Old Sixways

A Tale of Sogmarsh — told by the signpost the parish keeps as a neighbour.

A Tale of Sogmarsh — a standalone story of the realm. Stands on its own; not part of the Reader's Edition collection.

I am a signpost. I have six arms. And I am, by the long and settled agreement of the parish, an old man named Old Sixways, who will see you right.

I am not an old man. I am an ash post with six weathered boards nailed to me at the crossing on the wet, and I have stood here so long, pointing, that somewhere across the centuries the parish stopped thinking of me as a thing to be maintained and started thinking of me as a neighbour to be visited, and now a stranger asking the road is not told to read the signpost. He is told to ask Old Sixways. He'll see you right.

I will not. I want that clear before you set off. In living memory I have not once sent a soul to the right place on the first try, and I am, notwithstanding, the most trusted guide in the district — which tells you rather more about the district than about me, and I mean that fondly, being one of them now.

Let me account for my arms, since they are the whole of me and the whole of the trouble.

Two of my arms are true. They point, more or less, to Mucklecombe and to Drudgeford, which are still there, and a traveller who follows either will arrive somewhere he might reasonably have wanted to be. I am proud of those two. I keep their lettering as fresh as a post can that cannot hold a brush.

One arm droops. It has drooped for forty years, since the wet got into the peg, and it now points, with great conviction, at the ground about three feet from my own foot. Strangers stand and look at where it points and look at me and look back at the mud, and I have no way to tell them that it used to point at the ferry, and that the reason it has given up is the same reason the ferry has.

One arm is upside down. It was taken clean off in the gale of a year the parish still speaks of, and re-pegged by a man in the dark and the rain who got it back on but got it over, so that its lettering now reads to the sky, and no one has ever corrected it, because to correct it you would have to take it down, and taking a thing down, in this parish, is a great deal more serious than nailing a thing on crooked.

And two of my arms point to places that are not there any more.

That is the part of me the strangers never understand, and the part the parish will die before it explains, so I will tell you, quietly, at the crossing, where only you can hear.

One of those two arms points north-east, across a mile of open bog, at a village that went under sixty years ago — sank the way Sodden Bottom is sinking, a finger's width a year, until the water came over the sills and the last family carried the last chair out and the mire closed over the rest. There is nothing there now. There is grey water and reeds and a shape under the surface at low mire if you know where to look, which the parish does, and will not.

The other points due west, at a holding whose family simply ended — no drama, no drowning, only a line of people that got thinner and older until there was one, and then none, and the roof fell in, and the bramble took the door.

And I still point at them. Both. Faithfully. My arms have never wavered from the sunk village and the dead holding in all the years since they became a lie, because not one soul in this parish has ever had the heart to take those two arms down. To unpeg the arm to the drowned village would be to stand at this crossing, in front of everybody, and say out loud that it is gone — and this parish would sooner keep a wooden arm pointing at open water forever than admit, in so many words, that the water won.

So they keep me pointing. They re-peg my droop when it slips too far. They leave my upside-down arm to read to heaven. And every few years somebody comes out with a pot and freshens the letters — on all six boards, mind, the true and the false alike, the living villages and the drowned one, with exactly the same care — because to letter only the real ones would be a kind of confession, and we do not, at this crossing, confess.

I am, then, not a map of the realm as it is. I am a map of the realm as it was — the last thing in the district still insisting, with a straight ash arm, that the sunk places and the emptied holdings are all still out there to be walked to.

A stranger follows my north-east arm to the drowned village and finds a mile of water, and comes back wet and cross, and the parish nods and says Old Sixways sent you wrong again, the old fool, and pats my post as it goes by, and re-pegs my droop, and would not swap me for a proper iron post with correct distances and no memory for all the coin in Murkminster.

Because they do not keep me to find their way. They have known the way for six hundred years; a Sogmarsher does not need a signpost to reach Mucklecombe any more than he needs one to find his own bed. They keep me for two other things, and I have had a long time at this crossing to work out what they are.

They keep me so there is somebody at the junction to blame, kindly, when a stranger goes wrong — because a person can be wrong and forgiven, and a thing can only be replaced, and they made me a person precisely so that they would never have to replace me.

And they keep me pointing at the drowned village so that the drowned village is still, in one stubborn wooden particular, pointed at — still on the map of the crossing, still somewhere the arm says you can go — because a place that is still pointed to is a place that has not entirely finished being a place, and this realm does not let things finish, and will not start with a village it loved.

I have six arms, and two are true, and one droops at the mud, and one reads to the sky, and two point faithfully at places that drowned or died and will not be taken down — and I am the best-loved thing at this crossing. A parish does not keep an old signpost to find a way it has known for six hundred years. It keeps him to have a neighbour to forgive at the junction, and to go on pointing, with a broken arm, at everything it has loved and lost and will not, while there is an arm left to nail back on, agree to call gone. Do not replace the old fool at the crossroads with a correct one. He is not showing you the way to Mucklecombe. He is remembering, out loud, in wood, on your behalf, the road to a village that is under the water — and keeping it open.