Cobweb Walking, page 7
The sun was rising, huge and soft as an over-ripe tomato, through the willows in the water meadows. The wet moors ran right up to the edges of our land, and I arrived at last at my home at midday. I walked up our long driveway, in the shadow of the brambles upon which still hung the wizened corpses of last season’s unpicked berries.
Somehow in the years since Cora had been with us we had never managed to get the huge pickings of my childhood. A few years earlier Daddy and I had picked buckets of blackberries in a single afternoon. Daddy used to raise me, seated on his palm, to the very top of the bushes, where all the best berries grow, and I would drop them, sun warm, the fairy berries, into the pot that Daddy held up for me in his other hand.
When Cora first came she used to say, “Oh, what fun. I must come and help you and Morgan to pick the blackberries. When I was a child I was always reading stories about blackberrying, but, would you believe it, I’m such a townee, that until I came here I had never picked one myself, at all.”
But after quite a short time she would say, “Look, we’ve got lots now, Basil. Surely that’s enough. We’ll have blackberries coming out of our ears if we pick any more.”
Even when I told her, “We always pick them all, leaving only enough for the birds, we can’t bear to see them wasted in the winter,” she would say, “I just couldn’t pick any more, honestly. I’m scratched all over and my arms are aching,” and Daddy would say to me, looking rather embarrassed, “I’ll take Cora home, darling, and then come back and help you …”
And after Cora had begun to walk away, would whisper to me, with a wink, “It’ll be just like old times, eh? Just the two of us picking blackberries together.”
Sometimes he did come back too, but only after ages. And then he didn’t ever stay very long. “Look, I’d better get back, Fairy. Cora is waiting to cut my hair,” or “Good heavens! Look at the time. I told Cora I’d take her to the shops, and they close in an hour.”
Sometimes he never came back, or ages later he and Cora would drive past me down the drive, and Daddy would wind down the window of the car, and say, “I’m sorry about that, Fairy Queen! I forgot all about the blackberries.”
As I approached our yard, I went on tiptoe, expecting for a moment that the rich breakfast-time hush would be shattered by the joyful barking of George. And knowing that no feet, however quiet, not even ones that went cobwebwalking, could escape the hearing of my dog George. Then I remembered that George would never bark again, and that never again would I be greeted home by him.
But I still had my home. I at least had that.
“You need never worry,” Daddy used to say when I was little. “The house is yours, whatever happens, darling.” After Cora came he said, “It will be Morgan’s house when I am gone, though of course I will make quite quite sure that Cora and my little Abigail will lack for nothing.”
When he talked like that Cora would laugh, and once said, “Don’t be so gloomy, Basil. Nothing is going to happen to you, you are going to live for years and years. And I can tell from the way you look at Abbie that you would never let her or me lack for a roof over our heads. I’m sure Morgan will agree with me about that.” And she looked questioningly at me.
“What do you mean?” I asked her. “I don’t understand you.
Then my Daddy said, “Come on now, Morgan, don’t be an old grumpy. Cora wouldn’t want to live in this wild old house without me, would you darling?”
Then Cora laughed again, gave my Daddy a pretending smack on the hand, and told him, “I love your house now, Basil. I know I was a fussy old fool at first, but thanks to Morgan, who has taught me all about the countryside, I have really grown to enjoy it.”
“Go on,” said my Daddy. “You know perfectly well you’d do anything for a nice London flat,” and they both smiled at each other in some private joke.
I laughed aloud as I remembered that conversation, thinking that it had become my joke, for Cora would never get my house now. Then clapped my hand over my mouth. I could hear the clink of buckets being washed and knew that Maggie must be in the dairy washing the milking equipment. Whatever happened, she and Billy must not know I had come back home.
Entering our yard my silly eyes tried again to get a glimpse of the hump of trees squatting across the front field, half-way up the hill, and out of the corner of my eye I saw that the white path seemed to point there. Because of some grassing over, some lack of use, the path seemed to stop where it drew level with Druid’s Clearing. You would not think, I told myself, that it led all the way to the village any more. I had to make a really strong effort before I could pull my sight away, and fix it on the grey and rosy bricks of our house wall.
Several times on my journey home my eyes had tried to look to where dark oaks hunched round their hidden sacrifice. But every time I had remembered. Look anywhere else, I had told my eyes, and had fixed them on a pheasant bobbing rusty over the new-ploughed land, or on the scribblings of the winter trees. Sometimes I had found my ears listening, too, for some sound that might be more than just whimpering of hungry doves. I had jumped, and felt horror once when a sudden tiny shriek had reached me, until I had realised it must have been a rabbit snatched in the teeth of a stoat. But after that I had walked on feeling quite trembly, as though it had been at me the stoat had snapped. I knew I must not look or listen, not for three weeks, at any rate, yet it’s odd how the senses always try to know things they don’t want to. I watched ducks fly overhead, instead of looking towards the fall-out shelter, and they seemed to honk dismally, and did not give me the pleasure they once had done.
And I thought how differently things can look at different times, for once I had loved the fall-out shelter clearing more than anywhere. All through the mornings, when I used to do my lessons, I had looked forward, very excitedly, to going into it with my dog, George.
In the quiet clearing my own special silence often came to me, and then I felt as though the whole universe was spilling into my soul. The larks, punching the sky like tiny whistling fists, became transformed into splinters of eternity, and the thumping of the wild rabbits boomed round the universe. The quiet that came so readily in Druid’s Clearing had such a quality of perfection to it, that when I came back into the world of sound, everything seemed to be singing.
From the hearts of the lady’s slippers I could hear faint golden giggling, and the speedwell smiled and smiled, as though there was too much happiness in the world to contain it. The freckled throats of orchids are made for laughter, and the honeysuckle thrust its shoots upwards with such joyful vigour that you would have thought it was trying to enjoy infinity on its own. Then I would burst out laughing too, but quietly, so that the woodpecker only paused momentarily in his drilling, and the wild duck cleaning his breast feathers blinked with a sound that had a little of the quality of the mud on which he stood. And then, out of that silence would grow the humming.
Even after Cora came, and The Sister, I sometimes heard the silence in the clearing, though it did not come often in other places. But after the bomb fell I never experienced that wonderful hugeness any more, though often when we were inside the shelter I listened and listened. I would sometimes hear the rabbits thump, but never never that other sound that is all the sound that exists.
Daddy became very happy when I told him of the sounds I heard dimly through the concrete walls. He laughed and said, “Dear old rabbits. I shan’t grumble at all when they eat the kitchen garden carrots once we get out of here.” To me the animals sounded angry and afraid.
I heard a swan fly overhead once, too, the stinging sweep of its wings slicing through the darkness of our captivity. That was the first time Daddy had begun to suspect it had not been an atom bomb that had fallen.
After that, every hour or so, Daddy or Cora would ask me, “Can you hear anything out there now, Morgan?”
“A robin is singing,” I told them.
“Ah, a robin,” said Cora, and I could tell she was smiling.
“I can hear some sort of animal walking over dried leaves. Perhaps it’s a stoat.” And later, “There! Did you hear the rabbit scream? It must have been a stoat I heard this morning!”
But often there were long hours of nothing, an ugly sort of straining absence of sound that had nothing of joy and laughing in it. And then, just when I was beginning to feel despair bite into my chest I would hear the sharp snap of a twig, as a fox stepped on it, or the sound of a rook’s bill ripping through meat.
I would tell Daddy, “The rook sounds really hungry. I’m sure he wouldn’t eat like that if he was ill from radiation.”
Daddy would be happy for a little while, and say things like, “Well, weren’t we silly billies to come into a fall-out shelter, when there wasn’t any need.” But after a few hours his spirits would begin to sag again, and he would say, “Perhaps it takes several days for the effects of the bomb to show up in animals. We had better stay in for the full week.”
But by then it was too late. The shelter door would not open.
After we had been in the shelter for four days we began to look forward, very excitedly, to getting out again.
“The sky,” Cora would say. “I can’t wait to see it! I will even enjoy the smell of cow pats after this. I can’t understand now how I ever could have said I didn’t like them.” At intervals one or another of us would say, “Three more days! Two more days!” On the last day The Sister had said over and over, “No more horrid theathide tomorrow! Abbie go home tomorrow.”
Only my father did not seem quite as excited as the rest of us, and once I heard him whispering to Cora, “I hope so much that we are right. That it was not an atom bomb darling …”
Cora had kissed him, laughed and said, “Oh Basil, don’t be such an old pessimist. Let’s face that when we come to it … I just can’t wait to get outside again, whatever it’s like!”
Then at last the day came. We tried to open the shelter door, and found we could not. Only then did we realise that Drisco had jammed it with the ditch digger.
After that we all sat around feeling very hopeless, until I heard the sound of Billy and Maggie arriving back from their holiday in a taxi. “Are you sure, are you sure Morgan?” Cora had asked, and Daddy told her, “If Morgan says she can hear Maggie and Billy arriving, then she can. She has the most fantastic hearing.” I could hear Shep barking then, although we were so far away, and he sounded happy to be back home after his holiday.
When we knew Billy and Maggie were back we began to shout. We shouted and shouted. But Billy was very deaf, and Maggie never paid attention to other things when she’d got work in hand. And she always had a lot of work, I remembered, when she came back from holiday, things like airing the curtains, and rubbing up the silver. We shouted and shouted, and only the rooks in the trees outside answered us.
“Billy, Billy, Maggie, Maggie,” we shouted, even The Sister joining in with all her might as though they might hear us under six feet of soil, and two feet of concrete.
When Daddy had had the shelter built he used to say, “We mustn’t tell anyone ever about the shelter. If people knew we had one and the bomb fell they’d all try to squash in! And then none of us would survive!”
“What about Billy and Maggie?” I asked him. “Would they be able to come in our shelter?”
“Oh yes,” said Daddy. “It’s big enough for four people, and I will always keep it at the ready … It’s only a joke really darling, just a precaution in case of a very unlikely event,” he said quickly, seeing my face growing frightened. “We will have fun in our secret shelter. My little fairy can go there when no one’s looking, and use it as her little hidey hole. But not even Billy and Maggie must know about it, unless we ever have to use it. And that’s not at all likely.”
But when the bomb did fall Billy and Maggie were away on holiday, and a man called Drisco was looking after the cows. Drisco had stayed in Maggie and Billy’s bungalow, past the kitchen garden, and through the orchard. I thought Maggie and Billy probably didn’t know that Drisco had what seemed to be two wives. Drisco’s was a noisy rowdy family and seemed to be making an awful mess of Maggie’s spotless bungalow, with their many children and dogs. But by the time Daddy discovered what was going on it was too late to get rid of them. There was no one else to look after the cows and poultry.
But Drisco and his families had left before Billy and Maggie returned from their holiday. We were in the shelter when he left and I had heard, faintly, the sound of Drisco’s children crying, and his wives shouting, “Faster, faster,” as their battered lorry went off down our drive.
Daddy said, “I would have gone too, if I’d been him. The poor devil had no shelter to go into, and he must have been just as worried about his wives and children as I was about mine.”
As soon as Daddy had seen the dust cloud rise into the sky he had become worried. “I don’t think a gas explosion would cause a cloud like that,” he had said, and he had tried to get through to the police station. But the lines were engaged, as though everyone else was trying to get the police too. He tried and tried to get something on the radio but it only crackled and popped.
“I don’t like it. I feel very uneasy,” Daddy had said. “I wish we knew what had happened.”
The Sister was saying over and over, “Naughty Morgan broke Daddy’s plate. Naughty Morgan broke Daddy’s plate,” when we heard the sound of many cars in the lane at the end of our drive. Three cars an hour is quite a lot for this lane, and on that day of the bomb at least fifty were going past, one behind the other.
The cars sounded as though they were going slower and slower, as though there were by now so many down there that the lane had become congested. I could hear the sound of angry shouting, horns blowing, then a car came down our own drive.
Daddy gave up trying to get any sense from the radio, and rushed outside. He was standing by the bridge across the moat as the car arrived, on his face the scowl I had often seen when in the summer he discovered picnickers sitting in our fields. But before he had time to say sternly, “This is private land you know …”, the car doors burst open and from it stumbled a child and a woman. The child was sick on to the drive. The man, who sat at the steering wheel, levered himself from the car with tremendous effort, as though he was very weak or ill. And then he leant over our gravel making retching sounds. All three of them had livid marks on their faces, as though they had been exposed to some frightful tropical sunburn. A dog in the back seat of the car was hunched over, vomiting on to the seat. There were great bald areas on its back.
When the man could at last speak he said, “Thirsty, my God, so thirsty,” and he gripped the car door and gazed at my father, his teeth chattering. “I think it was an atom bomb,” he gasped. Daddy stared back at him, and the colour drained from my father’s face.
“God help us,” whispered Daddy, while Cora stared from the front door, The Sister in her arms, and George growled softly at the vomiting dog.
Now our drive was empty. Only a hen scooped soil over her sides, with a vigorous wing. She glared at me threateningly, so that I thought she probably had chicks hatching in some hidden corner of the yard. I slipped behind the cow shed wall. I could hear the sound of Billy’s footsteps along the path from his bungalow, the clink of a bucket handle as he brought the peelings and crusts from his kitchen, to be boiled up for our poultry on the farmyard copper.
Behind the wall, elder trees had crammed themselves, and they were festooned with dusty cobwebs. Cattle mixture was stored in the room above, and flour drifted down each time Billy fed the milkers. The smell of cowcakes and sugar-beet pulp rose, delicious, so that I could have eaten it myself, and my hungry stomach roared with longing, as the cows on the other side of the wall chomped and burped and slapped their tails against their newly washed flanks.
“Not bin milked for days by the look of the poor devils,” grumbled Billy, “and the yield’ll be right down because of it. Going off and leaving the poor things like that. Go on you, get out of it!” Slap, jingle of chains. “I reckon we’ll have our fill of mastitis this winter because of what he’s done. I’ll not never go away on holiday again, after seeing this little lot. How could Mr Basil have got such a fellow I don’t know …”
I longed for the waiting to be over, for Maggie to call from her bungalow, “Billy! Billy! Billy!” her voice shrill. Soon she would shout, “Your tea’s ready,” and off he would go, leaving the milky mothers chomping through their malty mixture.
Now I could hear the sound of cloth being shaken, and now Billy was covering the pail with a tea towel. Perhaps it was the one with “Present from Devon” printed on it. I felt a quick stab of sorrow, thinking of that hideous cloth, for it reminded me of the holidays that I had had with Daddy and would never have again.
Once, when I was very young, Daddy had told me he knew where pirates’ treasure was hidden. He had taken me into a dark, ammonia-smelling cave, and, pointing to a spot where the sand was moist told me, “Dig there, Fairy.”
My little wooden spade soon came up against something hard. With heart beating fast from excitement, I had pulled out a tin box. It looked very like the kind of tin toffees are sold in, but of course I knew that the resemblance was only superficial. This tin was very very old, hundreds of years probably. And inside I had found a banana and a pirate penny.
“The banana shows the pirates have come from some tropical island,” said my Daddy, with his eyes twinkling.
It was a long time before I began to wonder if a banana would look so fresh after a hundred or more years in a tin toffee-box. But seaside holidays were never the same after Cora came. Last year we had gone to Cornwall. Daddy said he would look after The Sister while Cora went shopping. She went off and bought, as well as a load of other things, this awful tea towel, and Daddy told The Sister, “I know where pirates have buried treasure.” He pointed into my own dark cave, while giving me a wink. I pretended not to see the wink. I wandered down to the sea, while Daddy, taking The Sister by the hand, led her off into my pirate cave. The waves did not drown the sound of Daddy’s voice saying, “Dig there, Abbie, perhaps you’ll find the pirate treasure.”
