welcome | book guides | slow reads | library
Footpaths is a journal on reading and writing at Footnotes & Tangents. Edit your notification settings here to get Footpaths in your inbox.
Last weekend, I visited Malham Cove in the Yorkshire Dales. This hulk of limestone rock weathered away over 10,000 years ago during the last Ice Age to carve out a 260-foot cliff. Once you have climbed up its back, you reach a long limestone pavement where you must step and jump across shallow crevasses to reach the moor beyond.
As a kid, I remember visiting Malham on a handful of occasions: its enormity is exaggerated by my smallness and the passage of time. Time weighs on me in this spot, as I see an earlier me scrambling through the water up to Janet's Foss. Janet is the fairy queen who lives in the cave behind the waterfall, watching as daytrippers squeal and splash in wood-held waters.
When I tell Zack there’s a cave beyond the water, he wants to go across. I pick him up and carry him through – my once smallness sealed now beneath this memory of my giant arms around his little body. Memory presses down on memory. The cave is covered in marks by those who came before.
We were staying in a bunkhouse with friends I knew from my days living in Oxford. Almost ten years have passed since I last saw most of them – and now our kids outnumber us and throng and thunder on the stairs.
Seeing us together, I slip back a decade and stumble over all the things we did and were back then. I eavesdrop on the past and watch with mild fright as feelings unsettle and resettle in half-forgotten pools. The proximity of these memories makes that world and those times seem very far away.
All this has now been transposed from Oxford to Malham to fix to much earlier memories. Those weekends when our parents walked us miles across the moors so we fell asleep on the drive home, dreaming vaguely of the flight of giants and our deep past. In the bunkhouse, I read Zack more chapters from Narnia.
The act of reading this book to him sits snug against the sound of my Dad in Sheffield, a laminated paperback with the legend: “This book belongs to Mr Cole.” I think of how, in a moment on our side of the Wardrobe, hundreds of years in Narnia may pass. This book is a portal, and I have long since grown up.
Makes me think of this poem by Julia Donaldson.
I opened a book and in I strode.
Now nobody can find me.
I’ve left my chair, my house, my road,
My town and my world behind me.
I’m wearing the cloak, I’ve slipped on the ring,
I’ve swallowed the magic potion.
I’ve fought with a dragon, dined with a king
And dived in a bottomless ocean.
I opened a book and made some friends.
I shared their tears and laughter
And followed their road with its bumps and bends
To the happily ever after.
I finished my book and out I came.
The cloak can no longer hide me.
My chair and my house are just the same,
But I have a book inside me.
I haven’t seen this poem before - it is perfection!