Before the tin ran out, Mum was a light airy woman. She kept all the windows open and took long dawn walks along the coast. She would blow in through the kitchen door half-way through breakfast smelling of salt and rosemary. Her pockets rattled with sea-glass and shells.
On the day we left Cornwall she wept unceasingly through three long train journeys north. She did not dry out until the very moment the train juddered to a stop opposite the glowing lights of the Lord Nelson Inn. Then she took a shuddery breath and, leaning heavily on my arm, stepped out of the carriage.
She couldn’t take to weaving. The threads kept getting tangled. The other women would blow air out through their noses, annoyed at the lost time.
When skimming stones by the river with the kids from school I found glass pieces as rounded and smooth as the ones Mum used to bring back from the beach. I placed the river-glass in the pockets of her dressing gown. But her fingers didn’t fidget with things in her pocket any more. They lay still, not even turning the pages of the book that rested in her lap all evening.
She said she felt caged when she couldn’t see the sea. She begged Dad to take us home.
He said there wasn’t a home to go back to.
There were once treacle mines on Pendle Hill. When the late-comers to the industrial revolution picked out the last usable land in East Lancashire, a rain-sodden valley below Pendle, they dug a quarry at the base of the hill. There, they unearthed an underground river, a river made not of flowing water but of black molasses that moved sluggishly underneath the rock. The miners brought the treacle up with their broad flat shovels. They took turns dipping their fingers in and tasting it. They poured it into barrels and loaded them into the back of wagons.
The treacle mine’s productivity was short-lived. Whilst the rising industrial chimneys were still fringed with scaffolding, the treacle retreated from the sound of digging. It slunk off into the deeper folds of Pendle, leaving behind empty sticky burrows whose walls were lined with dead beetles. But a sizeable bounty was extracted before the river disappeared.
Some of the treacle went to the confectioners in Oswaldtwistle where they added brown sugar and golden syrup and moulded it into bonfire lollies. Some of the treacle went to the biscuit factory in Nelson and they baked it into loaves of gingerbread. On days when the streets around the factory smelt of ginger and cinnamon the old timers would sniff the air and tell one another to breathe carefully; Sabden treacle was on the wind and if they breathed it in it would glue their eyes to Pendle. On those days people made a distinctive effort not to look at the hill that brooded over the town.
The treacle trees started appearing a few months after the mine dried up and whilst people would sometimes stumble on them by chance, my Dad was the only one who could sniff them out at will.
‘The treacle doesn’t like noise,’ Dad explained. ‘It sneaks off to lonely places away from the rhythm of the looms and rattle of the trains.
‘But a river has to come out somewhere. Now the tricky thing is to listen to the rock to hear where the river is heading. You need special ears to hear what the rocks are saying.’
Dad had special ears, they were exceptionally large and he could wiggle one independently of the other. He’d worked underground for twenty years and learned to trust his ears more than his eyes.
He understands rock very well but even he doesn’t know what happened in Cornwall. He just said that one day he drove his shovel down expecting to hear a clang and instead heard a whisper as his shovel flew straight down into soft useless soil. So empty was the earth that it swallowed the whole shovel and Dad was left holding nothing but air.
It wasn’t just tin that had vanished. Metal started to evaporate all around us. Pennies disappeared from the housekeeping tin and then the kitchen silverware vanished too. When the only metal left was the wedding band on Mum’s finger, Dad packed the family up. Everyone said that up north they were weaving cotton into gold.
Dad said the thing about cotton was that you didn’t have to worry about it running out. You could always grow more.
Over the summer Dad would lead whole groups up into the hills to look for treacle trees. People liked his easy smile and wiggling ears. And if they thought his wife was sad and peculiar, they didn’t hold it against him. He’d lead a small crowd along sheep trails and tiny streams. Sometimes he’d lay flat on the grass and press his ear to the ground and make everyone be quiet. We’d have to stand and wait for him for a long time. The more talkative children would stuff their fingers into their mouths to stop themselves asking questions. Then Dad would leap up and point an outstretched finger to mark the way forward.
It was never the same tree twice, because the treacle never stayed long in one place. It might be an oak, a birch or a hawthorn. All trees were greedy for treacle and when the river came within reach of their roots they would suck it up hungrily.
You could always tell who had been on a treacle tree walk because their fingers would be tacky for a week, no matter how much they washed their hands. They would also have a habit of turning their heads towards Pendle Hill in any lull of conversation.
Mum only came once to see a treacle tree. She didn’t do much walking anymore. She had grown heavier and when she laughed it was a spiky sharp thing that would cut off the corners of Dad’s grin.
Dad had said it would do her good to get out of the town and into the hills. The air would revive her, he had been sure of it.
But on the way up the hill she had turned and looked back over the valley. Her face had darkened.
‘What is it?’ I asked.
She was silent for a long time before she answered.
‘You know what they all say down there? They say, “cheer up, I know it’s not much but at least you can see THE HILLS!” They all say it like that; “THE HILLS!” Like the soot, and the filth, and the noise and smoke is all worth it as long as you can see THE HILLS!’
Her scorn was too loud. It clashed with the chatter of the other walkers in the group. The other parents ushered their children quickly past her on the path as if they didn’t want them to hear what she was saying.
‘The hills, the hills, it’s all worth it as long as you can get to the hills. But when you come up to the hills and look around you, what can you see?’
She paused as if I could supply the answer. When I couldn’t she continued.
‘When you come to the hills and look around you, all you can see is the town and its smoke. You can’t get away from it after all!’ She laughed an ugly laugh and elbowed me as if I might understand the joke now. But I had eaten from the treacle tree and she hadn’t.
When she saw the tree, she stared at it blankly and refused to eat any of the apples. She said they would taste of smoke. And I didn’t know what to say because they do taste of smoke. They’re supposed to taste of smoke.
Dad didn’t take her treacle tree hunting again, instead he took us all to Blackpool for a day trip to see the sea.
But when we got to Blackpool the sea had gone. The tide had withdrawn so far out that we had to walk for two hours into the sand to find water. We walked for miles straight into flat nothingness, the horizon drifting away from us and the wind battering our ears so we couldn’t hear one another.
When we finally came to the water it was flat and shallow. I tried to remember the coastland of my birth, the cold spray bouncing off the harbour walls and the scratch of shell shards on my feet. They were like memories that belonged to another boy.
Mum wanted to go on, to wade into the water and keep going until she found waves. But Dad made her turn back. He said that we could get caught in the tide.
Mum said we should just go back without her.
Later she said that she hadn’t meant it and that Dad was being silly. But Dad insisted on walking behind her all the way back. Whenever I looked over my shoulder at them they each looked coiled and ready to spring, Mum ready to race back towards the water and Dad ready to catch her.
When Dad and I went treacle tree hunting again we went alone, setting off early so none of the neighbours would see us leave and ask to come along.
Dad took up a trail through the gorse bushes above Sabden until we met a stream. Then we traced the water up through a shallow cleft in the hill. Dad walked steadily along the path, stopping now and then to listen to the rocks. I zigzagged up the hill, testing the strength and length of my legs by leaping backwards and forwards over the fairy pools and miniature waterfalls that grew wider and deeper the further we climbed.
‘Ah, there she is!’ Dad exclaimed, puffing out his cheeks as we topped a rise.
The treacle tree stood at the top of the stream. On another day it would have been an oak tree. Its trunk was thick and bulbous, like five trees had tried to grow in the same spot and had fused together. Its branches stuck out at odd angles, twisted by the fierce winds that blew and rebounded off the sheer flank of Pendle. Crystallised globes of dark brown sugar sprouted at the end of each spindly finger.
Some of the treacle apples were glowing amber in the sunlight and starting to melt. Treacle dripped down the branches, falling on the grass below, creating puddles invaded by a colony of ants.
Dad stood below the undermost limb. He tilted back his head, opened his mouth wide and extended his tongue to receive the next falling drop. He closed his eyes to concentrate solely on the taste. He moistened his lips with his tongue and more drops fell upon his upturned face, adding new speckles to his stubbled chin and pasting his eyelashes together.
He staggered backwards and struggled to blink his eyes open.
‘Drink your fill!’ he instructed me.
And I did. I held my open palms below the tree and licked off the treacle that fell upon my fingers. At first there was a hot bitterness that made me grimace but then it mellowed into something warm and sweet that coated the back of my tongue. It was nectar and earth and smoke.
Dad reached up to the nearest branch and pulled it down so I could snap off two twigs each bearing a black apple. I passed one to Dad and put the other straight in my mouth.
We sat on the grass and looked over the valley whilst we ate. Across from us on the opposite rise of the valley we could see the tops of the Yorkshire moors and between them and us were the orderly rows of terraced houses, punctuated by chimneys, church steeples and wide rectangular mills.
A train was coming in, carts full of cotton. I had once thought they grew their own cotton in Lancashire. But they don’t. It comes from Egypt, plucked by hands in wide fields in a low flat land with no hills. I know that it is grown in fields but whenever I think of cotton I picture it drifting like snow into the empty train carts that wait in Liverpool to come to Nelson and fill our mills.
The treacle dripped down my throat and pooled heavily in my stomach. I could feel it sinking down my legs, into my feet, into my toes, pressing them down into the mud. Somewhere a cuckoo called. Looking out from Pendle Hill I knew I could walk over every inch of what I could see, and in walking I would own it all.
Afterwards Dad walked around the tree three or four times, studying the branches in turn. He pulled down one bough to examine it closely and then released it again, dissatisfied. He had the same methodical slow manner he used when hunting treacle trees. I knew to be still and patient. I ate another apple whilst he searched. My teeth throbbed from the sugar.
The sun grew hot, more of the domes were disintegrating and watering the grass below. The ground was squirming with the kicking legs of ants drowning in the syrup pools. Eventually Dad picked out a large treacle apple, perfectly spherical, poised on the tip of a branch that was curved like a beckoning finger.
He placed it in a tin lined with baking paper that he pulled out from his coat pocket. He kissed the lid as he pressed it firmly shut.
‘This will do it,’ he said.
We washed our hands and faces in the stream before heading back down the hill. My fingers were still tacky to the touch. I liked pressing my thumb and finger together and then pulling them slowly apart, feeling the treacle residue strain against me to keep them together.
Dad presented Mum with the treacle apple. She barely glanced at it. She tried to give the tin back to Dad, but he refused to take it from her.
‘It will do you good,’ he insisted.
‘It’s sticky,’ she complained. ‘It will taste of smoke.’
‘But it’s sweet,’ I said. ‘Please try it. It will help you feel better.’
Something in our eyes must have told her that this time we would not give up.
With a sudden sly speed she plucked the treacle apple out of the tin and took a deep bite but she didn’t taste it. She bit down hard so that there was a loud crack and then she spat it out. The apple skittered in two halves across the kitchen table, dented and cracked. A white shard of tooth fell alongside it.
Afterwards, when they were still talking in low murmuring voices in their bedroom, I picked up the broken apple pieces and the chipped tooth and put them back in the tin.
Mum left the next day whilst I was at school.
When I got home, Dad was drinking and crying softly at the kitchen table. Her dressing-gown was gone from the back of her door and a pile of river-glass was left on my bedside table.
I opened the tin in my bedroom and ate both halves of the treacle apple. The broken edges scratched against the roof of my mouth and cut the inside of my cheeks as I sucked. For good measure, I swallowed the tooth too.
I opened my bedroom window and leaned out. When I turned my head to the left, I could see Pendle Hill. The hill was solid, immovable. Cloud drifted across its top but I knew that when the wind blew, the cloud would disappear and that hill would remain, brooding over us. Beneath its ground treacle trudged and around the hill’s feet the mill towns clustered; sheltered, watched, guarded.
I stayed leaning out of my window for a long time, thinking of nothing, not even remembering her name or the scent of salt and rosemary. I watched the smoke rise from the factories and blend in with the darkness above so that it looked as if the chimneys were not so much puffing out blackness but were rather pulling the night down from the ether like a blanket to tuck me in and hold me through the night.
*
Cathy Browne is a writer living in Pendle Lancashire. She co-hosts the Booktube channel: Lunabird Bookclub where she explores fiction of all types, with a leaning towards fantasy and folk fiction. She has previously been published by Bandit Fiction and The Liars’ League.
Social Media:
X: @CathyABrowne / https://twitter.com/CathyABrowne
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