by Paul Kearney
And then there is something behind me too. The clopping of a horse’s hooves on the road, clear and loud, and the rattling of a cart. I stand there at the side of the road, feeling trapped, and cannot decide whether to go on, to go back, or to plunge into the hedge and hide.
‘Whoa there!’
Too late to do anything but stand fast and see what comes. The horse and cart walk slowly up to me. An old grey horse with a white face, and blinkers and a big collar, drawing a two-wheeled wooden cart – and upon it there is a man in a flat cap smoking a pipe. He clicks his tongue a little, the cart trundles past, and he nods at me. He is an oldish man with a drawn face which has been outdoors all its life, and he wears leather leggings and a raggedy corduroy jacket with the elbows out.
He leans back on the reins.
‘Have you far to go lass?’ he asks me, over his shoulder.
‘Botley,’ I say.
He looks down the long and empty road with the dark hedges hemming it in, and speaks around the stem of his pipe.
‘Hop on then. I’ll save you a step.’
I look at him, unsure, and he turns in his seat and smiles. ‘I got me a parcel to pick up at the station. Happen that’s where you are headed?’
‘It is,’ I find myself saying, though I had not thought of it until that moment.
‘Well, climb up then. Morning’s going by.’
I clamber up beside him without thinking more about it.
‘Walk on.’ The horse leans into the traces, shakes her head, and we are off. It is much more agreeable sitting up here off the road, and I can see over the hedges now.
‘A Happy New Year to thee,’ the man says, puffing on his pipe. ‘Though it be a cold ’un.’
I say nothing. We pass the point where the black shape disappeared, and there is no gap in the hedge, just the thicket of hawthorn and stumpy ash. I wonder if I imagined it.
‘G’won now,’ the man says, and slaps the reins on the horse’s back. The mare breaks into a trot. The houses of Botley and west Oxford are not much more than a mile ahead.
‘Off travellin’ are we?’ the man asks.
‘I’m going to see my aunt in… in’ – the name comes to me out of nowhere – ‘Uffington.’
‘Ah. That’s a tidy step for a little lass on her own. But I see you have all with you.’ He nods at my knapsack. ‘I hopes your mother knows what you’re at, out alone at this hour.’
‘She knows.’
The man grunts, and leans forward on his knees. ‘There’s gypsies in them there woods behind ’ee girl. You needs to watch yourself on the road, these days. They had themselves some eggs of mine, not that I begrudge a morsel to hungry folk, but you can’t watch ’em close enough.’
We are back in the town now, and the streets are very quiet, but I hear the whistle of a train in the distance.
‘They’re all nursing a sore head this morning, the city folk,’ the man says. ‘Last night was the end of a long ten year, and today begins another one.’ We sit in silence for a while. A motor car passes us with its headlights burning, but the old mare does not even glance at it.
‘Uffington. ’Tis at the foot of the Downs. You’ll be taking a train to Swindon then,’ the man says.
‘Yes.’ I had not thought of that before now, but when the man says this, it sounds right.
‘I was on a train once. Nasty, smelly things, and noisy too. Easy there you damned fool –’ This to the horse, which had snuffled and capered a little as we passed a side-street. I look down it, and there is a man standing there, a tramp wrapped in rags with two eyes bright as marbles in a bearded face. He stands stock still and watches us go by, and I shiver.
We are in Oxford proper again, and there are more motor cars, and people walking up and down muffled against the cold. Normal life seems to have started again, and I can hear the shriek and puff of the trains and see the pale smoke of one hanging over the station. The man steers the horse with clicks of his mouth and little tugs of the reins, and finally brings the cart to a halt in front of the doors. Streams of people pass by.
‘Here we are. Safe and sound. I wish thee well lass.’
I hop down from the cart and look up at him. ‘Thank you.’
He bends over and offers me his hand. It is huge, and the palm is as hard as wood.
‘I’m Gabriel,’ he says with a smile. ‘I see the train a huffing and a puffing for you, girl. Get thee on it, and don’t look back.’
I don’t know what to say to him, but nod, and walk away, towards the growing crowd of people which are going in and out of the station doors. When I look back, I see him sat on the cart smoking his pipe, the pale horse standing as still as a figure in a painting. Then I walk through to the ticket office, and he is gone.
THE TRAIN GOES south, and the carriage is half full. People in caps and people in hats and people with parcels on their knees and people yawning and people nodding with sleep, and the sun rising higher beyond the windows and the country going past outside and the taste of acrid coal smoke in my mouth. I cannot remember the last time I was this far from Oxford, and I have Pie and my knapsack on my knee and my ticket in one fist, and my other hand is in my pocket counting out the shillings and pennies I have left.
I half expect to see the black shape of a policemen make his way down the corridor of the compartment. Will they look for me? Do they even know that I have gone? I wonder if the inspector in the trench-coat will think a runaway orphan worth chasing after.
For a few minutes I sit there with my face turned to the window and stare out at England passing by, and think of Pa, and let the tears come while no-one can see them.
I wonder if Miss Hawcross is relieved that I am gone. Sometimes I think that she seems as lost as I am in the world. And I feel sorry for all the times I thought mocking things of her and did not attend to her lessons, but sat all sullen and slow while she whacked me with her ruler and tried to make me learn French and algebra, and which queen lost her head. That is all gone now, and I have no need to learn those things anymore, but I do wish I had made more of an effort for her sake.
I wake up from a doze and we are in Swindon already it seems, and I am barely able to leap out of the carriage behind a fat woman with a lot of cases before the whistle is blown and the train is off again in a cloud and a shriek and a volley of puffs. It would all be so much more jolly, this stealing away and traveling the country, if only there was someone to share it with. As it is, there is only Pie and me, and we are getting wry looks from people on the platform.
I walk out of their stares and in the waiting room there is a map on the wall, and lines of roads and railways all over England like the veins in a leaf. I see names there I have heard before, but they are only names with no memory to paint them.
I was on a battleship once, which traveled the high seas all the way from Greece, but the thought of getting across a single English county leaves me bewildered. I feel very small and alone and lost, and I know that I smell as though I have stepped out of a bonfire, and cramps are knuckling at my tummy, hunger I suppose.
Perhaps the people jostling by think I am a gypsy, for I am all smoke-smudged and ragged, and there are still bits of briar in my hair which I try to tease out when I think no-one is looking.
I had begun to think of myself as English, my Greekness quite gone, but I realize now as the people look at me that I am not and I never was. My very face is different from theirs. No matter how much French I learned or how many kings and queens I memorized, that was always going to be true.
Well, hang them. I have to go east now, out of the towns again and into the open country, the blank spaces on the map that the roads avoid. That is my place now. It will be woods and firelight from here on in, and sleeping on the ground and smelling of woodsmoke.
So I begin walking. As much to get away from things as to get towards them. And it is easier, in a way, to do that, for it means that every step is progress. ‘If you do not greatly care where you are going, then it is impossible to be
lost,’ I tell Pie.
But I am brought up short outside the station all the same, wondering which way to go. As I stand there a well-dressed man goes by, and as he passes he gives me a quick glance, frowns, and then flips a sixpence down on the pavement in front of me before walking on.
I pick it up. So this is what it is to be a beggar.
Well, sixpence is sixpence. I pocket it and walk on.
WHAT A DREARY place. I pass lines of red-brick houses all crammed together, and people hurrying without a word for one another. An omnibus goes past, crowded and bright with an advertisement for Bovril.
Guinness makes you strong. Camp Coffee, drunk by men in kilts. Craven A cigarettes. Pond’s cream for a glowing complexion. The world is brown and grey except for the colours on the hoardings. I wonder if Louise Brooks uses Pond’s cream. I wonder if she has ever slept on the ground and watched a fire in the night.
The cramps spike up in my middle and make me pause and gasp a little. I wonder if it is something I ate yesterday, but all I remember is nibbling on a biscuit. The mere thought of food makes me feel sick now.
There is coal smoke in the air here, rising from the chimneys in yellow streams. On one wall an ancient ragged poster has a soldier with a huge moustache who is pointing at me. You, it says beneath his glowering face, as though he is accusing me of something.
East is where the sun rises, and while there is no sun to be seen here I know by the sky where it is hidden, and I tramp along with that lighter cloud in my face. I pass factories as I go, waste ground and broken glass and tall chimneys, lorries with flapping canvas tilts, pubs still closed with their windows like blank painted eyes.
A little brown and white dog goes snuffling past me in the gutter, raises his head as I go by and looks at me with the sweetest, most hopeful face; but as I slow he twitches away as if expecting a blow and runs off with his tail down. Another orphan, I suppose. I wonder if I will ever look as frightened and hungry as he does. And I feel a sudden blast of hatred for all the people who walk past him without so much as a glance or a kind word. What a horrible place. How horrible the people. And the pain in my stomach comes and goes in stabbing waves.
I have no time to be sick. There is nothing to do but keep walking.
At last, I leave behind the streets of little houses and the hanging reek of coal smoke. There is open country ahead, on my left flat and wide; on my right the road skirts a series of hills, all joined up and spotted with copses and woods. It travels to the horizon, the high ground, and as I trudge on the sun comes out from under a gravel-grey cloud, and the light falls on my face as if to show me the way.
My spirits lift a little. I see a signpost – Wanborough – and the road takes me up along the side of the ridge, and I am rising with it, and to the north the vastness of the country opens out under the sunlight, patched with woods and villages, all quiet with distance.
Far, far off to the north-east, I can make out the spires and towers of Oxford, just for a moment while the light is clear. I am almost walking back towards it, but it looks so far in the distance as to be a different kingdom entirely, a far place removed by the miles and miles of quiet countryside in between. For a second I am so intensely homesick that I feel almost short of breath.
And the clouds roll over the sun again, greying out the splendid view. I tuck Pie in the breast of my coat, grasp the straps of my pack, and labour up the steepening slopes.
Near the top of the rise there is a crossroads where a road comes down from the hill and then arcs across my path and extends out into the distance, as straight as a ruler’s edge. The slope drops off steeply to my left, and there is a scattering of bare trees where the ways meet, and a single, squat stone as tall as a gatepost but much more massive.
And sitting upon the stone is a black shadow, a man. With the light behind him I cannot make out his face until I am closer, and I brace myself to say good day – but a hundred yards from that he leaps easily off the stone and begins walking towards me. And a few yards after that I see it is Luca, and I begin to smile and quicken my pace.
He stops as I draw close, and I see his thin face, and long nose, and he holds up a hand. I am so happy to see something familiar in the world again that I almost break into a run, but the pain poking through my stomach keeps me at a slow walk and I am panting as we come together.
‘Here’s a fine thing,’ he says, and he pats me on the shoulder. ‘Off on our holidays, are we?’
I bend over, clenching my eyes shut, trying not to be sick. ‘How are you here? How did you know?’
‘Bless you girl, everyone is out looking for you. Thank your luck it was me as found you first.’
‘Why… why should you be looking for me?’
‘Queenie said we must. We knows what happened to your Da. It was the Roadmen did that, she said, though we had been watching the place. They must’ve got by us, and your Da opened the door to ’em… I’m right sorry, Anna, for what happened. We should have stayed closer.’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘Let me take that sack o’ yourn. You look white as a snowdrop.’ He peels the knapsack from my back and slings it over one shoulder as lightly as though it were stuffed with cotton wool.
‘The Roadmen? Why would they hurt Pa?’ I am bewildered, but so glad to lose the weight of the pack.
‘Queenie’ll tell you. She knows. She had us all out watching the roads. She read things in the fire, and saw you was meant to be with us. You’s got the Old Blood in you, girl – on your mother’s side I suspect. I’m here to take you to the camp. We’re up on the Old Chalk Road, the Ridgeway. It’s a bit of a step, near eight or nine miles. Are you game?’
I manage to smile at him. A great relief runs through me, as welcome as hot chocolate on a cold day. I am not alone, and I am no longer lost. Someone else is here now who knows where to go.
‘I’m game. I want to go to Queenie. There’s nowhere else now. They were going to put me in the workhouse.’
Luca takes my arm, staring at my face all the while. A flash of anger lights up his eyes. ‘Workhouse my arse,’ he growls, and his fingers squeeze tight. ‘We’ll sort you out, Anna. We’ll keep you hid from the peelers and the Roadmen. You’re to be family now, Queenie says.’ He pauses. ‘You are special, like. I ain’t sure why, but there it is.’
We walk on, but Luca turns me around until we are on the long straight road which is running up the hill. ‘Up here,’ he says. ‘This was laid down by the ancient Romans, this track, and if we follows it up the ridge it leads to the Old Way our folk has been using for time out of mind. One good haul, and then we’re up on the high downs, and can look down on the whole world.’
But I feel faint, and now there is a wetness between my legs, a stickiness. I look down, and see there is a thin line of blood running past my knee. My legs buckle, and Luca takes my weight.
‘Lord, girl, you’re not well.’
‘I have to… let me sit down.’
The road is deserted. I reach down, and my hand comes up bloody. I stare at the blood in astonishment and fear. ‘Luca, I’m hurt.’
He stares. His mouth opens and closes. ‘Let me get you summat for that.’ He begins rummaging in the knapsack, and comes up with a woolen sock.
‘Here, use this.’
‘Luca, I have to see a doctor.’ I feel a rising panic. I don’t see how I could have hurt myself there, in that place.
‘This your first time?’
‘What do you mean?’
He puts the sock in my hand. ‘All women bleed, with every moon.’ His face is reddening. ‘It’s a normal thing. It means you ain’t a little nipper anymore. You is a woman now. Here – soak it up.’
‘Soak it up?’
‘Use the damn thing, girl.’ He stands up and turns away.
I do as he says, tucking the sock inside my knickers. ‘Will it stop?’
‘Takes a while, a few days.’
‘Days?’
‘So I hear.’ He rubs
the back of his neck. ‘Didn’t no-one ever tell you this?’
‘No.’
He shakes his head, looking down at the wide countryside below. ‘T’ain’t nothing to worry about. It’s a womanly thing. Means you’re grown up, in a way.’
‘How horrible.’
‘Don’t be looking at me to tell you more. It’s not a man’s business.’ He bends and takes up the knapsack once more, still not looking at me. ‘When you’re ready, we’ll go on. Queenie and Jaelle can tell you all about it. T’ain’t my place…’
He rubs his long nose, and coughs. ‘Well?’
I stand up, feeling very odd. I feel even Pie is looking at me differently, or I at her.
‘All right then. Perhaps I’ll feel better walking.’ Irritated, I say, ‘You can look at me now.’
He glances back. ‘Well and good. Follow me, then.’
‘But not too fast.’
He growls a little. ‘Aye, right.’
WE SET OFF again, me trailing behind him as we make our way up the side of the ridge. Close-cropped grass, and a cold wind which strengthens as we get to the top. The view opens out even further, but I am not attending anymore. I feel as though my body has somehow betrayed me. More than that, I feel there is a barrier between me and Luca now, as though I have been set down on the other side of an impenetrable dark hedge and there are no gaps in it and never will be again.
We turn off the long straight Roman road, back into the face of the sun, and there is a last, steep slope which has me gasping and bent over.
‘This is Fox Hill,’ Luca says, not looking back. He sounds positively jaunty, and I envy him his quick, even stride that eats up the slope without obvious effort. I am like a little worn out slug in his wake, and the space widens between us as he strides ahead.
We are at the top at last, and I can see the line of high hills and plateaus extending out to the east for as far as the eye can see. A different world.
This is empty country, not like the Oxfordshire I have known, though I’m no longer sure which county we are in. The wind is cold and raw, and there is nothing to break its path up here. At another time it might be bracing and the view would be worth the chill, but right now I am almost dismayed at how strange England looks to me. I had always thought of it as a country with close horizons, but this is something else entirely. Wide open and vast under the sky. It is a land for wandering sheep, and the riding of horses, and it seems immense even in the grey light of the winter morning.