Cryers Hill (27 page)

W
HETHER OR NOT
Mary Hatt was pretty Walter could not tell. As she grew she changed. Her hair: this was dark and had a look as though the wind had been at it. It suited her, this weathered hair – rolls and ribbons would have made her plain. Her mouth: surly, but curled ready for laughing – at him, mostly. Her eyes. A poet would pay attention here. Green-grey. A poetic soul would think of water, of depths. Walter did. (The left eye may drift independently, though not always, during a seizure.) Her skin: pale, lashed with freckles under each eye. Her body. Place of havoc. Wide crescents of sweat in the armpits of her blouse. Girlish breasts. A sailor's swagger.

His first kiss from her cherry mouth was at cherry-picking time, he remembered that. Her lips were stained black from the juice, a patch as big as a bruise that reached up to her cheek on one side; her teeth were purple and she tasted of jam. Walter Brown, who was just a lad then, kissed her harder than he meant to. Once he had started he found he couldn't stop; he put it down to the cherries. She didn't seem to mind. 'Wally, Woolly,' she said to him as though she were concussed. He had had no idea at all that kissing was as grand as this. He kissed her again to make her stop it, and then he just kissed her harder and harder until she was completely silent.

Nowadays their mouths taste of tree bark and woodsmoke. They kiss in the woods. It is the only way. They press against the loosening boundaries of their clothes. It is armour they require now, iron and steel, not buttons, if they are to be kept apart. She bites his lip; there, that's for
you,
you bugga. And he takes her hand gently and presses it towards his belly, while she laughs at his pleading.

The wood keeps their secret, while overhead the sky hurries by. The sun slips imperceptibly to the right for a better view, its hot eye agog. It shrinks their shadows, lengthens them and wipes them clean away.

At the farm there is a barn, foggy with dust, sweet with the smell of hay, clover, flax. There is a single opening in the roof, where God's light pours in, and corners that are dark and gummy with age. Walter can hear the skittering of rats as he kisses her, and the cracks and creaks of the old beams. The gloom makes him bold, but Mary Hatt is no fool. She pushes him hard so that he teeters backwards, almost to the floor.

'Steady on,' she gasps. 'Stupid bugga.'

He looks at her dumbly.

'Wait your turn,' she says, a hint of a whine. And so Walter waits, like one of the Home Farm bullocks, with his wet breathing and standing heavy on his spread hooves. Mary Hatt knows to make him wait. She is her own best protector, though there are few who might suspect as much.

'Wally, Wally, Wallflower,' she coos. 'When you are washing at the tub, think of me with every rub.'

And Walter's head drops, as the heads of large livestock are prone to do, while Mary Hatt raises the hem of her wool skirt to expose one pale, sturdy leg.

'If the water be ever so hot.'

At the top of this leg Walter sees broad knickers that are white, laundered grey, with thick bindings. If the slaughterman were to arrive now with his firing bolt, Walter would take it between the eyes and go down heavy and unsuspecting as any poor bugger bull.

'If
the water be ever so hot . . .' Up goes the skirt. He stares at her drawers bunching thickly over her belly, the sketch of dark hair crescenting the top of her thigh. 'Lather away and forget me not.' She raises her eyebrows, juts her chin, and drops her skirt in a single movement.

Walter Brown is deeply in love.

Summer's green has crested all the hills
and grown across my heart a kind of moss.
Sorrel and field pansy bind your hair
While blackbird sings his song of loss.

Pity the muntjac, fallow and roe,
they flee phantoms you cannot see,
Pity the red-back shrike
who sails alone
in a wide celestial sea.

Walter closes his notebook. He has sickened himself with poetry. He is no good, he is not good enough. He doesn't wish to write any more for the time being. There must be an end to what a thing is like and how it compares to another thing and whether it scans or not. He would like to look at the world dumbly, he decides, without judgement or expectation, like an ox. There, he has done it again.

There are more pressing things to worry about besides. God is at His mysterious ways hereabouts. He is moving things around and knocking people askew. He is flattening barley and sickening livestock. He has struck with a bolt a God-fearing, humble man and ruined a farmer and an innocent girl. There are men on the lanes these days; labourers, farmers, those who have lost their livings as the farms go under. They are walking to find work where they may. Some walk into the next counties and beyond and some never come back. Walter himself does not know if he is coming or going, whether they are all individually or collectively going to Hell.

Moreover, there is a rumour that says they want to build houses at Four Ashes, lots of them. Grange Farm would go, also Terriers Farm, Rockall and Widmer Farms, and the ancient dew ponds too, not to mention Cockshoot Wood and all the fields and low grazing hills from Widmer End to Terriers, some 350 acres.

Who is they? They are known locally as the Powers That Be, as if they are implacable pagan gods. In reality they are a collection of men from cities and towns and other shires with no chalk in their soil. They are sometimes known as Planners, but their proper name is Developers; this is the correct terminology, the name they have given themselves. The Developer, like any other raptor in the valley, helps himself. Not for him the extended tedium of consultation, deliberation, collaboration. Naturally, he tells it differently. In his version the valley will not survive without him. In his version he is keen to be helpful, to engineer advancement where none has so far been made, to foster progress, expansion, to broaden, augment, restyle and
refine.
As if an overdue evolution must now take place and he, the single-breasted midwife, trained to facilitate and deliver, will take charge. Areas flagged for development are renamed: H5. H9. H7.

'We are planning for fifty years ahead, not five,' the Developers declare loftily. As though the view from their high horse affords them telescopic vistas of the future that no mere local could begin to visualise or comprehend.

Sid Perfect predicts that one day houses and factories will replace every last field and orchard in the Hughenden Valley. Everyone had a good laugh at him over that, and a few cheered at the prospect of a regular paid job in that case, and a decent roof to live under. Sid Perfect is never wrong.

If the Developers come it will be the end of Cryers Hill and Widmer End and Hazlemere. Dorrie Penn said that. Now everybody is saying it. 'And it'll be the end of me and you,' she added, 'and my lot and your lot too.' Dorrie Penn made sure she got everybody upset over it. She had long ago discovered that other people's upset soothed her own, was like a tonic to her. 'And don't think they will care to remember the way it was, they won't. People like you and me don't end up recorded, there'll be no books or CinemaScope about it, no; only the graveyards here and what has been writ on the stones.' Dorrie had a cheery few days after that.

But soon the talk moved on to other things. The Developers did no developing for the time being that year or the next and soon it was all forgotten. The talk of approaching war put paid to it. The woodland, farms, dew ponds and grazing land were safe from development for now, because somewhere in a smoky room in Munich the foundations for a brand-new development led by Adolf Hitler and his Nazi Party were taking shape.

'I
'VE SEEN HIM.
I know who he is.' There, he has said it.

Ann looks at Sean. She doesn't blink, but she cocks her head.

'Liar.'

'Not.'

'Liar.'

This was a thing about Ann, hers was the last word, her decision was always final. Sean continued anyway, though the protest in his voice was gone.

'He had a rabbit, a dead one. Reckon he's foreign, so there.'

'I see,' she said, rolling her eyes.

Sean thought p'raps he should push her down, sit on her. Instead he said, 'It's true, you better believe it. And I know his name.'

'What then?'

'Not telling.'

Ann enjoyed rolling her eyes these days, it was her new thing. Sean thought soon they might roll right out of her head and land in her lap, like the cows' eyes.

'Sean Matthews, you are a little liar.'

You could push a person so far. You could push a person too far.

'Liar liar pants on fire. Sean Matthews, where d'you think you're going?'

He didn't know, he didn't care. He had not yet made an executive decision.

Sean could see there were no kids like him in the Gabbett's Housing brochure. Only bright sketches of children in red knee socks strolling under cherry-blossom trees, not to mention grass and shrubs and a smartly dressed woman with a dachshund waving at a handsome man driving a Ford Zodiac Estate. It was not supposed to be a landscape of mud and dust and cement and sand filled with tribes of dirty kids. There was none of that in the brochure. Where were the packs of running dogs? Apart from the dachshund, there was only a white Scottie in a tartan jacket. And a shiny-shoed murderer in the woods? No sign of him. Perhaps they were on their way: the cherry-blossom trees, the grass and shrubs, and everything else. Perhaps they were just around the corner.

18th December 1943, C.M.F.

Dearest Mary,

I am sorry it has been such a long time since I was last able to write. Please forgive me. I hope you were not too worried. I had developed a case of jaundice and had to be hospitalised near Karnos, back in North Africa. Afterwards they diagnosed me as suffering with nerves. Having lost my exercise books, somehow I couldn't bring myself to write a letter, no other type of paper seemed suitable. I am so sorry. I feel better lately, though I was not at any stage before now aware of feeling nervy at all.

I'm afraid Bob Charles got badly shot up. I did my best, we all did, telling him it was not serious, telling him he'd be back home in time for New Year and so on, while he lay squirming, poor fella. He died of course.

I'm afraid Naples was terribly badly knocked about. I am writing this in the lorry. Everywhere is a quagmire outside. We await the din of the guns in the dark. I hear we are moving again, so I will say goodnight now and finish this later as my rigged light is poor. Cheerio, my darling girl.

Later:

Somerset has gone to Naples for a few days' rest and has loaned me his bivvy. Would you believe it, he has a carpet in here – filched from somewhere. Guns are going off all over. Everything is all right as long as our guns keep quiet. If ours go off the light is blasted out and everything in the bivvy dances about as if by magic. Jerry rakes the place with shellfire and, apart from casualties, lots of the lads lose all their kit. It is 6.30 p.m. and there is a new moon. Soto bene. Buona fortuna. Arriverderce. (I am speaking in Italian.)

Later:

We have not washed or shaved. The icy wind blew my grub out of my hand and knocked me over. Lots of the lads are sleeping in caves in the banks. We feel like Arctic explorers. Funny, after all the excess heat and the trouble that gave us. In the caves is a woman living with 4 kiddies between 3 and 10 years old. They have made their way from Jerry lines and are destitute. The kiddies watch us hungrily – they never beg, just watch each mouthful we eat with big, wondering eyes. Who can eat? I can't without giving them some. No stockings or shoes – bits of cloth bind their feet. How they got across the mountain amid a sea of shelling we do not know. Motherhood is tigerish and extraordinary.

Also, we had a new lad with us. When Jerry last shelled us he was too terrified to come out of his bivvy. He was found dead in it hours later. Poor young chap. For the next few months it will be all snow, hail and ice – so different to the desert.

Well, I had better close. Keep smiling, Mary. Remember me to everyone. I have written twice to Mother – she is a plucky old bird it turns out. I am looking at your picture. You are the loveliest girl in the world. God keep you safe.

Yours, always, Walter xx

Sean had to stay after school and write out
one hundred times. He didn't know if he'd reached a hundred. He stopped when his pencil lead snapped. The teacher reading the newspaper didn't count them. Sean told all the kids he saw on the way home that he'd written a thousand.

Sean had told Miss Day that his mother was dying of typhoid. He didn't know why he said it. Except in a way it was true; his brother was making their mother miserable with his great big head and disgusting habits. Anyway it was too late now. The school had told his parents.

'You're a right little liar,' his mother said.

His dad told him, 'Don't lie to the lady teachers.' And then, 'Brainless little sod, what are you?'

Later on when his dad was soft and sleepy in his armchair watching
Oh Brother!
starring Derek Nimmo, Sean mentioned that it was the teacher who was a liar not him, as he had only meant that Ty was driving his mum around the bend. But this too was a lie. Typhoid was the only deadly disease Sean had heard of.

Gor swung a slap that landed on the back of Sean's neck, a dull thud of meat and bone that tipped the room over and kept his head at an angle all the next day. But it didn't matter what kind of disease was not killing his mother, because Miss Day had put her arms around Sean as soon as he delivered the typhoid news, and he had breathed her in and told her what he knew: everything.

In truth Sean was not the only fibber. Especially since the girl died in Gomms Wood. Now there were stories growing taller each day, in the playground, at the launderette, in the queue for a tint and blow-dry at Faith's Creations. The small forked tongues, the ones belonging to the playground kids, the ones waiting to speak the words of service engineers, supermarket tellers, depot managers and town planners, these tongues were busy too, whispering and falsifying, wailing and rumour-mongering around the classroom huts; quick to judge, slow to pardon, but always tirelessly at it in their toytown court of no appeal.

Sean had always liked to watch the boys in the playground whipping themselves into the air, you could even see them from the road, above the fence, popping up like salmon. People on passing buses would turn their heads. And the girls, the way they would all lace themselves together in a herringbone weave of elbows; they could move great distances like that, plaited in a chain, cooperating, compacted, like something nature was about to unleash.

At the height of its torment the village saw murderers at every creosoted corner. The woman at the post office and the manager from the bank found themselves leaning confidentially left and right all day till you wondered why they were called upright citizens at all. Everybody had an opinion to voice over a Campari and an Embassy Tipped Virginia in their almost-house and not-yet garden. To cheer himself up, Sean opened two letters in one day.

10th January 1944, C.M.F.

Dearest Mary,

Well, Monty has left the 8th. We're still in the 8th, though attached to the 5th. I saw Abbott and Costello in
Who Done It?
at the cinema last night – amusing. There are hungry priests here with burst boots tied up with strips of rag. I haven't been out of my clothes for a week now. The soles of my boots are worn through and stones play havoc with the feet. Some Douglas transport planes have arrived. Our advance position is now secure. We have Jerries behind as well as in front of us. There is a lovely full moon, it makes me think of home.

You won't believe it but in Naples young boy touts cry, 'Fish and chips!' And you are led through backstreets and eventually to a room containing a naked woman on a bed. If you look nonplussed they all cry, 'Clean! Clean!'

Three of my pals have been killed. We have to keep jumping into holes like animals. A tank fellow went beserk and had to be knocked out for his own good. Mind you, Jerry never actually discovered our company. We were in pinewoods and he kept flying over us.

Arthur Atkins trod on a mine under the snow last night. He lost his right leg and left hand and cheek. He just looked absolutely amazed and kept repeating unbelievingly, 'No foot! No foot!' and looking down as if he'd lost his wallet. It is icy cold. My right foot has chilblains, they burn and itch.

The refugees are so upsetting. They are the same to Jerry as to us and forever on the scrounge. Villages like Sessa, Mondzone and Capri are nothing but stones and dirt.

We are the most forward ack-ack in Italy and are all the time doing field shooting. It feels as though we've been with the 5th Army for some time now. I dream of roast beef, lamb with mint, steamy potatoes and horseradish.

Well, chin up, Mary. Please write. I long to hear news. Keep smiling, darling. You are the world to me. There is nothing but you.

Yours, Walter xx

Sean notes that there are only a few letters left unread. He replaces the bricks. He wishes he had more. He will have to return to Mrs Roys. He must think of some kind of excuse. He wonders if he has nearly solved a crime.