When they reached the boat-shed, the gangway was submerged and the canoe, held by too short a mooring, was shipping water at the prow.
On windy days the surface of the river is raised in little pyramids streaked like the criss-cross fork patterns on mashed potatoes. The children knew already that even a little wind can make a canoe tiresome to manage. Today, however, there was no wind. The surface seemed just off the boil. Inverted bowls of smooth water travelled along it with a suggestion of waltzing and the grasses at the edge had no power to play at equal tug-of-war with the stream as they do on dawdling days. The children, however, were not experienced enough to know these as danger signs, and if there were no other boats out, they just thought they were successfully early. They held the canoe to the side, laughing as they mopped it dry because it tugged so impetuously. Then they got in and pushed off. Away it went downstream broadside on. The children enjoyed the sensation of easy speed, thinking that the first lock would bring their joy ride to a safe temporary stop. They managed after a struggle to keep the canoe straight, as was only proper. They might, Ida suggested, enjoying the adventurous thought, have to shoot a rapid. However, they kept well away from the weir, where the rapids were only too lifelike. They wanted to go as far down the main stream as possible.
When they came in sight of the lock, they were surprised to find both sides open and a heaped-up and purposeful swoop of water going straight through. They had no alternative but to swoop through also, holding their breath as the canoe struck the rough water on the other side. It shuddered and the water battered under it as if it would stave in the bottom, whirling it sideways in a hopping motion, but the momentum carried it over. Almost before they realized they were safe they were travelling rapidly down the lower reach.
‘Isn’t this fun!’ said Ida. ‘We must be travelling faster than salmon. Would you think there could possibly have been so much water in the sky. I expect by this afternoon it will all be gone out to sea, and when we come back the river will be just ordinary.’
She underestimated the amount of water there can be in the sky. After a cloudburst the river goes on rising for many hours as the high ground nearer its source drains into it. Nor did she guess that, to prevent a flood, all the locks all the way to the sea were standing open to get the water away. Laughing and exhilarated the three of them rushed along in their cockle-shell.
Soon they had passed the island that hid Hermit Island. They thought of him fishing from his front door. They passed Owl Palace Island and were going farther than their farthest trip while the water stretched wider and wider on either side. None of the usual anglers were on the banks, for the reason that the banks had disappeared. They would have been fishing in the fields. For the same reason no one was out walking, or working. The swans, the wild duck and the herons had the landscape to themselves. Where the current was swiftest the children rode along. The sun was now mercilessly out, the sides of the canoe burnt their hands and knees. They passed through lock after lock, by small villages where cabin cruisers were moored fore and aft to the quays. A woman popped her head out of a cabin and shouted: ‘Are you all right?’
‘Yes, of course,’ they replied waving.
‘Look out for the bridge!’ cried a man. ‘Look out!’
Just in time the children lay back flat in the canoe as it went under a stone bridge with no head-room. The flickering underwater-coloured arch passed close over their faces, so that their eyes were obliged to focus on the grain of the stone, the cracks and the lichen and the moss. It had a cold secret smell, soothing on a hot day. On the far side of the bridge the land was less absolutely flat, with occasional patches of wood. They went through a long stretch with no houses at all, till they saw on a slope ahead of them, beyond a spread of flood water, a disused windmill. The proper course of the river took a right-angled bend in front of it.
‘My arms are getting tired with trying to keep the canoe straight,’ said Ida. ‘I don’t want to wait till we get to the sea before I have lunch. Let’s make for that windmill, straight over the bend.’
It took the last ounce of their united strength to get out of the main current even though it went close to the bend, but they made it, and there was enough water to float them, digging their paddles into the earth, over the bank and on to the quiet overspill.
It was a relief to be able to pause. Over the meadow the water was barely nine inches deep and the current negligible. They paddled softly towards the windmill, and now that the excitement was over they chattered and laughed, and together with the quacker of the ducks that they disturbed their voices were carried by the water to the far banks.
Ida was watching the butterflies that were travelling across all this water where there was no place to land – except on her up-ended paddle where two stopped to rest. Ping’s eyes were shut. He was sunning, smiling and thinking his thoughts.
Oskar spoke in a tense voice:
‘Look, you two. I haven’t gone small again, have I?’
Ida and Ping turned their heads. ‘Not unless we have too,’ Ping answered.
‘Then look in front. There, on the bank.’
Ida looked towards the windmill. She had been facing it all the time, but had been more interested in what was round her – water rats swimming in search of land, earwigs troubled at finding themselves afloat on sticks. Now she searched the hillock where the windmill stood for something unusual. She saw nothing except a dead tree lying uprooted near the water’s edge. Its roots had been broken off, all but two which were bent back under one of those fuzzy knobs that the boles of elm trees often have, which, if the tree had been a piece of sculpture, would have been the head of a reclining figure. There were only two branches left, and they were crossed one over the other like legs. Quite an ordinary thing to see, really. Only while she was looking at it the branches moved and crossed the other leg over. And the foot swung contentedly in the lazy noon air.
Ping paddled the canoe nearer with all the strength of his silky melon-coloured back, and as the three voices sharpened into exclamations, the swinging foot froze into immobility.
They grounded the boat and walked abreast through the shallow water, silent now except for the splash of their feet.
It did not move again, but Ida taking her eyes off it for a split second to look towards the windmill, saw behind the broken window-pane a watching eye as big and blood-shot as a bull’s.
Another eye as big, but clear, bright and inquisitive, now opened in what Ida had once stupidly taken for a knob of a tree.
‘Good morning, Giant,’ said Ping, bowing.
The giant sat up. He was brown and tousled, but except for his size they would have supposed him to be about fifteen years old.
‘You weren’t taken in, then,’ he said amiably.
‘It was Oskar,’ said Ida. ‘This is Oskar. I would have walked past you without thinking. And this is Ping.’
‘It’s good to be noticed, for a change. I sometimes wonder whether people aren’t going blind, or perhaps can’t see anything bigger than themselves, like ants. I see them rushing about, but they never seem to look higher than their own shoulders. Except boys. Boys are always best.’ (Ida was ashamed.) ‘Babies, of course. They gaze up out of their prams with round eyes, willing to see anything that comes. I can even poke them and make them gurgle, but nobody takes any notice of what babies are looking at. Otherwise cats are the only things I have to talk to. They don’t seem to notice any difference. Dogs always bark at me. They are a nuisance when I’m out foraging. But I manage. There’s everything you could want in sheds and yards. They lock the gates but I just reach over the top or put my arm through the skylight.’
‘Do you just take what you want?’
‘What else could I do? Mother keeps saying I’ll get caught and put in a cage, but it doesn’t make sense. Anyway, if there’s a commotion because somebody’s missed a pig or a sack of potatoes, I just lean against a wall with a poster and everybody thinks I’m an advertisement. Or I lie do
wn by the side of the road and they think I’m a new watermain lagged with sacking. Or I go on all fours behind a hedge and they think my backside is a horse. It’s easy. Once I accidentally put my hand into some porridgy stuff that builders were using, and left a print there. It was a very convenient place where I had taken a lot of different things. Afterwards I watched them holding a council round the print of my hand. The constable was there and he got very angry about it. So did all the others. It wasn’t a hand, he said, because it couldn’t be, and he was not going to report it. What did they take him for? And all the time I was being part of a chestnut tree and he had propped his bicycle against my legs.’
‘That’s what the Hermit said,’ said Oskar. ‘What you don’t notice isn’t there.’
‘My mother won’t believe me when I say people don’t see me. It wasn’t like that when she was young, she says. You should hear her.’
‘TERAK!’
From the windmill came a voice like a cow’s cracked with too much mooing.
‘Terak! You will be the death of me. Didn’t I tell you to come in.’
‘That’s Mother.’
She came out, dropping to all fours in order to squeeze out at the double door. Her body was about as big as an elephant’s and as shapeless and sloppy. She lumbered erect on to her legs, helping herself up by pushing with her hands on her knees. The many creases of her huge bony face showed a lifelong discontent. There was not among them a line to show that she had ever smiled.
‘Oh, my lumbago! What have you gone and done now, you good-for-nothing boy. They’ll be after us. We’ll have to move along again. And where will we go now, I’d like to know? In this miserable country we show up like pyramids. There’s never a forest or a hill one can walk behind. Hardly as much as a haystack. All flat enough to break your heart. And the farther east we go the worse it is. And just when we were settled in this nice windmill you’ve got to go and be seen.’
‘Why have you got to move? We won’t tell anyone.’ Oskar was always the first to promise silence.
‘Because I won’t have my boy laughed at, that’s why,’ she said with sudden ferocity. ‘I won’t have it. He’s like his father, growing as big as he can just to be annoying. But he’s my boy and I won’t have him laughed at. Dratted children! They’re like water and lovers, get in anywhere. And their tongues will wag. Why didn’t you do as you were told,’ she went on, aiming a cuff at Terak who easily dodged it. ‘You’ll come to a bad end like your poor father. The same one. I’m warning you. Now keep an eye on those children and don’t let them escape. I don’t know what I couldn’t do to you for this. When I’ve put our things together you can stow them in the canoe and pull it after you. The children will just have to stay here till the water goes down, and by then we’ll have got clear.’ She heaved a sigh that scattered the straw on the ground like the flap of a blanket. ‘I wish I could lay my old bones down in my family cave. Blue and amber stony mountains they are there, with our own goats cropping and bleating among the boulders. But your poor silly father must want to be a great King! And his son’s as silly as himself. Ah me, the bigger the woman the bigger the burden laid on her. Watch those children now, Terak, or they’ll be off like mice!’
She trundled away, dropping to all fours again to squeeze back into the mill. With amazement the children watched the bulk of her seat and the soles of her feet in the last heave before she disappeared. Across the back of her coarse blanket skirt the words BRITISH RAILWAYS were stencilled in white.
Terak sat crestfallen and dejected, all the animation of his face had drained away, and it looked as lifeless as a water-butt.
Ida, Oskar and Ping stood round him sympathetically not knowing what to say. It was clear they had brought on a real calamity. For themselves, it was going to be difficult at home to explain the loss of the canoe, but it would be easier to get back without it, since they couldn’t hope to paddle against the current. They would have to find a road and hitch-hike in any case. For the moment they were only troubled by the fabulous gloom of Terak’s expression.
The silence lasted unhappily, until it seemed that no one would ever speak again. Terak sat unmoving like a great sad lump of tree. Then from inside the windmill came a gusty sound that was like a mixture of rookery, pigsty and donkey farm. It snuffled and groaned and squealed and brayed in a long monody.
Terak came to life. He winked lovingly at Ping and uncovered his teeth in a smile. They were as big as matchboxes and whiter than the whites of his eyes. He nudged with his head in the direction of the mill.
‘That’s Mother playing her bagpipes. She always does that when she’s upset. When she has used up all her puff she’ll go to sleep. So we have plenty of time to talk.’
The three children sat down in a ring in front of him.
‘What happened to your father?’ was Oskar’s first question.
‘Where were the blue and amber mountains with caves and goats?’ was Ida’s.
‘If your father wanted to be a king, was there a horse big enough for him to ride on?’
All three questions happened together, while Terak cupped both his ears with his hands. There was a silence after this traffic jam, then Ida began again.
‘How old are you, Terak?’
‘Mother thinks about a hundred and fifty. She notches the years on her walking stick, but some of the notches have worn off. You needn’t look so unbelieving. Giants live longer than you do. Mother thinks she is five hundred, but she says she is very old for her age. She says she’s worn out with trouble. She’s melancholy company.’
‘Tell us all about everything, from the beginning.’
‘I don’t know the beginning, except what Mother has told me. I don’t remember my father. But mother talks all the time, sometimes to herself, sometimes to me. She can’t stop. Perhaps if she wasn’t talking she wouldn’t believe in herself. I don’t know where the mountains were. Somewhere to the East. They were very high, with such cliffs all round that nobody could get up or down. The giants lived on top. They had big caves with carved doorways along the side of a valley with a little stream. They kept goats and wove cloth and read the stars and worshipped the moon. They made music by hitting tall stones with wooden hammers. That was religious music for full moon. The bagpipes were only woman’s music for funerals and sickness.
‘One day, after an earthquake, my father found a place where rocks had fallen, where he could scramble down to the lowlands. He took my mother with him because they were courting and he wanted to show off. They went a long way for the pleasure of exploring. There were things they had never seen before, forests and flowers and animals, and a great river. All the time my mother kept on saying “We ought to go back now,” but my father would not. Then coming out of a forest on a hillside they startled some shepherds. These were the first little men they had seen, and of course my father was very interested and spoke kindly to them. But they ran away, leaving their sheep behind. So my father and mother became shepherds, and stayed there because it was spring and a lovely hillside. My father heaved up rocks and made a house, but my mother was homesick because she had left all her crocks and blankets in the cave. So he made her the bagpipes.
‘One day when my father was watching the sheep and looking down over the valley, he saw a procession of little men on horseback, leading pack animals laden with bundles, and a long covered wagon drawn by eight horses. The little shepherds were with them, pointing up the hillside to him where he sat. Six of the riders came up the hill towards him. Some of them were fair haired with faces coloured like sandstone, but most were dark like the shepherds. When they came near enough they shouted wonderful words, and bowed down, and waved flags. My father did not understand their language, but he sat still and made them a sign to come on. My mother was a good way off, in the house, playing the bagpipes because she wanted to go home.
‘The men came near. They had brought presents which they laid on the ground, an embroidered cloak, a turban with a peacock’s feather s
ticking up at the front, a box of big blue beads, a dish of dates and figs and another of sweetmeats, and a bottle which the white man offered with a long speech and a specially low bow.
‘When they saw that my father did not understand them, nor their interpreters either, they began to act in dumb show. Two of them placed the cloak and the turban on my father. They could reach because he was still sitting on the ground, leaning on one elbow to watch their antics. He liked the turban and the peacock feather, and when they started beating their foreheads on the ground and then waving their hands towards the waiting horsemen below in the valley, he understood that they wanted him to come and be their King. He let out a bellow for my mother, and it made the men turn and run. They couldn’t help themselves. But the white man called them back. When they saw my mother – she was in her prime then with a face and figure like the Sphinx, so she says – coming down the hill, the men sat down plonk, like so many babies bumping on their bottoms.
‘“What’s that tomfoolery?” she asked my father, pointing at his turban. He told her they wanted him to be King.
‘“King of that miserable little lot?” she said. “Don’t be such a fool.” But she sat down and tried the sweetmeats, and my father out of curiosity tried the bottle. It made him sneeze, but he liked it and came back for more. And my mother put on the blue beads. She wanted the turban then, but my father wouldn’t let her have it. In the end they went with the men, who were very polite, bowing and scraping and flattering, and serving up more and more food and drink, making signs that it was proper kings and queens should be fat.
The Children of Green Knowe Collection Page 18