On the Black Hill

by Bruce Chatwin

  One Sunday, before Holy Communion, some women in flowery hats were approaching the church door, their features reverently composed to receive the Sacrament. Suddenly, a window of the vicarage banged open; the vicar’s voice bawled out, ‘Mind your heads!’ and he fired off a couple of barrels at the wood-pigeons crooning in the elms.

  The shot fell pattering among the tombstones. ‘Bloody heathen!’ muttered Amos; and Mary hardly held back her giggles.

  She liked the vicar’s sense of the ridiculous, and his sharp turn of phrase. To him – and him alone – she confessed that farm life depressed her; that she was starved of conversation and ideas.

  ‘You’re not the only one,’ he said, squeezing her hand. ‘So we’d better make the best of it.’

  He lent her books. Shakespeare or Euripides, the Upanishads or Zola – her mind ranged freely over the length and breadth of literature. Never, he said, had he met a more intelligent woman, as if this in itself were a contradiction in terms.

  He spoke with regret of his youthful decision to take Holy Orders. He even regretted the Bible – to the extent of distributing translations of the Odyssey round the village:

  ‘And who, after all, were the Israelites? Sheep-thieves, my dear! A tribe of wandering sheep-thieves!’

  His hobby was bee-keeping; and in a corner of his garden he had planted a border of pollen-bearing flowers.

  ‘There you are!’ he’d exclaim as he opened a hive. ‘The Athens of the Insect World!’ Then, gesturing to the architecture of honey-cells, he would hold forth on the essential nature of civilization, its rulers and ruled, its wars and conquests, its cities and suburbs, and the relays of workers, on which the cities lived.

  ‘And the drones,’ he’d say. ‘How well we know the drones!’

  ‘Yes,’ said Mary. ‘I have known drones.’

  He encouraged her to replace her own hives. Halfway through the first season, one of them was attacked by wax-moth, and the bees swarmed.

  Amos ambled into the kitchen and, with an amused grin, said, ‘Your bees is all knit up on the damsons.’

  His offer of help was worse than useless. Mary posted the boys to keep watch in case the swarm flew off, and hurried to Lurkenhope to fetch the vicar: Benjamin would never forget the sight of the old man descending the ladder, his arms, his chest and neck enveloped in a buzzing brown mass of bees.

  ‘Aren’t you afraid?’ he asked, as the vicar scooped them up in handfuls and put them in a sack.

  ‘Certainly not! Bees only sting cowards!’

  In another corner of his garden, the vicar had made a rockery for the flowering bulbs he had collected on his travels in Greece. In March there were crocuses and scillas; in April, cyclamen, tulips and dog’s-tooth violets; and there was a huge dark purple arum that stank of old meat.

  Mary loved to picture these flowers growing wild, in sheets of colour, on the mountains; and she pitied them, exiled on the rockery.

  One blustery afternoon, as the boys were booting a football round the lawn, the vicar took her to see a fritillary from the slopes of Mount Ida in Crete.

  ‘Very rare in cultivation,’ he said. ‘Had to send half my bulbs to Kew!’

  Suddenly, Lewis lobbed the ball in the air; a gust carried it sideways, and it landed on the rockery where it smashed the fragile bell-flower.

  Mary dropped to her knees and tried to straighten the stem, stifling a sob, not so much for the flower as for the future of her sons.

  ‘Yokels!’ she said, bitterly. ‘That’s what they’ll grow up to be! That’s if their father has his way!’

  ‘Not if I have my way,’ said the vicar, and lifted her to her feet.

  After Matins that Sunday, he stood by the south porch shaking hands with his parishioners and, when Amos’s turn came, said: ‘Wait for me a minute, would you, Jones? I only want a word or two.’

  ‘Yes, sir!’ said Amos, and paced around the font, shooting nervous glances up at the bell-ropes.

  The vicar beckoned him into the vestry. ‘It’s about your boys,’ he said, pulling the surplice over his head. ‘Bright boys, both of them! High time they were in school!’

  ‘Yes, sir!’ Amos stammered. He had not meant to say ‘Yes!’ or ‘Sir!’ The vicar’s tone had caught him off his guard.

  ‘There’s a good man! So that settles it! Term begins on Monday.’

  ‘Yes, sir!’ he had said it again, this time in irony, or as a reflection of his rage. He rammed on his hat and strode out among the sunwashed tombstones.

  Jackdaws were wheeling round the belfry, and the elm-trees were creaking in the wind. Mary and the children had already mounted the trap. Amos cracked his whip over the pony’s back, and they lurched up the street, swerving and scattering some Baptists.

  Little Rebecca yelled with fright.

  ‘Why must you drive so fast?’ Mary tugged at his sleeve.

  ‘Because you make me mad!’

  After a silent lunch, he went out walking on the hill. He would have liked to work, but it was the Sabbath. So he walked alone, over and round the Black Hill. It was dark when he came home and he was still cursing Mary and the vicar.

  12

  ALL THE SAME, the twins went off to school.

  At seven in the morning, they set off in black Norfolk jackets and knickerbockers, and starched Eton collars that chafed their necks and were tied with grosgrain bows. On the damp days Mary dosed them with cod-liver oil and made them wrap up in scarves. She packed their sandwiches in greaseproof paper, and slipped them in their satchels, along with their books.

  They sat in a draughty classroom where a black clock hammered out the hours and Mr Birds taught geography, history and English; and Miss Clifton taught mathematics, science and scripture.

  They did not like Mr Birds.

  His purple face, the veins on his temples, his bad breath and his habit of spitting into a snuff handkerchief – all made a most disagreeable impression, and they cringed whenever he came near.

  For all that, they learned to recite Shelley’s ‘Ode to a Skylark’; to spell Titicaca and Popocatepetl; that the British Empire was the best of all possible empires; that the French were cowards, the Americans traitors; and that Spaniards burned little Protestant boys on bonfires.

  On the other hand they went with pleasure to the classes of Miss Clifton, a buxom woman with milky skin and hair the colour of lemon peel.

  Benjamin was her favourite. No one knew how she told the difference; but he was, most certainly, her favourite and, as she bent forward to correct his sums, he would inhale her warm motherly smell and snuggle his head between her velvet bodice and the dangling gold chain of her crucifix. She flushed with pleasure when he brought her a bunch of sweet-williams, and, during elevenses, took the twins to her room and told them they were ‘proper little gentlemen’.

  Her favouritism did not make them popular. The school bully, a bailiff’s son called George Mudge, sensed a challenge to his authority and was always trying to part them.

  He made them play football on opposite teams. Yet, in the middle of the game, their eyes would meet, their lips part in pleasure; and they would dribble the ball down the pitch, passing it from one to the other, heedless of all the other players, and the catcalls.

  Sometimes, in class, they set down identical answers. They made the same mistake over a verse of ‘The Lady of Shalott’, and Mr Birds accused them of cheating. Summoning them to the blackboard, he made them down their breeches, flexed his birch, and placed on each of their backsides six symmetrical welts.

  ‘It’s not fair,’ they whimpered as Mary lulled them to sleep with a story.

  ‘No, my darlings, it isn’t fair.’ She pinched out the candle, and tiptoed to the door.

  Shortly afterwards Mr Birds was dismissed from his post for reasons that were ‘not to be talked about’.

  A fortnight before Christmas, a parcel came from Uncle Eddie in Canada containing the oleograph of the Red Indian.

  Having started out as a lumberjac
k, Amos’s brother had fallen on his feet and was now the manager of a trading company at Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan. A photo of himself, in a fur hat and with his foot on a dead grizzly, drove the twins wild with excitement. Mary gave them her copy of Longfellow, and they could soon recite from memory the lives of Hiawatha and Minnehaha.

  With the other children they played Comanches and Apaches in the spinney behind the schoolhouse. Lewis took the name of ‘Little Raven’ and beat out the Comanche war-song on an old tin bucket: it was Benjamin’s duty to guard the Apache wigwams. Both crossed their hearts and hoped to die and swore to be enemies for ever.

  One lunch-break, however, George Mudge, the Apache Chief, found the pair having a powwow in the brambles, and barked out, ‘Traitor!’

  He summoned his henchmen, who tried to haul Benjamin off for ‘nettle-torture’ but found Lewis blocking their path. In the fight that followed, the Apaches ran off, leaving their chief to the mercy of the twins, who twisted his arm and pushed his face in the mud.

  ‘We skinned him alive,’ crowed Benjamin, as they stormed into the kitchen.

  ‘Did you?’ sighed Mary, disgusted at the sight of their clothes.

  But this time, Amos was delighted: ‘That’s my boys! Show me where ye hit him! Ouch! Aye! Proper little fighters both! Again now! Aye! Aye! An’ ye twisted his arm? Ouch! That’s a way to git him …!’

  A photo, taken at the hay-making of 1909, shows a happy, smiling group in front of a horse-drawn cart. Amos has a scythe slung over his shoulder. Old Sam is in his moleskin waistcoat. Mary, in a gingham dress, is holding a hay-rake. And the children – together with young Jim the Rock, who had come to earn a few pennies – are all sitting cross-legged on the ground.

  The twins are as yet indistinguishable: but years later, Lewis recalled it was he who held the sheepdog, while Benjamin tried to stop his sister wriggling – in vain, for Rebecca appears in the picture as a whitish blur.

  Later that summer Amos broke in a couple of mountain ponies, and the boys went riding round the countryside, often as far as the Lurkenhope lumber-mill.

  This was a red-brick building standing on a strip of level ground between the mill-race and the wall of a gorge. The slates had blown off the roof; ferns grew out of the gutters; but the waterwheel still turned the saw-bench and, outside the door, there were mounds of resinous sawdust and stacks of yellow planks.

  The twins liked to watch Bobbie Fifield, the sawyer, as he guided the tree-trunks on to the whining blade. But the real attraction was his daughter, Rosie, an impish girl of ten with an insolent way of tossing her head of blonde curls. Her mother dressed her in cherry-red frocks and told her she was ‘pretty as a picture’.

  Rosie took them to secret hideouts in the wood. No one could fool her into mistaking which twin was which. She preferred to be with Lewis, and would sidle up and purr sweet nonsense in his ear.

  Pulling off the petals of a daisy, she would call out, ‘He loves me! He loves me not! He loves me! He loves me not!’ – always reserving the final petal for ‘He loves me not!’

  ‘But I do love you, Rosie!’

  ‘Prove it!’

  ‘How?’

  ‘Walk through those nettles and I’ll let you kiss my hand.’ One afternoon, she cupped her hands around his ear and whispered, ‘I know where there’s an evening primrose. Let’s leave Benjamin behind.’

  ‘Let’s,’ he said.

  She threaded her way through the hazels and they came into a sunlit clearing. Then she unhooked her dress and let it fall round her waist.

  ‘You may touch them,’ she said.

  Gingerly, Lewis pressed two fingers against her left nipple – then she darted off again, a flash of red and gold, seen and half-seen through the flickering leaves.

  ‘Catch me!’ she called. ‘Catch me! You can’t catch me!’ Lewis ran, and stumbled over a root, and picked himself up, and ran on:

  ‘Rosie!’

  ‘Rosie!’

  ‘Rosie!’

  His shouts echoed through the wood. He saw her. He lost her. He stumbled again and fell flat. A stitch burned in his side and, from far below, Benjamin’s plaintive wailing reined him back.

  ‘She’s a pig,’ said Benjamin, later, narrowing his eyes in wounded love.

  ‘She’s not a pig. Pigs are nice.’

  ‘Well, she’s a toad.’

  The twins had their own hideout, in the dingle below Craig-y-Fedw – a hollow hidden among rowans and birches, where water whispered over a rock and there was a bank of grass cropped close by sheep.

  They made a dam of turf and branches and, on the hot days, would pile their clothes on the bank and slide into the icy pool. The brown water washed over their narrow white bodies, and clusters of scarlet rowanberries were reflected on the surface.

  They were lying on the grass to dry, without a word between them, only the currents that ebbed and flowed through their touching ankles. Suddenly the branches behind them parted, and they sat up:

  ‘I can see you.’

  It was Rosie Fifield.

  They grabbed their clothes but she ran off, and the last they saw of her was the head of blonde curls hurtling downhill through the fern fronds.

  ‘She’ll tell,’ said Lewis.

  ‘She won’t dare.’

  ‘She will,’ he said, gloomily. ‘She’s a toad.’

  13

  AFTER THE HARVEST festival, the seagulls flew inland and Jim Watkins the Rock came to work as a farm boy at The Vision.

  He was a thin wiry boy with unusually strong hands and ears that stuck out under his cap, like dock-leaves. He was fourteen. He had the moustache of a fourteen-year-old, and a lot of blackheads on his nose. He was glad to get work away from home, and he had just been baptized.

  Amos taught him to handle a plough. It worried Mary that the horses were so big and Jim was so very small, but he soon learned to turn at the hedgerow and draw a straight furrow down the field. Though he was very smart for his age, he was a laggard when it came to cleaning tack, and Amos called him a ‘lazy runt’.

  He slept in the hay-loft, on a bed of straw.

  Amos said, ‘I slept in the loft when I were a lad, and that’s where he sleeps.’

  Jim’s favourite pastime was catching moles – ‘oonts’ as he called them in Radnor dialect (molehills are ‘oontitumps’) – and when the twins left, smartened up for school, he’d lean over the gate and leer, ‘Ya! Ha! Slick as oonts, ain’t they?’

  He took the twins on scavenging expeditions.

  One Saturday, they had gone to gather chestnuts in Lurkenhope Park when a whip hissed in the grey air and Miss Nancy Bickerton rode up on a black hunter. They hid behind a tree-trunk, and peered around. She rode so close they saw the mesh of her hairnet over her golden bun. Then the mist closed over the horse’s haunches, and all they found was a pile of steaming dung in the withered grass.

  Benjamin often wondered why Jim smelled so nasty and finally plucked up courage to say, ‘Trouble with you is you stink.’

  ‘Be not I as stinks,’ said Jim, adding mysteriously, ‘another!’ He led the twins up the loft ladder, rummaged in the straw and took hold of a sack with something wriggling inside. He untied the string and a little pink nose popped out.

  ‘Me ferret,’ he said.

  They promised to keep the ferret a secret and, at half-term, when Amos and Mary were at market, all three stole off to net a warren at Lower Brechfa. By the time they had caught three rabbits, they were far too excited to notice the black clouds roiling over the hill. The storm broke, and pelted hailstones. Soaked and shivering, the boys ran home and sat by the fireside.

  ‘Idiots!’ said Mary when she came in and saw their wet clothes. She dosed them with gruel and Dover’s powders, and packed them off to bed.

  Around midnight, she lit a candle and crept into the children’s room. Little Rebecca was asleep with a doll on her pillow and thumb in mouth. In the bigger bed, the boys were snoring in perfect time.

  ‘Are the
youngsters fine?’ Amos rolled over, as she climbed back in beside him.

  ‘Fine,’ she said. ‘They’re all fine.’

  But in the morning Benjamin looked feverish and complained of pains in his chest.

  By evening the pains were worse. Next day, he had convulsions and coughed up bits of hard, rusty-coloured mucus. Pale as a communion wafer, and with hectic spots on his cheekbones, he lay on the lumpy bed, listening only for the swish of his mother’s skirt, or the tread of his twin on the stair: it was the first time the two had slept apart.

  Dr Bulmer came and diagnosed pneumonia.

  For two weeks Mary hardly left the bedside. She ladled liquorice and elderberry down his throat and, at the least sign of a rally, she fed him spoonfuls of egg-custard and slips of buttered toast.

  He would cry out, ‘When am I going to die, Mama?’

  ‘I’ll tell you when,’ she’d say. ‘And it’ll be a long while yet.’

  ‘Yes, Mama,’ he’d murmur, and drift off to sleep.

  Sometimes, Old Sam came up and pleaded to be allowed to die instead.

  Then, without warning, on December 1st, Benjamin sat up and said he was very, very hungry. By Christmas he had come back to life – though not without a change in his personality.

  ‘Oh, we know Benjamin,’ the neighbours would say. ‘The one as looks so poor.’ For his shoulders had slumped, his ribs stuck out like a concertina, and there were dark rings under his eyes. He fainted twice in church. He was obsessed by death.

  With the warmer weather he would tour the hedgerows, picking up dead birds and animals to give them a Christian burial. He made a miniature cemetery on the far side of the cabbage patch, and marked each grave with a cross of twigs.

  He preferred now not to walk beside Lewis, but one step behind; to tread in his footsteps, to breathe the air that he had breathed. On days when he was too sick for school he would lie on Lewis’s half of the mattress, laying his head on the imprint left by Lewis on the pillow.

  One drizzly morning, the house was unusually quiet and, when Mary heard the creak of a floorboard overhead, she went upstairs. Opening the door of her bedroom, she saw her favourite son, up to his armpits in her green velvet skirt, her wedding hat half-covering his face.