Red Sky at Sunrise: Cider with Rosie, As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning, A Moment of War (4 page)

I was still young enough then to be sleeping with my Mother, which to me seemed life’s whole purpose. We slept together in the first-floor bedroom on a flock-filled mattress in a bed of brass rods and curtains. Alone, at that time, of all the family, I was her chosen dream companion, chosen from all for her extra love; my right, so it seemed to me.

So in the ample night and the thickness of her hair I consumed my fattened sleep, drowsed and nuzzling to her warmth of flesh, blessed by her bed and safety. From the width of the house and the separation of the day, we two then lay joined alone. That darkness to me was like the fruit of sloes, heavy and ripe to the touch. It was a darkness of bliss and simple languor, when all edges seemed rounded, apt and fitting; and the presence for whom one had moaned and hungered was found not to have fled after all.

My Mother, freed from her noisy day, would sleep like a happy child, humped in her nightdress, breathing innocently and making soft drinking sounds in the pillow. In her flights of dream she held me close, like a parachute to her back; or rolled and enclosed me with her great tired body so that I was snug as a mouse in a hayrick.

They were deep and jealous, those wordless nights, as we curled and muttered together, like a secret I held through the waking day which set me above all others. It was for me alone that the night came down, for me the prince of her darkness, when only I would know the huge helplessness of her sleep, her dead face, and her blind bare arms. At dawn, when she rose and stumbled back to the kitchen, even then I was not wholly deserted, but rolled into the valley her sleep had left, lay deep in its smell of lavender, deep on my face to sleep again in the nest she had made my own.

The sharing of her bed at that three-year-old time I expected to last for ever. I had never known, or could not recall, any night spent away from her. But I was growing fast; I was no longer the baby; brother Tony lay in wait in his cot. When I heard the first whispers of moving me to the boys’ room, I simply couldn’t believe it. Surely my Mother would never agree? How could she face night without me?

My sisters began by soothing and flattering; they said, ‘You’re a grown big man.’ ‘You’ll be sleeping with Harold and Jack,’ they said. ‘Now what d’you think of that?’ What was I supposed to think? – to me it seemed outrageous. I affected a brainstorm and won a few extra nights, my last nights in that downy bed. Then the girls changed their tune: ‘It’ll only be for a bit. You can come back to Mum later on.’ I didn’t quite believe them, but Mother was silent, so I gave up the struggle and went.

I was never recalled to my Mother’s bed again. It was my first betrayal, my first dose of ageing hardness, my first lesson in the gentle, merciless rejection of women. Nothing more was said, and I accepted it. I grew a little tougher, a little colder, and turned my attention more towards the outside world, which by now was emerging visibly through the mist…

The yard and the village manifested themselves at first through magic and fear. Projections of their spirits and of my hallucinations sketched in the first blanks with demons. The thumping of heartbeats which I heard in my head was no longer the unique ticking of a private clock but the marching of monsters coming in from outside. They were creatures of the ‘world’ and they were coming for me, advancing up the valley with their heads stuck in bread-baskets, grunting to the thump of my blood. I suppose they were a result of early headaches, but I spent anxious days awaiting them. Indefatigable marchers though they were, they never got nearer than the edge of the village.

This was a daylight uneasiness which I shared with no one; but night, of course, held various others about which I was far more complaining – dying candles, doors closed on darkness, faces seen upside down, night holes in the ground where imagination seethed and sent one shrieking one’s chattering head off. There were the Old Men too, who lived in the walls, in floors, and down the lavatory; who watched and judged us and were pitilessly spiteful, and were obviously gods gone mouldy. These Old Men never failed to control us boys, and our sisters conjured them shamelessly, and indeed in a house where no father ruled they were the perfect surrogates.

But there was one real old pagan of flesh and blood who ruled us all for a while. His visits to the village were rare yet deliberate; and when he appeared it was something both sovereign and evil that walked among us, though it was the women who were most clearly affected.

The first time I actually saw him myself had a salt-taste I still remember. It was a frost-bright, moon-cold night of winter, and we were sitting in the kitchen as usual. The fire boiled softly, the candles quivered, the girls were drowsily gossiping. I had fallen half-asleep across the table, when Marjorie suddenly said, ‘Ssssh!

She had heard something of course, somebody was always hearing something, so I woke up and listened vaguely. The others were in attitudes of painful attention; they would listen at the drop of a feather. I heard nothing at first. An owl cried in the yew trees and was answered from another wood. Then Dorothy said ‘Hark!’ and Mother said ‘Hush!’ and the alarm had us all in its grip

Like a stagless herd of hinds and young our heads all went up together. We heard it then, far away down the lane, still faint and unmistakable – the drag of metal on frosty ground and an intermittent rattle of chains.

The girls exchanged looks of awful knowledge, their bright eyes large with doom. ‘It’s him!’ they whispered in shaky voices. ‘He’s broke out again! It’s him!’

It was him all right. Mother bolted the door and blew out the lamps and candles. Then we huddled together in the fire-flushed darkness to await his ominous coming.

The drag of the chains grew louder and nearer, rattling along the night, sliding towards us up the distant lane to his remorseless, moonlit tread. The girls squirmed in their chairs and began giggling horribly; they appeared to have gone off their heads.

‘Hush,’ warned our Mother. ‘Keep quiet. Don’t move…’ Her face was screwed in alarm.

The girls hung their heads and waited, shivering. The chains rattled nearer and nearer. Up the lane, round the corner, along the top of the bank – then with a drumming of feet, he was here… Frantic, the girls could hold out no longer, they leapt up with curious cries, stumbled their way across the firelit kitchen, and clawed the dark curtains back…

Proud in the night the beast passed by, head crowned by royal horns, his milky eyes split by strokes of moonlight, his great frame shaggy with hair. He moved with stiff and stilted strides, swinging his silvered beard, and from the tangled strength of his thighs and shoulders trailed the heavy chains he’d broken.

‘Jones’s goat! –’ our Dorothy whispered; two words that were almost worship. For this was not just a straying animal but a beast of ancient dream, the moonlight-walker of the village roads, half captive, half rutting king. He was huge and hairy as a Shetland horse and all men were afraid of him; Squire Jones in fact kept him chained to a spike driven five feet into the ground. Yet when nights were bright with moon or summer neither spike nor chains could hold him. Then he snorted and reared, tore his chains from the ground, and came trailing his lust through the village.

I had heard of him often; now I saw him at last, striding jerkily down the street. Old as a god, wearing his chains like a robe, he exuded a sharp whiff of salt, and every few steps he sniffed at the air as though seeking some friend or victim. But he walked alone; he encountered no one, he passed through an empty village. Daughters and wives peeped from darkened bedrooms, men waited in the shadows with axes. Meanwhile, reeking with power and white in the moon, he went his awesome way…

‘Did you ever see a goat so big?’ asked Dorothy with a sigh.

‘They knocks you down and tramples you. I heard he knocked down Miss Cohen.’

‘Just think of meeting him coming home alone…’

‘Whatever would you do?’

‘I’d have a fit. What would you do, Phyl?’

Phyl didn’t answer: she had run away, and was having hysterics in the pantry.

Jones’s terrorist goat seemed to me a natural phenomenon of that time, part of a village which cast up beasts and spirits as casually as human beings. All seemed part of the same community, though their properties varied widely – some were benevolent, some strictly to be avoided; there were those that appeared at different shapes of the moon, or at daylight or midnight hours, that could warn or bless or drive one mad according to their different natures. There was the Death Bird, the Coach, Miss Barraclough’s Goose, Hangman’s House, and the Two-Headed Sheep.

There is little remarkable about a two-headed sheep, except that this one was old and talked English. It lived alone among the Catswood Larches, and was only visible during flashes of lightning. It could sing harmoniously in a double voice and cross-question itself for hours; many travellers had heard it when passing that wood, but few, naturally enough, had seen it. Should a thunderstorm ever have confronted you with it, and had you had the presence of mind to inquire, it would have told you the date and nature of your death – at least so people said. But no one quite relished the powers of this beast. And when the sheet-lightning flickered over the Catswood trees it was thought best to keep away from the place.

The Bulls Cross Coach was another ill omen, and a regular midnight visitor. Bulls Cross was a saddle of heathland set high at the end of the valley, once a crossing of stage-roads and cattle-tracks which joined Berkeley to Birdlip, and Bisley to Gloucester Market. Relics of the old stage-roads still imprinted the grass as well as the memories of the older villagers. And up here, any midnight, but particularly New Year’s Eve, one could see a silver-grey coach drawn by flaring horses thundering out of control, could hear the pistol crack of snapping harness, the screams of the passengers, the splintering of wood, and the coachman’s desperate cries. The vision recalled some ancient disaster, and was rehearsed every night, at midnight.

Those who hadn’t seen- it boasted they had, but those who had seen it, never. For the sight laid a curse upon talkative witnesses, a curse we all believed in – you went white in the night, and your teeth fell out, and later you died by trampling. So news of the phantom usually came second-hand. ‘They sin that coach agen last night. ‘Arry Lazbury sin it, they says. He was comin’ from Painswick a-pushin’ ‘is bike. ‘E dropped it, an’ run ‘ome crazy.’ We committed poor Harry to his horrible end, while the coach ran again through our minds, gliding white on its rocking wheels, as regular as the Post.

As for the tiny tragedy behind the phantom, it had been jealously remembered to haunt us. The tilted coach, the splintered shafts, the wheels crooked against the moon, the sobbing horses kicking out each other’s brains, the passengers dying on the moor – the image of that small but local disaster still possessed qualities to appal which the more grandiose carnage of recent times has never quite overshadowed.

As for Bulls Cross – that ragged wildness of wind-bent turves – I still wouldn’t walk there at midnight. It was a curious tundra, a sort of island of nothing set high above the crowded valleys. Yet its hollows and silences, bare of all habitations, seemed stained by the encounters of strangers. At this no-man’s crossing, in the days of foot-pads and horses, travellers would meet in suspicion, or lie in wait to do violence on each other, to rob or rape or murder. To the villages around, it was a patch of bare skyline, a baldness among the woods, a wind-scarred platform which caught everybody’s eye, and was therefore just the place for a gibbet. A gibbet, consequently, had stood there for years, which the old folk could still remember.

Below Bulls Cross stood a dank yellow wood which we knew as Deadcombe Bottom. My brothers and I discovered a cottage down there, roof-fallen, in a garden run wild. We played there often among its rotting rooms, running up the littered stairs, picking and gorging on the small sharp apples which hung round the shattered windows. It was a damp dark ruin in the damp depth of the wood; its rooms reeked of old beds and fungus.And behind the door, blood-red with rust, hung a naked iron hook.

To this silent, birdless, sunless shambles we returned again and again. We could do what we liked here, wreak what damage we wished, and strangely enough no one disturbed us. Only later did we learn the history of the place: that it had been the home of the Bulls Cross hangman, that he had lived there with his son, and worked at his trade, and had later killed himself here.

The cottage in the wood had been specially chosen, close to his work, yet hidden. The times were hungry, his days were busy; he was a discreet and skilful man. Night after night he strolled up the hill to load the gallows with local felons. After a routine summons one storm-black evening, he was handed a shivering boy. Used to working in darkness, he dispatched the lad quickly, then paused to light up his pipe. He was turning to go when a cloud moved from the moon and lit up the gallows clearly, and in the rain-washed face that stared crookedly down at him the hangman saw his son. To the men who stood by he said nothing at all. He just walked back to his cottage, drove a hook into the wall, fixed up a noose, and hanged himself.