The Death of Grass

by John Christopher

  ‘What if it had been Mary?’ Olivia said. ‘Jane has rights as much as any of us.’

  ‘You’re wasting your time, Olivia,’ John said. ‘It’s a different world we’re living in. The girl went over to Pirrie of her own free will. There’s nothing else to be said. Off we go now.’

  Ann walked beside him as they set off, walking along the railway line. The valley narrowed sharply ahead of them, and the road, to the north, veered in towards them.

  ‘There’s something horrible about Pirrie,’ Ann said. ‘A coldness and a brutality. It’s terrible to think of putting that young girl in his hands.’

  ‘She did go to him voluntarily.’

  ‘Because she was afraid! The man’s a killer.’

  ‘We all are.’

  ‘Not in the same way. You didn’t make any attempt to stop it, did you? You and Roger could have stopped him. It wasn’t like the business with Millicent. You were only a couple of feet from him.’

  ‘And he had the safety catch on. Either of us could have shot him.’

  ‘Well?’

  ‘If there had been ten Janes and he had wanted them all, he could have had them. Pirrie’s worth more to us than they would be.’

  ‘And if it had been Mary – as Olivia said?’

  ‘Pirrie would have shot me before he mentioned the matter. He could have done so last night, you know, and very easily. I may be the leader here, but we’re still kept together by mutual consent. It doesn’t matter whether that consent is inspired by fear or not, as long as it holds. Pirrie and I are not going to frighten each other; we each know the other’s necessary. If either of us were put out of action, it might mean the difference between getting to the valley or not.’

  She said intensely: ‘And when we get there – will you be prepared to deal with Pirrie then?’

  ‘Wait till we get there. As to that –’

  He smiled, and she noticed it. ‘What?’

  ‘I don’t think Jane’s the kind of girl to remain afraid for long. She will shake herself out of it. And when she does… I wouldn’t trust her on night watch – Pirrie proposes taking her to bed with him. It seems odd to think of Pirrie as being over trustful – all the same, he’s already been mistaken in one wife.’

  ‘Even if she wanted to,’ Ann said, ‘what could she do? He may not look much, but he’s strong.’

  ‘That’s up to you and Olivia, isn’t it? You keep the cutlery items.’

  She looked at him, trying to estimate how seriously the remark had been intended.

  ‘But not until we get to the valley,’ he said. ‘She will have to put up with him until then, at any rate.’

  As they climbed up to Mossdale Head, the sky darkened continually, and gusts of rain swept in their faces. These increased as they neared the ridge, and they breasted it to see the western sky black and stormy over the rolling moors. They had four light plastic mackintoshes in the packs, which John told the women to put on. The boys would have to learn to contend with being wet; although the temperature was lower than it had been, the day was still reasonably warm.

  The rain thickened as they walked on. Within half an hour, men and boys were both soaked. John had crossed the Pennines by this route before, but only by car. There had been a sense of isolation about the pass even then, a feeling of being in a country swept of life, despite the road and the railway line that hugged it.

  That feeling now was more than doubly intensified. There were few things, John thought, so desolate as a railway line on which no train could be expected. And where the pattern of the moors seen from a moving car had been monotonous, the monotony to people on foot, struggling through rain squalls, was far greater. The moors themselves were barer, of course. The heather still grew, but the moorland grasses were gone; the outcrops of rocks jutted like teeth in the head of a skull.

  During the morning, they passed occasional small parties heading in the opposite direction. Once again, there was mutual suspicion and avoidance. One group of three had their belongings strapped on a donkey. John and the others stared at it with amazement. Someone presumably had kept it alive on dry fodder after the other beasts of burden were killed along with the cattle, but once away from its barn it would have to starve.

  Roger said: ‘A variation of the old sleigh-dog technique, I imagine. You get it to take you as far as you can, and then eat it.’

  ‘It’s a standing temptation to any other party you happen to meet, though, isn’t it?’ John said. ‘I can’t see them getting very far with that once they reach the Dale.’

  Pirrie said: ‘We could relieve them of it now.’

  ‘No,’ John said. ‘It isn’t worth our while, in any case. We’ve got enough meat to last us, and we should reach Blind Gill to-morrow. It would only be unnecessary weight.’

  Steve began limping shortly afterwards, and examination showed him to have a blistered heel.

  Olivia said: ‘Steve! Why didn’t you say something when it first started hurting?’

  He looked at the adult faces surrounding him, and his ten-year-old assurance deserted him. He began to cry.

  ‘There’s nothing to cry about, old man,’ Roger said. ‘A blistered heel is bad luck, but it’s not the end of the world.’

  His sobs were not the ordinary sobs of childhood, but those in which experience beyond a child’s range was released from its confinement. He said something, and Roger bent down to catch his words.

  ‘What was that, Steve?’

  ‘If I couldn’t walk – I thought you might leave me.’

  Roger and Olivia looked at each other. Roger said:

  ‘Nobody’s going to leave you. How on earth could you think that?’

  ‘Mr Pirrie left Millicent,’ Steve said.

  John intervened. ‘He’d better not walk on it. It will only get worse.’

  ‘I’ll carry him,’ Roger said. ‘Spooks, will you carry my gun for me?’

  Spooks nodded. ‘I’d like to.’

  ‘You and I will take him in turns, Rodge,’ John said. ‘We’ll manage him all right. Good job he’s a little ’un.’

  Olivia said: ‘Roger and I can take the turns. He’s our boy. We can carry him.’

  She had not spoken to John since the incident of Jane and Pirrie. John said to her:

  ‘Olivia – I do the arranging around here. Roger and I will carry Steve. You can take the pack of whoever happens to be doing it at the time.’

  Their eyes held for a moment, and then she turned away.

  Roger said: ‘All right, old son. Up you get.’

  Their progress immediately after this was a little faster, since Steve had been acting as a brake, but John was not deceived by it. The carrying of a passenger, even a boy as small as Steve, added to their difficulties. He kept them going until they had nearly got to the end of Garsdale, before he called a halt for their midday meal.

  The wind, which had been carrying the rain into their faces, had dropped, but the rain itself was still falling, and in a steadier and more soaking downpour. John looked round the unpromising scene.

  ‘Anybody see a cave and a pile of firewood stacked inside? I thought not. A cold snack today, and water. And we can rest our legs a little.’

  Ann said: ‘Couldn’t we find somewhere dry to eat it?’

  About fifty yards along the road, there was a small house, standing back. John followed her gaze towards it.

  ‘It might be empty,’ he said. ‘But we should have to go up to it and find out, shouldn’t we? And then it might not be empty after all. I don’t mind us taking risks when it’s for something we must have, like food, but isn’t worth it for half an hour’s shelter.’

  ‘Davey’s soaked,’ she said.

  ‘Half an hour won’t dry him out. And that’s all the time we can spare.’ He called to the boy: ‘How are you, Davey? Wet?’

  Davey nodded. ‘Yes, Dad.’

  ‘Try laughing drily.’

  It was an old joke. Davey did his best to smile at it. John went over an
d rumpled his wet hair.

  ‘You’re doing fine,’ he said. ‘Really fine.’

  The western approach to Garsdale had been through a narrow strip of good grazing land which now, in the steady rain, was a band of mud, studded here and there with farm buildings. They looked down to Sedbergh, resting between hills and valley on the other side of the Rawthey. Smoke lay above it, and drifted westwards along the edge of the moors. Sedbergh was burning.

  ‘Looters,’ Roger said.

  John swung his glasses over the stone-built town.

  ‘We’re meeting the north-western stream now; and they’ve had the extra day to get here. All the same, it’s a bit of a shaker. I thought this part would still be quiet.’

  ‘It might not be so bad,’ Roger said, ‘if we cut north straight away and get past on the higher ground. It might not be so bad up in the Lune valley.’

  Pirrie said: ‘When a town like that goes under, I should expect all the valleys around to be in a dangerous condition. It is not going to be easy.’

  John had directed the glasses beyond the ravaged town to the mouth of the dale along which they had proposed to travel. He could make out movements but it was impossible to know what they constituted. Smoke rose from isolated buildings. There was an alternative route, across the moors to Kendal, but that also took them over the Lune. In any case if Sedbergh had fallen, was there any reason to think things were any better around Kendal?

  Pirrie glanced at him speculatively. ‘If I may offer a comment, I think we are under-armed for the conditions that lie ahead. Those people with the donkey – we should probably have got a gun or two out of them, apart from the animal. They would hardly have had the temerity to travel as they were doing, unarmed.’

  Roger said: ‘It might not be as bad as it looks. We shall have to make the effort, anyway.’

  John looked out over the confluence of valleys and rivers.

  ‘I don’t know. We may find ourselves walking into something we can’t cope with. It might be too late then.’

  ‘We can’t stay here, can we?’ said Roger. ‘And we can’t go back, so we must go forward.’

  John turned towards Pirrie. He realized, as he did so, that, although Roger might be his friend, Pirrie was his lieutenant. It was Pirrie’s coolness and judgement on which he had come to rely.

  ‘I think we need more than just guns. There aren’t enough of us. If we’re going to be sure of getting to Blind Gill, we shall have to snowball. What do you think?’

  Pirrie nodded, considering the point. ‘I’m inclined to agree. Three men are no longer an adequate number for defence.’

  Roger said impatiently: ‘What do we do then? Hang out a banner, with a sign on it: “Recruits Welcomed”?’

  ‘I suggest we make a halt here,’ John said. ‘We’re still on the pass, and we’ll get parties going both ways across the Pennines. They will be less likely to be downright looters, too. The looters will be happy enough down in the valleys.’

  They looked again down the vista their position commanded. Even in the rain it was very picturesque. And, even in the rain, the houses down there were burning.

  Pirrie said thoughtfully: ‘We could ambush parties as they came through – there’s enough cover about a hundred yards back.’

  ‘There aren’t enough of us to make a press-gang,’ John said. ‘We need volunteers. After all, if they have guns we should have to give them back to them.’

  Roger said: ‘What do we do, then? Make camp? By the side of the road?’

  ‘Yes,’ John said. He looked at his bedraggled group of followers. ‘Let’s hope not for long.’

  They had to wait over an hour for their first encounter, and then it was a disappointing one. They saw a little party struggling up the road from the valley, and, as they drew nearer, could see that they were eight in number. There were four women, two children – a boy about eight and a girl who looked younger – and two men. They were wheeling two perambulators, stacked high with household goods; a saucepan fell off when they were about fifty yards away and rolled away with a clatter. One of the women stooped down wearily to pick it up.

  The two men, like their womenfolk, looked miserable and scared. One of them was well over fifty; the other, although quite young, was physically weedy.

  Pirrie said: ‘I hardly think there is anything here that will be to our advantage.’

  He and Roger were standing with John on the road itself, holding their guns. The women and children were resting on a flat-topped stone wall nearby.

  John shook his head. ‘I think you’re right. No weapons, either, I should think. One of the kids may have a water-pistol.’

  The approaching party stopped when they caught sight of the three men standing in the road, but after a whispered consultation and a glance backwards into the smouldering valley, they came on again. Fear stood on them more markedly now. The older man walked in front, and tried to look unconcerned, with poor success. The girl began to cry, and one of the women tugged at her, simultaneously frantic and furtive, as though afraid the noise would in some way betray them.

  As they passed, in silence, John thought how natural it would have been, a few days before, to give some kind of greeting, and how unnatural the same greeting would have sounded now.

  Roger said quietly: ‘How far do you think they’ll get?’

  ‘Down into Wensleydale, possibly. I don’t know. They may survive a week, if they’re lucky.’

  ‘Lucky? Or unlucky?’

  ‘Yes. Unlucky, I suppose.’

  Pirrie said: ‘They appear to be turning back.’

  John looked. They had travelled perhaps seventy-five yards farther on along the road; now they had turned and were making their way back, still pushing the perambulators. By turning, they had got the rain in their faces instead of on their backs. The little girl’s mackintosh gaped at the neck; her fingers fumbled, trying to fasten it, but she could not.

  They stopped a short distance away. The older man said:

  ‘We wondered if you was waiting for anything up here – if there was anything we could tell you, maybe.’

  John’s eyes examined him. A manual worker of some kind; the sort of man who would give a lifetime’s faithful inefficient service. On his own, under the new conditions, he would have small chance of survival, his only hope lying in the possibility of attaching himself to some little Napoleonic gangster of the dales who would put up with his uselessness for the sake of his devotion. With his present entourage, even that was ruled out.

  ‘No,’ John said. ‘There’s nothing you can tell us.’

  ‘We was heading across the Pennines,’ the man went on. ‘We reckoned it might be quieter over in those parts. We thought we might find a farm or something, out of the way, where they’d let us work and give us some food. We wouldn’t want much.’

  A few months ago, the pipe-dream had probably been a £75,000 win on the football pools. Their chances of that had been about as good as the chances of their more modest hopes were now. He looked at the four women; only one of them was sufficiently youthful to stand a chance of surviving on sexual merits, and with youth her entire store of assets was numbered. They were all bedraggled. The two children had wandered away, in the direction of the wall where Ann and the others were sitting. The boy was not wearing shoes, but plimsolls, which were wet through.

  John said harshly: ‘You’d better get on, then, hadn’t you?’

  The man persisted: ‘You think we might find a place like that?’

  ‘You might,’ John said.

  ‘All this trouble,’ one of the women said. ‘It won’t last long, will it?’

  Roger looked down into the valley. ‘Only till hell freezes over.’

  ‘Where was you thinking of heading?’ asked the older man. ‘Were you thinking of going into Yorkshire as well?’

  John said: ‘No. We’ve come from there.’

  ‘We’re not bothered about which way we go, for that matter. We only thought it might be quiet
er across the Pennines.’

  ‘Yes. It might.’

  The mother of the two children spoke: ‘What my father means is – do you think we could go whichever way you’re going? It would mean there was more of us, if we ran into any trouble. I mean – you must be looking for a quiet place, too. You’re respectable people, not like those down there. Respectable folk should stick together at a time like this.’

  John said: ‘There are something like fifty million people in this country. Probably over forty-nine million of them are respectable, and looking for a quiet place. There aren’t enough quiet places to go round.’

  ‘Yes, that’s why it’s better for folks to stick together. Respectable folk.’

  ‘How long have you been on the road?’ John asked her.

  She looked puzzled. ‘We started this morning – we could see fires in Sedbergh, and they were burning the Follins farm, and that’s not more than three miles from the village.’

  ‘We’ve had three days’ start on you. We aren’t respectable any longer. We’ve killed people on our way here, and we may have to kill more. I think you’d better carry on by yourselves, as you were doing.’

  They stared at him. The older man said at last:

  ‘I suppose you had to. I suppose a man’s got to save himself and his family any way he can. They got me on killing in the First War, and the Jerries hadn’t burned Sedbergh then, nor the Follins farm. If you’ve got to do things, then you’ve got to.’

  John did not reply. At the wall, the two children were playing with the others, scrambling up and along the wall and down in a complicated kind of obstacle race. Ann saw his glance, and rose to come towards him.

  ‘Can we go with you?’ the man said. ‘We’ll do as you say – I don’t mind killing if it’s necessary, and we can do our share of the work. We don’t mind which way you’re going – it’s all the same as far as we’re concerned. Apart from being in the army, I’ve lived all my life in Carbeck. Now I’ve had to leave it, it doesn’t matter where I go.’

  ‘How many guns have you got?’ John asked.

  He shook his head. ‘We haven’t got any guns.’