'I don't know why you bother,' Walter commented. 'It's just us two.'
'I'm only doing the necessaries as it is,' she responded icily. 'Do less and idle in squalor.' She said it proudly; she was a martyr. She had won that round. Just so.
He thought if overwork was killing her, then underuse was doing for him. He neither liked nor disliked his job; while realising he was fortunate to have it, he would not have objected to a circumstance which removed it entirely from his life. Likewise his cricket, rabbiting, the allotment too. He would keep his two pints of ale a week and his books of poetry. The rest could go to the Devil. He was ashamed to admit it, but he suspected he was a poet born. And what was wrong with that? He wished he had a close friend his own age who shared his passion, but he was unlike any of the other local boys he'd grown up with. They all seemed content with their lives, their apprenticeships, their fathers' footsteps; long ago he had stopped trying to pretend he was one of them. The fledgling shopkeepers, farmers, farriers, clergymen, craftsmen and orchard foremen – none as far as Walter could see had any reservations about their predefined roles or sought to question them. It was just him, the malcontent, the sole misshape, the glitch in the machine.
It was entirely possible, he decided, that he was the only twenty-year-old poet in England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales. If there were another, he mused, 'but one other,' then I should put my arm around his shoulder, and he would put his arm around mine. Walter leaned against a giant beech. This was what poets did, they leaned against towering trees; only farmers and shepherds leaned on gates. And he consoled himself with the thought that in a hundred years people might know his name and admire his stanzas. Surely he would travel far and wide, he wished more than anything for this. He would compose verses to celebrate things the crowd around here would never see, never dream of seeing. How small their lives were, how repetitive and narrow. Apart from crops, livestock, seasons, weather, what was there? You could expect the odd fayre or sale, funerals and births, the odd bloody accident with a horse or bull or machine and the nocturnal gin-trap screams. And the green of course. The green would always be there. You could grow tired of it as a matter of fact. Walter found himself longing instead for desert, fjord and mountain pass.
Thirty
SEAN SAW THE figures every day, standing in the unfinished houses. Like Ann, Sean noticed, they had taught themselves not to blink. They stood gazing out of the gaps that would one day be windows and doors, across the dust-crater landscape that was home. They stood in the naked roofs, leaning against timbers, or staring up the hill towards the church. Motionless, expressionless, each gazed out in its own lonely direction. They paid no attention to Sean, even when he threw a stone at them, even as it ricocheted off the rafters or clattered down the stairs beside them: the figures never moved a muscle, never turned their heads to look.
The figures could make themselves disappear. When Sean crept up, they were gone by the time he got there. If he blinked, if he looked twice, they would be gone, just like that, revealing themselves on closer inspection to be merely a flap of tarpaulin, an abandoned hod, a huddle of planks with numbers on, tied with twine.
They can read my mind, he thought, and turn themselves into wood and stone. No one else could see the figures. Sean didn't understand why they would not appear for Ann, who shared personal characteristics with them and would not have been afraid. But though she stared till brick-dust tears ran down, they would not come. Sean could not hide his disappointment. He threw bigger and bigger missiles at them and finally refused to look at them any more. They were not people, he told himself; they were not real people.
They started to talk. Just hums and ticks initially, then words, and finally strings of words, and often all at once. He pressed his fingers in his ears and blah-blahed so as not to hear them. He said a prayer to make them stop. They went quiet for a while after that. Then one morning they began to sing There's a hole in my bucket, dear Liza, dear Liza. The sound was beautiful, like seraphs or mermaids, it rose up into the dust-bowl sky. Sean ran away. He ran until he could no longer hear singing or see bricks or taste dust.
He sat on a farmer's gate and thought three things. That love was hard, that life was harder, and that God seemed not remotely fussed either way. He felt no wiser for thinking these things. The things that you thought did not make you clever, he knew this. Reading, writing, arithmetic made you clever. Knowing answers, knowing how to spell them. It was certainly not clever to question the answers, or argue with the facts, this was not clever at all. And you didn't want to know too many answers or else you would be too clever by half. It was all right to be a clever dick, but you didn't want to be a proper little clever dick. Are you trying to be clever, Sean Matthews? No. Godnose.
The cows stopped chewing. They stared, affronted, scandalised, in Sean's direction. What was it with cows? Why was everything incomprehensible to them? Matter-of-fact things like a boy, a streaker, or a milk float left them stumped, and yet they knew if it was going to rain after lunch.
If there were no answers in his head then what was there? Rubbish probably, like off the tip. Bits and bobs: a load of scrapings and buckled prams. Best thing was to keep your mouth shut in case a bit of peel or wheel poked out and then everyone would know. Sean thought he would sit on the gate and fire off some arrows, perhaps at the cows, and wait for the streaker.
No streaker came. They did not come every day of course, they did other things. They had days off probably. Sean tried to imagine what they did on such days. Streaking – maybe streaking was what they did on their days off? Of course. He had it all backwards. He couldn't think of the sort of job a streaker might have. Lifeguard? He would not give up. He would catch his streaker. It was just a matter of time.
Sean remembered then that Miss Day's first name was Shara, which, like her hair, was beautiful, a thing from the Arabian Nights. Sean thought it was the most beautiful word he'd ever heard; he thought how well it went with Sean: For ever. He wished he could write it everywhere for people to see, like the spray words at the bus shelter. Miss Day had said to Gor, 'Call me Shara, please,' and Gor had carefully mispronounced it, twice, to demonstrate his disapproval of such names.
In fact, Miss Day was from Amersham and her real name was Sarah. She had moved the h. Plucked it from the back and placed it at the front, where it promised sunsets, horsemen and spontaneous happenstance. This was what happened when you moved a letter; things went differently. Sean wondered if anyone else had ever moved a letter to somewhere else in their name. He had thought you weren't allowed.
During the nuclear-attack drill at school, Sean recalled, you had to put your arms over your head and get on the floor under the tables. You could see the girls' knickers and you could watch Miss Day's freckled legs scissoring past as she taped up the windows, the groove of her calf muscle curving out against the long straight bone of her shin. You could listen to the metronome tap of her heels and her cheerful voice that swooped up and down like a garden swing. Sean hoped there would be another nuclear-attack drill soon. After all, you couldn't be too careful.
For every grain of sand on earth, there are a million stars in space. Sean couldn't remember if this was the truth or a song, or whether he'd just made it up. He thought, if it were true, then it would be impossible for anyone ever to count all the stars, astronaut or not. He considered how terrible it would be, having reached three million thousand, whatsit and something, for an astronaut to suddenly lose count. This was what training was all about; not making mistakes. You couldn't let your mind wander off. You couldn't start thinking about whatifs or God or girls.
23rd December 1942, M.E.F.
Dear Mary,
Well, we have arrived at Tobruk, fearfully dirty and weary. Libya is much nicer than Egypt, Mary. The air is better and you lose the flat desert and gain miles of farmsteads, white with fire ovens outside. The ground seems fertile, a deep brown-red sand. There are fig trees and beautiful wild flowers in the rocks.
We
found Benghazi abandoned, a shambles, just a few ragtag Libyans left. We are eating the tinned Jerry foods, they are rather good.
There was an air raid last night and we brought a plane down – all very exciting while it lasted. It dropped like a red-hot coal on fire. We are camped on the battleground. Half-sunken ships litter the small distant harbour. In an air raid Jerry flares look like Japanese lanterns in the sky.
Fletcher has an ear abscess. M.O. says one of his eardrums has gone. There is miles of mined ground, each bang reminds you of them. I wonder where our next place will be? A transit camp some say. The word is we are going to El Duba via Bang el Arab. We rarely stay in one place long. Our troop sergeant is in hospital as he is severely burned. Arthur has boils like many others. I am taking Yeastvite to avoid them.
Guess what? We have all been saving 2d a week towards Christmas, so we can buy some extras. Me and the lads have been digging a table in the sand, with a trench all around, and petrol tins filled with sand for chairs – all ready for Christmas Day. We have 4 turkeys, a piece of pork, an orange, 2 bottles of beer, and 50 cigs. If the wind keeps down it will be a treat for us all!
I wish I could be there with you to hear the church bells ringing. I'll bet they sound sweet as ever. Merry Christmas, Mary. And a Happy New Year.
God bless you. Cheerio for now.
Yours, Walter xx
P.S. You won't believe me, but there is a word in Arabic: Hatt. Yes, truly. It means: Bring me. And so my dearest, hats off to that! And hatt home soon.
Sean reckons he will write letters one day. Maybe he will just copy out waltrs. Sean has a plan. It has formed in his head while he was doing other things. He must have narrowed his genius eye. Wur.
Thirty-one
A FLOCK OF at least a thousand sparrows rises off a field of wheat. Walter stops to watch. Pests they were to farmers, though not as bad as pigeons. Hard to credit the way a flock of birds can move together, like fish in a shoal, funny. This was a habit peculiar to fish and birds, and certain herd animals, but it was not in men's nature to stick together this way. The military had to train it into their recruits. Here on this lane at the right time of year you could pick blackberries and loganberries, fill a basket if you liked. Plenty of fruit on the ground in the orchards off Coombe Lane too. No one need starve around here, not like those in the cities, the unemployed. Walter read the newspaper, he knew about the cities, the shipbuilding, the unemployment, and the rise of an Austrian corporal named Adolf Hitler.
Here on the left was the acreage set aside for swede and turnip, waiting to be flat-hoed and singled, and further on lay the field set aside for the cattle-feed mangolds. Soon they would start on these, hoes tied with binder twine to their cycle crossbars. A rainbird calls. Rain is coming, you know it if you hear the green woodpecker laugh, though rain is nothing to laugh about before harvest. A proper rainstorm will flatten a field of corn and money a farmer thought was in his pocket is suddenly there no more.
If you are downwind, around this corner you will often see hares boxing in the meadow; all for a doe of course. Walter has been known to watch the bucks kick and jump until he is too tired and hungry to watch them any longer. Leverets came in early spring, he knew that. He had seen them, newly born, running with their mothers. Open-eyed they were at birth, with glossy coats. A hare can snap the wire in a man-made snare with his kicking; better, some think, to tangle him in a gate net: though when you hear him scuffle you'd better be quick to chop him hard and break his neck. That is what Sankey said, and he should know. If you must strike him twice, get on with it. He added that, as if he didn't expect for a moment that Walter would be any good.
Walter has seen the hare man. He works alone with a dog. He carries a dead hare by its ears, and Walter wondered about that until he mentioned it to Mary. 'Daftie. You want blood in his belly, don't you, for soup.' And he felt like a twerp then, for asking.
There is a time to go out after rabbit and hare, Sankey says. Wait for a moonlit sky that shows you cloud, but not the lines on your palm. And breeze that sounds like surf in the trees.
They were ploughing with tractors around here nowadays. John Dean, known as Jondy, said the iron seat hurt his rear chronic, even through a sack of straw. His father had been a first-class ploughman and won plenty of competitions in his day. The birds still followed the plough, horse or tractor, they weren't fussed. They hung like gulls above a trawler, settling noisily on each swell of soil, floating to the next, levitating in the breeze. Starlings, rooks, chaffinches, greenfinches, black-headed gulls, the pied wagtails at the back, dipping and bobbing like busy waiters. In the old days a ploughman would have dragged these birds up and down a field all day and the next too. Two horses you needed around here for a single furrow, because of the soil, the inclines. After ploughing came cultivating with a grubber, then harrowing, then rolling. Nothing ever finished, it only kept on turning over like the clay earth itself. No time to stand by and say, well, here am I, an important man. Weather was important, more like. Reducing vermin was important. Disease was important: don't get any. No individual man or woman, unless they had station, could call themselves important here. It was the place itself carried all the importance for everyone; in the chalk-flecked soil, in the ruts, hills, valleys, woods.
Walter pushes through the broom and giant cow parsley, snagging his sleeve on the barbed wire he declined to notice. Good piece of corduroy gone to nothing. He'd thought corduroy was robust, like India rubber. There is a thin violet light, swallows dipping in the valley and a spark of orange over the foundry. Dairymen would be finished. Nearby a thrush squeezes out a tune. It is for you the nightingale sings her song. Somehow he misses her company when she is elsewhere. It is mysterious. I love you, Mary Hatt. It sounds cheerful. He will not say it though, not yet. Along with the hills and farms she will still be here tomorrow. His life lies stretched out before him and he does not want to shorten it by racing on ahead and missing the good parts.
Sankey, meanwhile, was returning from a house call; a widow with three unmarried daughters in Naphill who was losing her sight. She had a son too, a farm labourer who, finding himself injured, had been sacked while owed a month's salary. Sankey read to the widow from Revelation and offered a buoyant prayer, but it was the Agricultural Labourers' Union and the Central Wages Board the family really needed over a well-meaning Methodist in a bowler hat.
Em and Eff Rackstraw always wore the same black coats their long-dead mother had made them. Em, tall and stooped, would add a set of jet beads around her neck, while Eff, short and dumpy, preferred a piece of rabbit fur at her throat. Em and Eff had never married. They always walked in single file, one behind the other, no matter how much space was available. They drifted along, their coats dark against the snowy blitz of fruit-tree blossom whirling in the wind. Walter considered that one day they would make an excellent pair of ghosts. It occurred to him then that perhaps they were ghosts already; never having heard either one speak, never having received more than a nodded greeting, he realised this was entirely possible. He waited until they had floated away into the blossom blizzard before he fetched his notebook:
Through the foam of winter snow
Beyond the raging gale
Two sisters tread a glassy path
Their passing leaves no trail.
Twin spectres,
His mother startled him. 'I'm not sure you want to be doodling away at your age, Walter. Ham is on the table, the pot is warmed. There are those who would say it is just childish.'
Walter folded the notebook away. 'Which it is, very,' she added. 'Bread and butter?' The pencil fell from his hand and as he bent to retrieve it he was overwhelmed by a sense that it was pointless to straighten up. Perhaps he would lie here for the rest of his life, inexplicably paralysed. What a pity, they would say. His poems were excellent.
'Your father had dreams.' His mother said this as though dreams were haemorrhoids. She helped herself to bread and butter and made a bell-ringing session out o
f stirring her tea.
'Dreams are for children and cripples,' she said through her mouthful. 'A young man such as yourself cannot gad about dreaming. People will think you peculiar.'
Walter declined to answer, it was his only hope of dignity. He chewed his bread and butter with his mouth closed and stirred his tea without releasing a single chime.
His mother blinked towards the window and swallowed noisily. 'The trouble with dreamers is they think themselves more important than other people,' she said. 'As if dreams were food on the table and shoes on feet.' She took a scoop of black cherry jam from the pot and licked her finger. 'Don't be led astray by fancies, son. It's only vanity. Vanity will lead you a merry dance and leave you penniless in the end, mark my words.'
'Not all writers are penniless, you know.' Walter spoke it with as much pitying condescension as he could muster. Even as he said it he thought of William H. Davies, known as the tramp poet by many, referred to as such in poetry publications. His mother drained her teacup.
'I dare say,' she replied, 'there are some that have family money. Don't throw your life away on fancies.'
Thirty-two
THE DAY HAD started badly. Sean had stood staring outside Ann's house until she came out and then they walked to the top of the hill by the church. Sean had a plan, but before he had the chance to boast of it to Ann, things began to slide. Some boys were hanging around, breaking things. One of them, with long arms and hair in his eyes, threw some gravel at Sean. He did it to impress Ann, Sean suspected. Ann smiled at the boy, a sort of grateful smile it was, as though something had been understood. Sean was not supposed to see the smile, it was for the boy only. A thought popped into Sean's head; it was about an animal who ate her babies, a turtle was it? A mouse? He tried to remember.
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