At Hawthorn Time

by Melissa Harrison

  ‘Bill Drew has been making a map of them, so if you’ve got any on your property, do please let him know.’ Bill held up his hand to show who he was, and the group moved on, the children laughing and calling at the back and Christine Hawton’s cocker spaniel running out ahead. Five rooks flew lazily overhead, their black wings working the air like oars.

  Kitty watched the dog nose the ground and half listened to Christine, who was no longer chatting to Howard and had fallen into step with Jean Drew behind her.

  ‘Poor George saw him in his garden,’ said Jean. ‘Bold as brass, he was.’

  ‘Do you think he’s a gypsy?’ said Christine.

  ‘No, I think he’s a tramp of some kind.’

  ‘A tramp? Out here, in the countryside? You’d think if you were homeless you’d go into Connorville, at least. What is there for a tramp here? Unless he’s after something.’

  ‘Well, I don’t see what we can do. Report him to the police?’

  ‘Well, why not? It was trespass, at the very least. George’s garden, that’s private property.’

  ‘He’s probably long gone by now, though,’ Kitty intervened, looking round and letting them catch up with her. ‘Don’t you think? That was last weekend, and I don’t think anyone’s seen him since.’

  Jean looked doubtful. ‘Any sign of him in Ocket Wood, Christine? You’d know, you walk the dog there every day, don’t you?’

  ‘No, I don’t think so. Maybe Kitty’s right.’

  ‘It’s the kids I worry about,’ said Jean. ‘You can’t be too careful these days.’

  ‘And now, at the top of the rise you’ll see our Gospel oak,’ said the vicar, out in front, turning and pointing to a stag-headed tree in the centre of a large field. Kitty recognised it as the one she had been intending to paint; it seemed an age ago now.

  ‘We’ll stop there and give thanks for the crops. This oak and the one just a little further on – can you see? – they used to be part of a hedge that was probably planted during the Inclosures, but as you can see the rest of it was lost when the fields were enlarged, along with the footpath from Lodeshill to Crowmere. We’ll trace the old line of it, though. Just be careful not to damage the young, er – the corn, I think.’

  ‘Oats,’ muttered Jamie.

  Behind them, Kitty looked out across the field. It was an impressive enough tree, standing by itself like that, but she could see now that any painting she had made of it would have been utterly generic. She thought of the sketch that she had started the day before, on a small 10x10? canvas: an old gate rotting into long grass. Already it was coming to life in her mind, and more than that, it felt like her own.

  The warm weather suited the asparagus, and at Woodwater they had begun harvesting twice daily. Some of the other pickers grumbled about being out on the beds all day, but Jack preferred it to working in the pack house; loading the grader, packing and labelling the asparagus made it feel to him like a product rather than food – and him like a cog.

  For the most part the other pickers spoke Romanian to one another, though a couple of them made the effort with Jack. He didn’t mind not chatting, though; it allowed him to avoid awkward questions, like where he slept at night.

  At the end of the row he straightened up. The bundles of cut asparagus were in neat piles for Mihail to collect; as soon as the others finished their beds it would be time to move to the next field. Sweat was beading on his forehead; he went and sat in the shadow of the hedge, where he’d left a bottle of water, and drank. Cider would have been better, sour and cloudy and refreshing, but he hadn’t been offered cider on a farm for a decade.

  The field sloped away in front of him, brown and gently ridged, until it met the blue spring sky. At one time there had been a line of elms at the far end, but they had died thirty years before, the carcasses finally falling in the high winds of ’87. Jack fumbled in his pocket for an acorn and pressed it into the bank, a sudden flock of goldfinches dipping and chirruping briefly around him before moving on.

  As he watched them fly off Jack’s eye was drawn to a movement, and he saw that there was a line of people on the other side of the hedge, their heads showing briefly above the hawthorn blossom as they walked. It was quite a big group, perhaps twenty or so; they passed along the margin of the far field and then turned in through the gate towards the asparagus beds. He saw a couple of the other pickers, nearly at the end of their rows, straighten up and look over.

  The group began to toil up the far side of the field beside the beds. Instinctively, Jack shrank back into the hedge, glad of his khaki combats and dark T-shirt. As they drew level he saw that it was led by a man in a dog collar. Of course, he thought. Rogationtide: they were walking the old parish boundary.

  Mihail had gone over to talk to them, and he could see the vicar explaining, gesturing with his arm over the fields to where the tower of St James’s could just be seen between trees. The other pickers had all finished their rows by now; Jack watched as Mihail shook the vicar’s hand and, when the group moved off, he picked up his crate and began to collect the bundles from the final two beds.

  On the way back to the village Howard let himself fall behind. The only person who wasn’t deep in conversation with someone else was the lad who owned the muscle car, and he certainly didn’t want to talk to him. He wondered why the boy was even on the walk; he didn’t look like the churchy type. Though of course, he reflected, looking at Kitty, you never could tell.

  All in all it had been OK though; quite nice, even. A bit of a stroll around some places he hadn’t been to before; a look at the farms, which you wouldn’t normally trespass on. And that had been asparagus! He’d never realised. Actual people picking it, too, rather than machines. Probably it was cheaper that way.

  He thought about his night out in London. It was nagging at him, he couldn’t quite make sense out of it; he didn’t know whether to put it down as a good time or not. OK, so it had been a bit awkward at the end, but it had still been good to see Geoff, hadn’t it? Though there’d been an edge to a couple of things he’d said – Howard struggled to remember exactly what, now, but the sense remained.

  And there was more than that. Yes, he missed London; but he’d known that before he went down. That was natural; he’d lived there nearly all his adult life. But there had been a moment, in the Royal Oak, when he’d found himself imagining – what? That he could return there? Kitty would never go with him, he knew that. But he’d thought it anyway, just for a second. Christ.

  It didn’t mean anything, though. You could think about all sorts of things; it didn’t mean you wanted them to happen. And look at Geoff: he had no desire to be like that, a middle-aged man making a fool of himself. No, what he needed to do was come to terms with the fact that things had changed: really embrace it, instead of trying to keep one foot in a life that was past. Grow up, as Kitty might have said.

  He looked at the people walking in front of him: the two old men, the vicar, the husbands and wives, the children. Decent people; villagers – whatever that meant these days. He was never going to start going to church or anything, he was never going to sit on the bloody parish council. But perhaps belonging was as simple as deciding to. He quickened his pace to catch up.

  20

  Common nettle, purslane, dandelion; tormentil (high ground). A lesser stag beetle emerging.

  Despite having been up until the small hours the night before, James Albert Hirons woke around dawn. Sometimes these days he found himself confused first thing, and had to lie very still until the world assembled itself around him. But not today. His old bones ached, but for now his mind felt clear.

  He had gone to get a bit of fish the evening before. He’d arrived at the shop but they’d talked gibberish at him, said they didn’t sell fish, only newspapers and magazines and sweets. He’d turned to Edith, but she wasn’t there. After a while he’d remembered; the shame of it had caught him under the ribs. In the end a complete stranger had walked him home, like he was some kind of b
asket case. ‘No,’ he muttered to himself now, closing his eyes for a moment. ‘No.’

  He got out of bed, slowly, and went to sit on the cold porcelain for a piss. The bathroom smelled damp except on the very hottest days, and the grout between the old pink tiles was black. He tried, of course he did. But it was hard. And some things – like the bloody mat in there, the towelling grey and flat – they didn’t matter anyway. Not any more.

  He hawked and spat into the bowl, pulled the chain, then washed his face in cold water. His hands trembled for a moment as he held the threadbare yellow towel to his face. Gillian had told him once that the council sent a woman round to wash poor old George Jefferies. It didn’t bear thinking about; he knew he couldn’t have borne it in George’s place. No, he wouldn’t let it come to that.

  ‘It’s better than being in a home, Dad,’ Gillian had told him, daft as ever. ‘Home? Don’t call them that,’ he’d said.

  The sun poured in through the nets and he could hear a blackbird singing from somewhere nearby. Spring was almost over, he thought, pulling on his trousers and lifting the braces over his bony shoulders; the last he’d ever see. It was enough to make you weep. Children noticed the trees coming into leaf, but for most people what divided up the year was Christmas and trips abroad and school bloody holidays. God’s green acre: it was what he’d dreamed about when he’d been in Singapore, but apart from the loony bloody eco-warriors nobody these days gave two hoots about what was going on outside.

  Except the farmers, of course, he thought, taking the stairs down very slowly and putting the kettle on; they noticed. And he did, even now. A little part of him still thought of himself as a farmhand; always had, despite all those years making kettles and bloody washer-dryers.

  It had been hard to understand at first: rationing still on, the farmers told to grow more, but less and less farm work to be had. But then, he hadn’t made it back until ’46, and then there’d been the sanatorium; it had been a couple of years before he’d got his strength back, by which time he was at the back of the queue. Perhaps Edith was right, and it had been for the best; yet the conviction still lingered that, but for the war, and Edith, he’d have had a different life.

  Once he’d found an old iron coulter from a plough when he was out dipping with his grandson in the lake near the big house in Lodeshill. Even covered in rust he could tell how worn and notched it was, how well used. He’d tried to explain to the lad how it worked, but it was clear he hadn’t really caught on. He’d thrown it back, of course, like everything else; though once or twice since then he’d wondered how old it might have been. There were things that, until his own lifetime, had hardly changed for centuries. Most had now been swept away.

  He drank his tea black, rinsed the cup carefully and put it away; then he looked around the kitchen and whispered a last goodbye to Edith.

  It was time. Before he left he took his Pacific Star with its once-bright ribbon from the trouser pocket where it had lived for over half a century, passed his right thumb from habit over its familiar contours and placed it gently on the hall table. Then he pushed his feet into the boots he kept half laced to save bending, shrugged on his worsted jacket and walked out into the heavenly morning.

  After he had gone a breeze crept in at the open door and fluttered the pages of the Racing Post, obscuring and then revealing the medal, its royal cypher worn smooth by the old man’s anxious hands.

  The outline of Babb Hill was part of the architecture of Jamie’s self, like knowing which lintels he needed to duck his head under, or the way he wrote his name. He didn’t have to look for it on the horizon; he always knew which direction it was in, and its differing silhouettes from all sides: how the summit looked wreathed in cloud, the way the sun fell on its slopes and the cloud-shadows chased over it. He knew where the badgers dug into it, and the texture of the earth they brought out from its interior; he knew the weak-tea colour of the water in the clay pits. These things were so obvious that had he thought about it it would have seemed impossible that people in the very same county could live with only a vague image of Babb Hill in their minds. And although he dreamed so often of escape, the idea that all this knowledge would leave him – that one day these places might be to him a memory and nothing more – was not something he could easily conceive of.

  He’d woken early, like his grandfather, and had decided to climb the hill before breakfast. He took a short, steep route up to the summit, avoiding any dog walkers and early joggers who might be on the main track. Beneath the trees the damp ground was thickly clothed with the limp leaves of bluebells and wild garlic, dying back; the dew quickly soaked into his trainers, making his feet feel cold, but he knew that on the east-facing side the morning sun would be warm. As he climbed a woodpecker drummed once and was silent, and from somewhere deep in the trees a woodpigeon murmured complacently to itself.

  On warm nights there were often couples in the long grass on Babb Hill. Jamie had seen it a few times: pairs of pale knees and buttocks moving; cries that made his skin prickle and flush. Up at the trig point there were sometimes telescopes pointing skywards; it was a good place to look for meteors or read the map of stars above – the same stars, he often reminded himself, that had watched over the men who made their fort there thousands of years before. The fort was gone, but the hill itself was the same, and the shapes of the land around it. He wondered why it seemed so hard to believe.

  Now, though, the summit was deserted, and he was glad of it. He sat down with his back to the toposcope and looked out at the landscape below. The copse where the goshawks had nested was hidden in a fold of trees, but further away he could see the spire of St James’s marking Lodeshill’s position between the four farms, and the Boundway scoring a straight line past the village. Somewhere along it was the deer he’d killed – unless someone had taken it away for the pot by now, as his granddad had told him to. Further out was the dull stain of Connorville and the glittering motorway, and then the bluish rumour of hills. Buzzards mewed from the invisible staircases of the thermals overhead.

  Around him grasshoppers, having stilled themselves at his approach, restarted their tiny saws, and a magpie paced speculatively towards him where he sat with his arms loosely linked around his knees. The sun was warm on his face, and he could almost believe himself to be a child again, up here on a May morning with nothing to do for the rest of the day but inhabit this place in which he had been born as an animal does, unthinkingly and with something that was not love, but had something of love’s depth and simplicity.

  He looked at the valley below, the line of the water table made visible on its distant slopes by the old farms and hamlets built along the spring line. Somewhere down there was Mytton Park, its blank sheds humming inside with activity, the reed beds in the artificial lake filtering out the shit from the staff toilets. It still troubled him, why Lee and Megan and the others had abandoned him at the Vault. Had he embarrassed himself – or them? He couldn’t remember. In a few hours, when he got to work, he’d find out.

  Breakfast first, though, and then some time on the Corsa. The sound system was wired in now, though he hadn’t had a chance to test it out properly yet; not on the driveway, his mum would have gone spare. He’d take it out for that, turn it up, really feel the bass vibrate.

  This morning’s job was to fit a set of underglow LEDs that would make it look as though the car was floating on a pillow of blue light. He’d seen them in an auto magazine, and they were pretty cheap. When they’d come in the post his mum had said he was like one of those birds off the TV decorating a nest and hoping that a female would come; the way she’d said it was like a joke, but with a trace of mockery in it he couldn’t quite put his finger on. He’d told her that was just stupid; it wasn’t anything to do with girls.

  Jamie began to descend again, clouds gathering behind him to the south-west. A breeze picked up, shivering the young oak leaves as though the flanks of Babb Hill were sighing.

  ‘Bricewold,’ Jack said o
ut loud. It had finally come back to him, what this place reminded him of.

  It had been a bad night. Dreams had troubled him so that the boundary between waking and sleeping was uncertain, and he’d felt himself surrounded, part of some vast and shadowy throng. Finally he had cried out, waking himself with a great effort. There had been nobody there.

  When it began to grow light he had sat up and found that he was bone-tired, his lower back stiff, and so he had decided not to go to Woodwater today. Instead, he was in the grounds of the big Manor House in Lodeshill, picking his way through the low box maze towards the tennis court. There was no car in the drive, and no movement from inside; he’d checked. He wondered who the owners were: Russians? accountants? rock stars? A world away, no doubt, from the family who had passed it down through the generations and to whom the villagers of Lodeshill had for centuries tipped their hats. He pictured the long-gone carriage house, pictured the hounds massing at the gate.

  It was the tennis court that had made him think of Bricewold, a deserted village owned by the MoD where he’d spent a bitter winter many years ago. He had filed in, with a couple of dozen others, to its little church for a special Christmas service, and in the darkness afterwards he had simply slipped away. Someone at Twyford Down had put him on to it; soldiers still trained there, but not very often, and you could camp in the empty houses. He’d walked there, on the off chance; he was sick of protesters, their bickering and politics, and he had a sore on his leg that wouldn’t heal.

  That the army owned the valley in which Bricewold stood was immediately clear: notices informed him of the danger to his life, and in one field an old tank was rusting away, a buzzard heraldic on the gun turret, a freezing wind off Salisbury Plain ruffling the dappled feathers of its breast.