The 11:11 to Sheffield

I don’t enjoy travelling backwards on trains, makes me feel sick, but today, with no other seat available I realise that travelling this way means you can hold onto things a fraction of a second longer. Like if you see something stationary, and you’re moving towards it fast, once you see it it’s instantly gone again behind you, whereas travelling backwards you see it and get to keep seeing it for a little longer. Today I’m travelling back, towards Sheffield and away from my current life, so it feels right to be pulled back this way.

My dad is pulling me back. I can feel it in my hips, in my belly, tugging me. The last few weeks have been confusing and I’ve felt suspended, hung in limbo. An image of a spaceman comes to mind, tethered to his spaceship but floating, free of gravity. I feel like this at the moment, almost like I’m not there, just hanging in the air, travelling backwards while everything else happens around me and I have nothing to grip on too.

A passenger takes a call and my thoughts are halted. ‘Why don’t you build me up, buttercup baby, just to let me down’ blares from her phone, the ringtone reverberating around the carriage windows. I catch the eye of another passenger and there’s a knowing smirk creeping across her mouth which I mirror back. It takes the woman an age to answer. A broad, and loud, Yorkshire accent, she says hello, the volume on her phone so high that nearly all of us get to hear that the girl calling her has broken down and is waiting for someone to pick them up.

I snap back into my own thoughts.

My dad is ill. At various points in the past few weeks we’ve faced a very real fear of losing him. Sudden and very significant weight loss, no pain and no appetite, no energy, it’s unsurprising that he, and I, leapt to a diagnosis of stomach cancer, the horrific disease that took his mum, my nannan away. Or maybe bowel cancer, that quickly spread across my Grandad’s body, his father, and took him shortly before my 18th birthday. A week or so back we got an all clear on these possibilities. And then, despite the reprise of only a few days, we are plunged into dark thoughts once more as he’s admitted urgently to the Acute Care Unit. He’s weak, so weak he can no longer support himself on his skinny legs, and his speech is patchy. This smart man suddenly makes no sense at all.

My spaceship tethered astronaut now instead attached to a bungee rope, falling. Falling. Falling. Then snapped back, saved for a moment while the rope gathers, ready to be stretched to its limit again at any second. Frayed? Maybe. Not sure if it’ll continue to save me, like every fall and then every save, is making the rope weaker. Making me weaker.

This is where I must share that my relationship with my Dad has not been free of complication. While he’s ill though, his fate in the balance, I can only see and remember the good, reliving a handful of happy memories on a loop, not permitting anything else to exist while this worrying, overwhelming feeling of not having long left looms.

Not enough time to learn everything about this man who has shaped me more than any other. To ask for the details on childhood moments that are vague and wooly to me, but likely much sharper to him. To clarify names of older generations, their character, their role’s in his life and therefore their impact on mine.

The landscape that passes my window, has carried me back and forth on car & train journeys for the past few weeks as I’ve travelled to and fro to see my dad. It’s hills, trees, fields, becoming clearer, more pronounced, more enduring somehow than ever before. My memories are carved into its boulders, its edges, flowing down its streams. It holds something powerful for me, something I can’t yet explain yet I sense it’s about to play an even bigger role in what comes next for me.

Other than one friendship, my dad is my only living connection with Yorkshire now, with Sheffield. This is the place I grew in, forged in the way its factories forged its steel.

The train pulls into Hope, an ironic storm cloud looming over it and I regret leaving my coat at home, my umbrella in the car. Hope. Bamford, Hathersage, each stop and station along the way serving up another long forgotten memory. Walks with dad. School trips. Drives into the hills after passing my test. Memories from another time, still vague to me, feelings deep in my bones but light on detail. I’m tempted to dig a little into each one but the excavation must wait until I’m better equipped to hold what I find.

HOPE - Trips to Castleton. Resting on a pub bench, Britvic orange for me, pint for my dad.

BAMFORD - Walking around Ladybower reservoir. An army style rucksack. 2p bus tickets.

The loud woman with the loud phone interrupts. A different but equally piercing ringtone this time. I ponder the disconnect between her gravelly old sounding voice and the ability to assign ring tones. The bungee rope snaps me back to reality, present day, the train carriage. The sense of citrus sharp tears stinging the warm rims of my eyes. My journeys back and forth between Manchester and Sheffield, and this familiar scenery is calling on me to do something that I can’t yet pin down but which elicits an emotional pull so strong.

HATHERSAGE - Stanage Edge, cheese sandwiches being unpeeled from cling film, legs swinging over the boulders. Dregs of tea from the flask thrown into the grass.

There is a desire to reconnect with this landscape again. Glimmers of hiking boots and flasks of steaming hot tea get quickly cooled with worries about having the time, having the energy. I’m not an experienced walker, not in that sense. I get out of breath on stairs and these once familiar routes do not hold any clarity for me now. These are paths tracked with my Dad, he was/is my compass. They didn’t involve arriving by car or train. We would ding the bell on a double decker bus, head down the stairs from the top deck being buffeted around with a few sausage rolls for cushioning. No hiking boots or waterproofs, more likely a pair of wellies and a denim jacket.

GRINDLEFORD - Padley Gorge. Leaping across rocks in the middle of streams, Dad carrying the dogs over in his arms.

The thing is I don’t even think there were that many of these trips with my Dad. 5, maybe 10 tops, and my memory of them even more sketchy, more intermingled. I worry that the huge gaps in my childhood memories exist to protect me. Big gulfs in time covered over with tarpaulin, disguising what? I think the answers might be in these places I’m passing, scattered like gingerbread crumbs, and the urge to follow them is growing stronger on each Transpennine trip I take. Each of these place names, station stops, sparking something inside me that I can’t quite grab a hold of. Like the repeated striking of a match until it suddenly catches ablaze. How many trips before the light stays on long enough for the shadows to be illuminated? The biggest question of all, will I be walking alone or maybe, perhaps, with my dad again. Will he be there to shine light into the darker corners, illuminate the way? Or will I be left to mine for these stories alone, elements of them forever hidden in the land.

My dad, circa 1990, somewhere in Derbyshire