On The Black Hill (Vintage Classics) (8 page)

He made them play football on opposite teams. Yet, in the middle of the game, their eyes would meet, their lips part in pleasure; and they would dribble the ball down the pitch, passing it from one to the other, heedless of all the other players, and the catcalls.

Sometimes, in class, they set down identical answers. They made the same mistake over a verse of ‘The Lady of Shalott’, and Mr Birds accused them of cheating. Summoning them to the blackboard, he made them down their breeches, flexed his birch, and placed on each of their backsides six symmetrical welts.

‘It’s not fair,’ they whimpered as Mary lulled them to sleep with a story.

‘No, my darlings, it isn’t fair.’ She pinched out the candle, and tiptoed to the door.

Shortly afterwards Mr Birds was dismissed from his post for reasons that were ‘not to be talked about’.

A fortnight before Christmas, a parcel came from Uncle Eddie in Canada containing the oleograph of the Red Indian.

Having started out as a lumberjack, Amos’s brother had fallen on his feet and was now the manager of a trading company at Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan. A photo of himself, in a fur hat and with his foot on a dead grizzly, drove the twins wild with excitement. Mary gave them her copy of Longfellow, and they could soon recite from memory the lives of Hiawatha and Minnehaha.

With the other children they played Comanches and Apaches in the spinney behind the schoolhouse. Lewis took the name of ‘Little Raven’ and beat out the Comanche war-song on an old tin bucket: it was Benjamin’s duty to guard the Apache wigwams. Both crossed their hearts and hoped to die and swore to be enemies for ever.

One lunch-break, however, George Mudge, the Apache Chief, found the pair having a powwow in the brambles, and barked out, ‘Traitor!’

He summoned his henchmen, who tried to haul Benjamin off for ‘nettle-torture’ but found Lewis blocking their path. In the fight that followed, the Apaches ran off, leaving their chief to the mercy of the twins, who twisted his arm and pushed his face in the mud.

‘We skinned him alive,’ crowed Benjamin, as they stormed into the kitchen.

‘Did you?’ sighed Mary, disgusted at the sight of their clothes.

But this time, Amos was delighted: ‘That’s my boys! Show me where ye hit him! Ouch! Aye! Proper little fighters both! Again now! Aye! Aye! An’ ye twisted his arm? Ouch! That’s a way to git him …!’

A photo, taken at the hay-making of 1909, shows a happy, smiling group in front of a horse-drawn cart. Amos has a scythe slung over his shoulder. Old Sam is in his moleskin waistcoat. Mary, in a gingham dress, is holding a hay-rake. And the children – together with young Jim the Rock, who had come to earn a few pennies – are all sitting cross-legged on the ground.

The twins are as yet indistinguishable: but years later, Lewis recalled it was he who held the sheepdog, while Benjamin tried to stop his sister wriggling – in vain, for Rebecca appears in the picture as a whitish blur.

Later that summer Amos broke in a couple of mountain ponies, and the boys went riding round the countryside, often as far as the Lurkenhope lumber-mill.

This was a red-brick building standing on a strip of level ground between the mill-race and the wall of a gorge. The slates had blown off the roof; ferns grew out of the gutters; but the waterwheel still turned the saw-bench and, outside the door, there were mounds of resinous sawdust and stacks of yellow planks.

The twins liked to watch Bobbie Fifield, the sawyer, as he guided the tree-trunks on to the whining blade. But the real
attraction
was his daughter, Rosie, an impish girl of ten with an insolent way of tossing her head of blonde curls. Her mother dressed her in cherry-red frocks and told her she was ‘pretty as a picture’.

Rosie took them to secret hideouts in the wood. No one could fool her into mistaking which twin was which. She preferred to be with Lewis, and would sidle up and purr sweet nonsense in his ear.

Pulling off the petals of a daisy, she would call out, ‘He loves me! He loves me not! He loves me! He loves me not!’ – always reserving the final petal for ‘He loves me not!’

‘But I do love you, Rosie!’

‘Prove it!’

‘How?’

‘Walk through those nettles and I’ll let you kiss my hand.’ One afternoon, she cupped her hands around his ear and whispered, ‘I know where there’s an evening primrose. Let’s leave Benjamin behind.’

‘Let’s,’ he said.

She threaded her way through the hazels and they came into a sunlit clearing. Then she unhooked her dress and let it fall round her waist.

‘You may touch them,’ she said.

Gingerly, Lewis pressed two fingers against her left nipple – then she darted off again, a flash of red and gold, seen and half-seen through the flickering leaves.

‘Catch me!’ she called. ‘Catch me! You can’t catch me!’ Lewis ran, and stumbled over a root, and picked himself up, and ran on:

‘Rosie!’

‘Rosie!’

‘Rosie!’

His shouts echoed through the wood. He saw her. He lost her. He stumbled again and fell flat. A stitch burned in his side
and
, from far below, Benjamin’s plaintive wailing reined him back.

‘She’s a pig,’ said Benjamin, later, narrowing his eyes in wounded love.

‘She’s not a pig. Pigs are nice.’

‘Well, she’s a toad.’

The twins had their own hideout, in the dingle below Craig-y-Fedw – a hollow hidden among rowans and birches, where water whispered over a rock and there was a bank of grass cropped close by sheep.

They made a dam of turf and branches and, on the hot days, would pile their clothes on the bank and slide into the icy pool. The brown water washed over their narrow white bodies, and clusters of scarlet rowanberries were reflected on the surface.

They were lying on the grass to dry, without a word between them, only the currents that ebbed and flowed through their touching ankles. Suddenly the branches behind them parted, and they sat up:

‘I can see you.’

It was Rosie Fifield.

They grabbed their clothes but she ran off, and the last they saw of her was the head of blonde curls hurtling downhill through the fern fronds.

‘She’ll tell,’ said Lewis.

‘She won’t dare.’

‘She will,’ he said, gloomily. ‘She’s a toad.’

AFTER THE HARVEST
festival, the seagulls flew inland and Jim Watkins the Rock came to work as a farm boy at The Vision.

He was a thin wiry boy with unusually strong hands and ears that stuck out under his cap, like dock-leaves. He was fourteen. He had the moustache of a fourteen-year-old, and a lot of blackheads on his nose. He was glad to get work away from home, and he had just been baptized.

Amos taught him to handle a plough. It worried Mary that the horses were so big and Jim was so very small, but he soon learned to turn at the hedgerow and draw a straight furrow down the field. Though he was very smart for his age, he was a laggard when it came to cleaning tack, and Amos called him a ‘lazy runt’.

He slept in the hay-loft, on a bed of straw.

Amos said, ‘I slept in the loft when I were a lad, and that’s where he sleeps.’

Jim’s favourite pastime was catching moles – ‘oonts’ as he called them in Radnor dialect (molehills are ‘oontitumps’) – and when the twins left, smartened up for school, he’d lean over the gate and leer, ‘Ya! Ha! Slick as oonts, ain’t they?’

He took the twins on scavenging expeditions.

One Saturday, they had gone to gather chestnuts in Lurkenhope Park when a whip hissed in the grey air and Miss Nancy Bickerton rode up on a black hunter. They hid behind a tree-trunk, and peered around. She rode so close they saw the mesh of her hairnet over her golden bun. Then the mist closed over the horse’s haunches, and all they found was a pile of steaming dung in the withered grass.

Benjamin often wondered why Jim smelled so nasty and finally plucked up courage to say, ‘Trouble with you is you stink.’

‘Be not I as stinks,’ said Jim, adding mysteriously, ‘another!’ He led the twins up the loft ladder, rummaged in the straw and took hold of a sack with something wriggling inside. He untied the string and a little pink nose popped out.

‘Me ferret,’ he said.

They promised to keep the ferret a secret and, at half-term, when Amos and Mary were at market, all three stole off to net a warren at Lower Brechfa. By the time they had caught three rabbits, they were far too excited to notice the black clouds roiling over the hill. The storm broke, and pelted hailstones. Soaked and shivering, the boys ran home and sat by the fireside.

‘Idiots!’ said Mary when she came in and saw their wet clothes. She dosed them with gruel and Dover’s powders, and packed them off to bed.

Around midnight, she lit a candle and crept into the children’s room. Little Rebecca was asleep with a doll on her pillow and thumb in mouth. In the bigger bed, the boys were snoring in perfect time.

‘Are the youngsters fine?’ Amos rolled over, as she climbed back in beside him.

‘Fine,’ she said. ‘They’re all fine.’

But in the morning Benjamin looked feverish and complained of pains in his chest.

By evening the pains were worse. Next day, he had convulsions and coughed up bits of hard, rusty-coloured mucus. Pale as a communion wafer, and with hectic spots on his cheekbones, he lay on the lumpy bed, listening only for the swish of his mother’s skirt, or the tread of his twin on the stair: it was the first time the two had slept apart.

Dr Bulmer came and diagnosed pneumonia.

For two weeks Mary hardly left the bedside. She ladled liquorice and elderberry down his throat and, at the least sign of a rally, she fed him spoonfuls of egg-custard and slips of buttered toast.

He would cry out, ‘When am I going to die, Mama?’

‘I’ll tell you when,’ she’d say. ‘And it’ll be a long while yet.’

‘Yes, Mama,’ he’d murmur, and drift off to sleep.

Sometimes, Old Sam came up and pleaded to be allowed to die instead.

Then, without warning, on December 1st, Benjamin sat up and said he was very, very hungry. By Christmas he had come back to life – though not without a change in his personality.

‘Oh, we know Benjamin,’ the neighbours would say. ‘The one as looks so poor.’ For his shoulders had slumped, his ribs stuck out like a concertina, and there were dark rings under his eyes. He fainted twice in church. He was obsessed by death.

With the warmer weather he would tour the hedgerows, picking up dead birds and animals to give them a Christian burial. He made a miniature cemetery on the far side of the cabbage patch, and marked each grave with a cross of twigs.

He preferred now not to walk beside Lewis, but one step behind; to tread in his footsteps, to breathe the air that he had breathed. On days when he was too sick for school he would lie on Lewis’s half of the mattress, laying his head on the imprint left by Lewis on the pillow.

One drizzly morning, the house was unusually quiet and, when Mary heard the creak of a floorboard overhead, she went upstairs. Opening the door of her bedroom, she saw her favourite son, up to his armpits in her green velvet skirt, her wedding hat half-covering his face.

‘Psst! For Heaven’s sake,’ she whispered. ‘Don’t let your father see you!’ She had heard the sound of hobnails on the kitchen floor. ‘Take them off! Quickly now!’ – and with a sponge and water, she washed off the smell of cologne.

‘Promise you’ll never do that again.’

‘I promise,’ he said, and asked if he could bake a cake for Lewis’s tea.

He creamed the butter, beat the eggs, sifted the flour, and watched the brown crust rise. Then, after filling the two layers with raspberry jam, he dusted the top with icing sugar and, when Lewis came back ravenous from school, he carried it, proudly, to the table.

He held his breath as Lewis took the first mouthful. ‘It’s good,’ said Lewis. ‘It’s a very good cake.’

Mary saw in Benjamin’s illness the chance of giving him a better education, and decided to tutor him herself. They read Shakespeare and Dickens; and since she had a little Latin, she borrowed a grammar and dictionary from the vicar and a few of the easier texts – Caesar and Tacitus, Cicero and Virgil – although the Odes of Horace were beyond them.

When Amos tried to object she cut him short: ‘Come now: surely you can allow one bookworm in the family?’ But he shrugged and said, ‘No good’ll come of it.’ Education as such, he did not mind. What annoyed him was the thought of his sons growing up with educated accents, and wanting to leave the farm.

To keep the peace, Mary often scolded her pupil: ‘Benjamin, go at once and help your father!’ Secretly, she swelled with pride when, without looking up, he’d say, ‘Mama, please! Can’t you see I’m reading?’ It came as a wonderful surprise when the vicar tested his knowledge and said, ‘I do believe we have a scholar on our hands.’

None of them, however, had bargained for Lewis’s reaction. He sulked, skimped his jobs; and once, in the small hours of the morning, Mary heard a noise in the kitchen and found him, red-eyed by candlelight, trying to extract the sense from one of his brother’s books. Worse, the twins began to bicker over money.

They kept their savings in a pottery pig. And though there was no question but that the coins in its belly belonged to both of them, when Lewis wanted to break the pig open, Benjamin shook his head.

A few months earlier, at the start of a football match, Lewis had confided his pocket-money into his brother’s safekeeping – the game was too rough for the invalid – and from then on, it was Benjamin who controlled his money; Benjamin who refused to let him buy a water-pistol; who seldom let him spend so much as a farthing.

Then, unexpectedly, Lewis found a interest in aviation.

To her science class, Miss Clifton had explained the flight of Monsieur Blériot across the English Channel, but from her drawing on the blackboard the twins pictured his monoplane as a kind of mechanical dragonfly.

One Monday, in June of 1910, a boy called Alfie Bufton came back from the weekend with a sensational piece of news: on the Saturday, his parents had taken him to an air-display at the Worcester and Hereford Agricultural Show, where not only has he seen a Blériot monoplane, he had seen one crash.