Red Sky at Sunrise: Cider with Rosie, As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning, A Moment of War (20 page)

When all this was over, we retired to the paddock and played cricket under the trees. Sammy, in his leg-irons, charged up and down. Hens and guinea-fowl took to the trees. Sammy hopped and bowled like murder at us, and we defended our stumps with our lives. The cracked bat clouting; the cries in the reeds; the smells of fowls and water; the long afternoon with the steep hills around us watched by Sloppy still hid in the gooseberries – it seemed down here that no disasters could happen, that nothing could ever touch us. This was Sammy’s and Sixpence’s; the place past the sheepwash, the hide-out unspoiled by authority, where drowned pigeons flew and cripples ran free; where it was summer, in some ways, always.

Summer was also the time of these: of sudden plenty, of slow hours and actions, of diamond haze and dust on the eyes, of the valley in post-vernal slumber; of burying birds out of seething corruption; of Mother sleeping heavily at noon; of jazzing wasps and dragonflies, haystooks and thistle-seeds, snows of white butterflies, skylarks’ eggs, bee-orchids, and frantic ants; of wolf-cub parades, and boy scouts’ bugles; of sweat running down the legs; of boiling potatoes on bramble fires, of flames glass-blue in the sun; of lying naked in the hill-cold stream; begging pennies for bottles of pop; of girls’ bare arms and unripe cherries, green apples and liquid walnuts; of fights and falls and new-scabbed knees, sobbing pursuits and flights; of picnics high up in the crumbling quarries, of butter running like oil, of sunstroke, fever, and cucumber peel stuck cool to one’s burning brow. All this, and the feeling that it would never end, that such days had come for ever, with the pump drying up and the water-butt crawling, and the chalk ground hard as the moon. All sights twice-brilliant and smells twice-sharp, all game-days twice as long. Double charged as we were, like the meadow ants, with the frenzy of the sun, we used up the light to its last violet drop, and even then couldn’t go to bed.

When darkness fell, and the huge moon rose, we stirred to a second life. Then boys went calling along the roads, wild slit-eyed animal calls, Walt Kerry’s naked nasal yodel, Boney’s jackal scream. As soon as we heard them we crept outdoors, out of our stifling bedrooms, stepped out into moonlight warm as the sun to join our chalk-white, moon-masked gang.

Games in the moon. Games of pursuit and capture. Games that the night demanded. Best of all, Fox and Hounds – go where you like, and the whole of the valley to hunt through. Two chosen boys loped away through the trees and were immediately swallowed in shadow. We gave them five minutes, then set off after them. They had churchyard, farmyard, barns, quarries, hilltops, and woods to run to. They had all night, and the whole of the moon, and five miles of country to hide in…

Padding softly, we ran under the melting stars, through sharp garlic woods, through blue blazed fields, following the scent by the game’s one rule, the question and answer cry. Every so often, panting for breath, we paused to check on our quarry. Bullet heads lifted, teeth shone in the moon. ‘Whistle-or-’oLLER! Or-we-shall-not-FOLLER!’ It was a cry on two notes, prolonged. From the other side of the hill, above white fields of mist, the faint fox-cry came back. We were off again then, through the waking night, among sleepless owls and badgers, while our quarry slipped off into another parish and would not be found for hours.

Round about midnight we ran them to earth, exhausted under a haystack. Until then we had chased them through all the world, through jungles, swamps, and tundras, across pampas plains and steppes of wheat and plateaux of shooting stars, while hares made love in the silver grasses, and the large hot moon climbed over us, raising tides in my head of night and summer that move there even yet.

As a child I used to boast the rare distinction of having been christened twice. The second time, which took place in church, was a somewhat rowdy affair; I was three years old and I cheeked the parson and made free with the holy water. But my first anointing was much more solemn and occurred immediately after my birth. I had entered the world in doubt and silence, a frail little lifeless lump; and the midwife, after one look at my worn-out face, said I wouldn’t last the day. Everybody agreed, including the doctor, and they just waited for me to die.

My Mother, however, while resigned to my loss, was determined I should enter heaven. She remembered those tiny anonymous graves tucked away under the churchyard laurels, where quick-dying infants – behind the vicar’s back – were stowed secretly among the jam-jars. She said the bones of her son should rest in God’s own ground and not rot with those pitiful heathens. So she summoned the curate, who came and called out my Adam, baptized me from a tea-cup, admitted me to the Church, and gave me three names to die with.

This flurried christening proved unnecessary, however. Something – who knows what? – some ancestral toughness maybe, saw me safely through the first day. I remained seriously ill for many months, inert, unrioticing, one of life’s bad debts, more or less abandoned by all. ‘You never moved or cried,’ said my Mother. ‘You just lay where I put you, like a little image, staring up at the ceiling all day.’ In that motionless swoon I was but a clod, a scarce-breathing parcel of flesh. For a year I lay prone to successive invasions, enough to mop up an orphanage – I had diphtheria, whooping-cough, pleurisy, double pneumonia, and congestion of the bleeding lungs. My Mother watched, but could not help me; waited, but could not hope. In those days young children dropped dead like chickens, their diseases not well understood; families were large as though by compensation; at least a quarter were not expected to survive. My father had buried three of his children already, and was quite prepared to do the same by me.

But secretly, silently, aided by unknown forces, I hung on – though it was touch and go. My most perilous moment came when I was eighteen months old, at the hands of Mrs Moore, a neighbour. My Mother was in bed for the birth of my brother – we were all born at home those days. Mrs Moore, a Negress, had been called in to help, to scrub the children and to cook them soups. She was a jolly, eye-bulging, voodoo-like creature who took charge of us with primitive casualness. While still in her care I entered a second bout of pneumonia. What followed I was told much later…

It seems that brother Tony was but two days born and Mother just beginning to take notice. Eleven-year-old Dorothy came upstairs to see her, played awhile with the baby, nibbled some biscuits, then sat in the window and whistled.

‘How you all getting on?’ asked Mother.

‘Oh, all right,’ said Dorothy.

‘You behaving yourselves?’

‘Yes, Ma.’

‘And what you all up to?’

‘Nothing much.’

‘Where’s Marjorie then?’

‘Out in the yard.’

‘And Phyllis?’

‘She’s peeling spuds.’

‘What about the others?’

‘Harold’s cleaning his trolley. And Jack and Frances is sitting on the steps.’

‘And Laurie?… How’s Laurie?’

‘Oh, Laurie’s dead.’

‘What!’

‘He turned yellow. They’re laying him out…’

Giving one of her screams, Mother leapt out of bed.

‘No one’s going to lay out our Laurie!’

Gasping, she groped her way downstairs and staggered towards the kitchen: and lo, there I was, stretched naked on the table, yellow, just as Dorothy said. Mrs Moore, humming gaily, was sponging my body as though preparing a chicken for dinner.

‘What you think you’re doing?’ my Mother shouted.

‘Poor boy, he’s gone,’ crooned the Negress. ‘Gone fled to the angels – thought I’d wash him for the box – just didn’t want to bother you, mum.’

‘You cruel wicked woman! Our Laurie ain’t dead – just look at his healthy colour.’

Mother plucked me from the table, wrapped me up in a blanket, and carried me back to my cot – cursing Mrs Moore for a snatcher of bodies and asking the saints what they thought they were up to. Somehow, I lived – though it was a very near thing, a very near thing indeed. So easy to have succumbed to Mrs Moore’s cold sponge. Only Dorothy’s boredom saved me.

It was soon after this that my sister Frances died. She was a beautiful, fragile, dark-curled child, and my Mother’s only daughter. Though only four, she used to watch me like a nurse, sitting all day beside my cot and talking softly in a special language. Nobody noticed that she was dying herself, they were too much concerned with me. She died suddenly, silently, without complaint, in a chair in the corner of the room. An ignorant death which need never have happened – and I believe that she gave me her life.

But at least she was mourned. Not a day passed afterwards but that Mother shed some tears for her. Mother also grew jealous for the rest of us, more careful that we should survive. So I grew to be, not a pale wasting boy, but sickly in another way, switching regularly from a swaggering plumpness – a tough equality with other boys – to a monotonous return of grey-ghosted illness, hot and cold, ugly-featured and savage. When I was well I could hold my own; no one spared me, because I didn’t look delicate. But when I was ill, I just disappeared from the scene and remained out of sight for weeks. If it was summer when the fever caught me, I lay and sweated in my usual bed, never quite sure which of us was ill, me or the steaming weather. But in winter a fire was lit in the bedroom, and then I knew I was ill indeed. Wash-basins could freeze, icicles hang from the ornaments, our bedrooms remained normally unheated; but the lighting of a fire, especially in Mother’s room, meant that serious illness had come.

As soon as I recognized the returning face of my sickness – my hands light as feathers, a swaying in the head, and lungs full of pulsing thorns – the first thing I did was to recall my delusions and send messages to the anxious world. As I woke to the fever I thought of my subjects, and their concern always gave me comfort. Signals in morse, tapped out on the bed-rail, conveyed brief and austere intelligences. ‘He is ill.’ (I imagined the first alarm.) ‘He has told his Mother.’ (Some relief.) ‘He is fighting hard.’ (Massed prayers in the churches.) ‘He is worse.’ (Cries of doom in the streets.) There were times when I was almost moved to tears at the thought of my anxious people, the invisible multitudes up and down the land joined in grief at this threat to their king. How piteously they awaited each sombre bulletin, and how brave I was meanwhile. Certainly I took pains to give them something to be anxious about, but I also bid them be strong. ‘He wishes no special arrangements made. Only bands and tanks. A parade or two. And perhaps a three minutes’ silence.’

This would occupy my first morning, with the fever still fresh; but by nightfall I was usually raving. My limbs went first, splintering like logs, so that I seemed to grow dozens of arms. Then the bed no longer had limits to it and became a desert of hot wet sand. I began to talk to a second head laid on the pillow, my own head once removed; it never talked back, but just lay there grinning very coldly into my eyes. The walls of the bedroom were the next to go; they began to bulge and ripple and roar, to flap like pastry, melt like sugar, and run bleeding with hideous hues. Then out of the walls, and down from the ceiling, advanced a row of intangible smiles; easy, relaxed, in no way threatening at first, but going on far too long. Even a maniac’s smile will finally waver, but these just continued in silence, growing brighter, colder, and ever more humourless till the sick blood roared in my veins. They were Cheshire-cat smiles, with no face or outlines, and I could see the room clearly through them. But they hung above me like a stain on the air, a register of smiles in space, smiles without pity, smiles without love, smiling smiles of unsmiling smileness; not even smiles of strangers but smiles of no one, expanding in brilliant silence, persistent, knowing, going on and on… till I was screaming and beating the bed-rails.

At my scream all the walls shook down like a thunderclap and everything was normal again. The kitchen door opened, feet thumped up the stairs, and the girls bustled into the room. ‘He’s been seeing them faces again,’ they whispered. ‘It’s all right!’ they bawled, ‘There, there! You won’t see any more. Have a nice jug of lemon.’ And they mopped me, and picked up the bedclothes. I lay back quietly while they fussed around; but what could I say to them? That I hadn’t seen faces – that I’d only seen smiles? I tried that, but it got me nowhere.

Later, as the red night closed upon me, I was only barely conscious. I heard myself singing, groaning, talking, and the sounds were like hands on my body. Blood boiled, flesh crept, teeth chattered and clenched, my knees came up to my mouth; I lay in an evil swamp of sweat which alternately steamed and froze me. My shirt was a kind of enveloping sky wetly wrapping my goosy skin, and across which, at intervals, hot winds from Africa and Arctic blizzards blew. All objects in the room became molten again, and the pictures repainted themselves; things ran about, changed shape, grew monstrous, or trailed off into limitless distances. The flame of the candle threw shadows like cloaks which made everything vanish in turn, or it drew itself up like an ivory saint, or giggled and collapsed in a ball. I heard voices that couldn’t control themselves, that either whispered just out of sound, or suddenly boomed some great echoing word, like ‘Shovel!’ or ‘Old-men’s-ears!’ Such a shout would rouse me with terrible echoes, as though a piano had just been kicked by a horse.