The ghost with a bucket that sings

The heron clocks off at the chimes of dusk and flies up high into the last of the valley’s light to find her way home. Already stuffed with frog, there is no need to risk the darkness. Do they jiggle inside her, you wonder? Just for a while, as her solemn wing-beat conducts the orchestra of the evening air, respectfully adagio for the slow-march funeral drumhead of spring’s rebirth.

As darkness congeals, the oystercatchers scramble airborne in pairs to provide their chiding top-cover over the two spring-wet, summer-dry ponds below Pendragon castle. Kestrels snooze in the high slit windows of the abandoned keep. A last curlew bubbles an encore and leaves the stage. Owls mither. And so the day, an ephemeral eddy spawned by the great gyre of the year, hands off from day-shift to night-guard.

The frogs peep from behind the water-weeds and wink. Toads levitate out of the bottom slime and smile their unending smile. Newts glance suspiciously every which way but reserve judgement, pending further enquiries.

With night, the lane down from the castle can at last relax after the long working day of tractors and tourists. She drapes herself gloriously glamorous across the chaise-longue of the land. Curving down from the castle green she enviously separates the two ponds, denies them each other. They have been planning their elopement for centuries. She reclines over the hump of the obedient medieval bridge which has loved her forever but knows its place. She flirts briefly with the river but honestly, you know, there was never anything in it. Then up in echoes of hips and sweeps of thigh through a throng of admirers: ancient beech, oak and a single singing aspen. Upwards until she tempts her toes in the dream of the open fell. There are roads and then there are lanes. Roads rule by decree. Lanes and the landscape are lovers. This lane will sigh ‘Mallerstang’ with her dying breath when they come at last to widen and straighten so that she can carry her share of progress.

They say that the castle and its lane are haunted. Heavens, that’s not the half of it. There is the Norman knight who bars the valley to raiders and reivers. His body lies where they tossed it, under one of the castle’s great ash trees, now itself dying from within. He carries a lantern,  a sword and the rancid wound of his breach of faith. He will never speak of it. There is the herdswoman whose calf ran into the spate-swollen river, and who went in after it. She carries her herding switch, a calf halter with its knot unravelled, and the unbearable shame of her negligence. There are others, older still. Britons and Norse, a bewildered Roman. Each with two symbols of the path they chose to walk in the world. They carry all manner of possessions: a pouch of herbs, a target shield, a goose quill, a magnetised splinter of iron. Each also carries their share of the birthright burden of their species: some personal bundle of failure or despair, guilt or dishonour.     

And me? Yes. For two weeks or more, around the middle of March, I haunt the lane. I bring with me a headtorch and a bucket. And like all the other ghosts I also bear a personalised shard of humanity’s heavy darkness. Don’t ask me what my particular burden is. What weighs at the bottom of my soul is best left there.

Spring is still making up its mind, but all the frogs and toads and many of the newts of the high fells and the low woods are coming down to the annual fair at the ponds. Nature is adaptable. Up to a point. They find the new tarmac surface of the ancient lane quite acceptable. They used to play Russian roulette with an occasional horse’s hooves and mostly got away with it. But the rolling wrecking ball of a tyre is beyond them.

I cannot save them all. Hundreds have ridden in my bucket but still they come. I gather them up off the lane on the west side of the river, carry them over the bridge and put them in one of the ponds. Then I clear the east side, up as far as the castle. It is time to sleep but my bed is up the hill on the west side. And on the way back home there are more. So I gather them on the west side again and just for obsessive compulsion’s sake I must balance east with west. Still they come. Up near the castle I hear Sisyphus laughing.

The other ghosts and I, we can hear hell coming from a long way off. We have time to douse our lights, conceal our faces in cloaks and hoods, transform ourselves into sections of wall, gateposts, tree stumps. Whatever is to hand. Hell speeds by in glass and metal boxes. They burn white hot in front and smoulder bloody red behind. Hammers thump, thump, thump at bass demonic anvils. There are people trapped inside. I would rescue them if I could. But my bucket is not big enough.

After hell has been and gone, leaving only a foul taint of exhaust, we ghosts feel our burdens to be that bit heavier. Yet we go on with our work.

The male frogs, those who are not already getting a free ride on a partner’s back, grasp hold of my finger with wildly overblown protestations of love and fidelity. Their grip is as strong as a hungry lamb’s suck. The lady toads shuggle into the luxury of my warm palm. They have never felt the like. I think I feel them purr.

Into the bucket with them all. No kisses. What if one should turn into a prince or a princess? I couldn’t bear to lose one that way. Better the heron.

At first they squat and glower in the bottom of my bucket, like strangers in a doctor’s waiting room. Then one young frog forgets himself and chirrups. Another. And remembering that life is short all the frogs join in on the chorus. The toads tap their toes and count themselves in on rhythm at the end of a bar. By the time I reach the edge of the pond the whole bucketload is singing.

All the ghosts stop and listen. As the bucket sings the clouds part and stars twinkle. Our burdens are not lifted from us. But at least we remember why we carry them.  

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