‘Oh yes?’ said Chris. ‘What’s that?’
‘Puck – a sort of hobgoblin, you know, or a fairy. Very ancient. Anyway, I thought I might use it for a painting one day.’
Howard looked quizzically at her profile as they walked, a glance he intended, at some level, for her to see. So far her paintings had all been of landscapes or flowers, and not particularly interesting ones to boot – so how a hobgoblin was supposed to come into it was a mystery.
‘What’s it all about, then?’ asked Chris.
‘Well, this goes back hundreds of years, of course. He lived on a farm near here – although I think there are lots of Puck stories from all over the country, actually. Anyway, this one goes that in return for a tenth of everything the farmer harvested Puck made sure that everything grew: the crops never failed, the well didn’t dry up, the animals didn’t get sick. He wouldn’t cross the threshold into the farmhouse, or do any of his magic on people, but he brought fertility to the land and the animals so the farm prospered, even in bad years.’
‘Sounds like a witch, more like,’ said Howard. ‘Or he made a pact with the Devil.’
‘No, he wasn’t evil, not at all – though he wasn’t exactly good, either. Anyway, after a while the farmer got greedy; he started to wonder why he should have to give a tenth of his harvest away. So he began keeping back some of the sheaves. Puck found out, of course, and when he did he turned into a hare and ran away. But before he went he cursed the farmer and the land, and since then all sorts of misfortunes have been blamed on him.’
‘Like what?’ asked Chris.
‘Oh, you know. Cows’ milk drying up, haystacks burning down. And there’s an old track where he’s said to appear from time to time, demanding that the farmer honour their bargain. Anyway, I thought I might go and have a look at it later this week. I don’t know, I like these old stories. They’re part of what makes one place different to another.’
‘Even if all the stories are the same?’ Howard chipped in. ‘I mean, if you collected together all the mischievous fairies, black dogs and, I don’t know, haunted houses from all over the country, you’d soon see they’re all of a type – just ways of explaining what was unexplainable back then. Fortunately,’ he continued, turning to Chris with a grin, ‘we have science now.’
‘Oh, I don’t know, Dad. It must have been amazing growing up in those times: there’d be a story attached to every cave, every rock, every tree. It wouldn’t be, you know, there are some trees –’ Chris waved an arm at the general view – ‘and we know everything there is to know about them, though hardly anyone actually bothers to learn their names. It would be a case of, this tree, this oak tree, has a wicked witch in it, this willow tree is magic –’
‘Rowan,’ said Kitty, taking her son’s arm. ‘Rowan trees are magic. You wouldn’t dare to cut one down. Elder trees sometimes had witches in them. And hollies were planted in the hedges to show you where to turn the plough. It wasn’t all magic, you see, but everything meant something. It still does, we just don’t know how to see it any more. I think it’s a shame.’
Howard looked out across the workaday landscape of fields and roads. It was hard to imagine it all being suffused with magic and meaning.
‘So how are you going to paint him?’ he asked. ‘This Puck?’
‘I’m not going to paint Puck himself,’ she replied. ‘I just want to go and see the path the legend talks about. I don’t know, I feel as though I’ve been wanting to paint the countryside for years. And now we’re actually in it I want it to mean something, not just . . . look pretty. Do you know what I mean?’
‘But you have been painting it,’ said Howard. ‘You’re out there twice, three times a week.’
‘I know. I just . . . it’s complicated,’ she said.
It had been a miserable, wet winter, and there were still signs of it all around: many of the farm tracks were thick with mud, though it had dried now to a hard crust, and some of the old holloways that doubled as watercourses off the higher ground were still blocked with stones and branches.
The soil had quickly become waterlogged and the dairymen had taken the herds in early; some of the arable farmers with low-lying land hadn’t been able to drill for winter wheat, the fields were so wet. Those on higher ground had gone ahead, but just before Christmas a day of battering rain had flooded the newly sown crop out of the fields and leached the fertiliser from the soil. Much of the wheat around Lodeshill and Crowmere had had to be resown.
Normally Philip Harland’s herd would have been grazing the pasture Howard, Kitty and Chris were walking through; without them the grass had grown tall and lush. Trails through it were evidence of the secret lives of badgers and foxes, and here and there lay the clustered droppings of deer. The route they were following took them onto a narrow road green with moss in the centre and flanked by a bright rivulet of water for a hundred yards; then they would turn left through a farm gate, cross another field diagonally and pass a farm on the right. From there it was possible to pick up the road again into Lodeshill.
But once Howard had secured the gate behind them he turned to find that Kitty and Chris had stopped. The field ahead was full of farming equipment: two tractors, one of them huge, one smaller and older, two quad bikes, a trailer and some other huge machines and attachments that they didn’t recognise. There were several very old, rusty contraptions that looked as though they had recently been torn from the undergrowth, a pile of what looked like car and tractor parts and another of tools, a set of startlingly white uPVC windows, a couple of dozen blue sacks of something, coils of fencing wire and mesh, a stack of ladders and more, filling the field and marching away from them towards the farm buildings.
‘Oh – I wonder what’s going on,’ Kitty said, surveying the field.
‘Spring-cleaning the barn?’ said Chris.
‘It’ll be a farm sale,’ said Howard. ‘He must be selling up. They’ll be getting rid of all this – if some bugger doesn’t nick it first.’
‘I’m sure there’s a twelve-bore trained on it from the farmhouse, you know what these farmers are like. Is it all just farm stuff, though, d’you think? Anything good?’
‘Don’t know. Maybe. Sometimes they do the house contents too; depends if they’re taking it with them somewhere else, or it’s an old boy who’s hung up his boots.’
‘You should stop in,’ said Chris. ‘See if there’s anything worth having.’
‘I was thinking just the same thing. Long shot, but you never know. Old wirelesses often get binned when people move house, but these farmers, you see, they don’t move. They stay put for donkey’s years, you know? Could well be one in there, hiding away.’
‘It’ll be in the parish newsletter,’ said Kitty, turning her back on it all. ‘The auction. We can look it up when we get back.’
‘Do you hear much from your sister?’ Howard asked Chris as they skirted the last field and made for the road.
‘Not a lot. She called a couple of weeks ago, but that’s it. Mum said she’s still complaining about her flatmates.’
‘Yes, coming in at all hours, apparently. She has to get up early for work.’
‘Out having fun, are they? Can’t have that.’
‘I know, I know, and you’re right: she’s still young, perhaps she should be having more fun herself. But she’s driven, you know. Not like I was at that age. Anyway,’ he continued, fixing Chris with a sly grin, ‘speaking of fun, when do we get to meet her?’
‘I’m not seeing anyone right now, Dad, you know that.’
‘Oh come on. Course you are.’
‘Nope.’
‘No more Internet dates?’
‘Not right now. What is this – are you after grandchildren all of a sudden?’
‘Not me, your mum,’ he said. ‘She’d make a terrific grandma.’ He felt, rather than saw, Kitty wince at the word. It was true, though; she’d love it. Give her a bit of purpose again, even if she didn’t like the terminology.
‘God, I hope Jen gets this kind of treatment when she comes back,’ Chris grumbled, but good-humouredly.
They took the lane back three abreast as the sky above them cleared to blue and a breeze shook the last raindrops from the sycamores at the side of the road.
When they got back to the house Howard and Chris went up to the radio room. When Chris was ten or eleven Howard had bought him a crystal and a cat’s whisker detector and showed him how to build a simple receiver. He still remembered fitting his old piezo earpieces gently to his son’s ears and watching his face as the hissing turned to whines, undersea mutters and, finally, speech. Chris hadn’t been able to believe that something with no batteries, no slick plastic housing and no fancy logo could let him listen to the radio, even if it was only AM.
As he got older he had preferred listening to dance music in his bedroom, but whenever Howard got hold of a new wireless he’d always found a reason to drift out to the garage and stand at his dad’s elbow as he got into the cabinet and had a look at the circuit – although, had he been asked, he would doubtless have said it was boring.
Now, Howard switched on the craft light and swung it out over the Marconi he was working on. Chris pulled the spare stool out from under the counter and sat down. They sat in silence for a while, the only sound the faint rasp of Howard’s screwdriver as he tried to remove the front of the cabinet – and, after a while, the distant sound of church bells. Carefully, Howard put the cabinet down, gave Chris a tiny screw to hold and closed the window.
‘Dad, you know when Jenny comes back in a couple of weeks?’
Howard was trying not to damage the ‘M’ on the speaker grille. It was rare to find one with the M intact, so it would be irritating to chip it now. He flicked a glance at his son, then peered through the ring of the craft light again.
‘Don’t tell me you can’t make it. Your mother’s got a big welcome-home dinner planned. She’ll hit the roof.’
‘I know, I know. It’s just – remember Glen, from school?’
‘Glen, Glen, never again?’
‘It’s his stag do.’
‘Is it! Little Glen, getting married. Well I never.’
‘I’m not the best man, I don’t have to go.’
‘But you want to.’
‘Which day are you having the meal for Jenny?’
‘We’re picking her up on the Friday night – well, Saturday morning, really. So your mum wanted us all together on the Saturday night. And – I do, too. I want it to be nice. Family, you know?’ As Howard said it he could feel his throat unexpectedly tighten. Bloody fool, he thought; what the hell was there to get upset about?
‘Don’t you think Jenny’ll be tired?’
‘Look, I’ll speak to your mother,’ Howard said. ‘Maybe we could do it on the Sunday instead. It would mean you staying Sunday night, though, and I don’t want you getting in trouble with the boss.’
Chris grinned. ‘Shouldn’t be a problem.’
‘She’ll doubtless want to go to church, but we can always help to peel the veg.’
‘She’s still going, then?’ asked Chris.
‘Oh yes.’
‘Have you been at all?’
‘Nope.’
‘No interest?’
‘Course not. I can’t understand it, you know. To find God, now. She was always such a rational woman. It just seems so . . . out of character. Anyway, I’ll speak to her. Perhaps the vicar won’t mind her missing one service.’
‘Thanks, Dad.’
‘Now, what do you think to this?’ he said, holding up the speaker cloth, thick with three-quarters of a century of dust, cigarette smoke and God only knew what else. ‘Clean it up? Or replace?’
11
Ground ivy (hedge banks). Ash flowers. Warm and sunny; breeze from the south-west shifting east.
There was sickness and sickness, Jack thought, pausing by the roadside and looking up at an ash. Always the heart-rot and bracket fungus and gall wasps and wood-boring beetles, the old to-and-fro. But now there was something else: a hand on the trunk and he could feel it, like sadness in an embrace. The ash trees were steeling themselves.
He remembered the graceful elms. So did the rooks; you could hear the loss of them in their chatter still. Things didn’t always turn out as you feared, though; the countryside was still full of saplings, but fugitive, sheltered in hedgerows and abetted by taller trees. One day they might come back. It was something Jack tried to believe.
The ash was hung here and there with lilac and green frills: some flowers male, some female, and perhaps different again next year – and it was that indiscrimination that would save it, if anything could. Above Jack great tits picked caterpillars from its leaves, and a slate-blue nuthatch decanted itself like a shot cork from a hole.
Oak before ash, around here at least. This year, and for another few years to come, he thought, the lovely pinnate leaves would burst bud and cast the road surface in shifting, moving shade. For now, though, the noon sun drew the bare branches starkly on the ground.
On the other side of Connorville Jack briefly regained the old Roman road; it was a warm May morning and the tarmac ahead shimmered with mirages, pools of water forming and re-forming far away. Not far to go now, he thought, not far to go.
A speed-limit sign had two bunches of rotting flowers secured with cable ties to its grey post. Jack tried to read the card which hung from one bouquet by a twist of lilac ribbon, but it was wrinkled and faded, and although he could see there were some faint letters remaining he could not get the sense from them. He tried instead to picture what had happened, but it wouldn’t come.
The road sign itself wasn’t damaged, and was probably just a convenient place to make a shrine rather than the site of the accident itself – which was, in fact, fifty yards further on, not far from the place where, in less than two weeks, another collision would leave two cars spent and ravished, violence gathered about them in the dawn light, coins and CDs spilled across the road where Jack now stood. He felt briefly cold, as when a chill current finds you in the warmer sea, and walked on.
The cars seemed to speed past him in groups with long pauses in between, so that when a piebald cob trotted by pulling a sulky with a bare-chested boy in the seat, Jack could believe for a moment that he was in another time. But although he had often camped with them, he knew that with travellers often came police, and he decided to get off the road.
He vaulted a gate on which a home-made sign read ‘Ardleton Allotments’ in defiance of Connorville’s acquisitive town planners. He liked allotments, always had. There was something a little anarchic about them: strawberries growing in a pile of car tyres, a shed made from pallets, a greenhouse full of tidy rows of cannabis plants. He thought about the old home fields these allotments could well be built on, and the long-dead villagers, each with their strip to subsist from: carrots, onions, broad beans, lettuces. Some things endured, didn’t they? Although the context changed.
There were too many people about for Jack to risk taking anything to eat, and he wondered if it was a weekend. A woman weeding some raised beds gave him a hard stare, and he guessed he’d been talking aloud. He still couldn’t afford to be noticed, and he frowned and shook his head as he walked on: stupid, stupid. He had to concentrate, sometimes, to remember how normal people were supposed to behave.
There was a railway track on the other side of the allotments: he could feel it like a ley line, a change in the way the light and the wind were organised. Jack hadn’t been on a train since he was a child, and he wondered if he would again one day – if he’d ever need to get somewhere faster than he could walk. It seemed unlikely. Even so, he liked railways: the desecration their coming had once threatened was for the most part long healed, and like many motorways, their margins buzzed with life and formed corridors along which that life could travel. Abandoned lines quickly returned to nature, or formed their own layer in the palimpsest of paths and routes that crossed the country, joining places whose si
gnificance was passing out of common memory.
He threaded his way through the allotment plots to find only a line of scrub and a chain-link fence between himself and the track. Throwing his pack over, he swung himself down onto the ballast, the pale stones radiating heat so that walking on them was warmer than walking beside the track. The line wouldn’t take him all the way to Lodeshill, he knew, but he’d walk it a little way. There wasn’t that much further to go.
His mind, having always had a lyrical bent and being ready again to find its voice, gave him rough iambs that matched his footfall on the stones, a song that might later find its way into one of his notebooks or might simply vanish, the evanescent narrative we each trail behind us like the faint disturbance of air from a sparrow’s wing as it flies: barely felt, touching little, and soon lost:
O see the crow there as he unseats him
from the railway bank and hoists himself up
by the sheer incredulous power of
his ratcheting wings and then flap, flap, flap,
a caw for me as he cranks overhead
and lugs himself to the ash where he sits
and hunches and brags to himself in beady silhouette.
I used to know him –
Why do I think now of how a struck flame
feels in the hand, how the massed black feathers
in the roost shield the flock there from the wind?
O but a winter night is long for every living creature
to withstand . . .
The air had become heavy, distances appearing flat, and he could smell on the wind that the weather was changing.
12
Milkwort, cranesbill. Pedunculate oaks – first flower tassels. Spring weather: sunshine and showers.
Chris left after lunch on Sunday, and as soon as he had gone Howard got on the road and headed west along the Boundway. He’d had word a few days before, through a fellow enthusiast, of an old electrical shop in Wales that had closed; the grandson had discovered the stockroom stacked with returns and unclaimed repairs going back three generations. The chap who’d put Howard on to it collected gramophones, not radios, so had been happy to pass on the tip. Howard was hoping for some lead solder, at least; you couldn’t buy it any more, so places like this were useful sources. He wondered who else would turn up.
At Hawthorn Time Page 7