I’ve been thinking about darkness. Literally, I mean; as anyone who reads my books will know, I think quite a lot about figurative darkness but this time I mean the real thing: the way it looks when our part of the world turns away from the sun, and how differently we experience night in town and country.
I was in the south of France when the hour went back. This situation gave me a double time-shift: one hour lost in space, another three days later in time, and only one of them returned in flight at the end of the week.
I was staying in the countryside, far from street-lights. I’ve always lived in well-lit cities and always liked it. As a child, afraid of the dark, or more exactly afraid of what I sensed and imagined in the dark, I used to love staying with my grandparents in rural Yorkshire, until bedtime. I’ve never needed much sleep, still don’t, which turns out to often be an asset in adult life, but it added to the difficulties of a highly strung child. I was awake a lot, including times when the adults were or wanted to be asleep.
At home in the city I could hear people going about their business. Traffic continued nearly all night, a comforting assurance that there were people still out there, minding the place. When that quieted – it never wholly stopped – I could hear the bass notes of freight trains, masked in the day by the higher frequencies of people and cars and birds.
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Street lights dyed the city skies sodium orange. We never saw the stars at home, but even on the shortest winter days when I went to school in the dark and came home in the dark, I could always see people, shops, buses, houses and gardens. Only the indoor dark was frightening, because outside there was plenty of human company and room to run away.
As I grew older, I knew I was supposed to be afraid of being out at night. Being a free-range teenage girl in a rough city, I had my share of alarming interactions and lucky escapes, but it was men I learned to regard with caution, not the city by dark. Darkness sheltered me as much as it sheltered them, hid me from aggressors as well as aggressors from me. The two times I had to fight to get away, it was broad daylight and there were passersby who didn’t help.
The country dark felt different. The night silence was thick and deep, not so much broken as amplified by the occasional call of an owl or fox, which always made me worry for their prey, being a bullied child whose instincts were and remain on that side. I could map deaths on the landscape: the churchyard down the road, the field at the back where a dead cow once lay stiff-legged for days before the farmer took her away, the woods down the hill where we found a deer skeleton in the ravine, the smashed fledglings under the ash tree every spring. Somehow at night they crawled, with a vengeance I could sense but not see.
[ You can’t buy your way out of the terrible situation we have all createdOpens in new window ]
I’ve learnt, mostly, to control what I still think of as more perception than imagination of unseen presences. I turn my mind’s eye away. I apply rationalism, or psychoanalysis. I am an educated modern person and therefore I do not believe in ghosts and monsters, and to the extent that I cannot avoid them I understand them to be manifestations of my own fears and anxieties. There is nothing under the bed. If the shadow in the corner seems to move, it’s because there’s a draught behind the curtain.
I get up early and run every morning, wherever I am. In France last month, that meant waiting until it was just/not quite light enough to be able to see my feet and then moving fast, because any later would have made me late for the work I was there to do. My eyes adjusted, the sun rose as I ran, but the first few miles were in a kind of darkness I rarely encounter as a city-dweller. It was interesting and I liked the way I had to trust other senses, but a few days was enough. Each to their own: give me street lights and passersby and the bustle of my kind of morning, noon and night.
