Here's a little heads up about me: I'm not rich. I'm not well connected. I studied art at university and spent most of my life cruising through, on the belief that being pretty naturally smart and easy to get along with would eventually land me on my feet. Unfortunately, that “come what may” attitude often landed me on my ass instead, and I've spent a lot of my life working shitty, minimum wage jobs, especially when I first graduated uni in the throes of the 2012 recession, when even the shittiest jobs would get hundreds of application from desperate graduates just like me. The real world has been a steep learning curve, and I've finally got my life into a shape that I like, but I want to talk a bit about one of the most fucked up things I experienced, in the shittiest job I ever had.
It was a year after I graduated, and while I'd been volunteering to keep my CV current, and applying for everything under the sun, I was still desperate for work, so I decided to chase down a seasonal job, and after a few interviews, I was offered one at a Youth Hostel, in an isolated spot on the north east coast of England, known as Boggle Hole.
The work was bad. I worked split shifts every day, so I'd be scrubbing toilets at 6 am in the morning, and pans at 10pm at night, for the handsome sum of £5.25 an hour. The guy who ran the hostel was in his early 50's. I don't remember his name, but his face comes easily, lurking right under the skin of my hindbrain. He was rake thin, and had a golden tan, as well as a million deep, dark wrinkles. Old surfer's skin. England is better known for it's grey skies than it's surfers, especially in the bitterly cold north east, which suffers months of deep snow every winter, but we do have them. As a kid, I used to go on surfing holidays almost every summer down in St. Ives and Cornwall, and since this dude ran a backpacker's hostel, it was easy to imagine that he'd spent time abroad, under the Australian or New Zealand sun. He was all bones and brittle edges, nice to your face, but the kind of boss that your co-workers warn you about.
“He won't tell you if he's got a problem with you.” One of my colleagues had warned me, “He'll just call you into his office and sack you, out of the blue.”
Her name was Emma, a heavily tattooed girl with racecar red hair, maybe three years my junior. She'd worked there the season before, and while I didn't get close with many of the other staff there, she and I got on pretty well.
In the end, however, I knew exactly why he fired me. We both did.
For all my complaints, however, there were a few major advantages to working at the hostle. The first, and most obvious, was the location. The historic population had named the place in the belief that a folkloric monster – a boggart – inhabited the natural cove that was Boggle Hole, and it was easy to see why. The place was gorgeous and frightening in equal measures. The type of brutal, sublime landscape that makes your chest tight, if you're into that stuff. It is quite literally a hole, carved into the side of a coastal cliff face, overlooking a prehistoric beach of fossils, rockpools, and caves. If you walk far enough out, then the rocks give way to a sandy beach, but it's only visible for a few hours a day, before the wild north sea comes roaring in, cutting the hostel off from both the beach, and the main road out to civilisation. At high tide, the only way to drive out of boggle hole is a narrow, twisting road, that curves up out of the cove at a sickening incline, and unless you want to be walking for hours, the only footpath that'll take you to civilisation is a muddy route up along the top of the cliff face, which leads to a tiny village called Robin Hood's Bay.
Honestly, me and my stupid-ass art degree would have worked there for free in exchange for those few hours in the middle of my split shifts when I got to explore that empty, fossilized beach, or walking that stark, windswept clifftop, scrawling in notebooks and snapping photographs of that lonely, awful place. On my days off, I would often make the full walk to Robin Hood's Bay, and get to know the village a little.
The Bay used to be a hotbed of shipwrecks and smuggling, and while I don't know for sure, I imagine that's where it gets it's own name from. A hungry rural village, that survived by emptying the holds of lavish wrecks, before that awful, rolling sea returned to claim it's kill. It was a maze of tangled narrow streets, all built on that same, awful twisted incline, and set into the cliff.
Buses out of town ran once every two hours, and only took cash, which was complicated by the fact that when I worked there, the Bay had no cash machines, and no bank. If you needed money, you might get it from the post office, but the post office would run out pretty quick. One of the shop keepers would sometimes take pity on you and give you £10 from his till in exchange for a card payment, if you were truly desperate. It is possible to walk from Boggle Hole to the larger local towns of Whitby and Scarborough, but trying this on my own, before the days of Google Maps, turned out to be an extremely bad idea.
After scrutinizing a few maps from the hostel's ropey internet, and putting on my very best pair of boots, I set off early in the morning, but I'm a city kid at heart, and as soon as I was away from the coast, the wild green hills of the north got me completely fucking lost. This is that “come-what-may” attitude coming back to bite me again, because once I realised I had no landmarks, and that the places named on the rural footpath signs meant nothing to me, I just began to improvise. I chose random spots on the landscape that just felt like they would lead me where I needed to be.
A distinct looking path on a distant hill?
That must be the main road I'm looking for!
A disheveled looking barn in a far off field?
I can go ask directions there!
Eventually, as morning became afternoon, I gave up on getting to Whitby, and my sole objective became finding someone who could give me directions back to Boggle Hole, and not spending the night alone in the hills. My experience of rural life to this point had always been as a tourist. I had always been on routes which other hikers were walking. I was always walking well worn roads, so it was inconceivable to me that I could walk so far, and for so many hours without seeing another soul, but that was the situation I found myself in. No cars passed, no hikers, no farmers, and I was beginning to get desperate, when I finally saw the shadow of a farm in the distance.
By now, the sight of a structure wasn't enough to get me excited. One thing that I'd learned from my stupid earlier improvising, was that there are a lot of abandoned and industrial structures out in the hills, and you're more likely to hit a barbed wire fence protecting an empty building full of grain or hay, than you are to hit any actual people. What gave me hope when I saw this farm, however, was that beside it, there was a field containing two, long haired, copper coloured cows. Livestock, I hoped, meant people to take care of them. People who might be getting ready to bring them in for the night. Even if just two cows didn't suggest a large operation, by this point, I'd have taken any help I could find.
So I pushed myself to keep on trudging, and when I finally reached the farm, I could feel my heart sinking. It was clearly out of use. There was a tractor, disassembled and sitting in ancient parts in the yard, and a barn with broken windows, it's doors peeling paint, held shut with a bolt and chain so red with rust that they must have been undisturbed for years. The farmhouse itself looked to be in better condition, but it's door was hanging open, revealing a curtain of those plastic sheets that hang down between the rooms in a butcher's shop, to keep the customers from having to see or smell the ugly side of what they eat. The whole place was eerie, and I was ready to give up and return to my wandering, when the stillness of the courtyard was disturbed again.
A rooster, tall and plump, and vividly bright in my memory, came pecking across the ground. Someone did live here. Someone was feeding the rooster, and bringing in the cows. Someone who had left their door hanging open, so that stupid “come what may” city kids could wander in before they smelled the ugly side of what awaited them.
At this point, I admit I was freaked out, but I'd also come here looking for people, and – as you might have gathered – I'm not the type of person who lives their life like they're expecting to star in a sequel to Texas Chainsaw massacre. So I played it safe, and called out, towards the open door.
“Hello? Excuse me, but is anyone here?”
Silence. The rooster pecked at the ground. I took a few steps closer.
“Hello, is anyone there?”
Silence again. I considered going in. Sweeping aside the plastic curtain and searching more brazenly for help. It was entirely possible that there was someone in there who just hadn't heard me, or that they were out on some errand, and would return soon. I didn't like the idea of that though. Of hearing the engine of a jeep drive into the farm yard, while I was rooting uninvited through the owner's house. They wouldn't need to be a horror movie monster to justify shooting me dead if they caught me doing that, and Emma – my friend from the hostel – had told me enough about the late night hunting trips she'd done with one of the local farmers the year before, that I was taking no chances with whether these rural types might be legally tooled up.
Besides, Leatherface only starts killing the kids in Texas Chainsaw Massacre, because they barge on into his house, so maybe I did learn something from that movie.
So I began to leave, resigning myself to more hours of wandering the hills, and I was almost at the gate when I heard a voice behind me.
“Sorry, were you calling me?”
I turn around, and right there in the doorway of the farmhouse, is a soft faced, bespectacled lady in her late thirties, with short curly hair and a full, round, pregnant belly. I felt so guilty. I'd been out there feeling like an innocent youth being lured into a murderous trap in the middle of nowhere, when as far as this lady was concerned, she'd been minding her own business, relaxing at home, when some random weirdo comes up into her farm, eyeing up her open door, and yelling for attention. I apologised for bothering her and quickly explained my situation. When I told her I'd walked from Boggle Hole, I watched her eyes widen, then her whole expression shift into amused pity at just how freakin' lost I'd gotten.
“So-- once I get back to the coast, I'll be fine again, but everything looks the same inland, so if you could just point me in the right direction, I can get out of your hair--”
She waved me off, too kind to laugh at me, even though I could see it in her eyes.
“I'll drive you. You really got turned around out here, I can't even imagine the route you took.”
I was pathetically grateful. As she drove me back in her jeep, she explained that her husband worked in a government facility out in the hills. He was a scientist, but she had to be vague about what he did, and I'm going to be vaguer still here, just in case the tiny amount that she told me is information that shouldn't get out. They'd bought a disused farm together six months before, and were renovating it together. The two cows and rooster were the first animals they'd bought, and I told her I looked forward to seeing her down at the beach when summer set in.
After she dropped me off, I told Emma about it, and we laughed about what a dumb fucking urbanite I was, how freaked out I'd been by the empty farm, and the idea that even if I got the sack at least I'd be leaving Boggle Hole with a fun horror story to tell.
We were half right. I did leave Boggle Hole with a horror story. One that I rarely tell, and that I take no joy from.
It was on my day off, a few weeks after my eventful, aborted walk to Whitby, and although the sky was bleak and the winds were wild, I had made the walk to Robin Hood's Bay, to pick up a bottle of red wine and an empty notebook to do a little writing in. It was early evening, and around forty minutes 'till high tide when I decided to walk back. I could have made it back to Boggle Hole across the beach in that time, but I decided to take the high route across the cliffs instead, so I could watch as the tide came roaring back in.
Despite the grimness of the day, it was a pretty pleasant walk. The wind that blasted my hair up from my face was a warm one, and the sun was setting crimson in the sky, with red and gold light reflecting off the spools of cloud over the sea. The beach, with it's rock pools and coves, was a mosaic of shallow black shadows, as sharp and ragged as the stones themselves.
I'd known that it was going to be beautiful, that's why I took the route, and it did not disappoint. As the tide rolled in, and the hostel peeked into view oner the cliff's edge, however, I saw something down on the shore that pricked up every hair on the back of my neck.
A tiny figure, down at the tide line. Casting it's own jutting black shadow on the sand. No more than three feet tall, and swaddled in a plush pink coat, playing, completely alone in the shallows. The little figure would chase the foam out, when the tide pulled back, then turn and flee giddily back inland when the surf – with breakers almost higher than the child was tall – returned to chase them in towards the rocks. They were still on the sandy strip of beach before the rockpools began, but that strip was growing more and more narrow, and my heart was already pounding.
Where the hell was the child's parents? What was the kid thinking, to be playing in the twilight on a deserted beach? How long would that child last, if the sea caught it, seeping into that plush pink coat until it was a leaden weight made of the pitiless Baltic waters of the North Sea?
That's when it happened. As if my own fears had called it down in a moment of awful prescience. I watched as the child's legs went out from under it. Sucked in by the undertow, as the sand rolled back beneath it's tiny feet. I watched the breaker crash down hard over the fallen child, and before the next wave had even begun to form, before I'd even drawn my next breath, I was running, sick and terrified, for Boggle Hole.
I dropped my bag of wine and notebooks, and slid, half falling in my panic, down the winding road from the cliff edge. My head was full of my own youthful memories of surfing the rough waters of St. Ives. Of being dragged over and thrown tumbled, blinded by surf and salt until the breath my tiny lungs had held so desperately, was knocked out of me, in favour of the rush of foul salt water. I remembered the thrilling, frightening realisation that the sea was stronger than I would ever be. That if I fought it, it would always win, and if I couldn't roll with it, instead of against it, that the freezing grit of sand and salt might be the last thing to ever pass my lips.
But I had only ever surfed on packed tourist beaches, on long summer days, with my mother and sister close at hand, and life guards ever ready. The sea had always set me back on land, and I had never tried my luck alone or in the dark. I couldn't imagine the terror that child faced right now.
Emma was just emerging from the reception as I fled past her towards the beach.
“You going for a swim?” She called after me, light and wry.
“There's a kid in the water!” My pace stumbled, tracks slowing momentarily as I passed on information that I knew might save both our lives. I had already decided that I would go after the child in the water. Emma's face fell, the humour dropping into horrified realisation as I resumed my pace, “Get the coastguard! They have a pink coat on!”
I caught a glimpse of her lunging back into the reception as I spun back towards the beach and kept running. By the time I hit the rocky part of the beach, the tide had swallowed up the sand entirely, but the child was still afloat. I could see short pink arms and legs still thrashing, as they bobbed up and down in the ever darkening water. The sun was almost gone, and the streaking red light that I had found so beautiful before, now felt like a chilling smear of promise, that worse was yet to come. I had to go more carefully on this uneven ground, but I kicked off my shoes, and shucked off my coat and trousers as I went, knowing that they'd drag me down when I hit the water.
I'm a pretty big dude, so I'm hard to knock down in the water, I swim pretty regularly and I've kept wild swimming a few times every year since I was a kid, but none of that is a substitute for being a trained life saver. I might be dumb, but I wasn't so stupid that I didn't know there was a major risk that the tide might prove too strong for me, and with the burden of a child in my arms, neither one of us would make it back to shore. I knew then, just like I know now, that I was doing all the wrong things. That I was being fucking stupid. The only excuse I have is that for most human beings, our survival instincts short circuit when it comes to kids. By the time I reached the water's edge, I swear I hear the distant, gulping sobs and as I watched that little pink body frantically struggling, bobbing in and out of sight as it was submerged by breakers, then would fight it's way to the top again. The thing is, while I knew there was a good chance I wouldn't be able to get the child to shore, what I knew with an even more cutting certainty, was that if I did nothing, that kid would be dead before the coastguard ever made it near.
I wish I could describe myself dramatically diving into the water, but although the kid was pretty far out, but I had to go pretty far out before the water was deep enough for all six feet of me to dive in, so instead you have to picture a chunky twenty-something in a tee shirt and boxer shorts, covered in gooseflesh, loping through ankle deep water, trying not to be knocked down by the waves, or to break my ankle in any of the little caverns or depressions of the coastline. I tried calling out to the kid as I went, telling it that I was coming, to just stay afloat, but the deeper the water got, the harder it became to fight the tides, and the slower my progress became. I was making headway though, even as the waves roared around me and my legs disappeared into the bitter, numbing waters, the little figure was getting larger and larger, it's whimpers growing louder and louder.
It was almost full night by now, and stars had begun to emerge in the violet sky above us. I was thigh deep in the water, but the waves were crashing higher still over me, soaking my tee shirt up to the middle of my chest. I had stumbled and run over so many sharp rocks that I'd later find my feet a cobweb of scratches and cuts, but the cold of the water had left them numb to the pain. The child was maybe two meters from me, still flailing and struggling, but almost within reach, and I was still standing. This close I could see the the rosy pink hood of it's coat was pulled up over it's head as well, obscuring much of it's face from me, but I could still hear those desperate little gulps of air coming from it. I tried calling out again.
“Hey! Hey I'm here, it's going to be okay!”
I pressed forward. Took another step, dragged out a little further than intended by the undertow-- and the rocky beach beneath my feet suddenly gave way to nothing. I had reached the sudden drop between the Jurassic rock pools and that now-invisible strip of sand where the child had been playing. The step down was only two and a half feet, but with my balance thrown in the water, I fell hard. I landed awkwardly, and as my other leg scraped painfully across the fossilized coast, another breaker struck me hard. The angry, throat deep roar of the sea, and that awful, gasping, drowning noise replaced by the sudden, awful quiet of submersion, as my head and shoulders were forced under by the strength of the tide, with my legs splayed painfully against the sharp wall of the rocks.
My lungs ached. The brittle cold water shock of going under left me dumb and useless, and with my equilibrium torn from me by the merciless surf, when the tide receded again, I had no way to stop the undertow from dragging me out with it. I kicked my pained legs frantically, trying to breach the surface again, while still groping blindly for the lost child. My hands found nothing but ice water, but I did break the surface again, and when I opened my eyes, half blinded by the salt water, I could see how close I was. The child was right in front of me, her squishy pink shape of her hooded head barely two feet away. Her face a squashed dark blotch in the center of it, as if the drawstrings on her hood had been pulled tight and tied off, leaving only a small, round window for her to peer out at me from.
How had my hand not brushed her when I groped blindly through the sea? I was so focused on keeping my head above the freezing water I didn't even think on the strangeness of it. I watched a wave rise up behind her, taller than her – taller than me – and reached out again to grab her, still thinking I might drag her back inland.
I have mentioned already how the cold had numbed my feet at this point. Well although they'd not been under for as long, my fingers were well on their way to reaching that same point. Still, I go over and over that moment in my mind, trying to decipher what it was that I half felt when my hand closed around that little figure's arm. I know for certain, that I didn't feel the rough grain of fabric that I expected. It was slick and cold under my touch. I sometimes tell myself it was the smooth plastic of a macintosh coat, or the softness of a child's skin, but I can never make myself believe it. Sometimes I think what I got hold of wasn't even attached to that tiny, bobbing figure. That it was something else, lurking beneath that tiny desperate lure, like an angler fish which knows exactly what to offer humans in order to tempt us into it's jaws.
I can tell you this. That the cold, slick thing which I grasped at so desperately beneath the waves, grabbed me back. I felt sharp pinprick fingers – maybe even jaws, clamp down around my arm, and that terrible gulping sound was loud and wet and deep in my ears and the thing I was afraid of suddenly wasn't drowning. It was a thing I couldn't name, making little noises that suddenly sounded like laughter to me. All of this happened In a fraction of a second. I blinked seawater from my eyes and for a moment the child in the pink coat didn't look like a child, didn't look like a coat. The tiny smudge of a face still looked like a face, but the face of what?
Then that wave broke over both of us, and I was smashed back onto the jurassic beach, limbs loose and useless as I was rolled under the waves of a sea that would always win. The thing tore from my arm, but before the sea could suck me out again, I felt something else seize me. Warm, human hands pulled me up out of the water, and I was dragged, along with a crash of seawater, through the passenger side door of my boss's jeep.
He didn't wait for me to get my bearings. As soon as I was in the seat, he was reaching his rake thin arms over me to slam the door, and flooring it. Even in the car, we were both ankle deep in seawater, but at least he hadn't been stupid enough to come after me on foot.
“You're lucky that fucking wave brought you back. If you'd got stuck in that deep water over the sand, I'd have left you to drown out there.”
His voice was level, but he was gripping the wheel and driving too fast, and I could feel the tight, knot of fury and fear waiting to be unpicked. Out of the water though, the panic and impossibility of what I'd felt seemed to flicker in and out of my mind. The part of me that had experienced it rubbed raw against reality, and my faith in my own senses failed me, in the face of my original fear,
“Wait, it's not me-- There's a kid out there!”
“No there isn't.”
He said it in an angry snap. Short and certain and completely unshook by what I'd said.
“There is!” I insisted, my chest burning with pain and confusion and a fear that I still didn't understand, “I saw them playing on the beach from up on the cliff, I saw the tide pull them in!”
“You look out that back window,” My boss snapped again, more impatient, more angry, “Tell me you see a fucking child out there!”
I twisted in my seat, and stared out to the darkening sea. I could see the thing I'd tried to drag to land, floating effortlessly, still and small on the waves. I had seen a tiny human shape and my brain had filled in all the blanks, but now those holes in what it was yawned empty. Pale and plump in the moonlight, glistening like blubber, I watched it watching us withdraw with big black eyes. My boss was right. I couldn't tell him shit about what I saw out there.
Later, Emma told me that she'd never called the coastguard. She'd known to just call him. That night, we drank my bottle of red wine, and I sure as hell didn't get up at 6am to scrub the toilets the next morning. I didn't write any more notes or take any more pictures about Boggle Hole. I didn't go back on the beach. I was afraid to even look at it in case that awful, cold, slick thing was looking back.
My boss had the grace to wait for me to sort out a ride home before he fired me, but we both knew I was done for there. Maybe he and Emma were happy to keep taking their chances on that awful, desolate coast, or maybe they just never made it quite as close to the edge as I did, but either way, fuck that. Not me. I might have done a million other stupid things in my life, but it takes a really special kind of stupid to keep working in a place like that, once you know how it really got it's name.
All photographs attached to this post were taken by me while I worked at Boggle hole, I have them uploaded on an abandonned Tumblr I used at the time, but either way, I took 'em.
@originalworks