But the very thought of the antiquity of the Shropshire hills spurred Sam into speaking again of the matter so dear to him.
‘I suppose other planets – and obviously I don’t mean just the planets in our own solar system – have histories as long and complex as Earth’s and must have gone through just as many face-changes. So how can it be not just possible but probable that some of them (even if it’s only two or three) have developed sophisticated forms of life – intelligences, if you like – which are curious enough about Earth to want to help it or to frighten it into averting further disasters? It’s not a very happy place, our planet, is it?’
Pete winced, but he didn’t want to disrupt this present, unprecedented, marvellous harmony between them. The right time would come later. ‘Not happy?’ he echoed, ‘well, it looks terrific this afternoon, wouldn’t you say?’ and he swivelled his gaze slowly all the way from Shrewsbury, past the Wrekin and the rises of the Severn gorge right the way round to where loomed first the Black Hills, and then to their south, the Black Mountains, that familiar landmark on Leominster’s own allotted sky.
‘Yes, it looks okay enough on a day like this. It would fool anybody,’ said Sam. He moved his head to look in the opposite direction from that Pete was surveying. ‘When I asked you, before we set off, where you wanted to go today, you said “North and west”. And that was fine by me. It’s turned out well. So what’s north-and-west of here?’
For a horrible moment Pete’s mind was empty of an answer. And as he turned his head to the compass-point Sam had just mentioned, he didn’t feel the usual smooth rolling of information from the well-oiled grooves of his mental chambers. Way beyond Shrewsbury the atmosphere was considerably thicker than elsewhere, with infiltrations of mistiness. If the West is the last direction to retain a day’s light, it’s invariably the first to manifest coming changes in the weather. A greyness piled on its distant and indistinct northernmost heights suggested showers, most likely of snow, soon to sweep eastwards over England – maybe even before midnight… then the wanted name slid, albeit bumpily, into Pete’s head. ‘The Berwyns,’ he announced, ‘over the Welsh border.’
‘And?’ Sam’s face had gone a bit swan-like, a bit fierce again. ‘What might they be like?’
But Pete knew nothing to recite at him. ‘Pretty wild, I believe,’ he said.
‘The wilder the better. That’s where we should go next.’ Pete’s heart skipped a beat with pleasure that Sam should be wanting not just a repetition of but a sequel to today, ‘and hey, I’ve just remembered: I’ve told you about Don Parry who lives in Llanrhaeadr-ym-Mochnant. Well, that’s over in the Berwyns, isn’t it? To our north-west now?’ Pete nodded assent. ‘Well, there’s a date for the two of us to fix: a call on old Don Parry. You’d like him, Pete, he’s quite a character, a real card. Has no end of stories about the Welsh past. And the Welsh present too – at least where women are concerned…’ The man has made a huge impression on Sam, thought Pete, what he’s saying about him now is virtually word for word what he said before. ‘But now we should be making tracks!’
Back in the car – and they were glad of its warmth after the sting of the winter air now the sun was in retreat – Sam said, casually enough, and in the drawl with which, Pete was beginning to notice, he protected himself against social awkwardness, ‘I was a bit of a bastard all the journey here, I know. I’m feeling less of one now I’ve been in touch with my mineral self. I guess we all have mineral selves, coming as we do from… from all this rock! And I wasn’t telling you the truth earlier either. I do have some dope here; shall we smoke some?’
They did.
Once down in the valley again it was already evening, its thickening shades in such contrast to the light still carpeting the hills to their west. Sam turned on the car lights, for the first time, he said, since his ownership. In terms of the amount of remarks exchanged the homeward ride was proving quieter than the outward one, but what a different atmosphere! Yes, Sam did have qualities Pete couldn’t find in any other of his friends. Not one of them would have talked about his ‘mineral self…’ Also on this return journey Sam was handling the car rather more confidently.
So it came as a shock when, suddenly, he braked. The abrupt action bounced Pete alarmingly, jarringly in his seat. It needed quite some self-manoeuvring just to stay sitting. ‘Shit!’ Sam exclaimed with a loudness that bored through Pete’s head, ‘fucking shit! Did I bloody hit it?’
The outrage in Sam’s voice was infectious. ‘Hit what? I didn’t feel anything.’
‘Hit that badger crossing the road, idiot. Where are your eyes? I swear there was one, but it’s hard to see things in this narrow lane. I’d hate to kill a badger.’
He stopped the car engine and jumped out of his driving seat into the dark of the minor country road. Then, ‘Yeah! It’s okay!’ he called back, ‘Thank God…! Want to come and have a look, Pete?’
He was continuing, reinforcing that easy inclusion of Pete in feelings and actions which had begun in earnest only after he had come down from his solo scramble up the stern irregularities of The Devil’s Chair. Pete hadn’t associated him with tenderness towards animals. Was that another product of his rock climb? Or had the joint brought it out from under the several layers of his difficult, perturbing self?
Pete stumbled out of his passenger seat, and, without completely straightening himself – his movements must be stealthy lest he frighten the animal – he crept across to where Sam was standing stock still, as if mesmerised. And sure enough he soon made out the large shambling creature, dark-haired, much the colour of the evening itself, but with a broad white stripe on the head and further stretches of whiteness for cheeks and chin. About two and a half feet long and heavy in build it was – surprisingly so to those who didn’t often see its kind – and short in the leg. Nevertheless it was now moving purposefully at a slow trot towards a clump of ferns beneath a modest outcrop of rock on the left-hand side of the lane. Pete was closer to it than Sam, but for the next four chilly minutes at least, both of them stood still side by side, so close to one another that Pete’s right shoulder leaned against Sam’s left. They hadn’t enjoyed such proximity since the night of their first meeting. Only after the animal had gained the swiftly enveloping security of the ferns did they relax. They had seen the badger’s long strong sensitive snout continuously pointing down to the surface of the road as if it might find something there to snap up, and the highly developed claws on its forefeet. Looked at closer to, the dark of its thick hair coat was not a uniform colour, but charcoal grey on the upper body and black on the throat, underbelly and legs. Its tail was short, efficient, and grizzly grey.
‘Safely on the other side, huh?’ said Sam, with a sigh of satisfaction, ‘well, I guess we can bugger off now. It seemed to know where it was going okay, didn’t it? So why didn’t it wait till my car had passed by?’
‘They don’t seem to have evolved road sense,’ said Pete, ‘but they’re intelligent in other ways. I reckon that one was a female – most often the females are the first out from the sett when it’s dusk, like now – and she’s making for what’s called an “outlier”, a sort of satellite sett. Generations of badgers have worked pretty direct tracks through the undergrowth from one to the other, but of course they haven’t taken man-made roads into consideration… at least they are protected by the law since last year, 1973. That might well have been our badger’s first airing in quite a while after so long a cold spell. They don’t hibernate exactly, but spend days at a stretch underground in the winter, warm and safe, and with provisions of food.’
‘Sensible!’ said Sam, ‘on which note we should get back into the warmth of my car. I might have known you’d be a mine of information about badgers like everything else.’
‘In this case not a mine,’ said Pete, following Sam back into the VW. It came to him that he knew next to nothing about the deeper pattern and texture of these animals’ lives, not even how many years they could live. He should d
o something about this.
‘Brock!’ he said suddenly as Sam started up the engine again, ‘that’s an old name for badgers isn’t it?’
‘Yeah. When I was little I used to read the Sam Pig books, you can see why he appealed! And there was one called Tales of Four Pigs and Brock the Badger. I read them again and again; I must have really liked them for some reason.’
‘And it’s a bit sad,’ agreed Pete, ‘that school never taught us more about them. We should take seeing this brock just now as a reminder that we must learn from animals.’ Instead of which, he thought, I’ve set about cramming my head with facts (to call them, that) about the extra-terrestrial.
After this things went even better, in truth went the best ever, between these two young humans. And the quiet Shropshire hill country through which they travelled homewards seemed to encourage conversation.
As Sam swung the Beetle onto the A49 just north of Craven Arms – because it was getting dark, he’d decided to go back to Leominster by the highway – he said to Pete softly after a break in the talk scarcely long enough to be termed a pause: ‘Things aren’t a bed of roses for me at home, you know.’
Pete said: ‘Well, are they for any of us?’
‘Mine’s a very different case from yours, I’ll wager. Your parents are decent people; I don’t think that description fits mine, for all my dad behaves as if he’s living up to the first line of his song in the show: “A more humane Mikado never did in Japan exist!” But he isn’t. He beats my mother up!’
Didn’t I know it? Pete thought unhappily. Didn’t I say something of the kind to Mum, only she wasn’t having any of it. Blinkered as she always is against anything I say. But sometimes it’s worse being right than wrong.
‘And the terrible thing is – I don’t always blame him. She’s so disgusting and foul-mouthed when she’s drunk.’
Pete felt too shocked to find suitable words. But he now experienced a rush of tenderness towards Sam such as he’d never felt for anybody in his life. Didn’t Sam need his friendship? This was something Sam wouldn’t ever acknowledge, which made the feeling itself easier to accept – and endure.
After his disclosure Sam looked like a cob-swan again, ‘Anyway, Pete, now I’ve told you, we’ll drop the subject. As I’ve said, I can take you into Hereford in the morning when term begins. And we’ll have a Berwyns expedition too. I’ll get in touch with old Don Parry, maybe even tomorrow… And you, everything’s hunky-dory at Woodgarth is it? With old Oliver Merchant round every touch and turn. That man bats for the other side, doesn’t he?’
Pete, not knowing this expression, said: ‘Oh, yes, I expect so!’
Sam, realising his ignorance, which was also innocence, said no more here.
As they drew nearer their home town, both boys were struck by the roadscape not looking like its normal after-dark self. It took them a moment to understand why not. Buildings you expected to be lit up against evening were bleak, black shapes; of the string of lamps leading into the town, a fair number were not on at all, and those that were gave out the ghost-town rays of the new regulation wattage. Pete had to suppress a thought that this bore some resemblance to the change of mood between them in the last half hour. Sam’s revelation of his parents’ relationship had somehow darkened and chilled what, after Brock, had been so glowing and warm.
As he walked up the small front garden of Woodgarth he saw the family had started the evening meal without him. There they all were, at the dining-room table, the curtains not yet drawn (a practice Mum considered unfriendly before a comparatively late hour of the evening; ‘We have a lot to learn from our neighbours, the Dutch,’ she’d say, ‘who think as I do on the matter’). Shimmering candle-light showed them to better advantage than the now proscribed electric lighting could ever have done: Dad and Julian, their strawberry-blond hair shining in the flickering beams, talking animatedly and smilingly away to each other (when had he, Pete, last elicited an animated smile from his father? Had he ever done so?), Mum leaning over the table to give Robin, the son who most resembled her, an extra helping of what Pete knew from the casserole dish to be Irish stew (with sliced carrots and parsnips, and dumplings – the best in the West Midlands). Good people, all of them, Trevor and Susan Price’s conduct was unthinkable inside Woodgarth. And yet Pete felt as apart from it as, in physical terms, he now was.
That night he took a long time to go to sleep. His own fault really. After reliving the afternoon’s ‘mineral moments’ with Sam, he’d gone downstairs to Dad’s bookcase and taken out a book his father had bought, when a young man, to celebrate the Festival of Britain. It was called A Land by Jacquetta Hawkes, and was illustrated not only with extraordinary photos of petrified mud-cracks and ammonites and bivalves but with colour-plates by Henry Moore. It portrayed Britain as the result of a long process of evolution, not just political-historical, ethnic and cultural, but geological, natural-historical too. Back in his bedroom Pete turned to the Pre-Cambrian Age, 600,000,000 years ago, to which the body of the Long Mynd and major sections of the Strettons belonged.
‘The young [Pre-Cambrian] world was without spring; it knew nothing beyond rock and water. There was the colour of open skies and of sunrise and sunset, but when the sky was overcast the landscape was sombre beyond our present comprehension. Colour had not as yet been concentrated in leaves, petals, feathers, shells. The only sounds came from the movement of water, whether of rain or streams or waves, from thunder, and from wind sweeping across rock. At long intervals this passivity was convulsed by erupting vol-canoes and by the rending and falling of vast masses of rock, but silence and stillness prevailed. No one inured to the din created by our species can conceive the silence of a calm day on pre-Cambrian earth. I cannot use the word hush which perhaps best conveys the sense of a closed-in silence for it also implies a world of life that has fallen silent. This was a negative and utter quiet.’
And this terrifying scene (though there was no living being there for it to terrify) was stark reality once, and who was to say it might not be reality 600,000,000 years hence? To imagine sixty years hence, with himself no longer a lad with dark hair worn longish but a grey old man past the traditional three score years and ten, was hard enough. To imagine a future made up of 600 years was an impossibility: even 6,000 defied sanity, but 600,000,000…Yet such a world at such a date was as near to him tonight as that silent, sky-dominated world which Sam and he had gazed on this afternoon.
Where had he been all that time? Waiting in some cosmic wings, like Mum and Oliver Merchant preparing to come on stage? Where in all those hundreds, thousands and millions of years had any sign been given that one Peter James Kempsey would exist in the mid-twentieth century as a sensate flesh-and-blood-and-bone being that considered itself as important an item on the planet, not to say within the universe, as any other? Considered itself, moreover, unique. Wonderfully so.
‘You were nowhere,’ was the dreadful, irrefutable answer, ‘just as in 600 or 6,000 years you won’t be! The destination of everybody, everything, anybody, anything you’ve seen, or read or heard of.’ Dead, deadness, death! His body broke out into a cold sweat, the first of several, to assault him in successive waves of clamminess. He longed to go downstairs and put his arms round his mother and father, for all their irritating ways, and round Julian and Robin for that matter, and assure them – but what? It was himself he wanted assurance for, and he realised they could give him none.
When finally he went to sleep, however, it was to dream very briefly, but accurately, of that badger waddling its (her?) way towards the ferns in the early evening. This didn’t disperse these quite appalling reflections – which came back to him regularly throughout the next week or two – but it did provide a modest protection against them, an image of stubborn and, yes, beautiful life achieving a manageable aim. Snout held down and quivering with attention, stripe white against the encroaching evening, claws sharp and ready, short legs confident that the track on the other side of the road could not on
ly be reached but trodden, despite all the density of the thicket, until the sett and safety were reached.
In the morning he rang up Sam. Half of Pete wanted to share with him the visions, the snapshots of universal truth that A Land had forced on him; the other half wanted his friend to say something so diverting that these fell away, evaporated. But he had obviously rung too early. At half past ten Sam clearly hadn’t been up long; a luxury forbidden at Woodgarth.
‘Hi, Sam, it’s Pete.’
‘Well, I can tell that. Whatdyerwant?’ This last, delivered as one ill-swallowed word, did not have a detectably friendly ring to it.
He could hardly reply, ‘To stop thinking about what it was like six hundred million years back and what it will be like in six hundred million years’ time.’ Instead he said, ‘To see how you are!’
‘In fair enough shape,’ drawled Sam, ‘but I’m missing my Orgone Accumulator.’
‘Your what?’
‘No. You haven’t got round to the great Wilhelm Reich yet, have you? You’re unaware of the great value of an Orgone Accumulator.’
‘I’m sorry?’
‘You wouldn’t even understand me if I explained it, you’re such an innocent. But if I said name derives from same word as ‘orgasm’, perhaps you might have a bit of an idea.’
‘I’m not sure I would!’ Sam wouldn’t surely be meaning what it sounded as if he were meaning. ‘I just rang to see what you were doing over the weekend.’ He’d like to have said something that referred back to the riches of the day before. But Sam was in one of his moods again.
‘Following the social calendar of events that my mum and dad have drawn up. Probably won’t meet any of your lot. But that’s the harsh fate of us Bargates folk.But I’ll be in touch Sunday night – or Monday, yes, certainly, Monday. And on Thursday next you might still want to take up my offer of driving you into Hereford instead of riding in on the train with the usual band of yobs…’
After Brock Page 15