The Levels (4 page)

‘We came in to close the window.'

‘What window?'

‘Downstairs.'

‘None open down there. We had to break the kitchen door.'

‘We never heard, I don't think.'

‘How did you get in?'

‘Through the window. Promise. It was open.'

‘Lies?'

‘Promise. Cross my heart; we did. It was open. We were wet so we climbed in to get dry and close it. We would have told you.'

‘I don't believe it; you broke in. Where?'

‘We didn't. Mother, it was open, banging, in the wind.'

‘So who shut it?'

‘I don't know!'

‘We tried all the windows. And we were shouting, didn't you hear us?'

‘I might have.'

‘This,' she cried, ‘is the last time you come here. Your father …' I could hear him outside. ‘He's in the orchard, clearing a load of your rubbish.'

I went to the window and saw him, in the dark, like he had almost become his own shadow, carrying a piece of chicken house in the rain, his hat pulled down on his head, while she stood in the door. Dick stared at his feet, and I shivered.

‘So,' she yelled,
‘Move!'

We bolted out of Drove House, down the stairs, through the kitchen and out to the lean-to where my father was sheltering. I tried to say something, but my mother slammed the back door shut and marched us away from the place like an army of rats.

I could feel the pulses behind my ears racing, and a creeping on my palms, chasing along in the rain. I looked back at the house. It stood in the storm, as the clouds opened again and showed a moon to light the scene; in an eerie, pale light, Drove House, a pool of darkness.

‘Who shut that window?' I said to Dick.

‘And closed the door?'

‘And got it stuck?'

‘I don't know.'

‘Enough talk!' my mother shouted; she strode ahead through the mud on the road, between the low hedges towards South Moor, when she left us to take Dick back to his father, and what waited for him.

I held on to my father as we walked back to Blackwood.

‘What you hanging on for?'

‘We did get in through the window,' I said, ‘Someone closed it.'

‘The wind?'

‘The wind?'

‘Yes.'

‘No.'

‘It couldn't have been anything else. Unless the ghosts were walking tonight.'

‘The ghosts?'

‘Why not? After dark, you shouldn't go there,' he stopped in the road. ‘Really,' he said.

‘Really?'

‘But you don't want to worry.'

‘No?'

‘Worry about your mother.'

He let me into Blackwood, helped me out of my clothes by the stove, and I was in bed before she got back from Dick's. He said he'd see she didn't come for me. I was lying, staring at the ceiling and the light coming in from under the door. By the time she got back — I heard her pound through the yard and in the back door — by this time the storm had quietened, the rain no longer beat at my window; but I sat up in bed and thought I heard the sound of fingernails tapping, somewhere, in my frightened head.

As I sit here at Blackwood, the same age as my father when he sat in this chair with me on his knee, I look, in the night, out at the back. I have always preferred to sit in the kitchen.

He was, for a time, said to be the best basketmaker on the Levels, not the fastest, but the crown of best was seen by people who knew the preferred crown. Anyone could be fast, leave odd ends and rough borders, but the best basketmaker was seen to beat his work so close you couldn't see daylight. When my father knew he was the best he knew he'd be the next to give up, and though I was a master by then, I became his boy again, until he stopped.

He could make more types of baskets than I can name. Cockle pads, Fisking maunds, hundreds of Withy Butts, Seedlips, Creels, Winchesters, Swills, Flaskets, Hampers, Panniers, Pottles and Punnets, Wiskets, Fishtraps, Butter flats and Sieves.

When he was fourteen he was apprenticed to Slocombe, a 50-hour week, sorting, soaking and carrying, 4d. an hour. He moved quickly to working on the plank, after two tradesmen took work in Bridgwater. He earned a piecework rate of 11d. an hour by his seventeenth birthday, making eight baskets a day.

Then he slipped off a ladder and landed badly. He broke his legs and put a rib into one lung. War broke out but he was excused, because from that day on he couldn't walk without a limp. Towards the end of the fighting he was ordered to make parachute panniers by the Ministry of Defence, and forced to work all sorts of imported willow. He never told me much, he was a strong man, and didn't want to be at home while the others were away. He never saw a German aeroplane, and spent months, after it was over, avoiding old friends. I thought it was to do with fighting, but when packets of OMO appeared in wives' windows again, people understood.

He was often with women until he met my mother, and she told him to get out of Slocombe's apron and work in the old wash house, the workshop. She tamed him. Slocombe took that badly. It caused trouble. Slocombe tried to put my mother against my father by telling terrible stories about what he'd fought in the war: the temptations of the flesh, Amy Endicott, Joy Farthing; and he suggested that more than one child born since bore more than a close resemblance to father. Slocombe made one mistake; he faced her as she spoke, and she hit him so hard, with her hand, that he bled from the nose for hours, and dripped all the way home to Kingsbury.

Old Man Out.

The Farthings were the first people to put work his way, once he was on his own; there was a plague of rabbits in Devon, and he made hundreds of rectangular baskets, 28 x 18 x 18, with pole holes, for the bunny butchers in London. It didn't take Slocombe long to come round to the idea that it was foolish to keep work from a good basketmaker so, to start with, had him make Winchesters, really a spiteful thing to do, Winchesters are for bottles and require partitions. For their size, they take too long in making, but Slocombe had that sort of mind.

All the time so many tos and fros between work for other basketmakers and firms was going on with my father, my mother built a shed and kept one hundred laying hens in the field beyond the orchard. She was from an old poultrykeeping family. She had chickens lay 220 eggs a year, an average year 20,000 went through her hands to the egg man. She cleared a space in the store shed, where she packed them onto pallets. All these eggs saw us through Januaries and Februaries when neither Slocombe, Farthing, or anyone, had work for my father.

Something happened when she had me. Dick was the first child I knew. When I left school I was taken by my father for apprenticeship. I became his boy, like he had been Slocombe's, and carried and soaked, doing all the things boys do, or did; it's finished. Nobody has apprentices now, not since the cost of willow was one pound ten in 1970 and eleven pounds nothing within ten years. No one's that mad. When I was old enough to learn bases and wales, he had me on stake ups for a year, nothing but bases in the morning and stake ups the rest of the day.

It was a day like this when my mother went to Langport to return some milk churns, slung over the handle bars of her bike. It was a morning in May, like the first day of true summer. In every direction, the air shimmered over the ground as if fires were burning, out of sight, in the earth. That year, whatever year it was, the withies shot like no year since. On a hot day, even the dampness of the workshop was burnt out, so father checked my mother was well down the road, churns banging against the sides of her bicycle, before saying we should leave everything and go for a walk. He was like this. Soft.

‘Don't forget the egg man — eleven o'clock,' were her last words as she biked off, but we didn't remember, we jumped the orchard wall, walked past the chickens, and down onto the moor.

In the fields, amongst the purple cuckooflowers and primrose patches, my father's instructive names, the fires from deep in the earth burned on, and the haze rose in walls of solid heat. In leather boots, my feet swelled in their woollen socks, summer wear, so we took them off, tied the laces together and swung them off our shoulders. This was unheard of for men to do; as we walked then I thought, this is the day I am here with my father, and he's saying ‘you can see me do this now, you're a man'. We squashed through the moor, across the bridge below Muchelney Abbey, where the river is widening and deep, running towards Langport. We didn't think about the egg man. We didn't bother with the way we were meant to behave.

I took her near this place before they rebuilt the bridge, and we swam in the river, something my father never did, he never went so far. Water was for other things besides swimming in. I thought that, like other things he told me, until she changed my mind. Was I like Dick to her, like Dick was to me? She didn't wear much in the river, even though the road was busy and no trees bank the river for private shelter. The water was dirty, and I never got over the thought of pike racing for my legs with huge mouthfuls of needle-sharp teeth. She didn't care. Eel the size of firemen's hose, she swam across to the bank and back. I went in to show I could, but swam shallowly, and got back to the bank to hold her towel.

‘I came here with my father,' I said.

‘It's beautiful.'

‘He took his boots off.'

‘His boots?'

‘That was a big thing then. To me. Nobody took them off unless they were going to bed.'

We walked back along the river bank, towards a stand of ash trees, rested our backs against their trunks and smoked cigarettes. I never thought, walking there with my father, that one day I would walk at the same place with her. I never dreamt a girl like that existed. We sat in silence, Muriel, I. She said terrible things like ‘life is a sexually-transmitted disease with a 100% mortality rate'. She was full of clever sentences.

A cockerel crowed, a cloud crossed the sun, my father sat up, and shouted
‘Eggman!'
The bird called again, an answer came, back and forth through the heat. We were up and running, sweating and puffing through the moor, not noticing river or willow, heading towards the sun, back to Blackwood. My father was in it, no question. The egg man always called on Friday, my mother was going to have a hundred eggs waiting an extra four days.

I didn't like that idea, watching him as we crossed South Moor. He took his watch from a cotton-wool filled tobacco tin to find it was 11:45. A river of sweat poured down my back, another off my forehead, another towards home, and the orchard wall, greying the moor ahead.

‘Better get these on,' he said, swinging the boots off his shoulder. We hopped into the orchard, put our hands in our pockets, and walked through the trees with an air of purpose, hoping to look like we'd been somewhere important at short notice, but unsuccessfully. I hung back, he told me to go to the workshop. I couldn't bear the thought of the noise.

‘Where you think you've been? What? Just took yourselves off? Fancied a stroll before lunch? You know, you're as much use as someone who's never here. I spend half the time looking after you, the other half on the chickens, what happens the minute I ask you to lift a finger?'

My father's mouth would open. She would say what she always did: don't answer.

‘Don't answer!' She'd wind her arm up. Father wouldn't be able to do anything but wait, look at the view, sweat some more and feel the same sweat trickle down his back. I would hear a crash, but instead, a shout.

‘Billy!'

I went back outside. Father was there, ‘He's only just coming!' And I watched as the egg man drove into the yard.

‘Sorry I'm late,' he said, ‘the truck broke down at Middlezoy, had to walk miles for the mechanic', and at that moment, with a graceful curve of wheels, chrome, rubber, hair and grease, my mother appeared, a smile on her face, for if anything melted those brass knuckles a bike ride would.

May. Swifts. Horse chestnuts, candles of flowers. Fresh lapwings. The sun shone in a clear blue sky, a gentle breeze coasted by, scrubbing the damp from the walls of the house. In the hedge beside the road to Blackwood, like froths on green beer, blackthorn blossomed, and in that lane, someone whistling on a bike rode by. I was sitting outside, on the wall, and nodded hello.

I tilted my head to catch the sun on my face, I could hear my mother in the kitchen with a saucepan, and my father, opening the workshop, going to the tank. Two miles away, Higher Burrow Hill rose from the moor; I had been there many times since the night we were caught in Drove, and I'd stared down at the house, but it had been empty, I hadn't been there again. I was Billy, sixteen, boy now to my father, like a joke.

‘Where are you?' he shouted, I jumped down off the wall, went to sort bundles, to be his slave.

Since that night, Dick and I had been around, though for months we'd been separated at school and forbidden to visit each other's homes. Because my mother and his were friends — I suppose friends is right — sooner or later we would be about together again.

This day, I did my work, had tea, and went to get Dick.

‘I'm off,' I said.

‘Don't be late.'

I went to fetch him.

‘You coming?' I shouted.

We walked to the canal and across West Moor towards Higher Burrow. We were talking about one of our teachers. There had been a story in the paper about him. Mr Eric Gremner had been up to something. We'd known it all along.

Dick was working for Chedzoy, learning farming, milking by machine, tractor driving, mending gates and fences. He had a packet of cigarettes and a box of matches, we climbed Burrow Hill and sat under the tree, chewing grass, looking down at the orchards around Kingsbury and Lambrook. Amongst the trees, there were many patches of bluebells, like pools of water, we watched a mare and foal rubbing against the trunks, rustling the leaves and young fruit.

‘I got him to do anything,' Dick said, ‘goes like a bullet. Fetch ‘em boy! Bring ‘em back, bring ‘em back!' He was boasting about a ginger dog at Chedzoy's, Hector, who had taken to him, he claimed, and now saved miles of trudging over the moors.

‘Like a bullet. Knows every cow by sight, counts them. He's off looking, if there's one short, two short, ten short. Each one. Saves me miles. Chedzoy hates me for it, always talking about his dog. His dog nothing.' He lit two cigarettes and passed me one.

You could see for miles on a clear day, past places I knew to places I didn't know at all. Where a cloudless sky met the land, miles away, that district was covered in a blue mist, the grazed fields burnt patches of yellow into the view. Closer to the hill, where a single oak or elm stood beside a rhine, or a herd of cows lay in a field, the land was deep green, the houses like single bricks.

‘He is, don't know what I'd do without him. Have to walk miles. Then they won't let me take him home, say he'd soon as heel it back to their place. Don't see why.'

He stood up, climbed on the triangulation point, and shouted, ‘Let me take him home.' ‘Get down,' I said, ‘people'll think you're mad.'

‘They know I am.'

‘True,' I said, and walked to the edge of the hill, from where it gave a view of Drove House, its orchard, outhouses and surroundings. The sun was beginning to sink on that first real summer day, still warm, still a gentle breeze, and scent of tobacco, smoked outdoors. It was odd to see what was happening, and for a moment I stood, hearing, not listening to the far-off sounds, the men's shouts and heaves.

‘Dick!' I shouted, ‘Quick!'

‘What?'

‘Look at this!'

‘What?'

‘This.'

‘What?'

‘A removal van.'

Someone was moving into Drove House, someone or somebodies, there was a woman, organizing the men who were carrying tea chests and beds. All the windows were open, it looked stranger than when I had looked back that stormy winter night, five years ago. We watched as the men carried some pictures out of their van and into the house.

‘Pictures?' said Dick.

‘Why not?'

It was hard to organize my mind, all my life Drove House had been empty, people didn't know who it belonged to, nobody in their senses would live there, not if they got to know what I knew. The egg man said a farmer's wife lost her cat up a tree and called him in to get it down. He did it; two minutes later, backing out of her yard, he ran the same cat over, killed it.

I set off down the hill, was walking on my own for a while before Dick came running down and pulled me back.

‘Where you going?'

‘Get a look. Where you think?'

‘All right?'

We reached the bottom, and sat under a hedge at the top of the orchard, and watched, through the trees, three men in dust coats, carrying furniture out of the van, down a ramp and into the house. They carried more pictures than I had ever seen, some massive ones in gilt frames of people on horses with small heads and huge haunches. There came tables and a desk, and a pile of carpets and rugs. When they were carrying a wardrobe, before they took it into the house, one of them said, ‘Rest Geoff, it'll knacker us.'

Geoff sat on the wall by the gate, with his mate, the boss, and the youngest of the three.

‘What you doing?' said the boss to the youngest.

‘Eh?'

‘Get the thermos!'

‘Oh.'

The woman came to the men, and said, ‘Tea break?'

They stood up. ‘Yes madam.'

‘Jolly good.'

They looked at each other, sat down again. She walked away. At sixteen, sat under a hedge, Dick was in love with a dog, bored. ‘He's so scrawny. You wouldn't think he'd run like that. The thing is, Chedzoy never worked him, just chained him in the yard, curbing his natural instincts. When I took him out, he knew what to do, all the calls. I didn't have to teach him anything, it was all there, natural, in his brain.'

‘Yes.'

‘Are you listening?'

‘Course.'

The men carried a cupboard, careful, careful about it, but the one in front, the youngest, stepped off the ramp before the boss was ready, the cupboard overbalanced and slipped from their hands. It bounced on the ground, and even from where we were I heard it crack, and saw the gash in the wood.

‘No!' said the boy.

‘You bloody little fool. Bloody, bloody fool,' his boss said.

‘I didn't ...'

‘No, you didn't, did you?'

‘Did you see that?' I said.

‘What?'

He was thinking about Hector. I was thinking about a cupboard. I thought, are we growing apart? He wasn't interested in being by this hedge anymore, he wanted to find a herd of cows for his dog.

‘I'm bored,' he said, ‘I'm going to Kingsbury.'

‘What's there?'

‘Maybe something, at least.'

I was watching the men, staring at the damaged cupboard, the boss screaming, waving his arms, when the woman appeared.

‘Something wrong?' she said.

‘Afraid so, madam,' said the boss.

‘Oh dear. Do tell.' The woman spoke with a very clear voice, like she was asking someone to pass the tomatoes at a picnic. The boss shoved the boy in the back.

‘It was my fault madam, I didn't see the edge of the ramp,' he pointed. ‘I stepped back, lost my balance.'

‘Afraid we've damaged it,' said the boss. ‘That's what he's trying to say.'

The woman stared at the cupboard, and the piece of splintered wood. She picked it up and handed it to the boy.

‘Never mind,' I heard her say. ‘Worse things happen at sea,' and she walked back to the front door. ‘Keep up the good work.' She had a mane of hair, piled on her head, some strands had come loose, and flew behind her. Her dress, which looked the wrong size and fifty years out of date, blew around as she disappeared into Drove House.

‘I'm going,' said Dick.

‘Where?'

‘Kingsbury?'

‘There's nothing there.'

‘I can sit on the wall.'

‘It's a nice wall.'

‘There's other places.'

‘So there are,' I said. He got up, let out a long, high whistle, and walked up the hill, kicking at the ground. He was almost out of sight when he called back.

‘Hey, Billy! Come here!' I was thinking about getting up, following him. ‘What?' I said. He pointed the way we'd come, and when I reached him, looked and saw someone, walking our way.

‘Want another?' he said, passed a fag, and sat down.

‘Thought you were going.'

‘I'm watching.' He was bored. The person came nearer, a girl, brown hair, shirt, trousers. ‘Who's that?' ‘I don't know.' She walked with a straight back, her head up and a deliberate step. She didn't see us, reached the orchard, wound through the trees, stopped at one and put her hand on its trunk. She rubbed the bark and put her head against it.

‘Nutter,' he said.

She went over to the woman organizing the removal men and said something; we were too far away to hear what.

The men finished. They stood with the woman and the girl.

‘We should have stayed down there,' I said.

‘Why?'

I didn't reply.

The boss shook hands with the woman while the other two loaded some sheets onto the lorry. They closed the ramp, climbed into the cab, and after reversing by the foot in the yard, missing the orchard wall, the lean-to twice, and the front porch, drove off, down the road to Curry Rivel.

It was quiet a moment, as we sat on the hill, and I watched Drove House and beyond; Dick, bored.

‘Now what?' he said.

I was very angry, ‘How should I know?' I shouted. ‘Why'd you want me to tell you what we should do! It's all the time!'

‘It isn't.'

‘It is. You know it is. Ever since, I don't know ...'

He got up. ‘I'm going to Kingsbury.'

‘Go on then.'

‘I will.'

He set off up the hill, I walked down and when I looked back he was gone. When I reached the hedge, I walked through the trees myself, until I found one with a long, low branch, screened from the house by a pile of stones, where I could sit, lean back and not be seen. Nothing happened until the woman and the girl came from the house with a tray of tea, to sit in chairs in the garden. The girl put the tray on the lawn and sat down, let out a sigh I could hear, a sigh high and breathy, like a bird. Neither said anything, they looked straight ahead, the air was filled with the sounds of singing insects, cockerels crowing, back and forth, far away, the gentle hum of bees, the noise of tractors in the lanes, and passing cars.

‘It's so quiet,' the girl said, suddenly.

‘Yes. Strange, at first,' the woman said, ‘shall I be mother?'

They drank their tea, it was getting late. They hadn't said much, just tat about the removal men and the damaged cupboard, the woman really didn't mind. I got up to leave, but my legs had gone to sleep and I stumbled; but they weren't talking, I made a noise, and when I glanced up from my hiding place, they were looking at me. As my head appeared, I saw the girl stand up and say, ‘There's someone there.'

It was getting late, spring evenings were deceptive, suddenly the light gone, and the warmth. I looked up, and saw clouds blown in, the sky darkened.

I ran up Burrow Hill, and down the other side to the Kingsbury road. It had cooled, I was there in short sleeves, but felt safer on the road with its high hedges, bluebells in the orchards. When I reached the village, I was passing an old garage when I heard a voice call, ‘Billy!' I turned to look but there was no one there, just two old ladies by the shop and some kids I didn't know, throwing a ball. ‘Billy!' again, ‘Over here!' I looked and saw Dick, framed in a door on the other side of the road.

‘What's on?' I said.

He laughed. I crossed over, he let me in, pushing me in the back as I went by, and closed the door. It was gloomy, the only light came from a dirty window in the roof, but as my eyes became accustomed, I could see a workbench, old barrels, engines, lumps of broken machinery.

‘Who's this?' said another voice, but I was not afraid.

The garage stank of cider. The owner of that voice leant out of the shadows — Mr Jackson who'd worked at Chedzoy's years ago, still went up there, but spent more time in his well-known drink shop.

‘It's Billy. My mate,' said Dick.

‘Who?'

‘I told you, Billy! From Blackwood!'

‘Billy from Blackwood,' Jackson said, ‘Well! Sit down whoever you are, Billy from Blackwood. Have a drink!' He was drunk and passed me a mug of green cider, strands of undissolvable clear jelly floating in it.

‘Thanks,' I said.

‘Drink up!'

‘You ought to open that door,' I said.

‘What for?'

‘Let some light in.'

‘And everybody in the street?'

‘Two old ladies and a couple of kids?'

‘Appearances aren't everything.'

‘What?'

‘I said ...' he tried to say the words but gave up. ‘Never mind.'

Dick didn't look very well, held his head between his legs, moaning.

‘They saw me,' I said.

‘What?'

‘They saw me.'

‘Who?'

‘That woman, and the girl.'

‘What girl?'

‘You know.'

‘Where?' He jumped off the bench, spilt his drink and fell over.

‘Come on, Dick.'

‘Where?'

‘Home.'

‘Home? I'm staying.'

‘You're coming.'

‘Make me.'

‘You know I couldn't.'

He pulled himself up. ‘Okay,' he said.

Jackson didn't care and mumbled about kids. Dick said he'd see him later, or at the farm, but I led the way, and the fresh air made him sick.