The January Man by Christopher Somerville

Author:Christopher Somerville
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781473527133
Publisher: Transworld

30 July 1975. ‘Morning, lads,’ said Mr Morris to Dad and me as he brought our bacon and eggs into the dining room at Sunnyside. He jerked his thumb in the direction of the window. ‘Not looking too clever today.’ It wasn’t. All the fells behind Dufton had been cut off at the knee as though by a vindictive giant. Dad and I looked out on a two-tone world: green down here, dense and dirty white up there. ‘Ah, well,’ said our host, ‘at least we haven’t the Helm today, eh?’

True enough, we hadn’t the Helm, the vicious local wind that can rise out of nowhere to blast the top of Cross Fell and scatter the roof slates down in Dufton. But that was cold comfort. We’d limped into the village last night after one of those Pennine Way crossings you want to forget, a dozen rain-sodden, peat-splattered miles from Langdon Beck. A subtle bog above Maize Beck had lured us in. The gritty peat slutch with which it filled our boots had scoured our ankles into holes on the long descent from High Cup. We weren’t in great shape for one of the Pennine Way’s toughest days, the crossing of its highest point, Cross Fell, on a section supposedly sixteen miles long that would finish in the village of Garrigill. Hill mist of today’s sort, so thick you could part it with your hand in front of your face, was just exactly what we didn’t want. But we did have Wainwright’s Pennine Way Companion for a comfort. The Master’s obsessively accurate instructions and sardonic encouragement had seen us safely this far. Today would be ‘a pleasant ramble’ with ‘fine views’, apparently, followed by a ‘rapid descent’ on an ‘excellent track’. That was all right, then. And at least we hadn’t the Helm.

The Pennine Way adventure, the first long walk Dad and I had done together, was going well enough. We’d had a couple of pints and a chat about family things last night in the Stag Inn on Dufton village green. Dad wasn’t used to pubs, and was wary of the beery good fellowship of taproom strangers. But the knowledgeable and purely local talk of a couple of shepherds and a lorry driver, into which we were soon invited (‘Now then, lads, doing that Pennine Way, are you?’), had put him more or less at his ease. He still wasn’t prepared to divulge a thing to any member of his family about GCHQ or his working life there, however.

Even from my very uninformed perspective at that time, 1975 felt like a dodgy year. America had just been driven out of Vietnam, tail between legs. Communism in extreme forms was rampant, with the Pathet Lao taking control in Laos and the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, as well as Marxist governments establishing themselves in Angola and Mozambique. The good guys seemed to be on the back foot, though John le Carré in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy was nudging us to question exactly who the good guys were.

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