Oh, my, but it is dark.
And wet. Wet and dark.
And cold: that kind of cold that works its way deep into one’s bones, that seeps with the mist into one’s being, and makes one English.
We have a clear moon tonight, and the myriad street lamps of my town are casting their orange cheerless glow. The forest is kept from us by a barrier which, put simply, is not light. It is an absence of the golden days of Summer.
And we, we turn to stories.
The stories we tell in this blackness, when the warm days of Summer are still too close a memory, are full of this dark. And they have another ingredient: the dank.
This is the deeply undesirable marriage of cold and damp. To us here on the island, it is as much an old acquaintance as darkness.
Dickens puts it so well, in the opening chapter of A Christmas Carol: “The fog came pouring in at every chink and keyhole, and was so dense without, that although the court was of the narrowest, the houses opposite were mere phantoms. To see the dingy cloud come drooping down, obscuring everything, one might have thought that Nature lived hard by, and was brewing on a large scale.”
I do keep on about it: but it just so happens The Woman In Black opens its tale on a Monday afternoon in November, rather like today. Susan Hill personifies the dank. She says it is “Seething through cracks and crannies like sour breath, gaining a sly entrance at every opening of a door…. menacing and sinister, disguising the familiar world and confusing the people in it.”
It was just such a night that found a merchant alone in the forests which surrounded and stretched out from London towards the south coast of England. We are often told that old England was a forested country, and that in days of yore, a squirrel could travel from Edinburgh to London without ever once having touched the ground.
These days it is our forest, criss-crossed by roads and negotiated by mountain bikers, dog walkers and runners. Then, it was possible to get hopelessly lost, far from help, and walk with death. Most often, people would go missing in the fog. We all personify it as merciless here.
The poor merchant had no idea where he was, and things were looking grim. Exposure, on this dank night, waited in the wings. He began to lose all hope, when a sound pierced the gloom.
It was a peal of bells. The bellringers of a church in a village buried deep in the forest had gathered to practice, and their carillons rang through the deadening mists.
The merchant followed the sound of those joyful peals with quickening steps and made it, numb but unharmed, to civilisation.
He never forgot that moment, when the bell ringers saved his life. He put money in trust to the church, and every year, on that dank day, the bells ring out again for a man’s gratitude.
In a short while Phil will have braved the dank journey between London and home. These days it takes a train from Waterloo to make the journey, rather than a horse, a good coat and a ring of campanologists.
The dog knows this.
When Phil gets home, I take Mac out for his evening walk.
Never has his moustache been more upstanding, or his eyes more piercing. He is erect and alert. Because walks are much fewer and further between in November. His walks are severely curtailed by the dank and the dark.
We can no longer use the forest, and while Summer brings him an hour-long walk, both morning and evening, his Winter evening exercise becomes one of those impossibly parochial perambulations on the end of a ridiculous telescopic lead, down a road lined, of all things , with houses.
He becomes a much naughtier dog in the winter, this spoilt little mutt. I woke last night at about three in the morning, with a conviction that a pair of eyes were burrowing into my soul.
And they were. As my waking eyes became accustomed to the darkess, I perceived a pair of triangular ears framing those laser-eyes. He was trying, telepathically, to communicate something.
He fancied a turn in the dank garden. Dogs like dank. It smells pleasingly of dead stuff.
Phil groaned: he is quite receptive to ESP. He inquired out loud whether the dog felt it was my husband’s sole purpose in life to let him out into the mists before dawn. Macaulay indicated, without wavering his gaze, that this was indeed the case.
He got his way, because there’s only so many times I can make like a lioness and growl the irrepressible dank-lover into submission.
But there’s always a catch with Macaulay and that post-midnight garden, because he seems to feel it needs defending robustly.
And with a small terrier there is only one way to defend: one simply barks one’s small hairy head off. Row-row-row-row-row, into the dank mists. Using our extra sensory perception, is quite possible to divine that lights are turning on down the street, and out-of-hours council nuisance police are being notified by outraged 3am e-mail.
We are just over a month from the darkest, dankest day, and our English bones are feeling it keenly.
But as we squelched home from emptying an attic yesterday evening we spotted a blue glow which hung in the mist about a house.
And when we grew closer, we realised that it was the first set of Christmas lights.
It took an American, educated at Oxford, to point out to us the delight of darkness. Charles Austen Beard told us: “When it is dark enough, you can see the stars.”
Indeed. And what’s more, when it is dank enough, we warm uncharacteristically to Christmas lights, even if they are outrageously early and a kitsch shade of blue. We may be British, but we’re dank and a little desperate.
Reader, there in the dank night, we cheered.
And then we began to plan lights of our own.
Kate Shrewsday 
I loved reading this, Kate, though will admit to putting on a sweater half-way through as I let your fog and mist creep into my bones all the way across the ocean. We are damp here. No dank. No fog. Just damp and I’ve just gotten in from raking wet leaves, and starting to think of lights as well.
Lights are such a joy, aren’t they Penny? This post is the closest I get to a good healthy moan. The only thing that saved me was a trigger-happy Christmas decorator:-)
Ah, our canine family members have something in common. MacDuff has taken to waking far too early on these dark predawn mornings, There’s just something about that time of day that awakens his senses, different scents in that dark damp hour. My husband struggles to awaken and when he can focus and walk at the same time, the two of them start out. MacDuff is then ready to go back to sleep, while we, of course, are wide awake.
Susan, I know that feeling so well. Good to know Macaulay has an alter-ego in a faraway land, and with a solid Scottish name too.
It may be dark and dank but that forest still looks beautiful. I think the sole purpose of autumn and winter is to make us appreciate the lovely spring and summer. Great post Kate. X
Have you seen the moon tonight? The most hangs low but it is crystal clear above. I’ve just had a lovely dog walk in which Macaulay performed appropriately for the hour. Can’t get much better.
I didn’t read this post. I felt it.in my bones. Most uncomfortable, but at least there are stories. I’ll add Susan Hill to my list. I may have to run down to the bookstore this afternoon. The Woman in Black sounds like something I need right away.
Sorry to ramble on about it so, Kathy:-D The second chapter is entitled ‘A London Particular’, and it was written for England, this very day. Phil and I will be listening to it tonight as we drift off to sleep….
Dark I love, dank and raw not so much. Gray, breezy, misty here in the Pacific Northwest. I sit here typing with beret on my head and four layers of shirts. Partly my fault because I haven’t yet started the fire and it’s half way through the light hours already. My two dogs don’t want to leave the couch on days like this.
About those sweet little lights – I use them, too, but I wish I didn’t…wish I were more purposeful in my devotion to conserving energy on this tiny planet, but candles use up resources to make them, firewood doesn’t grow as abundantly as it used to and sends up noxious fumes. What are we to do, really, when we still have to work in businesses and can’t allow ourselves to sleep long and heavy as our long ago ancestors used to do. Oh to be a bear!!!
Yes indeed, Deborah. Wouldn’t it be lovely to keep daylight hours? Always brings to mind the Matthew Bartholomew books, Mediaeval detective novels where Matthew, a doctor and Cambridge lecturer in medicine, gets up along with the rest of mediaeval mankind at mad hours in the morning, simply because it’s light.
Although it did strike me as a rather grim existence.
Hallo Kate
Sorry but this font is very difficult to read for tired eyes, but we have managed to extract the juice from your post.
I believe the lights which twinkle out in December are not so much Christmas lights as Mid Winter lights.
At this time of year the lights are an essential Anti SAD measure, and well worth burning a little energy to achieve.
Because one of the worst things about dank and dark is that they induce dank and dark moods.
So long live winter decorations, which of course we Christians call Christmas decorations.
Love Dad
Couldn’t have said it better myself:-)
Have you tried pressing command and the + key? Should make the text bigger immediately.
If this is not sufficient I may have to regress to my old clothes….
Waking up in the dark. Coming home in the dark. That is what our days are coming down to now. I come home and turn on pretty near all the lights in the house- the halogens, fluorescents, incandescents. I’ll be adding candles soon. I am so glad indeed that the good sages of yester-year chose December in which to place Christmas!
PS- My ordered copy of The Empty Raincoat arrived today! I am looking forward to the read andto the lightbulb moments it will give me.
That Handy chap’s a genius:-) I’m with you on the light thing- but I have problem. As fast as I turn them on, Phil turns them off again in the name of energy conservation. And because I believe, like Nosfuratu, he shrinks from the light. Life is a constant bartering of light and darkness…
“The fog was as thick as pea soup” — the go-to example of simile in every one of my high school textbooks, and upon looking it up just now, apparently originated in England?
I absolutely love the photo of the woods. I often think about the forests and ecosystems of England. I also often think about how your (and my New(er) England) were once deforested!
My forest is a strange mix: some is crown land and includes ancient woodlands which go back hundreds of years. But our Forestry commission also farms plantations there, so we have lots of pine as well. Makes for an evergreen forest, along with the rampant rhodedendrons which take root greedily wherever they can. We are lucky that our part of England is still kind to squirrels.
You made me want to go for socks and a hot water bottle …
BTW, I recently came across this sentence, I think you’ll like it:
“The sky above the port was the color of television, turned to a dead channel.”
Neuromancer by William Gibson.
Now that’s someone who knows how to use modern technology to their advantage:-) Clever William Gibson. Never read him….
All the time I was writing this I was aware that you and Naomi are warming from Spring towards Summer. It must be very odd to read this when one is experiencing the exact opposite!
I came to this too late last night to read it all the way through… so a re-visit before work has been a pleasure on this foggy and frosty morning.
Yesterday the fog around here was so patchy: in a five mile journey I went from thick fog requiring head lights and fog lamps, to bright bright sunshine.
Here this morning I feel the sun is trying to break through, but at present I can not see beyond my own garden hedges!
Yet a morning like this holds potential – much more so than those dull overcast days when it is raw and threatening rain. So I have my fingers crossed for a revelation of the sun later on.
(Last night the moon from here had a full rainbow halo around it.)
For me the word ‘dank’ includes a smell of decay… I’m with Mac on that!
Pseu, I can always count on you to put a positive spin on our Autumn:-) Thank you for that beautiful reply. I shall be continuing with the whole decay thing today:-)
Imagine a tall, sweaty man who ruined a financial institution: dank lank sank bank
Mr Daggley, your perspective is individual verging on singular:-D
PS The sun didn’t come out after all. : 0
those silly americans and their kitsch…
🙂
it’s quite an epidemic out here, those christmas lights.
sidenote: in the desert, dank is not a word we know.
I think I would love the desert 🙂 but we have the damp in our bones and even, I suspect, our synapses. I am surprising myself when I say, I’d love to spend time in a desert, but I would need, finally, to come home to my dank island.
That first comment just brought that wonderful National Lampoons Christmas Vacation film to mind, with Chevy Chase maxing out on fairy lights. But Beard was a man who knew wide open skies and the value of true dark, I think. It is a gift we rarely value.