Greg

May 1982

On dry, windless days, one of my regular habits during my research years was to sit on that bench in the park with my lab notebook, a pad of writing paper, and a pen. Sometimes I did some work, and sometimes I just sat there and thought, or wrote something for the local ‘alternative newspaper’ – an occasional left wing publication put together by a few friends and sold around the town in modest numbers.

One warm Wednesday afternoon I was sitting there, actually working on a paper for a journal – a report of some work I’d been doing – when who should turn up but the same gent who four years earlier had suggested I visit India. He sat down beside me and said, “Well, did you visit India?” Just like that, as if it was only a few weeks since we’d been sitting there before.

“Twice now, actually, I went for the second time last Christmas. Thanks very much for the suggestion!”

We got chatting, and one thing led to another, and we ended up going to the theatre together that Saturday evening. That was the first of many such occasions.

His name was Greg. He was forty-five, I was thirty-three. He’d been a teacher, but had found it very stressful and after a nervous breakdown and a period of unemployment he’d got a job as a counter clerk in a bank. That was two or three years before the first time we met.

A couple of years after we’d first met, his wife had died in a car crash, and he’d been living alone since then.

I visited his flat a few times. Despite damp walls, draughts and inadequate heating, it was clean and tidy, and he was a much better cook than me. He was making the best of a horrible place. It wasn’t long before I felt confident enough of him, and I told him to give up the flat and move in with me. My flat was plenty big enough for both of us, and far nicer than his.

We had nine very happy years together. When my university work dried up, I did a postgraduate certificate in education, and started teaching maths and physics in a school quite close to my flat – our flat as I was calling it by then, although it was always in my name.

I say nine happy years, but the last was tinged with sadness. Greg was diagnosed with cancer of the liver. It was too far advanced for surgery, and we were told that he probably had about three months to live. In the event he lived six months. He was fifty-four when he died. He wasn’t even a heavy drinker – scarcely drank alcohol at all, particularly after moving in with teetotal little me.

We never had any children. I think he was afraid of the responsibility, but we never actually even discussed it. I think neither of us realized until it was too late that the union was until death did us part.

We’d never married. It had never seemed relevant. It would have been quite funny to be Dr Penny Farthing though.

He’d never been to India with me, either. I was in India – Christmas 1990 – when his cancer was diagnosed. Every time I went, we said that he should come with me “next time.” Ho hum.

We did get to Iceland, Greenland, the Faroe Islands and several parts of western Europe together though.

I particularly remember his discovery of trolls – not the obnoxious internet clods who hide behind their supposed (and possibly actual) anonymity in order to harass other users and obstruct discussions, but the kind that originate in Scandinavian myths and legends. We spent some time in a lovely bookshop in Tórshavn in the Faroes, and he was so taken with the children’s books about trolls that he bought a few.

That was the point at which I realized Greg should have taught in a primary school, not a secondary school. He loved children, and was good with younger children, but he found teenagers hard to cope with.

We drove all round Iceland in my old Land Rover, and almost wherever we went, Greg saw trolls – stone faces or whole chunky bodies in the rocks and cliffs. He realized that they really were troublesome creatures who threw rocks down mountainsides, endangering travellers; and he saw how they moved.

You never actually see them move, but you can tell that they do, because one moment they’re not there, and the next, there they are – and then a moment later they’re gone again. It’s really the mist, one moment hiding them, the next silhouetting them against a backdrop of mist, and then letting them disappear again, camouflaged against a background of more distant rocks.

And they really do throw rocks down at unsuspecting travellers. Rocks certainly come tumbling down dangerously from the crags where the trolls live, anyway.

And the one in the Billy Goats Gruff story, who lived under a bridge, was a distinctly eccentric troll. What a very strange place for a troll to live! They mostly live amongst the rocky crags high in the hills.

I’ve still got those Faroese children’s books, and some that he bought in Iceland, too. I thought about giving them to Pippa’s children after Greg died, but they’re all written in Faroese and Icelandic, and anyway all my nieces and nephews – and now my great nieces and nephews – love to have them to look at when they visit me. I have toys and games in the house for the same reason.

I remember that bookshop in Tórshavn for another reason. It’s one of many buildings in the Faroes that has a turf roof, and I’ve got a photograph of it that Greg took. I’ve got a lot of his photographs, but distressingly few of him.

He had a thing about waterfalls, too – especially waterfalls you can walk round behind. Well, truth to tell, so do I.

Iceland has some wonderful waterfalls. You can walk right round behind Seljalandsfoss, and we did. Greg dropped his lens cap there. There was no way we could retrieve it, as it had gone right into the plunge pool.

We drove back into Reykjavik to try to get a new one. It would have been hopeless trying to keep his lens clean otherwise. It’s only about ninety miles, but in those days the road was pretty rough, and even in the Land Rover it took a good four hours, and the shops were closing when we got there.

We stayed the night in a youth hostel, which was actually a school during term time, and a youth hostel in the summer. The following day we tried to find a lens cap of the right size. Quite early on, we found a cardboard tube with plastic end plugs that fitted quite well, and bought that. We spent most of the rest of the day trying to find the right lens cap, without success.

Greg’s camera sported that plastic end plug as a lens cap to the end of his days – it still does, although the camera hasn’t been used since he died. It was actually more satisfactory than the original lens cap, which was too easy to knock off accidentally.

The next best waterfall we knew to walk behind is Hardraw Force, near Hawes in Yorkshire. It’s in a lovely glade behind a hotel, through which you have to go to get to the waterfall, and where you have to pay. I remember when the hotel was more a pub than a hotel. I’ve a feeling that it was run by two old ladies, but I’m not very sure about that. Whoever it was, somehow I didn’t mind paying them, it just felt right. The money was certainly going into the local community.

Nowadays the hotel has been developed into something much larger and more modern, and is owned by some national – or even international – chain or other. Somehow it doesn’t seem right that they should charge for access to the waterfall. Not that I can justify that feeling – well, not more than I can justify a feeling that national and international chains and corporations are just plain wrong somehow, anyway.

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