On The Black Hill (Vintage Classics) (26 page)

The churchyard was choked with willow-herb. Fallen yew-berries made little red scabs along the path to the porch. The memorial had columns and a Roman arch and stood at the far end of the chancel. On the right sat a white marble effigy of the Queen herself – a jewel-encrusted manikin weighted under a chain of Tudor roses. Dame Blanche knelt beside her, in profile. Her face was drawn but beautiful, and in her hand she held a prayer book. She wore a ruff, and below it there hung a pectoral cross on a ribbon.

The church was chilly: Benjamin was bored. He sat outside in the car, while Lotte copied the inscription in her notebook:

… So that my tyme I thus did passe awaye

A maede in courte and never no man’s wyffe

Sworne of Quene Ellsbeths bedd chamber

Alwaye with the maedn Quene

A maede did ende my lyffe
.

She completed the line. The pencil fell from her hand and bounced from the altar-carpet on to the flagstone floor. For suddenly all the loneliness of her life came back to stifle her – the narrow spinster’s bed, the guilt of leaving Austria, and the bitterness of the squabbles in the clinic.

Lewis stooped to recover the pencil; and he too recalled the misery of his first loves, and the fiasco of the third. He squeezed her hand and pressed it to his lips.

She withdrew it gently.

‘No,’ she said. ‘It would not be correct.’

After high-tea, she took Benjamin aside and told him, in no uncertain terms, that he was going to buy Lewis a tractor.

AGGIE WATKINS DIED
during the terrible winter of ’47. She was over ninety years of age. The snow had drifted over the roof, and she died in darkness.

Jim had run out of hay. The cows kept everyone awake with their bellowing. The dogs whimpered, and the cats nipped in and out with hunger-swollen eyes. Seven of his ponies were missing on the hill.

He shoved his mother into a sack, and laid her, frozen stiff on the woodpile, out of reach of the dogs, but not the cats or rats. Three weeks later, when the thaw set in, he and Ethel lashed her to a makeshift sled and hauled her down to Lurkenhope for burial. The sexton was staggered at the state of the corpse.

Jim found his ponies a few days later, all seven together, in a cleft among some rocks. They had died on their feet, in a circle, their muzzles pointing inwards like the spokes of a wheel. He wanted to dig a grave for them, but Ethel made him stay and help with the house.

A big bulge had appeared in the gable-end, and the whole wall seemed likely to collapse. Some rafters had given way under the weight of snow. The icy water had seeped through Jim’s stuffed animals, and poured from the attic into the kitchen. And though he kept on saying, ‘I’ll get me a few tile an’ fix ’em up like new,’ all he ever did was spread a leaky tarpaulin over the roof.

When the spring came, he tried to buttress the wall with stones and railway-sleepers, but so undermined the foundations that it caved in completely. Next winter, no one lived in the east end of the house, and no one had to; for all the
Watkins
girls, except Little Meg, had left.

Lizzie, married to Manfred, pretended The Rock did not exist. Brennie had gone off with ‘some kind o’ darkie’, a G. I., of whom nothing was heard until a postcard arrived from California. Then, at the May Fair in Rhulen, Sarah met a haulage contractor, who took her to live with him on his smallholding behind the Begwyns.

Sarah was a big-boned, blowzy young woman, with a tangle of black hair and a very unpredictable temper. Her one great fear was of lapsing into poverty; and this sometimes made her seem callous and grasping. Unlike Lizzie, however, she kept her eye on The Rock and made it her business to see they never starved.

In 1952, after another storm had made the kitchen uninhabitable, Ethel abandoned it to the hens and ducks and piled all the furniture into the one remaining room.

This place now looked like a junk-dealer’s shed. Behind the curving settle was an oak chest, on top of which stood a tallboy and a stack of cardboard boxes. Strewn over the tables were an assortment of pots, pans, mugs, jamjars, dirty plates, and usually a bucket of fowl-mash. All three occupants slept in the box-bed. The perishable food was stored in baskets that dangled from the roofbeams. Heaped up on the mantelpiece was every kind of object – from shaving bowls to sheep-shears – rusty, worm-eaten, smeared with candle-grease and speckled with the excrement of flies.

A file of headless lead soldiers marched along the window-sill.

As the wall-plaster crumbled, Jim tacked up sheets of newspaper and roofing felt.

‘Aye,’ he’d say optimistically, ‘I be makin’ it wind-proof, like.’

The smoke from the chimney covered everything with a film of brown resin. In time, the walls were so sticky that if a picture took his fancy – a postcard from California, the label off a tin of Hawaiian pineapple, or the legs of Rita Hayworth – all he had to do was slap it up – and there it stuck!

If a stranger came near, he would reach for his ancient muzzle-loader – without the shot or powder to charge it – and
when
the Tax Inspector came asking for a ‘Mr James Watkins’, Jim poked his head over the stockade and shook his head: ‘’Aven’t see’d ’im in a good while. ’Im be gone to France! Fightin’ the Germins, as I did ’ear it.’

Despite her attacks of emphysema, Ethel would walk into town on market day, striding briskly down the middle of the lane, always in the same dirty orange tweed coat, and a pair of shopping-bags slung at either end of a horse girth round her neck.

One day, on the crest of Cefn Hill, Lewis Jones drove up behind on his new tractor, whereupon she waved him to a halt, and nipped up on to the footplate.

From then on, she timed her departure to coincide with his. She never said a word of thanks for the lift, and would jump down at the War Memorial. The morning she spent scavenging round the stalls. Around noon, she called in at Prothero’s Grocery.

Knowing her to be light-fingered, Mr Prothero winked at his assistant, as if to say, ‘Keep an eye on the old girl, will you?’ A kindly, shiny-faced man, bald as a Dutch cheese, he would always let her lift a can of sardines or cocoa. But if she overstepped the mark and took, say, a large tin of ham, he would slip round the counter, and block the door:

‘Come along, Miss Watkins! What have we got in the bag this morning? That one shouldn’t be there, should it now?’ – and Ethel would stare stiffly out of the window.

This went on year after year until Mr Prothero retired and sold his business. He told the new owners they should pardon her peccadilloes; yet the first time Ethel stole a can of Ideal Milk, they worked themselves into a fever of righteous indignation and called the police.

The next time it was a £5 fine: after that, six weeks in Hereford jail.

She was never the same again. People saw her moving through the market like a sleepwalker, stooping now and then to pick up an empty cigarette packet and stuff it in her bag.

One drizzly November night, the passengers waiting for the last bus saw a figure slumped in the corner of the shelter. The
bus
drew up and a man called, ‘Wake up! Wake up! You’ll miss the bus.’ He shook her, and she was dead.

Meg was nineteen at the time, a nice compact little person with dimpled cheeks and eyes that seemed to outglare the sun.

She woke at dawn and worked all day, never leaving The Rock unless to gather whimberries on the hill. Sometimes, a hiker saw her tiny figure rattling a bucket on the edge of the pond, and a file of white ducks waddling towards her. She would bolt for the house if anyone came near.

She never took off her clothes or her hat.

The hat, a grey felt cloche, had with age and greasy fingers come to resemble a cowpat. Her two pairs of breeches – a brown pair over a beige – had ripped around the knees, leaving the lace-up parts as leggings, while the rest flapped, in panels, from her waist. She wore five or six green jerseys at a time, all so riddled with holes that patches of her skin showed through. And when one jersey rotted away, she would keep the wool and use it to mend the others with hundreds of tiny green bows.

The sight of Meg in these clothes made Sarah feel very vexed. She brought her blouses and cardigans and wind-cheaters: but Meg only wore green jumpers and only if they were falling off her back.

On one of Sarah’s visits, she found Jim squelching up to his ankles in the ooze:

‘An’ ’ow’s you?’ he grunted. ‘An’ what d’yer want anyway? Why can’t yer leave us alone?’

‘I come to see Meg, not you!’ she snapped, and he limped off, cursing her under his breath. A week earlier, Meg had been complaining of pains in her abdomen.

Pushing past the hens, Sarah found Meg squatting by the fireside, listlessly fanning the embers in the grate. Her face was twisted with pain, and there were sores up her arms.

‘You’re coming with me,’ Sarah said. ‘I’m taking you to the doctor.’

Meg shuddered, swayed back and forth, and began to drone a repetitive dirge:

‘No, Sarah, I’d not go from here. Very kind of you, Sarah,
but
I’d never go from here. Jim and me, we been together, like. We done the work together, like. Aye, and the foddering and the feeding and lived our lives together. And the poor ducks’d starve if I’d be gone. Aye, and the chicks’d starve. An’ that poor ol’ pullet in the box there! Her was all a-dying and I took her back to life. But her’d die if I’d be gone. And the birdies in the dingle, them’d die if I dinna feed them. And the cat? You canna say what’d happen to the cat if I’d be gone …’

Sarah tried to argue. The doctor, she said, was only three miles away, in Rhulen: ‘Don’t be daft! You can see his house from the hill. I’ll take you down to surgery and bring you straight back.’

But Meg had slipped her fingers under her hat-brim and, covering her face with both palms, said, ‘No, Sarah, I’d never go from here.’

A week later, she was in Hereford Hospital.

At dawn on the Friday Sarah was woken with a reverse-charge call from the phone-box at Maesyfelin. It was Jim the Rock, from whose incoherent sputterings she gathered that Meg was sick, if not actually dying.

The fields around Craig-y-Fedw were frozen hard: so she was able to drive her van to the gate. The house and buildings were blanketed with fog. The dogs howled and tried to burst from their shelters. Jim was in the doorway, hopping up and down like a wounded bird.

‘How is she?’ Sarah asked.

‘Bad,’ he said.

In the front room the hens were still drowsing on their perches. Meg lay on the floor, eyes closed, amid the droppings. She was moaning quietly. They rolled her on to a plank and carried her to the van.

Halfway down the hill, the thought of taking Meg to the doctor in such a state made Sarah feel dreadfully ashamed. So instead of driving directly to Rhulen, she took the patient home, where, with soap, hot water and a decent coat, she made her look a little more presentable. By the time they reached the surgery, Meg was delirious.

A young doctor came out and climbed into the back of the
van
. ‘Peritonitis.’ He spat the word through his teeth and shouted to his secretary to call for an ambulance. He was very offensive to Sarah for not having brought her in sooner.

Later, Meg had only the haziest recollection of her weeks in hospital. The metal beds, the medicines, the bandages, the bright lights, lifts, trolleys and trays of shining implements were things so removed from her experience that she dismissed them as the fragments of a nightmare. Nor did the doctors tell her they had taken out her womb. All she did remember was what she was told: ‘Run down! That’s as ’em says I was and that’s as I was. Run down! But them didna say the harf of it what buggered me.’

THE FIRST TRACTOR
to arrive at The Vision was a Fordson Major. Its body was blue, its wheels were orange, and it had the name ‘Fordson’ written in raised orange letters down the sides of the radiator.

Lewis loved his tractor, thought of her as a woman, and wanted to give her a woman’s name. He toyed with ‘Maudie’, then ‘Maggie’, then ‘Annie’; but none of these names suited her personality, and she ended up with no name at all.

To begin with, she was extremely difficult to handle. She gave him a bad fright by slewing sideways into a ditch; and when he mistook her clutch for the brake-pedal, she landed him in the hedge. Yet once he had her under control, he thought of entering a ploughing competition.

He liked nothing better than to hear her firing on all eight cylinders, purring in neutral, or growling uphill with the plough behind.

Her engine, too, was perplexing as a woman’s anatomy! He was forever checking her plugs, fiddling with her carburettor, poking his grease gun into her nipples, and fretting about her general state of health.

At the slightest splutter, he would reach for the maintenance manual and read aloud from the list of possible ailments: ‘Wrongly set choke-valve … mixture too rich … defective leads … dirt in the float chamber’ – while his brother pulled a face as though he were listening to obscenities.

Again and again, Benjamin groused over the cost of running the tractor and kept saying darkly, ‘We’ll have to go back to horses.’ Having paid for a plough, a seed-drill and a
link
-box, there seemed no end to the number and cost of her accessories. Why did Lewis need a potato-spinner? What was the point of buying a baler? Or a muck-spreader? Where would it ever end?

Lewis shrugged off his brother’s outbursts and left it to the accountant to explain that, far from being ruined, they were rich.

In 1953, they had a nasty brush with the Inland Revenue. They hadn’t paid one penny of taxes since Mary’s death. And though the inspector treated them leniently, he insisted they take professional advice.

The young man who came to audit their books had the pimply and undernourished complexion of someone living in digs: yet even he was astonished by their frugality. They had clothes to last their lifetime; and since the grocery bill, the vet, and the agricultural merchant were all paid by cheque, they hardly ever handled cash.