Thimblewinter, page 9
The three whistle blasts came, sounding tinny and faint in the vastness of the night. I heard the Constable gasp and then looked out towards the cross roads. The darkness had been all but blotted out by the flames that came from the house that flanked the barricade. Dark figures were pouring out of there to be met by a volley from the woods in front of us. I knew that would be Cal and the two brothers. By the light of the flames we could see that some of the figures had been cut down by this fire and the others ran back towards the crossroads seeking other shelter. These were met by other gunfire, the soldiers this time, who had worked their way around behind the houses on the river side and lain in wait.
One or two of the figures had slipped out of the side of the house and, seeing the killing ground that was the street in front of them, had run up the road in our direction. I could hear Nes curse under her breath and then came the metallic clicks as she cocked her shotgun. There was little chance that they would run up into the woods towards our hiding place, but we spent some painful moments in waiting. Soon, though, we couldn’t hear or see them anymore.
As we got the vehicles ready, I heard two blasts of the whistle, which I knew was the signal to stop firing. But then there was another burst of firing, until it stilled after a loud bout of shouting. Then one more blast of the whistle and we bumped off down the track onto the road; the Constable driving the Land Rover with Mrs. Sharma and Nes driving the white van with me as passenger. I could sense how anxious she was, afraid that those fugitives were lying in wait. The shotgun was on the seat between us - a strange blunt thing, heavy and almost morose, if you could say that of such an object - ready at a moment’s notice to take out its ill humour on you by spilling your blood.
The mystery of the fleeing figures was solved as we gained the road. Three bodies lay there, like bundles of clothes or bales of straw fallen from vehicles, lifeless or as good as. I strained hard to see what had struck them down in this strange way, until by a slight flaring of the light I saw the arrow shaft protruding from a figure, a youngish man, curled up at the base of a roadside tree. Rowena had been there, I thought. The man was still alive, but we drove past him. We did not have the luxury of mercy that day.
By the barricade, Cal was waiting. We had to steer though the dog-leg bend it formed with care. The two brothers emerged from the woods besides the round house, looking nervous but elated. From further up the road, the Sergeant came suddenly out of the shadows like a phantom.
“Let’s go,” he said, “quickly!”
It did not seem to be a quick to me. We sat there while the soldiers and the others looted the place of anything of use, particularly weapons and ammunition. The round house, the old toll booth, was locked, but when Cal forced the bolt it was found to be full of prisoners in a pitiful state, some eight in all. The Sergeant was all for leaving them, the idea that he had gifted them their freedom was enough for him, but the Constable insisted something should be done for them and a vehicle was found, an old pick-up truck, and they were loaded for the journey up the mountain. As they were helped out into the air and up on the truck bed, Rowena looked into all their faces, but found nothing there.
All the time the Sergeant was hurrying us, but suddenly Dai called him over to one of the houses and I could hear them oohing and aahing like two old women over a baby. Then they bundled something into the van, their faces stern and secretive. I asked Dai later what they had found, but he shushed me and said that it was a surprise.
One of the prisoners was garrulous with the shock of things and told the Constable, in the midst of a welter of thanks, of how they came to be there. They mostly had been taken at the barricade, robbed of everything they had and locked up for some unknown later purpose. He talked of villages burning up the valley, which made me afraid, and of banners with winged skulls. And I saw these same winged skulls painted on the walls of the houses about the place and on some of the jackets of the dead bodies lying around.
It seemed to take a long time all this, but in truth it was over in a short span of minutes. The fight at the barricade took about ten minutes or so and the harvesting of the place of its food and arms only twice that, so we were off on the mountain road within the hour. Sergeant Summer was avid for us to be on our way, as he feared that relief of some sort would come to the post. We had, all in all, counted few bodies, so we knew a good number of those strangers had escaped. The soldiers could have cut more down, but had been loath to use up so much of their ammunition in one go.
Though the mountain roads could be treacherous after dark, fortune smiled at us with a fullish moon and we took off up an illuminated path. This disquieted the Sergeant’s nerves somewhat, as he knew our convoy - four vehicles now as another truck had been commandeered to carry all our booty - was vulnerable out on the hillside. But nothing attacked us, we saw some fires off at a distance and heard some hallooing in the night, but we must have looked too big a mouthful to bite off and chew for the bands that roamed the broken land around us.
We breasted the last rise as dawn came up, one of the trucks all in and the white van straining through its gears. My heart was beating like some kind of drum, half-expecting to find a burnt shell of ruins where once the village had stood. Instead, as if laid out by some magic, it was still there almost unchanged, as I had left it, and we were ushered in, after a brief anxious challenge, as saviours and special guests. And I was left to face the tearful anger and joyful relief of my aunt.
Chapter 12
The weeks after our arrival came to be known as the Sergeant’s reign, not to his face, but behind closed doors at the end of the long, hard days. Where people had been pleased, they, with time, grew resentful. It seemed that he was everywhere, demanding more and more from them; more training, more digging, more work on the defences. And, all the time, he and his men - all those extra mouths - eating their fill of the village’s food.
The offence they felt was partly because of all this extra work and partly because it had been easy to forget the threat of the people of the winged skull during the last few weeks of summer. Also, my people had become unused to strangers and used to their quiet lives, which were gradually being turned upside down.
Of those we had brought with us, the Sergeant and the two other soldiers led the work. The two brothers seemed to be steeled by the fight at the crossroads and were less useless afterwards, as Cal put it. Besides, they knew that winter was nearly upon them and they had little option but to stay till the spring and make the best of it.
There was little that was biddable about Rowena, she seemed to come and go as she pleased, but knowing her deadly nature now, she was left to shift for herself as she wished. I think the Sergeant knew that, though she would not take to being ordered, she would do her share of the fighting.
Though the villagers thought of Nes as one of the others, the outsiders, she spent most of her time with Rachel and me. My aunt had taken to her, when she had got past that first flash of jealousy and suspicion, and seemed to accept her being there. I think Cal had told her of the care Nes had taken of me, her only blood relative, and she showed her gratitude in this way.
Nes spent some of her time with Cal, who had set up a make-shift armoury in one of the village storehouses. I had seen that she had knowledge of weapons before, that somewhere in the mystery of her past she had been a warrior of some sort. I had mentioned this to Rachel on one of the late summer days as we hung out the washing on the line behind the house. All the gardens of the terrace were draped with the flapping strings of clothes, dull and worn with age.
“Like Welsh prayer flags,” Rachel said, laughing, though I didn’t understand the joke.
But she became serious when I talked of Nes and told her my thoughts.
“There’s hardly anyone that I’ve ever met who wanted to fight, be a warrior as you say. Most were at best reluctant, few could stomach fighting long.”
Even then I think I still harboured some idea that there was romance in it, that this was the stuff that legends were made of; these knights, as they seemed to me, come to save us by heroic deeds. But for me, after all, this was a quiet time, taken up by the everyday life of the village; school in the morning; work in the afternoon, whatever needed doing; and the long evenings gradually shortening, almost imperceptibly.
I wonder now, looking back, how I spent what I remember as a happy time - the long, dry and fine days, the evenings with Rachel, Cal and Nes, the Sunday meetings – when, over us all, the winged skull people cast such a shadow; like a thunderhead on the horizon, always there, constantly imminent.
When I could get out of the work I was supposed to be doing, or finish it early and shirk another task, I would seek out Nes, the Constable or Cal. Invariably they were taken up with what everyone called the preparations. And there was always much arguing going on.
The Sergeant’s writ only ran because the Constable was always there by his side to back him, but the villagers, being little used to being commanded and much given to discussion, would always seek to question his orders. Early on, in the days after our arrival, he would often show his frustration by shouting and cursing at them. But later he grew accustomed to these questioning ways and became somewhat calmer.
From what I could see and understand of all this, I reckoned that he had found fault, initially, with the village wall. It was, after all, a palisade of old corrugated iron and reclaimed timber, thrown up on the earth spoil from the ditch the JCB had dug out. He had sniffed at it when he first inspected it, like a dog tracking a rabbit, all the way around the perimeter, silent and unreadable, followed by the Constable and Cal; trailed by Nes, who seemed to go where she wanted without challenge and followed in turn by me, being as invisible as I could.
“It’s not bad,” the Sergeant had said, when we’d finally completed the circuit and stood by the gateway and the bridge. The Constable visibly perked up, straightening his body and letting his face relax in a smile.
“But it’s also not good,” the Sergeant went on and we were all somewhat taken aback again.
“Because,” he said, “what you have basically got is a wall, a fence, not a fortification. The perimeter is also too big. But if we shorten it, you lose half the village.”
He walked up and down thinking, and we all kept as quiet as we could, as if waiting on the word of some angel, or demon even.
“I’m not an engineer, but what I think we have to do is…”
I didn’t follow it all, but got Cal and Nes to explain it to me later. He was going to base his defence on a series of strongpoints along the walls, at the corners of the palisade, and by the gateway. The defenders would fire from these places and cut down the attackers in the ditch, rather than wait for them to climb the walls. When they got over the walls, they’d face another run of these strongpoints; the chapel, the old Welfare Hall, the school and the former Co-op store, now one of the warehouses. These were all tall, strong buildings, standing on their own, so they couldn’t be overlooked or outflanked, as the Sergeant put it.
“What happens if they fall?” The Constable had asked.
“Then we lose,” the Sergeant replied.
After this, the Sergeant, with the two sailors, had supervised the work on the defences and the Constable was constantly there too, a worried presence in the background. Apart from building the strongpoints on the wall, built up like medieval towers at the corners and the gateway, work was also carried on apace on the four village buildings that would be our secondary forts. These were fortified and stocked with food and supplies.
The other two soldiers, May and Dai, were training the young and able-bodied villagers up as soldiers and so unwilling were most of them to play the warrior that they all but proved Aunt Rachel right. There was no spare shot for firing practise, but bows and slings and home-made javelins were plentiful enough to allow them some exercise. Close fighting too could be rehearsed, though this led to arguments and squabbles as they confused sham fighting with real combat. The soldiers had one attempt at drill, but no-one took to it, so they shrugged and gave it up as an impossible job.
Cal, with the aid of Nes, had become the village armourer and to him had fallen the most difficult of tasks. The Sergeant might seek to build up his fortress and train up his army, but Cal was the one who had to worry from the old and broken implements and tools the weapons that would equip it. There were the AK47s, of course and the soldiers’ guns, but for the majority of the reluctant foot-soldiers there were shotguns, if they were lucky, or bows of some sort. So Cal’s time was spent in feverishly making shot and powder, fletching arrows and even forging pikes and spears, because at close quarters these could be as deadly.
Then there were also the spikes to make, that the Sergeant wanted set in the ditch and in pits around about the perimeter as man-traps, and the caltrops, the wicked metal thorns that would lame horses or puncture tyres that he would also make use of. Cal could not do all this on his own, so he had his own gang of assistants; men and women who had worked with metal or at other processes of manufacture.
Then there were also the bombs. There was a hut that stood some way away from the old garage that Cal used as his workshop for the manufacture of these infernal devices and I was allowed only a few furtive glimpses at what took place there. One of the soldiers was usually there and one of the older men, Mr. Jenkins, who had worked at one of the local quarries.
In the usual pattern of things, I would approach and then be quickly shooed away, but I would glimpse the empty bottles that were lined up there, the half-full sacks of something I didn’t recognise and all the various implements of the task they had set themselves. They were like black magicians or alchemists practising their dark arts in seclusion.
Though all this was going on around me and the village was in so many ways a changed place, there was little that could be said to have changed in my life. I still spent time with Joshua and my other friends in those rare times when there was no work to be done. But inside I felt changed, as if the things I’d seen and the places I’d been had affected me.
Before, the outside world had been a dangerous place, but the dangers had been unknown to me and distant, like those that lurked in the deep, dark woods in some fairy story. But now I had seen some of the things that haunted those woods close up; I could conjure them out of the formless ghosts. Before, the world had seemed harsh and cold, but the village had been a secure, warm place, where I would come to no harm. Now I doubted that I could truly, ever, be safe here.
So I became quiet amongst people, keeping things close to myself, loath to join in the games and escapades that I’d so zealously thrown myself into before. Instead of my friends, I sought out Nes and even Rowena, though the latter did little more than tolerate my presence. I think I felt safe when I was with them, or at least safer.
I also took to visiting Mrs. Sharma in the evenings. She had reluctantly agreed to stop school, while the preparations were going on, as there were always tasks that needed to be done, even for the smallest of the children, but the resulting idle days seemed to lay heavy on her, as she was too old and infirm to pitch into the more physical work. She always seemed pleased to see me and we would talk about books and she would search out another tattered and mildewed copy of some novel I hadn’t read.
It was during these visits to Mrs. Sharma that I tried to salve my conscience and rid myself of the terrible guilt that I felt. For I had lost the book that Richards had given to me, somewhere during that flight along the sand dunes I had mislaid it. And it had only been later at The Services that the fact had occurred to me, but I had been too numbed to really face the truth of it. So at Mrs. Sharma’s, in her house or at the school room and library next door, I would search for another copy of that book, “Moby Dick”, but I would never find it. I still think about it and wonder what I lost that night, what things the book could have told me.
Mrs. Sharma seemed to have been much affected by our journey. She seemed a smaller, older figure, somewhat shrunken and without that vital spark that had carried us through all those lessons in the school room. I think she was mourning her lost family and now felt bereft and without hope of seeing them again.
With the burden of years that now lays on me, it is hard to see clearly back to that time. We were preparing for more than winter then. We were facing more than our usual struggle to survive the deep cold. My grandmother had told me once, when I was a very small child, of the great winter of the Vikings that they called Thimble Winter. The three great winters without intervening seasons that would come before the battle at the end of the world. So this was what we were anticipating, our very own Thimble Winter. And with it, before it was through, would come the end of our world. For, whatever ultimately happened, things would never be the same for us again.
Chapter 13
A few weeks after the Sergeant’s reign began, Aunt Rachel woke me up from sleep on the old sofa in the living room. Still drowsy from the fire, I shrugged on my clothes and took the billycan of soup that she gave me, heading out in the direction of the gateway towers, where Cal was standing guard. It seemed a cruel thing to me at the time, to get me up at that hour, but Rachel was looking after Mary Anne, the neighbour’s baby, as the woman was poorly. To me the child seemed a noisy, needful thing, but Rachel was captivated by it and wouldn’t leave the creature to run this errand.
