Then, quite suddenly, everything was sorted out to everyone’s satisfaction and the women started to fill pots from the stream while the men and the older boys straggled off toward the nearest copse.
“You come too, Nicky,” called Gopal.
Halfway to the trees they came to a neat stack of fencing posts which the men picked up and carried back for firewood while the boys and Nicky went on.
As they reached the edge of the wood they heard a scuffling and snorting, and about twenty deer flounced away uphill, then turned to watch them from beyond throwing range.
“If only I had a gun!” said one of the older boys with a laugh. “Pow! Wump! Kerzoingg!”
“No!” cried Nicky.
“A bow and arrow, perhaps,” said Gopal in a teasing voice.
“Yes, that would be all right,” said Nicky, seriously.
It took them some time to gather dry twigs and branches and pile them together for dragging down to the camp. By then the men had fetched the whole pile of fencing posts and were sawing them into short logs. Soon four neat fires were sending invisible flames into the strong, slant sun. Pots boiled. Some of the men were cutting bracken up the hill, others were rigging a mysterious screen. A child fell into the stream, but luckily Kewal was sitting on the bank, brooding at the passing water, and he snatched it out. The child was scolded for falling in and Kewal for not doing his share of the work. Nicky half dozed, and wondered whether it was all a dream.
“Come and wash, Nicky,” said Neena, “if you want to.”
There was nothing she wanted more. The women were queueing to wash behind the screen, using barely more than a mugful of hot water each in a collapsible canvas baby bath. Nicky, ashamed at her month’s grime, used more than her share of water, but nobody complained. Cousin Punam inspected her scratches and dabbed some nasty-smelling stuff along the sore place where her collar had been rubbing. Neena borrowed clean clothes for her from another mother. Then she joined the chattering laundry party.
A frowning woman, darker than the others and with flecks of gray in her hair, hung out her own clothes beside Nicky and looked at her several times without speaking.
“We Sikhs are a very clean people,” she said at last, in an accusing voice. “We are cleaner than Europeans.”
“I like being clean too,” said Nicky.
“Good,” said the woman without smiling.
Then Nicky was called over to where the men, who had also been washing and laundering, were holding a council. Gopal had told them about the gun and the bow, and now they settled down to ask her random questions about what they could or could not do with safety. It was difficult because some of the questions made her sick and unhappy again; besides, the way they all asked different questions at the same time, or started discussions in Punjabi among themselves, or became involved in flaring arguments about things that didn’t seem to matter at all—all this muddled her attempts at sensible answers. If she hadn’t been so tired she would have laughed at them several times, but soon she realized that it wouldn’t have been a good idea. They were too proud and prickly to take kindly to being laughed at by an outsider. She thought they wouldn’t actually hurt her, not now; but looking at the rich beards and the strong teeth and the dark eyes, fiery and secret, she was sure that they could be very cruel to their enemies.
And Nicky wasn’t an enemy—but she was determined not to be a friend either. As the big uncle had said, she was to help them and they were to help her, but one day that would end, and it must end without hurting her. She realized that her raid on the pub had been partly a way of saying that she didn’t belong, that the Sikhs had no other claims on her than the single contract of alliance. She was their canary, but she was neither friend nor enemy.
While one of the longest arguments straggled on, Nicky noticed a movement just beyond the group. Four or five deer, long accustomed to the idea that people mean picnickers, and picnickers mean scraps of food, had come nosing up. Uncle Chacha, who hadn’t spoken as much as the others so far, now broke into the argument in Punjabi, shifting a couple of feet back out of the circle as he did so. The deer shied away at his movement, then drifted slowly in again.
“Do not look at them, Miss Gore,” said one of the uncles. “A wild animal is made more nervous by the gaze of the hunter.”
“I do wish everyone would call me Nicky,” she said. “Miss Gore sounds like somebody’s aunt.”
Smiles glowed amid the beards.
“Okay,” said several voices; but they said it quietly, and when the discussion rambled on it did so without any sudden bursts of shouting which might disturb a wild animal.
She never saw Uncle Chacha strike because she was carefully not looking straight at the deer. But in the corner of her eye there was a flash of movement, a silent explosion followed by one sharp thud. Then the deer were bounding away and all the Sikhs were on their feet, crowding around and cheering. Nicky jostled through to see what had happened and found Uncle Chacha standing, stave in hand, by what looked like a pale brown sack. He hung his head with exactly Kaka’s shyness—he must be the fat boy’s father. Then Nicky saw that the sack had a spindly leg, and a round eye big as a halfpenny, dull and unwinking.
“He broke its neck with his lathi,” said Kewal proudly. “One blow, bim, like that. We’ll have roast venison for supper.”
The council was over. Nicky raced twigs on the stream with Gopal and his friends for a bit, then joined in a game of blindman’s buff. Then all the children sat in a circle around the cart to hear the old lady tell them a story. Nicky went off to play with a tiny brown baby, Neena’s niece, who kicked and gurgled on a pink towel. After that she curled up and slept amid the tickling grasses.
It was almost dark when they woke her, and the dewy dusk smelled beautifully of roasted meat. They all sat on the trampled grass in a ragged circle around the fires; even the smallest babies were awake again, staring from their mothers’ laps at the wavering flames. The Sikhs looked stranger still as the night deepened; the men’s beards became huge shadows—shadows with no shape to cast them—and in these shadows a row of teeth would gleam for a moment when a mouth opened to talk or smile or chew; the eyes too shone weird in the weird light. They looked like a ring of pirates, murderous invaders.
The venison was charred at the edges and tough to chew, but full of delicious juices even if you did have to spit out the pithy gobbets of fiber that were left unswallowable at the end of each mouthful. The Sikhs had made a curry sauce to dip the meat into, and passed it around in pots, but it was too hot for Nicky. The grown-ups ate a flattish scone-like bread called chapati, which they’d brought with them, but the children preferred to finish off the cheese biscuits from the pub. The drinking water was still tepid from its boiling, but delicious after a month of lemon soda.
When they’d finished eating, the big man stood up by the old lady’s cart and read in a solemn voice from a book. Sometimes the Sikhs answered him, all together.
“Prayers,” whispered Gopal in Nicky’s ear.
Some of the babies were asleep again before he’d finished, and now they were settled into their prams. An awning had been built over the old lady’s cart, and the cut bracken piled into mounds under that and the other carts for the smaller children to sleep on. The older children and the grown-ups slept in the open, women and girls in one group, men and boys in the other. Somebody had a spare blanket to lend to Nicky. The bracken was surprisingly comfortable.
“You see?” said Neena as they were sorting themselves out. “It takes a long time to make a camp. It’s a lot of work. We cannot hope to march more than ten miles a day, with the children to think about and the carts and prams to push.”
“Where are you going to?” said Nicky.
“We do not know. We’ll just go until we can find a place where we can live. Perhaps it is across the sea, but I hope not.”
Chapter 3
GOOD LAND, CLEAN WATER
A place where they could live.
They came to it eight days later, but did not recognize it at first. They thought it was just a sensible place to stop for a few days so that Rani, Neena’s sister-in-law, could have her baby. On the left of the lane stood a raw, ugly square brick farmhouse with metal-frame windows; then, a little further up the hill, was a brick shed; then a tiny brand-new bungalow; and then, for them to camp in, an old brick farmyard built like a fort with a single gateway, an old barn down one side, and on the others single-story cattle sheds and grain stores. A hundred yards on, right on the ridge of the hill, loomed two vast new concrete barns and a cluster of grain towers. On the other side of the lane there was only a single house, opposite the farmyard. Once it had been two old cottages for farm laborers, but someone had run them together and smartened them up for an artist to live in.
He’d gone, and so had all the other people. Every house was empty. No cattle lowed for milking, no cat miaowed on any doorstep. Hundreds of birds clattered in the hedges around the artist’s cottage, but the fanner had hauled out every other hedge on his land to make it easier to cultivate the flowing steppes of hay and wheat and barley that now stood rippling in the upland wind across six hundred acres.
A mile and a half down the hill you could see the tower of Felpham Church, warm brick, rising amid lindens, seeming to move nearer when the afternoon sun shone full on it, and then to drift away when a cloud shadow hit the sun. You could see only a few roofs of Felpham, although it was quite a big village. Beyond that was distance.
And the distance really was distance, although the farm stood barely a hundred and fifty feet above the plain which stretched to the northeast. For twenty miles there was nothing else as high. There were no real landmarks, except the now useless electric pylons. A double row of these swooped across the slope between the farm and the village, but Nicky tried not to see them. Instead she gazed out beyond them to the mottled leagues, blue and gray and green, that reached toward London. Though they had been settled here for weeks she felt that she still could count every footstep of the road they had come.
It was the people she remembered most. First the old tramp who had come, snuffling like a hedgehog, up to their camp on Esher Common and asked for food. The Sikhs had simply made room for him, dirty as he was, and fed him all he wanted. He must have been half crazy, for he seemed to notice no difference between them and other people, nor between these times and other times, but just mumbled and chewed, and at last lurched away into the dark without a word of thanks.
But the first real people they’d met—ordinary English people, wearing English clothes—had been at Ripley. And they’d been enemies. A dozen men and women had run out of a pub at the sound of the iron wheels on the road. For a while they’d simply stared as the march of Sikhs moved slowly past, but then one of the women had said something mocking to the men, then a man had shouted and all the men were throwing stones and bottles at the Sikhs while the women cursed and jeered. Kaka had been hit by a stone, but had managed not to cry. Nicky had rushed from the line, shouting to the men to stop it; their attitude changed, and for a moment she’d thought they’d heard her and understood, until the rear guard of the Sikhs rushed past her, staves whirling. The Englishmen had broken and run, while their women cowered against the wall. As the procession moved out of Ripley there were catcalls from behind walls, and clods of earth lobbed into the line, but no one had followed them. And the people working the fields paid no attention as they marched by, grim and silent.
They’d camped that night in a field north of Guildford, on the banks of the river Wey, and had held another council. The discussion sounded earnest and subdued, and after it a party of men had gone night-raiding into Guildford, though there’d still seemed to be plenty of food left in the cardboard boxes on the carts. (Seeing a can opened made Nicky uneasy, but the meat inside tasted all right.)
They’d decided to head for the coast, but to avoid towns and villages even if it meant going the long way around. However, the houses in the Home Counties are so close sown that they were bound to pass some of them, and at the very next hamlet two or three faces had leaned out of windows and called cheerily for news, just as though columns of bearded foreigners passed that way so often that there was nothing strange about it. So for a while they’d felt more optimistic, but as they steadily trudged the days away they’d learned that every village was different, and that the frowning ones were commoner than the smiling ones. And people seemed to have little idea of what was happening more than a mile or two from their own doors.
No more stones were thrown at them, but they had thrown some themselves. This was in their second battle, on the outskirts of Aldershot, a much nastier business than the skirmish at Ripley. The enemy had been a wandering gang of robbers, though at first they’d looked like another procession, trundling down the sunk road toward the Sikhs; but almost at once a dozen young men armed with pick helves had charged shouting and yelling, forcing the Sikhs’ advance guard back against the group of women and children. Uncle Chacha had brought the rear guard up in a counterattack. While the grunts and bellows rose Nicky stared wildly around for something she could do. Gopal grabbed her elbow and pointed to the flinty chalk at the top of the embankment, and the next moment they were scrambling desperately up. There’d been seven of the children up there, screaming and hurling flints, by the time the robbers broke and ran back to where four or five dirty women had been watching the fun from among their own prams and barrows. The angry Sikhs had driven the lot of them on down the road, hitting as hard as they could. Nicky had stopped to look at the robbers’ baggage, which had turned out to be a hoard of cheap looted jewelry, a lot of boxes of sweets and some moldy loaves. The Sikhs left it all where it was.
Mr. Gurchuran Singh had hurt his leg in the battle, so they’d decided to rest for a couple of days where they next found water. They had posted extra sentries that night, and after supper the big uncle, whose name was Mr. Jagindar Singh, had spoken very earnestly to Nicky.
“We think you should leave us,” he said, “as soon as we next meet friendly people. You will be safer with them than with us. We propose to try to reach the sea and go away to France. We listened to the Paris radio in London, and they are free from this madness there.”
“But what will you do for a canary?” Nicky had said.
“Oh, we shall be careful. You have taught us much.”
“I’d rather come with you for a bit longer, Mr. Singh.”
“We do not consider it wise.”
“What does your mother say?”
“Ha, you have bewitched her, Nicky. She says that it is no business of ours, and that you are to make up your own mind.”
Nicky had looked toward the cushioned cart and seen the bird-bright eyes watching her through the gloom.
“Please, then,” she’d said. “I’d much rather stay. I don’t want to have to learn to know a new lot of people. Have you still got the … the thing you listened to France with?”
“Kaka knocked it off the table and none of us knew how to mend it.”
“Good.”
She’d meant what she’d said about the new people. They would be English, like her, and the kindlier they were the worse it would be, day after day probing to pierce through the clumsy armor she’d built around her heart. They would try to be mothers, and fathers, and perhaps even the sisters and brothers she had never had. And only she would know, all the time, in waking nightmares as well as the deeps of dream, how such a home can be smashed in a single morning. She couldn’t live through that again.
Besides, against all her reason, she had made a new friend. Kaka’s elder sister Ajeet was a very quiet girl whom Nicky had at first thought was seven or eight; in fact the two of them had been born only a week apart. They had fallen into that instant, easy friendship which feels as though it had begun before any of your memories and will last until you are so old that the humped veins on the back of your hands show dark blue-purple through your wax-white skin. Ajeet’s mother—Uncle C
hacha’s wife—was the fat frowning woman, and she seemed anxious to know about every breath her children drew, but they all seemed happy enough when you got to know them. At least she didn’t try to be a mother to Nicky.
They had to move before Mr. Gurchuran Singh’s leg was properly healed, because a passing horseman had shouted to them that there was plague in Aldershot. That had meant a long journey around the northern edge of that ugly, shambling town, so in the end they had come to Felpham from the north, taking eight days to get there from London. Felpham was a frowning village, but not a stone-throwing one, so they had trudged silently through and begun the long push up Strake Lane, never guessing that they were nearly home. In fact Nicky almost refused to pass the double line of pylons, because they seemed so much worse than the single ones which she’d crossed with a slight shudder before, but Gopal cajoled her under.
It had rained twice that day, and there were looming clouds about, so they were glad of the farmyard roofs and the dry hay beneath them. Four of the men pushed a cart laden with pots to Strake, two miles further along the road. There was a pond marked on the map at Strake.
It was Nicky who found the old well, which had enabled the farm to be built there in the first place. The close eye which the Sikh parents kept on their children irked her, though she didn’t like to say so; but she tended to drift off and explore as soon as she had done what she could to help set up camp; it was her way of saying that she wasn’t going to let herself be watched and pampered like that. Once or twice Gopal had slipped away and come with her, only to be scolded when they got back, but this time she was alone.
The artist’s cottage was locked. Nose against windows, Nicky could see a low-ceilinged kitchen and another big room which had been made by knocking down several walls. Light streamed into it through a big skylight in the far roof. She didn’t feel like visiting the huge barns because they’d be full of engines, and everywhere else was nothing but rippling wheat; so she sat on a low circular flint wall, topped with a line of brick, and thought about nothing much. The shouting and chatter of the encampment washed over her unheeded. The center of the flint wall was covered with a four-foot round of wood; she thought vaguely that it must be some sort of garden table, uncomfortable because you couldn’t get your knees under it. She slapped the timber with her palm.
The Changes Trilogy Page 4