Lunch Break

At noon I would race into the daylight.

Often, a fresh wind cut across the open farmland. The vast cumulous sky always came as a shock. Lapwings skimmed low over ploughed fields. As a boy, I used to listen to their ancient peewit call while walking along the lane on the outskirts of Cheadle. Leaning against the wooden five-bar gate in the oak tunnel's shade, I remember watching the birds stride among the squelchy cow hoof-holes and performing their flittery aerial dance. Lichen from the top bar of the gate smearing the sleeves of my combat jacket.

During lunch breaks, I drove down similar country lanes away from Leicestershire and the prison gymnasium where I worked. On either side, the flowering hawthorn entwined with honeysuckle turned into a cream-crimson blur. A buttery scent blasted through the open window of the van. Fat flies popped against the windscreen. And within twenty minutes of leaving the prison gates, I arrived at my destination, deep in the rolling countryside of Northamptonshire.

Slawston Bridge: an old disused railway bridge, a crossword puzzle of blue brick, large ironstone and gritstone blocks. Of aerosol daubs that looked familiar: Rat Boy, Jew Boy, and an anarchy A.

Many years ago, at the annual wakes in Cheadle, the town I was born, I'd worn my green combat jacket. A white capital A on top of a circle was now tippexed in the centre of my back. Feeding copper coins into one-armed bandits. Bunches of raspberries, cherries, crowns, oranges, grapes and black rectangles with the word BARR spun. Bumper cars jerked across on an ice rink made of metal. Ceiling mesh sparked. Flaking hand-painted light bulbs flashed in sequence: red, green, yellow, blue. Glittering goldfish with dark eyes swam in bags of plastic tied at the top with string. Girls with perms and platforms sat in hand-painted carriages, a metal bar resting along their denim covered thighs. Tattooed men in leather waistcoats spun them until they screamed. And the tattooed men looked at each other and laughed.

Jimmy McCausland leaned against the wooden barriers, watching the permed girls spin. Jimmy was twenty; he came from Hammersley Hayes: the Wild West, a pebbledash council estate at the top end of Cheadle. Jimmy was a proper punk rocker with a Honda XL 250, a proper punk motorbike. He and his mates noticed me in my combat jacket with the big letter A. They laughed. The Bay City Rollers sang, Bye, bye, baby. Pink candy-floss trees on square wooden trunks swayed. "What's that A on your back mean?" Jimmy's question sounded spat. Erratic.

Like a lapwing skimming the sodden earth, the prodding finger in the centre of my back moved in time with the question. I could tell that Jimmy already knew the answer. The mates laughed. "Anarchy. It means anarchy." "Yeah and what's that then?" The laugh from the pack grew louder. Silver-studded black leather, chains and tartan bondage straps rattled. I was thirteen: I just wanted to be accepted. Jimmy and his mates walked away, shoulders shaking, still laughing. Job done. I felt like a fraud. A few weeks later, Jimmy was killed on his motorbike.

By the time I was twenty-eight, my own chances of falling and ending up like roadkill were high. I'd not long discovered climbing when I began visiting the bridge. There was the immediate muscle ache in forearms as I learned to read rock and brick; the coarse, sharp, crystalline grit; the orange ironstone calcifications; the bubbles and waves and embedded lumps; the smooth, shiny, blue rectangles; and the positive edges in-between, where rain and wind and probing fingers had worn away yellow mortar. Full of fear, but thrilled, I had teetered beneath the summit seven meters high. The thin strip of grass and the rough chips of the rutted road looked a long way down.

In 1993 a Leicestershire Climbs guidebook was published, including Slawston Bridge. The guide listed all the names and grades of the up climbs and traverses and in time, the bridge became a trusted sanctuary. With frequent visits, I noticed other things: the nesting blue tit, the aggressive robin, the inquisitive wren, the nodding pied wagtail. When the grass around the base grew, it covered the lowest edges and squelched between rubber and brick and my nose filled with the scent of crushed green, like the smell of the long grass growing in the hayfield near Cheadle, beneath the broad leaf canopy and the flowering horse chestnut candles, where as a teenager, side by side, I lay with a girl.

Cumulous clouds bubbled on the horizon. Bees worked the pollen. The green combat jacket insulated us from the damp. Holly leaves crunched beneath the cloth. Tree roots poked through the ground.

Her hair was long and black and shone like a freshly peeled conker. Brown freckles smattered her pale cheeks. Staring into her goldfish eyes, I felt scared and exhilarated, shy and inexperienced, wrapped in a glow of teenage love. I pretended I knew what to do but having lain there for over an hour all I'd done was talk. She spoke of their friends who were flattening a patch of field not so far away, how they would be removing their clothes. Touching. The smell of crushed grass caught on the evening breeze. The smell was sharp. She eased her body up, leaning on an elbow. I kissed her for the first time. She asked, "Are you trying to eat me"? Terribly embarrassed, I kissed her again, but this time opened my mouth a little less wide.

A short time afterward, we split up, and she spread the word that I didn't know what to do with a girl in a hayfield. I felt betrayed. At school, heads from the front of the class turned to look at me. Whispers sounded behind cupped hands. The foundations of my teenage world seemed fragile.

But my relationship with Slawston Bridge was solid. It was El Cap, Cerro Torre, the Sex Pistols singing "Pretty Vacant" on Top of the Pops, the Cima Grande; it was lying in the grass with a girl I loved. Rusty iron edges, deep positive pockets, ornate nubbins, chalk-smeared pinches, fins, ripples, slopers, crimps, spread in more random patterns surely than could ever occur in nature. I knew each hold intimately, and each hold knew my touch. The bridge was honest and dependable, and it demanded commitment. The single finger pocket high up, in the middle of the blue brick on the left side of Sun Wall was, perhaps, my second favourite feature. The small slash beneath the mono—a tiny imperfection, also in the blue brick, but hidden around the arête, balanced my body just enough to enable a foot-swap, a pull, a smear and a quick shuffle of feet—this was my favourite, but the climb only succumbed after devotion.

During the summer, the barley in the surrounding fields swayed in the sun, and in the sun, it was a shimmering ocean of burnt gold. The lap of the stalk-sea helped movement over the orange, into the yellow and across the blue. The bridge became North Stack Wall at Gogarth, then, a place that had caught my imagination ever since I'd first visited it and run away, too scared to climb. Once a climber crossed its unprotected quartzite face, they'd entered a relationship that proved respect and dedication.

Here, instead of the choppy Irish Channel that flowed beneath North Stack's chiselled face, a road ran between the walls of the bridge and because the span had long gone, a climber was free to top out, as long as they could reach around the lip, beyond the sloping coping stone and mantel.

One lunch break, Nige Masters, the Senior P E Officer in the gymnasium, my immediate boss, joined me. I drove the familiar lanes, chatting and laughing. Overhead, the screaming swifts scythed the warm summer sky. Nige was not a climber, and as I pulled into the gateway at the side of the bridge, he jumped from the van and pulled on. All footballers' legs, untrained forearms and plimsole clad; not content with traversing, he decided then to climb up, stopping abruptly at the small overhang, just below the coping-stone. I attempted to talk him through the moves, moves that hopefully would lead him onto the flat grass above, but he couldn't let go with either hand. Shaking and laughing, laughing and shaking, his voice cracked. I climbed up, level with those large legs and attempted to push him onto the rock, but he let go and took me with him.

I hit the grass at the base of the bridge. Nige was lucky, his landing was cushioned as he landed on me. We lay in the grass for a minute or two, a tangled, groaning and laughing pile.

The following day, aching from the fall, I was at the bridge again, with another colleague. He made it a move higher than Nige, slapping for the top, but the coping stone and its sloping edge saw him off. I had learnt my lesson from the day before, and stood clear as he thumped into the earth, twisting an ankle. Returning to the gym with my injured workmate, Alex, the Principle P E Officer, banned me from taking anyone else to the bridge.

In 2000, I transferred to the gymnasium at HMP Welford road, in Leicester city centre and my lunch break visits came to an end, but I regularly visited the bridge on rest days and evenings. I left the prison service in October 2003, but between winters and expeditions abroad, I would sometimes make a detour to visit friends and call in at the bridge on my way to Wales.

The sun shone more often than not at Slawston, and I will always remember my lunch breaks sitting on the grass at the top of the bridge breathing fresh air, while watching the rabbits and the sheep and the floating clouds, so easy to watch.

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