Life at a Distance
Niall Campbell writes about memory and peat-gathering
1: Hands
Are other people’s memories located in a particular sense? I ask this because, while I remember that wet peat has a distinct scent, I cannot recall it. I presume it is rich, an almost sweetened woodiness. But it is lost, gone. Nothing has been filed in this part of the brain. What I recall, instead, is the feel of it on the hands, so maybe mine is a tactile memory. It was slick – black butter, Heaney called it. Your hands being covered in wet peat made them feel as though they were completely new, had never touched or been touched. Every pore was filled. The fingerprints caked and smoothed out by that dark wet earth. Looking back, it was not just that I was young, peat-gathering aged nine or ten; it is that the whole world seemed younger. Maybe this is nostalgia or naivety on my part. That part is questionable – but what is not is this memory of hands that keeps coming back to me. Hands – at the peatside and at the graveside. I’ll write of the graveside later. For now, I want to focus on the black stain covering hand and forearm, as though they had been dipped in a barrel of ink – and remember, too, how it made no difference if it rained when the peat was first cut.
The bog ground was soft underfoot, as though you were walking on a portion of the world that, after all these millennia, was still trying to settle. We trampled across a spongy mile that still had its wealth of flowers: bog cotton, ragged robin, marsh marigolds, and irises. These were not roses or tulips, but they had their own quiet beauty, the kind you wouldn’t gather into a bouquet. All the while, our feet drew up puddles with each step. We brought spades, and jackets to sit on. We wore shorts with wellies, the rubber slapping and chafing our bare legs. We didn’t do it gladly but nor did I recall it being especially weary or miserable. It was just a task to be completed. Just do it - Nike says, with all the positivity of an American company trying to sell you something. Ach, just do it – every adult said, since it was a straight road with no option to turn off. These were things that just needed to be done.
That year’s cutting took place at the ledge of where we finished on the previous year, so the peatbog was its own ledger of time passing. The spade made two cuts, portioning off a rectangle maybe twenty centimetres wide. The rhythm was to cut and lay aside, cut and lay aside, as many of these rectangles as possible. The cutter, sweating but with no time to wipe away the sweat, would work to exhaustion. When he reached this point, another took his place. Their work created what looked like dark, wet books of peat, which they tossed onto the grass and heather that surrounded the lip of the bog.
As a child, my job was to carry the freshly cut portions to a farther spot where it could dry through the summer. Two or more families worked a bog. The men took turns to handle the spade, the children were harried to work faster since space was always needed for the newest clod. We tripped and stained our knees, we fought off horseflies that longed to bite the softest parts of our skin, behind the legs, or in the crease of the elbow. During a break, a bottle of lemonade would be passed around, its glass gaining the marks of all the muddied, sweating fingers. If it rained on this first day, it did not matter. It did not harm the peat and it kept the flies at bay. Our cotton t-shirts darkened, our wet hair shone, and the rain made buttonholes in the brown water that gathered at the bottom of the bog.
By the end of the day, the cutter’s work seemed almost like the activity of a primitive printing press. Their one black-covered book was repeated and splayed out in a huge perimeter as though we had excavated the island’s library from deep in its earth.
When coal was ever delivered, an open-backed van would drop white plastic sacks in the driveway and we would lift them up and empty them in the bin beside the house. This was a different sensation. It was dusty, almost sickly. It came with a gritty coarseness. Here was something millions of years old and mined far from our home. Peat was different. It is younger than coal, and it was dug out of the island’s here-and-now.
Later, leaving the bog and reaching home, we would strip at the door so as not to bring any ticks into the house. But before this, we sat around the bog site. And this is what I’m remembering now: the arms, stained and dirtied. We had time on our hands. Didn’t we just. Peat is moss, grass, flowers, collected and decomposing over thousands of years. Thirty-something years have passed, and it seems a picture from a different world. It spread across the fingernails and cuticles. The black mud covered every life line on the palm. I’m not sure if I can remember the sound of the rain still scattering in the puddles, or the sound the tractor made when it struck into life – but I can recall drawing a fingernail down across the mud on the hand, so thick, so plastered on, and it was a surprise to find, underneath it all, that fresh, smooth skin.
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"The bog ground was soft underfoot, as though you were walking on a portion of the world that, after all these millennia, was still trying to settle"
"The rain made buttonholes ..."
Such a lovely piece of writing :-)
Yes, beautiful writing, opening a bright crack in time.