GHOST OF THE SKY - by Sarah Hehir

Text & SFX version

(Leeds dock sounds - the sound of rope rubbing against rope, boats banging dock walls)

CHORUS (ECHOING): Leeds Dock: once a nerve centre,

a vast expanse of store yards and warehouses

offloading coal and goods from the barges.

Then derelict.

Now regenerated.

Cafes and walkways, museums and galleries.

(Sound of a shopping mall, the thud thud of music, distant voices)

A very young boy, maybe four or five,

skips, hops, spins down The Boulevard.

This is Kashan: mum and dad Kurdish,

him, a Yorkshire boy born and bred.

In his hand, he holds a folded paper bird that he’s painted.

It catches the breeze as it flies beside him.

Swooping. Diving. Rising. Hovering.

From a bench a woman watches. The woman points.

Laughs. Delighted.

Her carer says, ‘Bird. It’s a bird Angie. The boy’s made a bird.’

Angie frowns and thinks

then shakes her head.

‘It’s a ghost dancer,’ she says.

A train leaves. Kashan hears it.

Angie too. And they catch a smile from each other and feel a bit warmer

as the paper bird rises.

(Sound of a train leaving and honking its horn

Some swooshing SFX, like a train at high speed

Then, abruptly, the interior sound of a train. And clackety clack, clackety clack)

HELIUS: (As if the conductor on an announcement) Welcome. I’ll be your guide on the Bentham Train Line. Whether you’re travelling for real or in your mind, look out of the window. Look up. If your eyes are sharp, you might catch a glimpse of me. I have yellow legs. A hooked-back beak and I fly with my wings in a V. I spy with my beady eye...something beginning with... me! So, let me introduce myself. I am Hen Harrier. No other name.

CHORUS (ECHOING): We called you Helius.

LIBERTY: You do have other names. Ghost of the Moor. Skydancer.

HELIUS: Yes! I like that! Helius the sky dancer. That’s me. And you are?

LIBERTY: I’m Liberty.

HELIUS: Grand! In Carriage 3 we have Liberty the bird lover. Puffa jacket. Green hoodie. Only twenty three. Liberty Lovebird, I reckon. On your way to find a mate in Morecambe?

LIBERTY: Nah. There’s a job going in a pub kitchen. The Dog and Partridge. I need to work. I’m just out of prison.

HELIUS: So, you’re a jailbird. Banged up for...?

LIBERTY: Does it matter? We all have a past.

HELIUS: True. When I was still a whippersnapper of a ringtail, a juvenile, I was a rascal. I could tell you some stories of the Forest of Bowland!

LIBERTY: Me too. I’ve got stories of the forests and fells. Like how when I was still a meat eater and a rough girl, my dad taught me how to poach.

HELIUS: Poach? The rogue!

LIBERTY: Just the odd fish for dinner. Maybe a rabbit. You see, when my dad lost his job, he spent his days hiking and foraging. I hated school so I tagged along with him picking bilberries, blackberries, hazelnuts, rose hips,

elderberries, sea beet, sweet chestnuts and sloes.

CHORUS (ECHOING): Bilberries, blackberries, damsons and rose hips.

Elderberries, sea beet, sweet chestnuts and sloes.

Thorns sharp. Fingers sticky. The winter is coming.

Making jellies and jams to eat when it’s cold.

LIBERTY: Every spring we’d fill our bags full of nettles to make nettle soup and dock pudding.

HELIUS: Liberty. Free as a bird.

LIBERTY: Back then I was. Stretching out under the setting sun. All hills and fields and grouse and rabbits. Counting Swaledales and Texels as I slipped into sleep.

HELIUS: But then?

LIBERTY: Trouble came knocking. Jamie. He was six foot tall. A tall talker. A wrong ’un. He took hold of my hand and my heart was bangin’. Took me to Leeds on this train and I thought life was starting. I started to do all the things Jamie taught me. You’d never believe the stuff he got up to. And, fool that I was, I did what he told me. Fortune’s fool. I was freshly grown up: tattooed and tattered. Doing his dodgy trading for him. Ducking and weaving, doing his bidding. Then ...

(Police sirens)

LIBERTY: ...banged up before I could blow a whistle the way my dad taught me like the time I got lost on Warrendale Knots when a fog came down thickly. But this fog I’d got lost in was thicker and meaner.

HELIUS: And this time it was too late for your dad to save you?

LIBERTY: Yeah. Not much you can do if your daughter is up in the dock and the judgement comes through. So, I’m eighteen years old, sat in a cell at her Majesty’s pleasure. I’d ruined my life before I’d got started.

HELIUS: But that wasn’t the end of your story. Look at you! Heading towards a shiny new start. A pub kitchen in Morecambe. An honest pay-check at the end of the week.

CHORUS (ECHOING): Reformed. Released.

(sound of Peahens and Peacocks calling eerily)

LIBERTY: Hold yer horses. I haven’t got the job yet! And it wasn’t time served that turned me around. It was the women I met that kept my chin up. The chef in the kitchen, the gov in the gardens. (Smiles) The gardens! A little piece of freedom inside Armageddon. We grew mint and sorrel and chervil and chives. Artichoke, cabbages, potatoes and peas. (Thinks) Peas. Helius, I’ll tell you something for nothing. It’s no life for a peahen in prison.

HELIUS: You were the peahen?

LIBERTY: No. Not me! The peahen was real. 3D. Alive. She was the wife of our prison yard peacock. He’d strut around, surveying his kingdom, petrol blue feathers splayed out and gleaming. But she was the smart one. Always an eye on escape, that one. An eye on the outside. ‘Outside it is beautiful’ we all heard her whisper. And one night she flew high up, up and over – leaving the walls and the bars and the locked doors.

HELIUS: What did she want? What was she seeking?

LIBERTY: Same as us all. Liberty. Freedom.

(A peacock calls again, eerily.

Then the train - clackety clack, clackety clack

And

RAIN. A huge rainstorm against the train)

HELIUS: We fly along the Bentham Line.

CHORUS (ECHOING): River Valleys. Penine Peaks and Forests.

Past Shipley, Bingley, Keighley, Skipton, Gargrave, Hellifield, Long Preston to...

HELIUS: ...Giggleswick Station where a ghost is waiting. He’s walked here from Settle to stand on the platform and wait for the train. Do you see him? For a ghost he’s quite sturdy in plus-fours and a tweed hat and jacket. His face round and ruddy.

(The train slows down and the doors open

And the rain is louder)

CHORUS (ECHOING): In 1965, his ashes were scattered on Attermire Scar. A local legend.

TOT: Nice of you to say so. I’m Tot Lord. And you are?

HELIUS: Helius. Ghost dancer. Hen Harrier.

TOT: Helius. The god of the sun, no less. And by gum, we could do with the sun today. This cold. It chills me right through to my bones. But no complaints, eh? Hop onto the train. Take a seat. There. That’s it. That’s better.

(Beep beep! The train doors close and the rain sounds softer…)

CHORUS (ECHOING): Tot Lord found a bone yard, bone yard, bone yard,

Tot Lord found a bone yard with elephant tusks.

HELIUS: Tot Lord takes a seat beside our friend Liberty.

TOT: Afternoon. I’m not disturbing you, am I?

HELIUS: Liberty looks up. Even if she can’t quite see him, she can feel the shape of something beside her. She can sense his energy. Raw history. There’s a crackle of personality that over fifty years of being dead does nothing to diminish.

TOT: If you’re not busy, I could tell you the story of what I found in that boneyard.

HELIUS: And Liberty takes off her headphones as if listening.

CHORUS (ECHOING): Tot Lord loves his Pig Yard Club, Pig Yard Club, Pig Yard Club,

Tot Lord loves his Pig Yard Club and his mad Pig Club museum.

(The rain stops)

TOT: Up in them hills right there, above Settle, on Attermire Scar, there’s caves. Victoria Cave, Jubilee Cave. And what was hidden there?

CHORUS (ECHOING): Mysteries, riddles, history.

TOT: Sometimes, you’ll find something inside - inside the house - that will catch your interest. It may be a book or a trinket. A pretty thing attached to a memory. But I know, deep in my soul, that it’s only outside you’ll find the things transform you. Change you. Move you from one state to another. Outside it’s elemental. It’s chemistry a million, billion years old. Outside it is beautiful.

HELIUS: Liberty looks out of the window, places her flat palm against the glass. The storm is behind us. She smiles at the promise of sun.

TOT: But even more precious than the promise of sun, is the mystery held in the darkness of caves. What a thing to stand in the heart of geology: held in the very bones of the earth.

CHORUS (ECHOING): Tot the explorer, the excavator, historian. Tot the obsessive.

TOT: If you to linger in a cave long enough and let the cold, dampness of age into the very marrow of you, you’ll hear the past. Listen. 120,000 years ago, you’d hear straight tusked elephants, narrow-nosed rhinos, hyenas, hippopotamus, giant deer and brown bears. I have the bones of these creatures in my Pigyard museum. But the seasons have shifted. The climate has changed us. The beasts now are different.

HELIUS: He turns to Liberty.

TOT: Look out of the window. Now what do you see?

HELIUS: And she answers as if she hears him.

LIBERTY: Rabbits, foxes, birds of prey. A Belted Galloway with beautiful eyes. And if I’m lucky. I might see an otter slipping into The Wenning as it winds towards Bentham.

CHORUS (ECHOING): From the old English ‘wann’ meaning dark river.

HELIUS: Tot sits back, relaxes. Enjoys the slowing rhythm of the rails as the train draws into Bentham...

(the train lurches, slows)

CHORUS: …meaning homestead in the open grassland...

HELIUS: ...draws into Bentham where Martin and Charlie and Gerald are out on the platform: masters of timetables, signals and engines. The train doors slide open and the energy changes!

(the train door opens and

A baby wails…loud…)

CHORUS (ECHOES): Children! The future!

Inheritors of the earth.

TOT: It’s tough for a man to hear his thoughts in so much noise.

HELIUS: Tot stands to let a young mum sit next to Liberty. She plonks a baby on her knee as her little girl squeezes in beside her.

MUM: Sorry. It’s crowded today.

LIBERTY: Don’t worry.

CASSANDRA: Hi. I’m Cassandra. I’m a karate gold belt and this is my sister. She’s only a baby.

LIBERTY: Pleased to meet you both. I’m Liberty. I’m not really anybody.

TOT: And I’m Tot Lord. Ambassador of the pre-histories of Settle.

LIBERTY: And that bird you can see, dancing in the sky is Helius.

CASSANDRA: I know. I’ve met him before. We go to the seaside nearly every week except if my sister needs to be in hospital because she does sometimes. A lot.

LIBERTY: I’m sorry about that.

CASSANDRA: She’s alright today so we’ve got our buckets and spades.

MUM: They’d stay digging on the beach come hell or high water.

TOT: Then the baby starts to cry.

(Baby crying louder and louder)

TOT: Very loud. Loud enough to shatter my reversed barbed harpoon fashioned from antler.

CHORUS: Now Tot’s kicked the bucket, he carries his Pigyard treasures with him.

HELIUS: Cassandra sings a made up song to hush the baby.

(The baby stops crying as she sings)

CASSANDRA: (Sings) As the wind brushes past me

And the sounds go through me

As the trees sway and the bugs crawl

As I swoop and sweep through soft white skies

I feel free and feel safe.

CHORUS (ECHOING): The journey goes on along with our travellers. The train runs on tracks and the tracks cross the miles. Embedded in earth. Embedded in soil. Earth. Soil. Land. Landscape. Look out of the window. Look at the sheep. But much of this land they are grazing, is post war uplands where channels called grips were scoured into moorlands, draining our peat bogs. Restore them! Restore them!

HELIUS: Peat is the holder of history. Cradles the carbon.

CASSANDRA & CHORUS (ECHOING): Grips, gullies, hags.

HELIUS: A blanket bog of epic importance.

CASSANDRA & CHORUS: Rewet, replant, restore.

HELIUS: This girl on the train, this girl Cassandra, can see in the distance, two possible futures. The one where we care and we all work together and the one where we don’t. The one of her nightmares.

CASSANDRA: (Sings) Once there was a hen harrier, ghost of the sky, sky dancer,

Once there was a hen harrier, where is he now?

CHORUS: (Singing) Once there was a hen harrier, ghost of the sky, sky dancer,

Once there was a hen harrier, where is he now?

(The Chorus repeats her song and Cassandra echoes it as…)

HELIUS: We pull into Morecambe. Cassandra’s mum grabs the spades and the buckets, unfolds the buggy, checks for her brolly.

Liberty gathers her courage. Tot Lord summons his ghostly travelling museum, hops onto the platform and hurries away from the noise of the children. He’s excited. There’s a shop on the seafront that sells curiosities. Not a cave made of stone but a cave of sorts. What might he seek? What might he find?

(The sound of a busy street - cars honking, traffic, giving way to

The sound of a fairground and of a carousel)

And Liberty? She’s dragging her feet. Making chow in a prison kitchen is one thing. Impressing a chef in the real world feels like a hill too high to climb. Give her the three peaks any day. An interview! A trial shift! Who does she think she is? Her eyes flick to the screen announcing the trains back to Leeds. She could forget all this. Go back. Bury her head in the sands of despair – in the ‘I can’ts and I won’ts and I shouldn’t have dreams.’ But then Cassandra’s mum is beside her, touching her shoulder.

MUM: My daughter drew a hen harrier. She wants you to have it.

CASSANDRA: Its wings aren’t the right shape and I only had orange.

HELIUS: But its spirit is perfect. A determined survivor.

LIBERTY: Thank you.

CASSANDRA: If you get the chef ‘s job that you’re after, what food will you make first?

LIBERTY: Jelly and ice-cream butties. Of course.

CASSANDRA: (Laughs) Of course.

MUM: Good luck. Though I’m sure you won’t need it.

(Sound of a gull - actually a tern. Then gulls. Then waves.)

HELIUS: Down on the beach, Cassandra makes a castle to use as her base for collecting her fossils. Just shells and stones but in the tales she tells to her sister, these are neolithic creatures preserved in the patterns her finger traces.

CASSANDRA: Look. This could be a worm that died in the ice age. Or the beak of a creature that liked jelly and ice-cream.

HELIUS: I leave this family on a Saturday afternoon, enjoying the wildness of sand and sea. I leave Liberty tying on an apron and taking a deep breath with Cassandra’s hen harrier tucked in her pocket. I see Tot Lord ambling towards the sea with his travelling museum. I hear the heather moorlands calling. I see the distant Bowland Fells and follow my heart homewards.

(Sounds of birds on a mountain. And the waves. And gulls)

TOT: Hey! Little girl. Cassandra!

CHORUS: Cassandra holds up a stone.

CASSANDRA: I found this! I found this!

TOT: Limestone from the carboniferous period. Over three hundred million years old.

CASSANDRA: Imagine all the seasons it’s seen. Spring, summer, autumn, winter. Round again. Spring, summer, autumn, winter and on and on. Imagine the hands that have held it. The sun that has warmed it. The seas that have shaped it.

TOT: And I see in her now, not a noisy child but a kindred spirit. This child knows the stones have stories inside them, waiting, with clues to the past, for us to find them! Cassandra!(ECHOING)

(Footsteps crunch across the sand)

CASSANDRA: (Calls) Hey Liberty! Look at my stone! It’s the colour of a bluey grey sky on a wintry day with splodges of white like huge snowflakes.
LIBERTY: Wow. Let me see! I think it’s rugose coral. That’s a cool find.

CASSANDRA: Super cool.

TOT: Rugose coral. Yes. That’s it. You’re right. You’re right.

CASSANDRA: So?

LIBERTY: So what?

CASSANDRA: Did you get the job?

LIBERTY: Yep. I start Monday. Your bird brought me luck.

CASSANDRA: No. I think it was you on your own who did good.

LIBERTY: Maybe. We’ll see.

TOT: The woman and girl look out across the sea to the hills of The Lake District .

(Sound of gulls and waves)

CASSANDRA: Where’s Helius?

TOT: Beyond the sight of the human eye, Helius swoops, twists, somersaults and turns.

CASSANDRA: He was here, flying above the beach with the seagulls. Now he’s gone.

LIBERTY: I bet he’s flown home to the fells. He was probably tired and hungry.

CASSANDRA: I’m hungry too, mum.

(the voices fade)

MUM: For chips and mushy peas?

CASSANDRA: Yes!

MUM: Come on then. Help me pack up the buckets and spades.

LIBERTY: Or I could go get them. So the girls can stay playing.

CASSANDRA: Do you like chips and mushy peas too?

LIBERTY: Course. Who doesn’t?

TOT: Plenty of salt! Plenty of vinegar!

CHORUS (ECHOING): Meanwhile, Helius has danced his last dance. His luck has run out. As he reluctantly makes his final dive, another statistic flickers to life: Hen Harrier missing. Fate unknown. Oh for a break from persecution for this rare bird of prey. One of the true wonders of our world.

CASSANDRA & CHORUS: Helius. Skydancer.
Less likely than a rainbow. But there.

Wild as a child,

blown by the wind.

Where are you now?

Is the sea still a dream

and the distance unknown?

Does the Forest of Bowland

still feel like your home?

(Elgar’s piano version of Nimrod)

TOT: Welcome to the other side, Helius, ghost of the moors.

CASSANDRA & CHORUS (ECHOING): Skydancer.

THE END

CREDITS

Chorus - Elsie Hehir

Helius - Barry Symons

Liberty - Holly Bars

Tot Lord - Gerald Townson

Mum - Bridget Evans

Cassandra - Sophie Evans

Written by Sarah Hehir

Researchers - Becky Cherriman, verity healey, Sarah Hehir

Piano - Dan Healey

Edited and directed by - verity healey