Cobweb Walking, page 2
During the years between the mummies George and I often went into this clearing, and lay on the grass that was always soft and young because of rabbit nibbling. A tiny stream trickled through the clearing, emerging out of one lot of dark trees and vanishing into another. In the summer I used to set down clock-puffs on the water surface, and watch them wobble off into the clench of oaks, bright one moment, lost in the dark the next. Then George and I would run right round the outside of the woods, to where the stream emerged, but there were never any clock-puffs on the water when it came out of the woods. Somewhere, somehow, something always happened to them in there.
I never stayed in Druid’s Clearing after the sun went down, as though it was the light of the sun that protected me. As though after dark, when that protection was withdrawn, I might vanish.
When we got trapped inside the fall-out shelter, I thought to myself that it had become true—I had been swallowed by the holy woods. Maggie, when she got back from her holiday, would think that me, Daddy, Cora, and The Sister had, like the clock-puffs on the little stream, floated away forever, never to be seen again.
But during the hours of sunshine, the Druid’s Clearing was our playground, and we would watch the delicate seed globes on their journey, George’s head cocked on one side, his eyes bright and fixed as though at any moment he was going to understand something important. Me feeling so light and buoyant that I could almost have stepped on to the water myself and stood upright, hardly wetting the soles of my feet, alongside the clock-puffs. Once or twice I felt so sure that the water would not let me sink that I even raised my foot ready to step on it. Then I remembered the clock-puffs, and how they always vanished when they got among the trees. And I hastily brought my foot back again.
In those evenings I did things with Daddy. We baked potatoes and ate them, sitting side by side before our roaring fire. Or we sat at the attic window, watching the bats emerge at dusk and shake out their wings, preparing to fly.
Once Daddy asked me, as the bats slipped sleepily into the still glowing sky, “Do you remember you told me once you heard a humming? Do you still hear that, Fairy?”
I felt, suddenly, too shy to answer him. For so many years, ever since Maggie’s tonics, I had not mentioned the humming to anyone. Now I found it hard to talk about it.
After a long pause, during which I stared fixedly through the window, I managed to nod.
“Ah,” said Daddy. “You see, I have been reading about people who are so in tune with nature that they are able to hear the sound she makes when she is creating and sustaining herself.”
I said nothing, but continued to stare at the pale sky, into which, so far, only three pins of stars had appeared.
“Or you could call it the vibration of the cosmos,” said Daddy. “The sound that caused all this to be in the first place, and keeps it going even now.” Daddy spoke a little dreamily, as though he didn’t really expect me to understand him. And he was right about that. I had no idea what he was talking about. “The hum has been heard by saints and artists, when they were functioning in perfect harmony with creation, and acting in a way that supported life. For this is the self-congratulatory singing of an intelligence that creates. If you go the way of the cosmos you can hear the sacred humming, but if you take a wrong turn your ears become muffled …”
Daddy was silent himself for some moments. Then he said, “Did you know, Morgan, that the word ‘sin’ comes from the Greek, and means to miss the aim, or to take a wrong direction?” He looked at me closely, and asked, “Did you understand any of that, Fairy?”
I shook my head.
“Look,” said Daddy. “Suppose that in the beginning there was nothing, nothing … except a … Fairy King, and he felt lonely and alone. And wanted company. The company would have had to be very great, of course, because the King was very great. So he began to hum. And out of his hums grew … what? Everything. Everything that exists. A great cosmos, in which is a great universe, in which are creatures that are great because not only are they made of the humming of the Fairy King, but, if they are very, very quiet, they can learn to do the humming too.”
I imagined Daddy lonely and alone, with nothing and nobody, humming to himself.
Sometimes I could hear Daddy, lonely and alone in his bedroom along the passage. He would never have imagined that my ears were sharp enough to catch the sounds of him, crying there.
“Would you get what you wanted if you hummed, Daddy?” I asked him.
“Oh, Fairy, you haven’t been listening to a word I have been saying,” laughed Daddy. “I suppose it was just as well, though. I think I was talking quite a lot of rubbish.”
Maggie came rushing into the room then, and switched on the attic light, making Daddy and I blink and rub our eyes, and the bats swoop out of sight in a moment.
“Goodness me, Mr Basil, whatever are you and the child doing up here, all alone, in the dark? I’ve been searching the house for you. Calling and calling. Didn’t you hear me call? Your dinner’s getting cold on the table.”
As Daddy and I made our way down the winding stone stairs, I said, “It could have been a Fairy Queen, Daddy. Fairy Queens could get lonely too.”
But Daddy only answered, a bit cross, “If Maggie calls you have to answer, Morgan. It is rude to pretend not to hear.”
Daddy knows how good my hearing is.
Chapter 2
During the first few days in the shelter, Cora and I kept asking Daddy how long it would be before the air was safe and we could come out again.
When the president of a South American country whose name I have forgotten, but who Britain had been having some quarrel with, had said, a couple of weeks earlier, that they had now got the atom bomb, and were going to drop it on London Daddy said, “That fellow is mad. Quite mad. And if he really does have the bomb then he is quite capable of dropping it regardless of the consequences.”
After the president made his threat all the papers were full of what would happen to London if the bomb was dropped on it, and Daddy was always listening to talks on the radio about it, though I told him not to because they made him worried. Cora didn’t listen because she said they made her too frightened, and that if it was going to happen it was going to happen and there was nothing anyone could do about it, so she didn’t want to hear. But Daddy said, forewarned is forearmed, and even got a little pamphlet from the local library called How to Survive a Nuclear Attack which I found him reading rather surreptitiously when he thought none of us were looking.
“Oh, Daddy,” I said, catching him at it one day, “anyone would think you expected that bomb to really be dropped.”
But Daddy answered very seriously, “We are only a few miles south of London, Fairy, and even if it is only the tiny nuclear device that they all say it is, with the wind blowing in this direction we would certainly be in danger of nuclear fall-out. I think it’s much better to take too many precautions than too few, especially when we have a little baby to think of… And my big girl too,” he added quickly. “I can’t take risks with my children’s health can I?”
But after we got into the shelter Daddy discovered he had left the pamphlet behind. “I had it in my hand. I was looking up what to do about drinking water after the blast,” he said, “and I must have put it down on the hall table. It must still be lying there. But if I remember rightly it said that you should stay inside for at least four days if you were within fifty miles of the blast. I think we will stay for a week at least though, just to be on the safe side.” Then he struck himself on the forehead with his fist, as he always did when he was despairing, and said, “I thought I knew enough, but now I feel that my information was totally inadequate. I wish to God we could get the radio to work.” And he began, for the hundredth time, to shake the portable radio that was kept in the shelter.
In our first hour in the shelter we could only get the same kind of crackling sounds on our radio that we had been getting on the one in the kitchen. And even the crackles came spasmodically, with utter silence in between. Sometimes, after the first crackling hour, we would get a few words among the silences:
“… serious damage … the bomb that fell on South London yesterday was …” And then silence in spite of all the shakings, twiddlings, and tiltings that Daddy subjected it to.
“Something must have got loose inside,” Daddy said, while Abigail shouted, “I wanna shake the wadio. I wanna shake the wadio.” Once after we had been in the shelter for about three days, we got quite a long sentence.”… is a Ministry of Health announcement. Following the recent bombing of a London suburb, many people in the area are still experiencing some degree of nausea. This is the result of gaseous inhalations from the wrecked power station, and most patients, except for the very young and the very old, should find that twenty-four hours of bed rest will cure all the symptoms. During this crisis please do not go to your doctor unless it is absolutely necessary. Give your doctor a chance to treat those who really need him.”
Cora said, “Do you think they are just saying it to prevent panic?”
“I’m starting to wonder if it really was an atom bomb. Perhaps the sickness, damage and dust cloud came from the power station being blown up,” said Daddy. “From the sound of that it could have been the result of those gases they mentioned that made the family in the car so sick.” After we heard the bomb explode, and saw that big mushroomy shaped cloud rise up on the horizon Daddy had kept trying to get news on the radio in the kitchen but only got crackles.
Cora had shouted at him, and said, “For God’s sake Basil, what a moment to stand listening to the radio. Every second the air is probably poisoning us. Let’s get into the shelter and listen to the set in there. If we hear that the bomb is not a nuclear one, then we can come out again at once.”
But even though Daddy had said that the air was probably not contaminated after all, when I got out of the shelter I was frightened to breathe it, and all the way from Druid’s Clearing I held my jersey over my face, and permitted myself only stingy breaths of wool-flavoured air when I was absolutely desperate.
When I got out into the clearing, I heard the birds sing, rabbits were nibbling the edges of the field of winter wheat, and in the front field Billy’s Ayrshires grazed peacefully. As I skirted round the field, I examined the cows carefully, but they did not look in the least bit ill to me. In fact they looked extremely well, with glistening coats, muzzles stickily oozing, and droppings, quite firm, tumbled on to the dark winter grass. But even then I did not dare breathe the air. I thought that perhaps it was different for animals.
I walked to the railway station still with my jersey over my mouth and nose. There was no one about in our village, and at first I felt afraid, and wondered if all the people were dead, or had run away. But then, looking at the sky, I realised that it must be very very early in the morning, and that probably they were all just still asleep. When I got to the station, a group of school children were waiting for the train, and I began to be even more reassured.
The children were behaving very stupidly, shooting sweet papers at each other, laughing in a loud, shrill, showing off sort of way.
I was forced to travel with these unpleasant children, though normally I would never even allow myself to be seen near any children at all. However on this occasion it was to my advantage to be among them, for I went past the ticket collector without his asking me for a ticket, obviously thinking I was one of the group.
When I reached our nearest town, and saw people in the street, I began to be sure that the air was not polluted at all. I breathed in the raw winter air with confidence for the first time, sucking it in deeply in spite of the pain in my chest caused by operating the air pump in the fall-out shelter. Hours after getting out of the shelter my chest still hurt from that pump. At the time I had protested at having to do it, saying why should I, if The Sister was let off, but Daddy said, his voice a bit sharp, “Come on now, Morgan, be reasonable, do. Abigail is only a tiny little baby. How can she operate the pump?”
I took deep breaths of air that had not been filtered through a couple of feet of glass fibre and revelled in the luxury of breathing air that was not heavy with the smell of four human bodies, and the awful portaloo. It had been worse for me than the others, no matter what Daddy said. I have an abnormally sharp sense of smell, and what to other people is only a mild discomfort, to me is a chest-choking stench.
And then, after all those weeks of insufficient, foul air, I was put, by the police, into a room which contained a dirty ash tray. Once again I was forced to cover my mouth and nose with my jersey, though this time to prevent nicotiney smells getting into my breathing system, because the policeman who had arrested me for shop-lifting had put this horrid ash tray by my side.
“What is your father’s address?” asked the policeman again, and the policewoman said, “You will have to tell him, dear. It is only for your own good that we are asking all these questions.”
I don’t know what happened to me then. I felt so tired, so hungry, so discouraged. I just felt I couldn’t go on, couldn’t hold out any longer. Before I could stop myself I gave the policeman the address of our cottage in Cornwall.
As well as my beloved home on the moor Daddy owned a cottage by the sea where we went every summer for our holiday. Before Cora came, we had always gone in the winter too, for Daddy and I adored the wild cold saltiness of the winter sea. We would run over wet beaches, in our ears the roar of waves and sad gulls’ cries, and the spray would sting our faces until the tears ran down. But after Cora came, we did not go in the winter any more.
At first she had said, “I haven’t even got used to the country yet, Basil. Let’s stay in our cosy home this winter.” And then, after The Sister was born, she said the cottage would be too cold and damp for a baby. “We’ll go when Abbie is older, Basil,” she would say.
Earlier this year I said to Daddy, “Why can’t just you and me go? We could have so much fun together, it would be just like old times … do let us, Daddy, do!”
For a moment he had looked quite excited, and had said, with his eyes sparkling quite like old times, “Well, darling, what do you think …”
“We could run and run on the sand, and help the crabs back into the water … Do you remember that time we found a gull caught in a fishing line, and set it free … It’s better in winter when there are no other people, isn’t it Daddy?”
I told Billy, “We’re going to the seaside again this winter!” But the next day Daddy said, “Oh, Morgan, how could I leave Cora and Abigail all alone here? Cora would die of fright if she had to spend a single night alone in the house. We’ll have to wait a year or two until Abbie is bigger, and then we’ll all go together …” But when Billy asked me when we were all going to Cornwall, I told him “next week”. I don’t know why I said that. Perhaps I felt ashamed to tell him that Daddy had preferred The Sister’s comfort to my happiness, or perhaps in some way I felt that if I behaved as though we really were going to Cornwall, it might make it come true, after all.
“Next week?” Billy looked very surprised. “But I told the Master I was going on my holidays next week. What can he be thinking of going away at the same time!”
“Daddy is very confident in Drisco,” I told Billy quickly. “Oh, and Billy, please don’t say anything to Mr Basil or Mrs Cora about our going away … Daddy told me to keep it a secret for the moment … I shouldn’t really have told you … You see, Daddy hasn’t broken the news to Mrs Cora yet. She’s not keen to go so Daddy’s got to get her in the right mood.”
Billy nodded, but went away rather bewildered. He is terribly deaf and I had had to shout everything three times to get him to understand.
Of course Billy did go and tell Daddy. “What you got to go away for just when I’m going off on my holiday Mr Basil?” Daddy said we weren’t going away. Billy said Miss Morgan said that we were. Daddy tried to tell him that we had thought of it, and decided against it, and in the end Billy had departed more bewildered than ever and only having heard half the conversation.
“He’s got it into his head that we are going, I don’t know why,” Daddy told me, “and you know Billy with an idea. He’s like a terrier with a rat.”
After that Billy told Daddy at least four times, “I don’t like the idea of that Drisco in charge when I’m on holiday, Mr Basil, if you aren’t going to be here either. I’d have cancelled my holiday, but it’s all paid down now, and we won’t get the money back …”
That had been four weeks ago, and before the bomb dropped. As soon as I had given the address of our Cornwall cottage to the policeman I realised I had made a bad mistake. Now the police would go there, and they would discover that Daddy, Cora and The Sister were not at the cottage, and, in fact, had never been there at all this year. The police would realise I had lied to them, and they would try to find out why. And then another awful realisation came to me. The people in Cornwall would be sure to give the police my Daddy’s address here. I suddenly saw that soon the police might come searching for me and I knew that, at least for the next few weeks, until my problems at home were solved, I would not be able to go back there. I closed my eyes and calculated — I would have to stay away for another three weeks at least. This realisation came as a horrid shock. I did not think I could possibly endure twenty-one more days like the previous two.
I must have let out a little whimper at the idea, for the policewoman said, “Oh, the poor thing! Do find her a comfier chair, Officer,” as though she thought my cry of dismay was due to my tall hard chair. Before I could tell them that I was perfectly all right, and preferred to stay as I was, the policeman lifted me with both hands round my waist as though I was a doll, and placed me on a tightly stuffed armchair made of some kind of slippery synthetic substance that smelled slightly of medicine.
I felt my face burn with shame. He said, wagging a finger at me as though I had been a child, “Don’t you move from there. She will be bringing you a cup of tea and something to eat in a few minutes …” His voice was strict, cross almost, but his hands, awful though the episode had been, had been kind and had smelled of carbolic soap like Daddy’s always did. I tried to smile at the policeman, as I wriggled to keep a seat-hold on my slippery chair, but he only looked at me rather grimly, and then he and the policewoman went out.
