Grace

Yorkshire, 1 January 2020

In my dreams I’ve returned to this place a thousand times but each time I live out a different version of the story. Sometimes he’s alive and well, other times he’s just lying there on his back in the snow, his eyes open to the sky and the stars. Sometimes he’s nowhere to be found and I run from room to room, calling his name over and over again. ‘Dad,’ I cry, the word as natural as the air. ‘Dad, where are you?’

Now as I stand here, looking at the empty space where the house used to be, I hear echoes of the life I once had, a trail of memories extending behind me all the way back to that mysterious arid desert where men with guns and tanks drove themselves mad with the guilt of their killings.

I put my hand in my pocket and pull out the book that I’ve kept with me ever since they took me away from here. The book that revealed his secrets, that told me I had a mother and a family and a history. I open it up at the page he had marked with an X and read the words that had haunted him since the day he took me from my mother’s arms and brought me to this remote, hostile place in the depths of Yorkshire.

Your love

Oh you with fathomless eyes

Is extreme

Mystic

Holy

Your love, like birth and death

Is impossible to repeat.

And as I read those words, words I’ve committed to memory now, I realize for the first time that he wasn’t thinking about her and the kind of love they could have had, he was thinking about his daughter, the wild little soldier, and when that realization sinks in I finally feel ready to say goodbye.

There is nothing more to see here, just an empty lake and a bunch of old stones. Let the dead rest in peace, I say. I put the book into my rucksack then, lifting it on to my shoulders, turn from Rowan Isle for the very last time. And as I walk towards the woods I feel the wild girl stirring inside me, the girl who has been silent all these years. I see a tiny bairn clutching the hand of a broken man, a stranger who I learned to love, and I realize that this desolate spot in the heart of the Dales made me who I am. He gave me that. As the trees envelop me and a sliver of moon appears in the sky, I remember the words he spoke to me all those years ago: ‘The moon is not afraid, Grace.’ And with that I feel a remarkable sense of courage. I hear the foxes rustling in the bracken, the curlews circling overhead. All is as it should be. I am heading back to where I came from, to the crags and hills and wide-open spaces. There’s nothing holding me back now. I can breathe easy because I know, for the first time in my life, that the only place I belong is out there in the wild.