apart from several members of staff and a man in a thin black jacket who stood reading the magazines from cover to cover. We would all leave with nothing. I used to be a regular at the Swindon branch, once or twice a week, when I couldn’t find a use for my lunch breaks, the short walk from my office to Smiths, what was I looking for, I never found it, slowly but surely I wore out the carpets. I was aimless but looked purposeful in my blue shirt and smart trousers and customers would often mistake me for an assistant. Unless I was due back at the office I would try to help them with whatever it was that they needed help with, where are the ballpoint pen refills, oh, I see them now, where are the ink cartridges, you’ll find them at the end of the next aisle. My father would have known the shop as well as me and he didn’t work there either. They still stock the things he used to pick up there, the multo-ring stamp album refills, 25 quadrille leaves, the same brand, the same packaging, but he is no longer around to weigh them in his hands. He started several stamp albums for each of us, my brothers and me, when we were small. The albums grew as we grew. He didn’t make a fuss about it, or try to force our interest. There were periods when I forgot that it was happening. He was building something that we would come to value later in life. I had a Stanley Gibbons International Stamp Album, a dark brown vinyl cover with coffee cream etchings of the world and its people. Or some of its people. A few leaves of stamps issued in France or Germany would be followed by just one or two stamps for all of Guinea or Guinea-Bissau or perhaps none at all. We knew that this wasn’t the whole story, the only story, the gaps told a different tale. There was no way to complete a stamp album. It was an atlas of cancellations. Years after my father died, my mother and a philatelist neighbour started to sort through the loose, unbound stamps that my father had left behind. Some of the mint British stamps had more value as postage than they did for collectors so my mother put these into little packets and posted them to my brothers and me. Many of them were commonplace, I knew this, yet it was hard to use them as currency. I let them go, one by one, on letters and parcels that I had taken particular care with, to be handled with care and opened with care. The last few I held back. I have them still, a 13p stamp that reproduces a fragment of medieval embroidery, a 29p stamp from a series on the theme of insects with a bush cricket against a yellow background, and a 13p stamp with protons, electrons, and neutrons, the single word ELECTRICITY, and a distant institutional building at the edge of a printed plain. I don’t know why I kept these three. They were all that was left. That’s enough.

‘Last Collection’ is an excerpt from a work-in-progress that draws on an afternoon’s walk around the city of Sheffield.

Brian Lewis is the editor and publisher of Longbarrow Press.

Second Delivery | Brian Lewis

Saturday 19 December, 1.05pm. I was born two weeks late. I don’t remember this, of course, it is not the sort of thing that you remember, yet I remember being told this, the first time I was told this. I have been late ever since. School, paper rounds, every job I ever had. Some years ago I resolved to correct this by setting my watch 13 minutes fast. The trick doesn’t work, it has never worked, the brain does the maths. I am still 13 minutes late for everything. I am late now, as I climb Walkley Lane, past the dead winter deck of La Plata Social Club, past R A Leggett Newsagents and its dark display, past Walkley Food & Wine, once Keliz off licence and convenience store, then Pops off licence and convenience store, then it closed, there was a rethink, a smart, aspirational refurbishment, tasteful grey tones and a minimal typeface, Walkley Wine, it seemed all set to go, but it never opened, it got stuck, now it is Walkley Food & Wine, in red and white, the main signage, yet still the grey frontage of Walkley Wine, WW on the small projecting corner sign. On a wall panel headed OPENING TIME the hours of the days. TUE is TEU. I was going to call at Fay’s with a card, this was going to be my first stop, I have to skip it, I will come back, it is local. I turn left up the hill and onto Walkley Road. It is mild. I felt it as I left the house, the first wave, it is too mild for December. All the lights strung up in windows and gardens seem out of place and out of season. I turn back uphill, a right turn on Freedom Road, I almost don’t see the household recycling site, it diminishes every few months. The bottle banks have gone. A complaint from a neighbour, perhaps, that would do it, the sound of breaking glass. Uphill, still, I remember the house number but not the house, here it is, not where I expected. I follow the path round and knock on the kitchen door. I hear Ruth’s voice, then a scramble for keys, I step back, she appears, then goes away, she returns with Matt. We spend a few minutes catching up. I seem to be apologising for various things, for the unscheduled visit, for missing a project deadline, for the little time that I am spending on their doorstep. We exchange gifts and good wishes. Uphill, the same hill, left onto South Road, the house that used to be a post office, the house that used to be a pub. All the pubs in Walkley seemed to disappear within the space of a few years, one by one, they were picked off by property developers. The only pub left standing was The Rose House. I went there once, with Andy, and Matt, we didn’t stay long. It is still here. Beeches is still here, now incorporating a post office, Gerry’s Bakery is still here. I take a right at Fir Street, this should lead me to Chris’s house, I said I’d be there at 1.30pm. It is 1.35pm. I tell myself that I will make time, I will make up the time. I scramble up the hill and turn left at the brickwork of the long-disused public convenience at the junction with Heavygate Road and scramble up another hill to my right and there is Chris, in the doorway of his house, the door wide open. It is 1.40pm. My breath is heavy so I take an extra step back. We talk of the days ahead, of Christmas, of plans rewritten, scaled back, abandoned. Chris is between appointments and so I leave him and turn back down the hill, the incline is sharp and I nearly slip on a clump of wet leaves stuck to the cobbled slope. I wonder how many walks I have taken along Northfield Road this year, errands, deliveries, collections, so many of them have led me to or through Crookes. At the turning for Cobden View Road I pass the site of a community garden torn up by developers, this happened without notice, the loss is still protested in graffiti on the hoardings. The shops seem to be thriving, there are short pavement queues here and there, then I remember that there is almost no-one inside the shops. Everyone is waiting their turn. I step into the road to avoid the pavement queues, the shops thin out and the queues recede. The Ball is still encouraging its patrons to book ahead for Christmas meals. It has been closed for weeks, all the pubs have been closed for weeks, the signs have been left up to show how it could have been. And here is Noah’s Ark, which has not been spared, and here is the Old Grindstone, always changing hands, I took my parents here in 1995, I was new to the city and I didn’t know where else to take them, I’ve not been back since. And here is the junction, the downward slope, the last of Crookes and its mile-long spine.

2.05pm. Every road leads down. Short, long, steep, curving. I take the turning that I always take, the turning for Taptonville Road, a long street, a long perspective that widens on the descent. There is a cottage on the nearside corner that I often stop or slow for, at the edge of what might have been spacious grounds, a large estate. I imagine it as a lodge, a gatehouse, I imagine its pent snugness. A wreath on the door. The pavements and gutters are thick with leaf-litter. The trees are not street trees, they are confined to private gardens, the trunks lean into the light and the branches overhang. I stray into the road, the traffic is light, intermittent. I pass Broomhill Community Library and the clinic that dealt with my dental emergency in late January. I don’t know what I expected from an emergency dentist, I hadn’t visited a dentist in more than 20 years, this was the reason for the dental emergency. It was much like any other dental appointment except that it was 9.30am on a Sunday and the atmosphere in the waiting room seemed heavier than usual. Two of the people in the waiting room were a couple, it was his appointment, she had been urging him for months, he wouldn’t make time, and now look at him. He seemed disinclined to speak, and I was disinclined to speak, as my mouth was numb with anaesthetic, so she spoke, and I nodded. As she spoke she knitted little blue gonks, they had a purpose, she did tell me, I don’t remember what it was. She said that he was a haulier and that for months he had been trying to manage the pain with anti-inflammatories. Sixty-hour weeks driving lorries on Nurofen Plus. She spoke of his shyness, this surprised me, the tenderness in her voice. I can never remember how to cross Fulwood Road so I wait until the cars have stopped and run. When I turn into Glossop Road, its glass-fronted boutiques and parlours opaque and indeterminate, I think about the soft industries, the small businesses, that there is still a demand for touch, the personal touch, in a time without touch. I can’t see how it can work, it doesn’t seem viable, it is a question of scale. I turn right onto Westbourne Road. At the first house on the left a group of five or six people stand around the open boot of a black Land Cruiser. There are gift bags on the ground and in the boot and it appears that some sort of exchange is taking place. I keep to the left, the pavement is narrow, it is studded with small black bollards that inhibit parking. The road curves and drops and widens and it is all downhill south. I think that the detached, regular houses on the right must have been part of a scheme, the contrast with the properties opposite is sharp, they are larger, the houses on the left, set back in dark gardens, screened by stone walls and hedgerows. Absently, I explore the back of my mouth with the tip of my tongue, until it finds a molar’s socket, empty since March. I come out at Brocco Bank and glimpse the western edge of the botanical gardens while hurrying past the roads for Endcliffe that have Endcliffe in their names. I think that I have passed the botanical gardens at least a dozen times this year, not once passing through them, it was not on the itinerary, and now the year has gone. I look up at the clock tower of St Augustine’s and wonder why the time is 13 minutes out and then realise that it isn’t. At the foot of Brocco Bank I step slowly around small clusters of pedestrians and pedestrian infrastructure. I forget to look out for the Porter Brook, flowing west to east, as it slips below me and behind me.

2.25pm. There used to be a toll gate at Hunter’s Bar. Today it is a roundabout with four exits, and, it seems, it is still customary to pay your way into or out of the area. Everything is moving slowly. I can’t tell if the lines ahead of me are queues for the shops or queues to get past the queues for the shops. Half a dozen people are waiting to be let into Sheffield Makers, they are patient and courteous, the shop has a system in place. I can’t see inside so I make a sketch of crafted decorations, handmade jewellery and recycled accessories and hold it in my mind for the few seconds that it takes for me to turn the corner into Sharrow Vale Road. There are queues in threes and fours at the artisanal takeaways, the deli, the cafe. Things are brought to the open doors, no-one goes in, no-one goes out. I cross the road but I don’t quite leave it, I stick to the broken white lines of the parking bays to avoid the pinch points on the pavement. I see groups of three and six and seven near the galleries and framing shops. The gatherings seem casual, close, uninhibited. I try to shut down the judgements before they start. I try to turn the judgements on myself. I start to turn south onto Cowlishaw Road, the long, low buildings of the Pine Works, it all sinks as I move up the slope, the Lescar is somewhere at the back, I can’t see it from here. It is always further off in my mind. There are blue and black bins spilling over the terrace boundaries and onto the pavement. It’s a Saturday, it isn’t a bin day, still I expect to see lorries. It is bin day somewhere. The road levels out at the intersection with Psalter Lane and I come to a halt at the pedestrian crossing. As I wait for the lights to change I take out a sheet of paper from the breast pocket of my fleece. The sheet is folded into eighths, half of them blank, half of them filled with small black script, some of the script is struck through. I take out a black Bic biro from the left pocket of my trousers and start to add something to one of the eighths but then think better of it and strike it out. The lights change. I cross into Kingfield Road, straight and long and secure, and let go of the thoughts I had thought my way through. At the end of Kingfield Road I turn right at the intersection and come out on Kingfield Road. I take off my rucksack and take out the map and try to work out where I have gone wrong. After a minute or so I realise that I have not gone wrong, I am meant to be on Kingfield Road and this is a continuation of Kingfield Road, although it bears little resemblance to the first Kingfield Road and is pointing in another direction. I don’t know who decides these things. Ahead of me, on the descent, a people carrier slowly reverses from a driveway to the street. There are people in the car and people on the pavement. I cross the road, a similar scene two doors down, I take myself into the gutter. A few of the large, detached houses are having work done to make them larger, skips and portakabins skewing the pathways and the driveways. A female blackbird at the edge of the gravel. A sudden sharp pain in my right temple. It will pass, I think, it is usual on these walks, it is expected, it passes. I look up and find that I am finished with Kingfield Road. I recognise the street opposite without knowing its name. It isn’t part of the route but I need to know more. The street sign tells me that Meadow Bank Avenue is a private road, that parking is for residents only, that there are speed ramps, that the road is slow. The road has prominent features, two fixtures at the top that mark it from the highway, stone gateposts without a gate. I can’t tell where it ends. The road is unadopted, there are others like it around here, there may or may not be a right of way.

2.50pm. I turn from Meadow Bank Avenue and realise that I am no longer running late as I no longer have a schedule. No one is expecting me. The signs of The Union remind me to turn left onto Machon Bank Road, the pub name is spelt out in capitals at the side, title case on the corner. It seems lonely. I walk alongside it for a few seconds, someone still cares, a smart, seasonal window display, someone has taken the trouble. The road drops, the roofs are staggered on the descent. Most of the properties are terraced, thin stone fronts, there is some divergence from this, you see this on Sheffield hill streets, subsidence, voids, some of the older houses will have had to be taken down. A few upstairs windows are open. I think of the heat and the heat escaping. Although I no longer have a schedule I still have deliveries to make, I won’t knock, the deliveries are silent. Machon Bank Road turns into Machon Bank Road. I don’t take out the map because I remember what happened with Kingfield Road and Kingfield Road, the road is the same yet not the same, I trust myself to follow this. I pass a postman stepping up to a house with a bay window and a red front door. This is not his first round of the day, I don’t know this for certain, it’s not as though I can ask him. The plain white backs of cards pressed against the glass. I am sending and receiving more cards this year, not all of them have got through, some are at the mail centres, some will be out for delivery. We want people to know that we are thinking of them. That we haven’t forgotten them. The houses give way to a Sainsbury’s Local and a Sainsbury’s Local car park. There are cards that I don’t send, I don’t have the addresses, I don’t know where the people are. There are cards that I don’t send because the people are no longer among us. I am thinking of them but the thoughts have nowhere to go. Machon Bank Road ends in a crossroads, Sheldon Road ahead, Moncrieffe Road to the left, Nether Edge Road to the right. I take a right. The small businesses are lined up opposite, Bombshell, a hairdresser, Edge, a dentist, Zeds, a grocer. The last shop on the block is Cafe #9. I came here with Rob Hindle ten years ago, there were eight of us, we had been walking for a few hours, we had been stopping on frozen ground and listening to the long wake of the Sheffield Blitz. This was a scheduled stop. Rob’s sequence, premiered in snowy woods and fields on the 70th anniversary of the Luftwaffe’s first bombing raid, drew on his earlier walks through the south-western edges of the city, and on the city archives: the contemporary reports, the eyewitness accounts, the testimonies. We heard more from these voices as the city drew closer, extracts from the memoirs of survivors, inventories of damage and loss. It is harder to imagine today. It is 10 years further off, it is 10 degrees warmer, and the gaps in the city have been filled in. I am still thinking about the closed cafe when I reach the closed pub, the Byron House, where I stop to see where I am on the map. After a short interval I hear raised voices from the pub, no, I hear one voice, there is a second interval. Here is the turning. I went through the addresses in my address book earlier and found that I hadn’t updated it in years. Or is it that I add addresses but do not take them away. I have six addresses for a friend who moved house six times in six years. I couldn’t bring myself to cross the old ones out. Or strike through the addresses of people who have died. Here is the house. It is a friend, not a close friend, but a friend whose year has ended in difficulty. It is a small thing and I don’t know if it will help but I have written a card. There are warm white lights in the window, there is someone at home. I hear the card land in the hallway and I turn back down the road.

3.10pm. I grew up without rivers. There were lakes, and a canal that didn’t work any more, but nothing flowed. Years later, I learned of the River Ray, a tributary of the Thames that passes to the west of my hometown. It runs in a northerly direction from Wroughton, on my father’s side, through Rodbourne, on my maternal grandparents’ side, to a mile east of Purton, on my mother’s grandmother’s side. I have glimpsed it only once or twice in adulthood and have never tried to follow it. It is a faint and minor constellation at 1:1 scale, an idea of navigation that is not for navigation, a pattern that I can read on the map but not on the ground. This is in my mind as I reach the top of Nether Edge Road and try to work out a way down. If I cut through the wood I might end up in the allotments, the terraced slope of Brincliffe Edge, I might lose the outline. I take a sharp right turn onto Archer Road that doubles back on the descent, the Scouts at the end of one driveway, a car park at the end of another, before levelling out at the junction with Edgedale Road and straightening to the east. The street is not familiar. I must have cut through Edgedale Road before, terraces to the north, semis to the south, nothing stands out apart from the sheltered or self-contained housing development, set back from the road in layered greenery, that stands out because it has been designed not to stand out. Although the street is not familiar, I remember how it ends, the junction with Abbeydale Road, the shops in both directions, the pedestrian crossing to the right. The signal is halfway to green and I step into the road. There is very little traffic, are the lights automatic, how do they know. I remember this, too, a left onto Langdale Road, it is short, the road that I need is at the bottom of this road. No right turns for vehicles, left at the corrugated autocentre, the same flagpole, a different flag. It used to be a chequered racing flag and now it is a union flag, or half of a union flag. The other half is missing, worn away by wind, nothing more than wind. I pass the autocentre and am at the end of Rydal Road and here, below the white railings, is the river. I turn right onto Little London Road and walk against the river which means that I am walking into the south. After a hundred feet the road and the river cram under a railway bridge and the pavement thins to almost nothing, I straighten my back and quicken my step, I am listening for oncoming traffic as the stonework darkens. On the other side I take a moment to look at the river before it turns away from the road. I have lived in the city for long enough to know that this is the Sheaf, the dark river, its course obscured by culverts or industry. It is hard to follow, it is never far from the railway, it is glimpsed in passing. I don’t know if anyone else calls it the dark river. Perhaps the Don is the dark river. Perhaps it’s the Porter, which meets the Sheaf underground, beneath the railway station. I started to think of the Sheaf as the dark river when Andy and I used to walk alongside it at night, the short stretch via Halfords and the car wash and the trading estate, under the railway bridge and over the footbridge, we’d end up at the Sheaf View, we’d walk back the same way. I remember the exposed bed and moonlight glinting off metal debris. I tried to record Andy reading some poems there, it wasn’t successful, he turned his back to the Edirol, still reading the poem, we tried again, voices and footsteps beneath the iron footbridge, we tried again, a southbound train overhead. I wanted to come back at 3am and record the poems but it didn’t happen. I turn from Little London Road to Aukley Road, a sharp fork uphill, I can’t quite remember how to get to Chesterfield Road from here. The hill is lightly wooded to my left and I see the shape of a hairpin at the top and I follow it into an unnamed road with a white rail running down the middle. At the end of the rail is Chesterfield Road. On the other side of the carriageway another white rail marks the foot of a steep, narrow passage, a short cut to Cliffefield Road. I climb the steps halfway and stop to take in the city below and find that I am out of shape. The next delivery is somewhere off this road, it is J.R. Carpenter’s This is a Picture of Wind, the order came through yesterday. The customer is going away for a few days, will it be delivered by Monday, of course, I reply, I will make sure of it.

3.30pm. I can’t even post something through a letterbox without asking myself if it might have been done better, the angle, the length of the drop, what to do when meeting resistance from brushes and springs. I let it go and I find the lane that leads from the corner of Cliffefield Road to a southwestern edge of Meersbrook Park. I know nothing about the park and I have never set foot in it. I enter under leafless winter canopy, not too heavy, the trees help with orientation, they are part of the design, the extended line, space enough to make sense of the branching paths. The path to my left is for the walled garden. I take the path straight ahead, a view of the park as it opens out from the hill, there are other paths criss-crossing the green slopes. I see people, sitting, strolling, singly or in pairs, children at a distance. A great sweep on the descent. I take a satsuma from my rucksack and peel and eat it as I walk. The descent is shorter than I’d expected. I leave the park through an open gate, I face the street, the streets leading off. I don’t know which side of the park I am on so I slip the rucksack from my shoulder and take out the map. I turn to page 133 and find that I am north-west when I should be north-east. I take a right and then tell myself to take another right on reaching the end of the first right, right right, Brook Road to Meersbrook Park Road. It is quiet. I pass a small white camper van, decorated with stickers or stencils, open the door and you’re home. A left onto Cross Park Road, a large detached property on the corner, an outbuilding that I mistake for a house. Something isn’t right, the windows whited out, is it done with, is it derelict, it doesn’t take long for a building to come apart. At the end of Cross Park Road I stop to look for Suzannah and Will’s card and then I look around for Suzannah and Will’s house. The street looks much the same as when I last visited except that it is in Christmas colours. It will be dark soon, I don’t have to read the sky, it only takes a few minutes. I post the card without fuss and turn right at the gate and right at the end of the street. Towards the bottom of the hill the terrace starts to break up, a flat-roofed, single-storey Unit 17 wedged between 63 and 69 Valley Road, number 67 is missing, it ends with Mastercast Fire Surrounds and a courtyard out back that I can’t make out. Ceiling Rose’s, Coving Plain & Ornate, DaDo Rail. I don’t know why I bother. A vast and empty car park and a nondescript building with numerous small windows, it all belongs to the Jehovah’s Witnesses, this is explained in a transparent panel attached to the car park gatepost. As I pass the Meersbrook Enterprise Centre, a range of modern office and business units from 200 sq ft to 2,000 sq ft, I am reminded of the financial advisers for whom I used to provide remote administrative services, many of them working out of buildings like this. The letters of authority, signed by their clients, photocopied or faxed or emailed, to be actioned with urgency. When the letters had been processed I would store them in a box and then the box would be sent to an off-site archive. All of my work from those years has been destroyed, long since, in accordance with the Data Protection Act 1998. Bag supplies, roofing supplies, hand tools. The buildings get smaller and fewer and the numbers run out at the corner.

3.45pm. Valley Road meets Chesterfield Road at an obtuse angle, this isn’t obvious at the time, it’s only there when you look back. There is a large Lidl opposite with ground level parking and I wonder what was there before. You could ask that question anywhere. I used to ask it of myself as I walked the streets that I’d known for decades, I’d turn a corner and see a new hotel or a new showroom, what had it taken the place of, what had we lost, where did it go. Sometimes it would come to me, days or weeks later, there used to be a garage there, an old post office. As I take a right turn I glance at the wall that divides the far pavement from the Lidl car park. A section of the old wall has been integrated into the new wall, there is no plaque, no date, no foundation stone. It is hard to let go. I head north. Many of the businesses on this side of the road are closed, or appear to be closed, some are still trading, discreetly, warily. I am overtaken by a man who makes for the doorway of a coffee shop, he catches the eye of the proprietor, a transaction ensues, wordless and familiar. A grocer, a takeaway, a long-dead bakery. As I near the end of the block I pause at the windows of Rails, a store for model railway enthusiasts, also Dinky, Meccano, Scalextric, etc. It is spread over several units with matching panels of hand-painted signage above the shopfronts. A handful of customers are inside, at the counters, at the displays, at a distance. I am almost moved to join them but I don’t because it is not part of my world. It was part of my father’s world, I imagine him there, taking his time, a smile or a half-smile on his face. Some years after he died, my mother said that he had very few toys as a child, the late 1930s, the 1940s, and so he collected Matchbox cars later in life, Models of Yesteryear, they filled the little corners of the house he had built, the high shelves above the bookcase, the recesses in the attic. It had never occurred to me. It wasn’t nostalgia for a time that he had lost, or a time before his own time, but a space that he made for a time that he had never had. I cross the junction with Albert Road and notice the railway bridge opposite, the trains are running parallel, the Sheaf must be on the other side of the tracks. Chesterfield Road is now London Road though it still feels like Chesterfield Road. I pass The Red Lion, which is grey, and then, a minute or so later, The White Lion, which is green and black. A few more lights in the distance. Next to The White Lion is Ponsford, a furniture showroom, and Ponsford, a furniture showroom, and Ponsford, a furniture showroom, infinite recursion in black and white. The scale is not apparent from the south and the end is not the end. The terrace runs out but Ponsford runs on, via a covered walkway that lifts the business over Well Road, linking the second floor of the older premises to a new purpose-built showroom with parking at the rear. I have never bought any furniture in my life, apart from a secondhand desk which cost £20 in 1999, and which I still use today. A low bridge ahead, the railway turning right, the Sheaf following, running under light traffic on London Road, overtaking the mainline at Greyspace Flooring, meeting and parting in the blind spots of the city.

4.00pm. This is the eastern edge of the antique district, or the dead centre of the carpet district, or the outskirts of the fabric district. I can’t see any antique shops or carpet shops or fabric shops from here but the patterns were printed in my mind, some years ago, and I can’t edit them. I know that the patterns weren’t set down straight and that I could walk around for an hour without finding any carpets. I know that I could set off in any direction and be proved wrong. I know that the constellations will fall apart when I’m not looking. Here is an antique shop, the doors are closed and windowless, the paintwork a shade redder than the neighbouring Machine Mart. It is not clear if the antique shop is still trading in general antiques, the signs on the window glass encourage this idea. A newer sign, nailed to the brickwork above the shopfront, states that it is militaria, nothing more, JUST MILITARY in a military stencil typeface. There’s no point in arguing with a military stencil typeface. There is a lot of London Road to get through. Just ahead are the turnings for Queens Road and Wolseley Road, everything widens at the intersection, everything stops, the queueing traffic and the mounted lights. I am on the wrong side of London Road and I have to use three Pelican or Puffin crossings to get myself back on track. When I cross the last set of lights I am rewarded with the display window of GULL’S FABRICS, you see, I was right, I am always half right. Tool hire, a mini market, Asline Road branching off, to the E-Bike shop and the U-Mix Centre. London Road veers left. I pass Hearth and Home and Baitul Mukarram Jame Masjid mosque and then I realise that I should have taken Asline Road for the next delivery, the last delivery. It doesn’t matter, I can find my way back. Everything branches east. Royal Apartments at the corner, closed curtains, open windows, is the heating stuck, are the windows stuck. The light is starting to go and the landmark buildings come into their own. Highfield Trinity Church is first, stone stacks, the local vastness. I glimpse a similarly-sized ex-church opposite, set back on Highfield Place, skylights where the slates were. At Highfield Library, another Victorian corner building, I stop to read the words chiselled into the portico: THAT THERE SHOULD ONE MAN DIE IGNORANT WHO HAD CAPACITY FOR KNOWLEDGE, THIS I CALL A TRAGEDY, WERE IT TO HAPPEN MORE THAN TWENTY TIMES IN THE MINUTE, AS BY SOME COMPUTATIONS IT DOES. I cross the junction with St Barnabas Road to a furniture centre, which is called Furniture Centre, then cross to the west side of London Road to the half-open shops, Erbil Barber, Amigos Mexican Kitchen, closed or closing shops looking back from the other side, Jay Jay’s Army Surplus, Foam & Upholstery Supplies. On the corner with Grosvenor Square I nearly miss the window I was looking for because it’s not on the itinerary. I thought that it was done for when I passed it in late April, and again in late June, and it looks done for now, but it isn’t, not yet, not today. It’s a single unit, tucked between Chikoo’s Peri Peri and Treatz Dessert Parlour, SHEFFIELD TRANSPORT MODELS in the upper half of the sign, initial caps and petite caps, Model Railways & Transport Books centred in the lower half, dark blue text in an off-white field. The small display at the front of the window is gone. I try to remember how it looked in June, the remains of a tableau, a partial layout, one track, one tree, a few bushes, a church half-buried in sand. A paper background of hills, forests, lakes, the scenery bleached pale blue by sunlight. There is nothing in its place. I know that the shop is not done for because the man who stood behind the counter in April and June, sorting through paperwork, perhaps, or fulfilling online orders, is here today, in similar clothes, in a similar attitude. I step aside from the window as I don’t want him to see me looking in. The light is on inside the shop, it doesn’t reach much further than the counter, but I can make out the titles of the books and magazines stacked up behind the glass door. Waterways in Europe, Dictionary of Rail and Steam, The RAILWAY magazine. I see myself flicking through the books, not for the books themselves, but for the postcards, notes, and letters that might be tucked inside, accidentally, incidentally, or intentionally, then forgotten, unseen, unread, the letters to the future.

4.10pm. As a child, I would faint, now and then. It happened in school assemblies, scout parades, I didn’t make it out of the cubs, it wasn’t for me. The first time it happened, I was at a loss, the adults were at a loss, what happened, is he OK, is he going to be OK. I wasn’t hurt. The floor was hard but there wasn’t far to fall. I wanted to know how long I had been out. A few minutes, someone said. It became useful, for getting out of things, assemblies, parades, standing in silence for what seemed like hours, marking time. The uniforms were always too tight, the collars and the ties, it happened for a reason, it wasn’t a bluff, they would say that I changed colour in the last few moments. It’s also true that I didn’t want to be there. It was hard to fall in line. The last time it happened, I was at a temporary blood donation centre, this was a few decades later. I’d just given blood, but it wasn’t the blood, that part had gone well, I was resting, I decided it was time to leave, I gathered my things and stood up and I fell into a faint, a dead faint. I wanted to know how long I had been out. A few minutes, someone said. You should sit down and wait here, there’s tea and biscuits on the table. I’d tried to walk before I could stand. I keep going, north along London Road, towards The Moor, towards town, then stop, I am forgetting the delivery, the last delivery. I turn back at Clarke Square and cross to the junction with Alderson Road, there is a pharmacy on the corner, there are yellow metal signs, weighted down with sandbags, COVID Testing Centre in black with black arrows. The arrows are pointing south-east, the road is the same. I need to be south-east then north-east then east. The test site isn’t far, a minute or less, I hear the generator as the traffic falls back. I see the white tents and the white portakabins. The test site is in a car park, it is a walk-through centre, there is no parking in the car park. There are metal barriers, concrete blocks, traffic cones. The layout is similar to the walk-through centre that Emma and I visited in October, in Burngreave, a few miles to the north-east. Emma had made the appointments just a few hours before we set off. We didn’t know how long it would take on foot so we left as soon as we could and walked for an hour or two in steady drizzle and arrived half an hour early. No-one was going in or coming out. It was a few moments before we realised that the site was open but no-one was using it. A supervisor scanned our QR codes and another supervisor beckoned us into a portakabin. It didn’t seem to matter that we were half an hour early. We sat in our partitioned spaces and familiarised ourselves with the steps in the booklet and then we put ourselves through the procedure. The supervisor was on hand throughout, tactful, discreet, attentive. We put the swabs in the vials and the vials in the zip-lock bags and the zip-lock bags in the biohazard bags and then handed over the biohazard bags to another supervisor before leaving the site. Then we walked home. It rained on and off. I can’t remember what we talked about, were we anxious, relieved, reflective. Neither of us kept a record. I turn left onto Woodhead Road, terraces on one side, long low windowless walls on the other. I see the Copthorne Hotel in the middle distance and the Railway Hotel in the near distance. I’ve never set foot in the Railway Hotel, it’s opposite the United ground so I think of it as a match pub, United Fans Only. It must let people in at other times but I have never seen the doors open. When I pass the Railway the Copthorne comes back into view. I look left along Bramall Lane, losing the focus as the Copthorne meets the stadium, I think of the time when Andy and I were walking back from town. It was late, past midnight, a taxi pulled up in front of us, and Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry got out of the back. Andy stepped over and embraced him like a long-lost cousin, though we had only seen him an hour before, onstage, at Plug. There was no hesitation in the embrace and I admired that. Funny. To think of Scratch at the Copthorne. To think of embracing anyone now. I look right and left and there is nothing coming so I cross straight into Cherry Street and look out at the empty Blades car park. I haven’t been here in two years or more. This is where so much of it started, this is where we sat and talked, mostly it was Andy who did the talking, I listened, I went away and came back with sketches, we worked on them together. This is why I can never throw anything away. It is dusk. It was always dusk. The poems were shaped at dusk, they were spoken at dusk. All the poems come back at once in his voice. The ginnel gate is unlocked, someone has nailed a mailbox to the slats, that wasn’t there the last time I was here. I could have sent letters. There are differences at the back, I can’t say for sure, a fence or a wall has come down or gone up. There is a light in the kitchen. I knock, and wait, then knock again. No sound, no shadow. Perhaps he’s gone to the off-licence. Perhaps he’s editing his photographs, the headphones on, a roll-up on the go. The letterbox is smaller than I remember but the parcel will get through. I wait until I hear it make contact with the kitchen floor. The chequered linoleum. Not here. Anywhere. Bills stacking up. A year in arrears.

Sheffield, 19 December 2020.

‘Second Delivery’ is a ‘winter postscript’ to Lockdown Walks, a series of posts that appeared on the Longbarrow Blog during April 2020; you can read the fifth instalment here.

Brian Lewis is the editor and publisher of Longbarrow Press. Longbarrow Press is continuing to fulfil book orders via its website during the COVID-19 pandemic; click here for a full list of our current hardbacks and to order titles.

Local Distribution | Brian Lewis

if the weight in my bag has increased
then books are migrating

‘Lines That Echo’, Rachel Smith

At the corner of Bank Street and Scargill Croft the wheeled luggage stops moving. It takes a moment for the arm to grasp this, stretching and jerking. I scan the pavement for obstructions. It is difficult, I cannot bend, I find nothing. The pavement is clean and flat. I tilt forward, the luggage tilts forward, the wheels drag, then turn, I let go, straightening, the trolley slumps back into its bulk. Three strides, stop, repeat. I see the cobbles and the long drop and some bits of Crown Court at the end of the drop and I stop again and look back at where I started, 100 feet to the east.

Always, it is slow, going from door to door. I think back to when I started, the paper round on weekdays and weekends, everyone had a paper then, the first hour picking and marking and building the round, the second hour under the weight of it, a PVC bag and its awkward strap, shifting it from shoulder to shoulder, in and out of closes and crescents. I’d get my stride back at the end, an empty bag in one hand, wondering where the weight had gone. It was £2 on a Sunday, a lot of money then. It still is. The print on the fingers, the black marks on the shoulders.

A few weeks before Christmas, I receive an email from John. John has closed the arts centre he founded 10 years ago and is clearing the building. The books that lined the walls of the café are now surplus to requirements and he wonders if they might be of use to me. I am not sure that they will be of use to me, but I agree to collect them, I apply the terms ‘poetry community’ and ‘redistribution’, I propose dates for collection, I express confidence that a use will be found. I will call round shortly after 2pm on Monday. I will bring a large rucksack and some carrier bags.

Around the time that John was acquiring premises in Sheffield, shortly before the economic crisis of 2008, I was employed in a low-status administrative role in the financial services industry. Unbeknownst to my colleagues and managers, I was also running a secondary business from under my desk, a small poetry press with a turnover of approximately £23 per annum. The idea for the press had originated in the misuse of office equipment a few years earlier. As the building never seemed to close, and the printers and copiers were unmonitored after business hours, I began to design and make little pamphlets on the machines, a pocket library in a filing cabinet.

It is shortly after 2pm on Monday. I am staring through the gridded sash of a Georgian terrace, there is John, no, he turns away, I am tapping and waving. After a minute the noises and gestures scratch through his side of the glass and he lets me in. The central gallery space is bare apart from some drifts and heaps in the middle. I take a few steps towards them and see that they are books, bagged and boxed, skewed and listing. I start to add them up, perhaps 250 in all, excluding magazines, the little magazines. Where’s your car, asks John. You won’t be able to manage all these.

The sessions with the copiers were late, irregular, there were toner spills and paper jams, sheets in the wrong order. A stack of clean print and a heap of discard. After clearing the printers and worktops and tables it would be 10pm, 11pm, midnight. Some of the scrap would be left for recycling and the rest I took away. On the way home, passing through the commercial districts, I would post the surplus pages through the doors of solicitors, hairdressers, building societies, estate agents, travel agents, a sonnet, canto or haiku for every tile and mat, the loose leaves behind me, slowly running down the discard, shedding paper through the night.

You won’t be able to manage. Why don’t you take some now, and come back for the rest. He means well. It’s fine, I say. I have brought a large rucksack and some carrier bags. I have also borrowed my partner’s suitcase, into which I am stuffing boxes of various sizes and a few of the larger books, not all of it is poetry, the collection also includes works by Leo Tolstoy and Peter Stringfellow. The suitcase will not close. I remove the Stringfellow and a cricket memoir and it zips shut. As John looks on, I cram the remainder into my rucksack and four carrier bags, two for each hand.

It is personal, the thought of choosing a book, the act of buying a book. When I receive orders for books that I have published, I consult a map to see if the address lies within a walking distance, and if it does, I walk the book to its purchaser. Then I walk back. This is how I think with the city, this is the Sheffield that I piece together from wrong turns and blind bends, from Wadsley to Woodseats, Walkley to Wincobank. One by one, the books find their way to their new readers, another Sheffield in their wake. Always, it is slow, always, it is slower than I think.

The rucksack is solid and straining at the buckles. I can’t hoist it onto my back, so I squat, slipping my arms through the shoulder straps, then rise to my feet, setting my spine against the frame. Something isn’t right. I gather all four carrier bags in my right hand, grasp the suitcase handle with my left, and try to make all this appear normal, reasonable, viable. John looks on, restating his concerns, I could call you a cab, let me call you a cab. The suitcase drags, one wheel good, one wheel bad. It’s fine. I haul everything through the narrow exit and the door closes for the last time.

The first time I set foot in Bank Street Arts was sometime in the autumn of 2008, I think, there was something happening, an exhibition or a reading, the centre hadn’t been open for long, it was hard to find and when you did find it you couldn’t be sure if anyone would come to the door. Over the next few years, each part of the building came into use, the uses often changing, artists’ studios, public galleries, a café, residencies, readings, performances, book fairs. It didn’t always run smoothly, but it was an outlet, a community, a space of making. Now it has closed, without a word it has closed.

I take three steps with the rucksack, suitcase and carrier bags, enough to put myself out of sight and earshot of John, and slump against a wall. This is a mistake. One of the carrier bags is swollen with Magmas and Rialtos and something called I Bought a Mountain. The handle is weak. I lift it onto the top of the upright suitcase and twist the plastic grips around the metal rod, making a loose knot, the bag will be supported by the suitcase at rest and in motion. Well done, I think to myself. I regather and rebuckle, and carefully tilt the suitcase handle. Seconds later, the bag falls off.

The spaces of the city are always coming into use, or falling out of use. Or so it seems. I think of Bank Street Arts, and I think of Bloc, CADS, Cupola, DINA, Furnace Park, the Nichols Building, 7 Garden Street, the new work made possible by and in those spaces, what did we do without them, what will we do when they’re gone. The links are broken, the histories wiped. It must be acknowledged, there must be a record. The spaces of the city did not appear or disappear by themselves, they did not find or lose their mark on the map without a fight. It was not for nothing.

I reattach the bag to the suitcase and tilt everything forward. Three strides, stop, repeat. Sometimes it is the suitcase that stops moving and sometimes it is me. After 10 minutes I reach the junction of Bank Street and Queen Street, the main road divided by New Street to the north, Figtree Lane to the south. The light is going. I squint at Figtree Lane, little more than a ginnel, it winds around the cathedral and into the city centre. I could take a tram from there, I think. Then I see the cobbles and the slope. No. Also, the tram is an extra 70p from the centre, think of that.

The bookshops, anyone could walk into the city bookshops, it was never clear how they kept going, and then they were gone. Alan Hill Books, Rare and Racy, the left-wing store on Surrey Street, the idea of them always seemed more solid than the shelved stock, yet only the stock survives, somewhere, still, it must survive somewhere. Someone knows where it is. Every now and then you’d call in and see the new acquisitions near the counter, boxed or unboxed, a complete run, someone’s collection, you knew that you were seeing the best of the libraries, you wouldn’t see them as they were, at the end, before they were broken up.

My palms burn. I see the sign of the Three Cranes, half-lit, a few feet above me. There is someone in the doorway, slouching, smoking. One of the plastic bags is losing the internal reinforcement from its handle, in a few moments it will be useless. I quicken my pace, I do not want to fall apart under the sign of the Three Cranes, let me sort this out. I make it to the corner of Queen Street and Northchurch Street. Mail Boxes Inc, no, Mail Boxes Etc. Some builders are staring from a scaffolded building. They are not laughing or pointing. After a minute they go back to their work.

When I was very small I founded a library. The library comprised six books that I no longer had a use for and six books that I claimed to have written or was going to write. I circulated the list among a handful of friends and invited them to subscribe to the library. No-one joined. The list went missing and I lost the books I hadn’t written. I didn’t want to write a book, I wanted to see the books lined up with my name on the spine, Brian Lewis, Brian Lewis, Brian Lewis. I wanted the mobile library to come and take them and for people to write in them.

It is 500 feet from Mail Boxes Etc to the end of Queen Street. With 250 books and the little magazines, it takes 15 minutes, half of this stoppage. At the turning for West Bar I stop again and remove some of the larger books from a Sainsbury’s carrier bag and stuff them into the suitcase. The suitcase will not close. I try again, the suitcase closes, then opens in a different place. My shoulders ache. I shuffle everything to the pedestrian crossing and press the button. A black cab slows for a roundabout, its roof sign lit up. I am saving the books, I think, but for whom, for what?

I reach the second pedestrian crossing, linked to the first by an island of white rails, I am moving with difficulty, the traffic impatient. I follow the National Emergency Services Museum round the corner and into what is not yet Gibraltar Street. The pavements are deteriorating. I put my body behind the deadweight of the suitcase, push not pull, the wheels seize and I pile into the frame. It is embarrassing. I try to remind myself that poetry has value, I pass Yorkshire Decorators Centre, Shakespeares, no, The Shakespeare. I stop at a builder’s skip to adjust my rucksack. I fall back and the drawstring opens. The books have had enough.

I have had enough. I drag the rucksack and the suitcase and the carrier bags along the last few yards of Gibraltar Street and cast them down at the edge of a mini car park. I prop myself against a wall with the hand that doesn’t hurt. There is frost on the pavement, there are books on the pavement, two or three paperbacks tipped from the carriers. One of them is The Bus to Hope by Brian Lewis. The cover depicts the author lurking behind a Henry Moore figure, his big laughing face framed by the arm and torso of the bronze, the parkland receding. I flick the pages and wince.

Then I pick up The Art of Seduction by Robert Greene. The title, embossed and gilded, is laid within a vertical pink slit, the slit offset with midnight blue trims. The gilt is fading. The cover tells us that Robert Greene is the author of the International Bestseller The 48 Laws of Power. I open the book. It is badly designed on cheap stock. It employs six typefaces and advocates cruelty. It is heavily underlined and circled throughout, in black pen, the thin paper scored in agreement. One of the highlighted passages contains the word ‘stategy’. There are 500 pages of this. The moral right of the author has been asserted.

I don’t know what to do. My hands are not working properly and the tram stop is another quarter of a mile. I stare at the carrier bags and their broken handles. It occurs to me that I could leave them here, in the mini car park, among the weeds and nettles. I could find my way back to them tomorrow. They will be safe here for the night. I hoist the rucksack onto my shoulders, I have nothing with which to hoist it, I fall over and right myself, then slowly set off with the suitcase, the library in hand, another on my back, slipping in and out of alignment.

An earlier version of this piece appeared in the DW Cities: Sheffield anthology, edited by Emma Bolland (Dostoyevsky Wannabe, 2019). The contributors to DW Cities: Sheffield are: Helen Blejerman, Angelina D’Roza, Daniel Eltringham, Tim Etchells, Louise Finney, Rachel Genn, Pete Green, Linda Kemp, Sharon Kivland, Joanne Lee, Elise Legal, Brian Lewis, A. B. G. Murray, and Rachel Smith. You can buy the book here: https://www.dostoyevskywannabe.com/cities/sheffield

Click here to read ‘On Cities, Solidarity, Loss, and Hope’, Emma Bolland‘s account of the second launch of the DW Cities: Sheffield anthology.

Brian Lewis is the editor and publisher of Longbarrow Press. His publications include East Wind (Gordian Projects, 2016), an account of a walk across the Holderness peninsula, and White Thorns (Gordian Projects, 2017), based on a series of walks through the Isle of Axholme.

The Haul | Brian Lewis

Sunday 23 August, 6.45am. I scrabble at the back of a kitchen cupboard and separate three margarine tubs from the stack in which they were stuck. The lids are loose, somewhere in the unit, I count out three and close the door. Then I stuff everything into a threadbare rucksack and leave the house. I think that I am putting the thoughts behind me as I head east along Holme Lane, there is very little traffic in either direction, no tailbacks at the intersection. I pass Subway and Wilko and Lloyds and make a diagonal crossing of the garage forecourt. I bend to the newspaper stand, then realise that my face is uncovered, I unbend and unpocket a fabric mask and attach it to the front of my head. As I bend for the second time, another man leans into the newspaper stand, he is perhaps 60, 65, his face is uncovered, he pauses, mid-lean, then takes two or three newspapers from their plastic compartments, pauses again, then walks through the door of the kiosk. I take a newspaper and follow him into the kiosk and stand behind him in the queue. I make judgments about his character while I wait. When I am called forward by the cashier I discard the judgments and present the newspaper for payment. I ask the cashier how she is, she is concerned about the scaremongering in the newspapers, this is the word she uses, scaremongering, she points at a headline, it warns of food shortages, a winter crisis, worse to come. ‘People will start panic buying again’, she says. I nod, half-heartedly, it is a weak gesture, I have nothing to say. I leave the kiosk and leave the forecourt. I have stopped keeping proper records in the last few months, the accounts are full of holes, but I remember that Emma and I came this way a month ago, we met our friend, Helen, in the avenue that was still an avenue, we walked to the park, the three of us, the park at the end of the street. We made a slow circuit of the paths, north, east, west, south. We passed the lake and Helen was talking of the Canada geese that live on the lake, its small islands, she hears them from her house, yes, we said, we hear them from our house. As Helen was talking I was thinking that we hadn’t seen her for months, we had seen very few friends in months, yet the time that had passed had been marked by the geese. I would look up from the back garden and see the overhead formation, a few minutes after Helen, or a few minutes before, east to west, west to east. She said something else, that they were in training, that they were practicing flight. A long journey ahead. I don’t know if the geese are migratory or sedentary. We couldn’t imagine it, or I couldn’t, not really, the thought of the Labrador Sea, the long haul.

A blight in the palm,
a season without colour,
a field without work.

I am still heading east but the impetus is broken, I will have to start from somewhere else, I think back to where I left off. There is a wide empty stretch between the garage and the casino and I let my thoughts slow to almost nothing. The images, too, are slower, smaller, fewer, I sort through them as they come, I set all of them aside but one. It is a photograph of my father, which I saw for the first time only recently. It is a photograph of a photograph. The original photograph sits in a silver frame, the edges of which are visible in the photograph of the photograph, the photograph of the photograph was taken by one of my two brothers. I don’t know who took the original photograph. I don’t know when it was taken, or where. I know that this is my father, at some point in his National Service, which dates it to the early 1950s. I think that the setting is somewhere in south-west England. The image is sepia-toned, I can’t be certain of the colours of my father’s clothes, the trousers are dark, the shirt is a lighter shade, khaki, olive, sage, I remember that my father was colour-blind. The shirt has two pockets, buttoned on the right, unbuttoned on the left, and the sleeves are neatly rolled to the biceps. In the photograph he stands with his left hand on his hip and his right hand on his knee, the knee is bent, he is bracing his right foot on a boulder or a tree stump. There is light at his back. Perhaps it is summer, late spring, early autumn. He has a fine, pencil-thin moustache, it is partially obscured by shadow, as are his eyes. This makes it hard to read his mood. Is he at ease, is he distracted, is he impatient to get back to work. His work, as I recall, was the renovation of dilapidated army accommodation, he was a carpenter, assigned to the Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers, this was the use they put him to, that and the lorries, the fleet repairs. On my left, the casino car park, then the casino, five months closed, it reopened a week ago. I count six or seven cars in the car park, there is no-one in the parking booth, there is no-one at the entrance, there are waves of distorted sound thudding into the rear of the building, like bad cabling, like wires shorting out. On my right, Hillsborough Fencing and its frayed union flags. I remember the wrong turn I took some years back. I crossed the street and took a right at the flags, a short walk to the dead end of a trading estate, the concrete yards and padlocked gates of suppliers and dealers, no through road. I had no business there and so I turned back. I think of Roy, my father’s cousin, who died earlier this month. He would have seen no end of estates like this, or perhaps the same few, repeatedly, he worked in haulage, I don’t know where his work took him. After he retired he spent much of his time helping to restore the waterways near his home in Oxfordshire. He was a volunteer with the East Vale branch of the Wilts & Berks Canal Trust and, for many years, the Branch Work Party Organiser. I can picture him there, in his element, the van, the gear, everything at hand, pressing on, he is cheerful, pragmatic, resourceful. It is a time out of season and the picture is in colour.

It is not finished,
the work is never finished
or left unfinished.

Here are the first bramble bushes, the road turning left at the power station. It is so quiet, the hum is low, level, unbroken. I could stop here and pick blackberries, that would be enough, but I did that last week. I want to see the slopes. I pass through the last section of Livesey Street, the greyhound track behind a concrete fence, the power station behind a metal fence, and somewhere the greyhound track meets the Cadbury Trebor Bassett site, I can’t see the join. The road ends in a bridge and the bridge unlocks the River Don. I look the water up and down, north-west, south-east, it takes a moment for the eyes to adjust. On the north-east bank I see a man asleep. He is seated on a bench, overlooking the river, fully dressed and approximately upright, his stance aslant to the left. I imagine him waking, at intervals, he starts, he sets himself right, then falls back into a tilt. The bench was installed earlier in the year by the Friends of Wardsend Cemetery. I walk up the cemetery’s steps, into the cemetery’s shade, the path is clear, the place feels cared for, it is more than just maintenance, upkeep. The stones have been set right, as far as possible, the ground is tended. The Friends have spent years mapping this site, clearing the knotweed, helping to make inscriptions legible, putting names to unmarked burials, guiding descendants to the graves of their ancestors. The dead are remembered in each act of care. The path and the shade and the graves run up against the railway bridge, a steep climb and a fast drop, a scattering of graves on the north-east side of the railway line. I forget that this is also part of the cemetery, the railway came first, the churchyard was full, the new acres are the overspill. I cross the bridge and turn left, away from the cemetery and the railway, it is uphill sharply. I stop at the foot of the steps cut into the slope and take one of the margarine tubs from my rucksack. Do I start at the top of the ridge, then work my way down, or ascend gradually, harvesting as I go. I decide to start from where I am. There are some brambles just up ahead, the ridge path straightening after the turn, I slow down and take a look. I see the flattened grass, the bent branches, someone got here first, before the storm. What’s left is rotted or unready. I look again, beyond the outer branches, I turn the leaves back, there are ripe blackberries on the underside, a good size. Still they are few and the bushes are strung out along the ridge. This will take time, I say to myself, but I have time. As I go, I think of Roy, of my last visit to his house in Oxfordshire, four years ago. He wasn’t well even then, but he was no less himself, gentle, kind, good-humoured. After a few hours I said goodbye and turned left at the gate, then took the footbridge over the A420. It was late August, the blackberry season nearing its end, it comes earlier in the south. I stopped in a field near the dual carriageway and filled two boxes in twenty minutes. It rained. It rained on the rolling farmland and it rained on Harrowdown Hill. It rained on the Thames Path and on the sections where the path ran out. I cut the walk short on the outskirts of Oxford and caught a bus back to Swindon. I looked out from the top deck at the land I must have looked out at from childhood, all those Sunday afternoons, and I recognised almost none of it. I thought of the miles that my father must have clocked up in South Oxfordshire, the visits to the Mattingleys, the Murrells, the building work that ran on for weeks, there were no blank spaces in the Vale of the White Horse, he could read it back to front. In half an hour I have filled half a box.

Another harvest.
You wouldn’t see it, and yet
you prepared the ground.

I step back from the edge of the slope and stare out at the bushes that skew from the hillside. The best are out of reach. There was rain in the night, it gets into everything, I am soaked when I lean in. I climb the slope, crossing from left to right, from bramble to bramble, there is very little for the taking. The path forks in two, one track on the level, another on a gradient, I see brambles in the fork. I poke around in the brambles and set my rucksack down. Roy was the best man at my parents’ wedding, I know this because my mother told me, two weeks ago, it is something that I think that I thought that I knew, but I didn’t, not really, I have to be reminded. I remember that he was there at the end, though, for my father, at or near the end, perhaps a week or so before he died. There was a suddenness, things were moving very quickly, and there was Roy, with his easy, familiar manner, there was no awkwardness or reserve. I remember that it cheered my father. I saw the years fall away. I pick up my rucksack and move on from the brambles in the fork, I settle on the upper track, the gradient. I can hear the machinery at the Bassett site, I can see the white clouds assembling. One or two emergency vehicles on Penistone Road. I can’t tell if they’re southbound or northbound, they slip through earshot in seconds. The ground levels out to a grassy plateau between Owlerton and Shirecliffe, there are more brambles ahead, a bank of allotments somewhere behind me. I set the rucksack down again. I am thinking of the last journey I made with my father. It was a Tuesday afternoon in early August, I had arranged an early departure from the office, I had agreed to meet him at his allotment. I don’t remember if he asked for help or if I volunteered. It was my first visit to the allotment in two decades and possibly his last. He was there ahead of me, I saw the car parked at the end of Barnfield Close, I knew that he’d paced himself accordingly, spared his energy for the labour, the short drive there and back. I opened the gate and walked through. I couldn’t remember which allotment was his, then I spotted him at the far end of the plot, the third one along, or the fourth, they were numbered, I’d forgotten how large the plots were, it was a job of work in the summer. I waved, then made my way to the end of the plot, was he retrieving something from the shed, was he filling a bucket with water. He told me that he had walked over to the new B&Q across the road, it had opened that summer, he thought he would take a look. He overheard a conversation between a customer and a manager, neither of them was getting anywhere, neither of them had an answer for the other, the thing, what was the thing, where would you find the thing. He intervened, gently, he was able to show the customer what they needed, what it was, where it was, the manager offered him a job, so he said, he joked about this, he was still making jokes. We spent an hour or two there, on the plot, working separately, then working side by side. I picked the blackberries, it was all I knew, what else was there, runner beans, broad beans, carrots, much of it under nets, I don’t recall. I was there to keep an eye on him. I was there to help out, I wanted to make myself useful, but I was also there to keep an eye on him. I think he understood this. He understood what was happening, that the days were shortening, though none of us knew how many days were left. It was important to him, the plot, I knew that, but I didn’t know that it would be important to me. I didn’t know how difficult it would be to hand the allotment keys back to the council, the plot that he had tended for over 30 years. I carried them around for a week before giving them up. I make a circuit of the plateau, the second margarine tub fills slowly, here is another clump of brambles. The white clouds lose their shape in the valley. Once or twice, in my father’s last weeks, I paused at the threshold of his room. An open door. I wanted to ask him how he was, how do you start a conversation like that, what would I have said, what would he have said. I can’t fill in the blanks. That afternoon at the allotment, we harvested twelve kilos of blackberries. It didn’t seem to matter that he could no longer taste them. We carried them to the car and stacked them in the boot. Just before he closed the door, he surveyed the haul, then glanced back at the plot. ‘Good job’, he said.

i.m. Raymond Lewis (d. 23.08.2007) and Roy Murrell (d. 06.08.2020)

Photograph taken in Owlerton, north Sheffield, 28 August 2020.