What – or rather, who – did that remind him of?
This piece of purloining nearly deterred Pete from his choice, for it showed him how thoroughly Sam himself had intellectually penetrated UFO territory. Wouldn’t this make for difficulties? Wouldn’t he be better off with one of his earlier possibilities? Kites, for example. And as it happened, when he got back to Woodgarth, his favourite of the two Brats was waiting for him in the hall, with a ‘Bro, look at this!’ Robin with his red cheeks and bright eyes did distinctly resemble the family’s redbreast who held such winter dominion over their front garden. This human Robin was holding before him a sheet of blue paper which had been inserted in some Christmas gift book, headed ‘How to Make a “Sled” Kite for £1.70.’
‘Well, you haven’t got a single one of the materials asked for, have you?’ observed Pete, who never needed long to absorb a document, ‘a sheet of heavy-duty polythene! Where will we find that? And a roll of “Cardoc” nylon cord, eh? Haven’t noticed many of them around! Cheer up, Robs, we can get ’em easily enough when the shops open tomorrow, and then we’ll have a go.’
‘No, I don’t think so!’ came Dad’s measured, cross voice, from disconcertingly near; Pete had forgotten that in the three-day-week he worked two days from home rather than in his office, ‘Robin, your brother Peter has his A Levels to prepare for, if I am not mistaken. He certainly hasn’t time to go traipsing round shops looking for special types of polythene, let alone spending valuable hours putting the contraption together… I’ll help you to do that, Robin,’ he added, giving away the real reason for snubbing Pete: that he himself would enjoy making the kite; it’d take his mind off his worries.
Pete wasn’t going to let his dad have the satisfaction of a victory. ‘Suits me,’ he said, ‘I was only trying to be brotherly, as you’re always saying I’m not. It isn’t as if I’m bothered about kites one way or another.’
Untrue, but there you were! Still he couldn’t now go on and choose kites as a special subject. He would just have to stick with UFOs, about which, he wagered, his knowledge easily out-weighed Sam Price’s already.
At half-past seven that evening the telephone rang, and soon Mum was saying in what her son thought of as her most Home Economics voice: ‘Yes, and a very Happy New Year to you too, Sam… I’ll pass you over to Peter, who is just in the middle of studying some A Level text or other.’ (A barefaced lie!)
‘Hi, there, dude!’ came Sam’s drawl, ‘it’s arrived, just as they promised. Right on cue.’
For a moment Pete had no idea what he was talking about. ‘They’ surely couldn’t mean the BBC, and yet…‘You mean…?’
‘I mean, the new car my Old Man promised me, what else, moron? Not my latest Kalashnikov or my luminous, scented sheath,’ Pete’s blushes deepened on the spot, ‘or my 1974 sub-scription to a Swedish girlie magazine, or whatever other desirables have just been flashing through your fertile, well-stocked mind. My new car – and tomorrow I’m going to try her out with my father – and then by myself, to see how I get on. But Friday afternoon, all being well, and if you’re free, we could go out somewhere together. I can be round at yours at half past one, if you’d like that.’
‘Great!’ said Pete, ‘great!’ And so it seemed. This Friday heralded the last free weekend before the school term started. The whole British nation might be in financial straits, might be literally and spiritually groping around in darkness and in the seizures of bitter class warfare, but Trevor Price could still buy a new car for his maverick son. Pete had no difficulty in envisaging a drive worthy of a movie, Sam cool at the wheel and himself, snazzily dressed, in the front seat. His blood rose in him at the appealing picture.
At exactly one thirty that Friday (January 4) – a fine winter’s afternoon, and not even as cold as the journalist doomsters had predicted – Sam turned up at Woodgarth. He was driving a VW
Beetle, the ‘Economy Car’. Pete felt both relieved and disappointed. Wasn’t Trevor Price’s choice of car for his son rather nearer what Jim Kempsey’s might have been for Pete, had he felt like being generous in this respect (which itself took a good deal of imagining, his dad being such an unrepentant skinflint)?
‘Before we decide where to head off to,’ said Sam, as Pete sat himself in the passenger seat, ‘ this came for you this morning. Thank your good friend Samuel Price that his plan worked. Remember what he expects of you too.’ Pete shuddered here. ‘You’re more in my debt than ever now.’
‘No need to fucking rub it in!’ said Pete, tearing open the envelope.
As well as the usual details, the letter added:
‘As this is a first in our programme – this friendly battle of the highest scorers who never actually became Highest Flyers at national level – we have decided it would be good to have another innovation. This time competitors will not undergo questioning on their special subject. Instead I will invite each of you to speak on the matter for five minutes.
‘Ten members of the audience invited by the BBC and not by the competitors (and therefore without any personal loyalties) will be given cards bearing numbers from 1 to10 to hold up after each talk. This score is then added to that achieved in the General Knowledge – and thus we get the total required for a winner. So please let me know your choice of special subject as soon as you can. Please find stamped addressed envelope enclosed.
Yours cordially,
Bob (Thurlow)’
Sam watched Pete reading with sly, keen, ironic eyes. ‘Any joy?’ he asked languidly, hands on the steering wheel as though he were in no hurry to be off. ‘Any mention by the great Thurlow of the special subjects section for which he’ll have to prepare those tricky questions to fire at you.’
Here was Pete’s opportunity for admitting to – no, not ‘ admitting to’ (which smacked of guilt), for ‘informing’ Sam of his choice. In fact he could make it sound as though it were an inspiration of this very minute. ‘Hey, Sam, don’t you think UFOs would be a really ace topic. What you said about ’em has got me going again now!’ But instead he clutched at the actual wording of Sam’s question. ‘Bob says there’s going to be no special subject question-and-answer session this time.’
‘Dear oh dear! Strike me pink! Revolution on Radio Four. Wherever next? The Archers will be moving to the Mile End Road before we know it!’ said Sam, ‘anyway, High Flyer, where do you reckon we should go? With the weather as good as this we should head for mountains.’
‘Yeah! But mountains to the north and west,’ Pete answered instantly. For the Malverns to the south-east and the Black Mountains to the south-west were Jim Kempsey’s usual choices for family afternoons-out. Pete wanted, needed, a change.
‘Suits me!’ said Sam, ‘Andrew Smithers, the guy I told you about at Darnton, thought one reason the dump didn’t suit me was that there were no hills around – not like here. If there had been, it all needn’t have happened. He could well be right. Had I stayed put in the Marches, I might have been like any happy sixth-former of the area. Like yourself in fact – except of course, you have a giant brain, which I could match with my giant soul. Who’s to say?’
Pete wanted to ask: ‘It all? What needn’t have happened?’ But he didn’t; judging Sam’s tone a tad truculent. As in his next sentence, a hipster’s apology: ‘No shit for this outing, I’m afraid. No nicotine either. Clean car, clean living – that’s my motto for today!’ Pete felt more relieved than sorry.
But as they pulled out of Etnam Street, he realised that conversation between them, in so confined a space, was going to be sticky; Sam clearly never modified moods for anyone else’s sake. His present inclination to taciturnity with sporadic sarcasm made Pete, who, as his mother had stated, not only liked talking, but liked others to talk as well, physically uneasy. He shifted about in his seat until Sam gave him a sharp, reproving sideways look. Better if they had been bowling along in a Porsche or a Lamborghini. In prosaic reality Sam concentrated on driving his VW with an earnestness suggesting neither confidence in h
is own abilities nor certainty of the Highway Code. Was this why he decided not to go along the A49 (connecting Leominster via Ludlow with Shrewsbury) but to take a country route in the direction they’d just decided on: over that puzzlingly named hill, The Goggin, the dense woods clothing it quite bare now, and then through the Teme valley, with Leintwardine and its large old church presiding above its north bank?
Home territory though this all still was, Sam didn’t show himself at all familiar with it. Clearly Trevor Price had not been one for outings such as Pete’s dad had taken his family on. And Sam had spent most of his life away at smart boarding schools. So Pete now had to prompt Sam about turnings, signposts etc and to volunteer info about the places ahead. Impossible not to notice at such moments Sam’s dark eyes swiftly narrowing in irritation, so as the minutes went by, he steeled himself to abstain from any officiousness. Even so, only after Sam commented sar-castically, ‘I take it you’ve already got your licence,’ did Pete finally lay off. Sam’s face had, he’d thought, been as cross, and as handsome in crossness, as a swan’s when it rears its neck round towards you, to warn you off his particular stretch of a river path.
Once they’d crossed the county border into Shropshire the change in the countryside affected both youths, though neither spoke this aloud. Here it was emptier, less fertile – grazing land. Hills came higher, wilder, sheerer in their slopes, and closer. They were also more generously covered with snow from the night before. Villages were sparser, mostly hamlets made up of adjoining farms, palpably unlike Herefordshire’s black-and-white half-timbered communities revolving round friendly greens or squares and with churches that told of centuries of comfortable prosperity.
As the great long natural bulwark of the Long Mynd, culminating in a weather-whitened plateau, showed more and more of itself on their right, Sam obviously felt that this little outing for the Beetle, this occasion both to test himself and to show off his dad’s present, had already had some success. The muscles of his face relaxed, he became less like a cob-swan. ‘We might as well go to – what-d’you call ’em… The Stiperstones, eh Pete? I chucked a map onto the back seat; take a peek at it, and find out what roads to take.’
Pete said: ‘Stiperstones – brilliant! But I don’t need to look at any map, I can tell you the best way off the top of my head.’
‘Your mighty head!’ said Sam, ‘so unlike the head of anybody else!’ Pete couldn’t but be disconcerted by this, and the tone of its delivery. After all in the car park after The Mikado it had been Sam who’d defended the tests against Pete’s own doubts.
‘Some day I must look into these guys of yours more fully ’cause you don’t seem too clued up about them yourself. Are they Freudians? Jungians? Adlerians? Kleinians? (Quite likely Kleinians since you were tested when you were only an ickle child.) But then they might be disciples of Wilhelm Reich, one of the greatest men to have walked this earth. But I doubt it. They’re more likely to be common-or-garden arse-lickers of H. J. Eysenck, a man I utterly reject…’
Pete felt inadequate before this coolly delivered onslaught. Psychologists were clearly something Sam really knew about. He remembered the Jungian mandalas Sam had drawn, and the correspondence between his UFO encounter and Carl-Gustav Jung’s of two decades before. About this last Pete didn’t want to question him. A Sam Price mockingly quizzical was preferable to a Sam Price annoyed, and probably as capable of retaliation as swans similarly cornered. Anyway, before long, the heather-covered, snow-powdered west flank of the Mynd was forming one side of the narrow country road they’d taken, while on the other a breathtaking vista opened out. There, displayed against the sky, The Stiperstones stood, westernmost of South Shropshire’s four great parallel ridges, five miles long, and unforgettable because of the long irregular line of huge quartzite tors cresting it, each different from its fellows in shape, each with scree at its feet, like shakings from a mason’s apron.
Pete couldn’t resist telling Sam the facts with which years later he was to impress Nat, ‘The Stiperstones is 1,759 feet high and the rocks you can see on the top are 500,000,000 years old.’ But Sam didn’t snub him, as he’d half-feared, and after Pete had informed him that the biggest and most distinctive tor was called The Devil’s Chair, his interest even seemed to quicken. ‘And when you can’t see the Chair from below – because of rain or fog or something – it’s a bad omen; you should start to worry. But if you can’t make it out from nearer to, then real disaster’s on the way, so get serious. It might be World War Three. Or the end of the world itself.’
‘You don’t say,’ said Sam, ‘well, that shouldn’t bother us too much.’
‘What shouldn’t?’
‘The end of this world. It’s not such great shakes as it is. I thought I’d made my views on that clear enough already.’
When Sam spoke like this, was it out of affectation or real deep-down dissatisfaction? Pete countered his companion breezily: ‘Well, this day’s the clearest we’ve had for ages. I can see The Devil’s Chair standing out as sharply above the patches of snow as if some giant race left it there for us to find.’
He was to use almost identical words to these last when he went out here from Lydcastle on trips with his son, Nat. Whatever the merits of the conceit itself, it changed Sam’s mood suddenly and entirely. Even during the best moments of their communion after The Mikado Pete had never seen him in such good humour. This presently developed into high spirits of a boyish kind Pete wouldn’t have suspected.
Maybe it was the day’s nipping cold or maybe, it being Friday, likely tourists were back in the workplace, but the beauty spot was devoid of visitors, and so swathed in silence. Neither sheep nor birds disturbed it – nor the red grouse, nor the two ravens in slow movement above the first significant tor in the long hilltop line, Cranberry Rocks. The boys did not impact on it either, walking uphill from the deserted car park. But when they reached, after the exhilaration of a short steep climb, that part of the main path which runs the length of the hill’s spine-like crest, Sam surprised Pete by pointing ahead and asking in a stage yokel’s voice: ‘That there be The Devil’s Chair, bain’t it?’ And by then sprinting off. Really sprinting too, though his feet, unlike Pete’s own, had no knowledge from previous experience of all the pathway’s treacherous little twists which skeins of black ice now compounded. Pete decided to let Sam have the freedom he so clearly wanted, therefore didn’t take off after him. Soon, Sam was on top of the enormous quartzite pile which has fascinated so many over such a vast period, was standing against the deepening blue of the afternoon sky, in a black-leather bomber-jacket worn over red-and-blue Icelandic sweater and with a tasselled red woollen cap pulled over the ears but leaving long strands of jet-black hair still exposed.
Should Pete, now having gained its base, join Sam on the Chair? He’d have scaled it in next to no time had he been up here with Mum and Dad and the Brats (whom, especially Julian, he would have done his best to keep away from this tor). But what if today, for the first time ever, he were to miss his footing, slip, fall, something daft of that sort? How humiliated he would be! Also Pete sensed that Sam was positively relishing his own apartness against the great canopy of the winter sky, wouldn’t want even those two ravens circling Cranberry Rocks to be given any indication that he and Pete were mates.
And were they? Pete couldn’t, even now, decide. What he did know was that Sam Price was fiercely anti-sentimental, would never dream of expressing any admiration of his attributes or pleasure in his company… Oh well, that’s how he was!
‘Whoo-hoo! Here I come, earthlings!’ And he did, bounding down towards Pete, arms stretched out straight like an animated scarecrow to preserve his balance in his precipitous descent of the huge, slippery pile of rocks, displaying an agility at least equal to (but not surpassing!), Pete’s own on previous visits.
‘Christ, view’s fucking brilliant!’ Sam exclaimed, ‘All Wales lies on the other side, I know, Land of My Fathers, or at least of Trevor Price’s,’ and he ges
tured to behind the gaunt shape of the Chair he had just mounted, ‘but what am I seeing from here?
The Wellerman-Kreutz wizard can surely tell me.’
The ridges looked more like great beached whales than ever today, whales with their backs caught out of water by snow showers. ‘Well, that’s the Long Mynd directly ahead,’ said Pete, ‘and over there’s Wenlock Edge, and the Clees. Brown Clee is in fact higher than The Stiperstones, though it may not look it from here.’
‘I can’t believe, friend, you’re not going to supply me with its altitude down to the last fucking foot,’ said Sam.
Ignoring any irony, Pete supplied, ‘Brown Clee is 1,772 feet high. And if you try to look behind the Long Mynd, Sam, you can see the Stretton Hills, which are even more ancient than here: pre-Cambrian or Uriconian Volcanic,’ he couldn’t help his pride in knowing such things, ‘well over 600,000,000 years old. And I’ll tell you something else: The Stiperstones, all this extensive quartzite terrain about us, survived the Ice Age. So, had we been around then, we’d have seen only the very tops of the other hills peeping up out of the swirling seas.’
‘Well, even now they look a bit like a school of whales half out of water,’ agreed Sam, pleasing Pete with his quick analogy. Even though so many had made the comparison before.
After Brock Page 14
