Ring the Hill by Tom Cox

Author:Tom Cox [Cox, Tom]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781783528363
Publisher: Unbound
Published: 2019-08-08T16:00:00+00:00

There were times in late 2017 and early 2018, on one of the less brutal days, when I would be driving across the Peak District – a notably high, desolate bit – and look up to a ridge, about 500 feet farther above that and think, ‘What crazy idiot would choose to live up there in winter?’ then, with a jolt, realise the answer was me. I might have only lasted just over three months in the end, but it was the longest three months I can remember in my recent life: a period where time passed as slowly as it does in summer when you are ten, but without the fun, or the summer. The subsequent three months raced by, but, because of the happy and untethered way I spent them in the best weather I’d ever witnessed in Devon, put such a divide between me and my experiences in Eyam that, in their own way, they felt like a long time too.

By June, when I sat beside my parents’ wild pond in the sun during my first trip back north, that unwelcoming house, that hilltop, felt as far away as a dream dreamed under a different monarchy. It felt far away enough for me, almost as if the whole winter had slipped my mind, to casually tell my mum that I’d perhaps like to try proper northern living, one day in the future. George and Casper were close by, napping, but Clifton was away on an adventure. She appeared to have a different concept of what home was to the other cats in my life. She disappeared a lot, my mum said, and had been found living in the village primary school for a spell, and in a couple of barns over in the direction of Mompesson’s old church at Eakring, but she always came back. We talked a little about Eyam and my mum promised me, for the third time, that she had never moved the carved fish. From one of the house’s open upstairs windows, we could hear my dad on the phone, loudly befriending an IT worker based in India. ‘He didn’t really need to phone them,’ said my mum. ‘He could probably have just shouted, and they’d have been able to hear.’

My mum went inside to prepare lunch and I napped on the grass, fractionally under the surface of consciousness, until I was woken by a gang of ducks, charging past me in the direction of the water, talking in their varying local duck voices.

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