On the Black Hill by Bruce Chatwin
‘Kevin! … Kevin!’ came a shrill voice. ‘If you don’t come here, I’ll slap your bottom …!’
43
HE WAS A nice boy, lively and affectionate, who liked his Uncle Benjamin’s fruitcake and loved to ride with Uncle Lewis on the tractor.
In the school holidays, his mother sent him to stay for weeks on end: they came to dread, as much as he did, the first day of term.
Perched on the tractor mudguard, he would watch the plough-share bite into the stubble, and the herring-gulls shrieking and swooping over the fresh-turned furrow. He saw lambs being born, potatoes harvested, a cow calving and, one morning, there was a foal in the field.
The twins said all this, one day, would be his.
They fussed over him like a little prince, waited on him at table, learned never to serve cheese or beetroot and, in the attic, found a humming-top that whined like a contented bee. Wilfully retracing the steps of their own childhood, they even thought of taking him to the seaside.
Some nights, his eyelids heavy with sleep, he’d rest his head in his hands and yawn, ‘Please, please will you carry me?’ So they carried him upstairs to their old bedroom, and undressed him; and put on his pyjamas, and tiptoed out with the night-light burning.
In a patch of garden, he planted lettuces, radishes and carrots, and a row of sweet-peas. He liked listening to the zinging sound of seeds in their packets, but saw no point in sowing biennials.
‘Two years,’ he’d moan. ‘That’s far too long to wait!’
With a bucket slung over his arm, he went off scouring the hedges for anything that took his fancy – toads, snails, furry caterpillars – and once he came home with a shrew. When his tadpoles grew into baby frogs, he built a frog-castle, on a rock in the middle of an old stone trough.
About this time, the farmer below Cwm Cringlyn started a pony-trekking centre; and in the summer months, up to fifty boys and girls might trot through The Vision on their way to the hill. Often, they forgot to shut the gates; churned the pasture into a mud-pie; and Kevin wrote a sign reading ‘Trespassers will be Prosecuted’.
One afternoon, Lewis was scything nettles by the pig-sties and saw him racing across the field.
‘Uncle! Uncle!’ he shouted, breathlessly. ‘I seen a very funny person.’
He dragged Lewis by the hand, and together they walked to the edge of the dingle.
‘Sshh!’ Kevin raised a finger to his lips. Then, parting the leaves, he pointed at something through the undergrowth. ‘Look!’ he whispered.
Lewis looked and saw nothing.
The sun filtered through the hazels, spattering the stream-bank with varied light. The stream tinkled. Croziers of young bracken curled up through the cow-parsley. Woodpigeons cooed. A jay chattered nearby, and lots of smaller birds were chirping and twittering around a mossy tree-stump.
The jay glided off its perch and hopped onto the stump. The small birds scattered. The stump moved.
It was Meg the Rock.
‘Sshh!’ Kevin pointed again. She had brushed off the jay and the other birds were coming back to feed from her hand.
Her skin was plastered with reddish mud. Her breeches were the colour of mud. Her hat was a rotting stump. And the tattered green jerseys, tacked one to the other, were the mosses, and creepers, and ferns.
They watched her for a little while, and then they walked away.
‘Isn’t she lovely?’ said Kevin, knee-deep in the ox-eye daisies.
‘Yes,’ his uncle said.
At the start of the Christmas holidays, Kevin said he wanted to give the ‘Bird Lady’ a present. He bought an iced chocolate cake with his own pocket-money; and because Thursday was Jim’s day at market, he and Lewis chose a Thursday to take it to The Rock.
Slaty clouds were tumbling over the hill as they picked their way through the defences. The wind was whipping the surface of the pond. Meg was indoors, up to her elbows in a bucket of dog-feed. She cringed at the arrival of visitors.
‘I brought you a cake,’ Kevin stammered, and screwed up his nose at the stench.
Lowering her eyes, she said, ‘Aye, and thank you very much!’ and then slipped outside with the bucket.
They heard her yelling, ‘Quiet, y’old buggers!’ And when she came back in, she said, ‘Them dogs is wild as hawks.’
She transferred her gaze from the cake to the boy, and her face lit up: ‘And will I boil you people a kettle for tea?’
‘Yes.’
She split some sticks with a hacker, and set them alight. No one had come to tea for years. Dimly, she remembered the day Miss Fifield showed her how to lay the table. She flitted round the room with the agility of a dancer and, taking a cracked cup here, a chipped plate there, laid three places each with a knife and fork. She put a pinch of tea in the pot, and pierced a can of condensed milk. She wiped the breadknife on her breeches, cut three hefty slices of cake, and threw the crumbs to a pair of bantams.
‘Poor ol’ boys!’ she said. ‘Them was buggered by the cold, but I be feedin’ ’em up in the house.’
The shyness had left her. She said that Sarah had taken Jim to Hereford to sell some ducks: ‘That’s as ’em says!’ She rested her hands on her hips. ‘But them won’t get no moneys ’cos them gulls is old. Let ’em live, that’s what I say! Let ’em live! Let ’em rabbits live! And ’em hares live! Let ’em stoats go on a-playin’! Aye, and ’em foxes, I won’t harm ’em. Let all God’s creatures live …!’
She clasped both hands around her cup, and her head swayed to and fro. Her cheeks crinkled with merriment when Lewis mentioned the pony-trekkers:
‘Aye, I see’d ’em,’ she said. ‘Drunk as zowls, and howlin’ and hollerin’ and fallin’ dead drunk off their horses.’
Kevin, horrified by the squalor, was itching to go.
‘And I’ll cut you another slice?’ she asked.
‘No, thanks,’ he said.
She cut a second, larger slice for herself, and swallowed it. She did not throw the crumbs to the bantams, but mopped them up with her fingers and put them in her mouth. Then she licked her finger tips, one by one, and burped, and slapped her stomach.
‘We’ll be off now,’ said Lewis.
Her eyelids drooped. In a dispirited voice she said, ‘And what’ll I owe you for the cake?’
‘It’s a present,’ said Kevin.
‘But you’ll take it along with you?’ She put the remains of the cake back in its box and, sadly, shut the lid: ‘I wouldn’t want Jim to catch me with a cake.’
Outside in the yard, Lewis helped her heave a tarpaulin off some hay-bales. The trapped rainwater sluiced over and splashed down Kevin’s wellingtons. On the roof of the barn, a loose tin sheet was rattling in the wind. All of a sudden, a gust lifted it in the air, and it flew, like a monstrous bird, in their direction, and landed with a clatter on the scrap-heap.
Kevin threw himself flat on the mud.
‘Bloomin’ gale,’ said Meg. ‘Blaowin’ ’em zincs about!’
The boy clung to his uncle’s arm as they walked away across the hummocky field. He was filthy and whimpering with fright. The clouds were breaking and patches of blue flew low over their heads. One by one, the dogs stopped barking. They looked back and saw Meg, by the willows, calling in her ducklings. Her voice was carried in the wind: ‘Wid! Wid! Come on then! Wid! Wid! …’
‘Do you think he’ll beat her?’ the boy asked.
‘I don’t know,’ said Lewis
‘He must be a very nasty man.’
‘Jim’s not so bad.’
‘I don’t ever want to go there again.’
44
KEVIN GREW UP far faster than either of his uncles thought possible. One summer, he was singing with the trebles. The next – or so it seemed – he was the long-haired daredevil riding a bronco at the Lurkenhope Show.
When he was twelve, the twins made out their will in his favour. Owen Lloyd the lawyer pointed out the advantage of giving Vision Farms to Kevin in their lifetime. Far be
‘Nothing to pay?’ Benjamin perked up, thrusting his face across the lawyer’s desk.
‘Nothing but the Stamp Duty,’ said Mr Lloyd.
To Benjamin, at least, the idea of doing down the Government was irresistible. And besides, in his eyes, Kevin could do no wrong. His faults, if he had them, were Lewis’s faults – and that made them all the more lovable!
Naturally, Mr Lloyd continued, Kevin would be legally bound to provide for their old age, especially, he added in an undertone, ‘if either of you two gentlemen fell ill …’
Benjamin glanced round at Lewis, who nodded.
‘That settles it, then,’ Benjamin said, and instructed the lawyer to draw up the deed of gift. Kevin would inherit the property at the age of twenty-one – by which time the twins would be eighty.
No sooner were the documents signed than his mother, Mrs Redpath, began to plague them. As long as the inheritance had been in doubt, she had kept her distance and minded her manners. Suddenly, overnight, she changed her tactics. She acted as though the farm was her birthright – almost as though the twins had swindled her out of it. She importuned them for money, rummaged in their drawers, and made jibes about them sharing a bed.
She said, ‘Fancy trying to cook on that old range! Small wonder the food tastes of soot! There are such things as electric stoves, you know! … And those stone floors, I ask you? In this day and age! So unhygienic! What that floor needs is a damp course and some nice vinyl tiling.’
One Sunday, simply for the sake of disrupting lunch, she announced that her mother was alive and well, a wealthy widow in California.
Benjamin dropped his fork, then shook his head.
‘I doubt it,’ he said. ‘She’d have wrote if she was living’ – whereupon Mrs Redpath burst into a flood of crocodile tears. No one had ever loved her. No one had wanted her. She had always been pushed out, passed over.
In an effort to console her, Lewis unfolded the green baize of the silver box, and gave her Rebecca’s christening spoon. Her eyes narrowed. She demanded harshly, ‘What else you got of Mother’s?’
Leading her to the attic, the twins unlocked a trunk and spread out all that remained of the little girl’s belongings. A sunbeam, falling through the skylight, played over the tartan coat, the pairs of white silk stockings, the buttoned boots, a tam with a pompom, and some lace-trimmed blouses.
Moved to silence, the twins stared at these sad, crumpled relics and recalled those other Sundays, long ago, when they all drove to Matins in the dog-cart. Then, without so much as a by-your-leave, Mrs Redpath wrapped the lot in a bundle, and left.
Kevin, too, had begun to disappoint them.
He was charming: he even charmed a motor-bike out of Benjamin. But he was incurably lazy, and attempted to hide his laziness under a patter of technical jargon. He pooh-poohed the twins’ farming methods, and worried them silly with his talk of silage and foetus-implantation.
He was supposed to put in two days’ work at The Vision and three at a local polytechnic. In practice, he did neither. He would turn up from time to time, in sunglasses and a denim jacket decorated with studs and a death’s head mask. A transistor radio dangled from his wrist. He had a snake tattooed on his arm, and he had bad friends.
In the spring of ’73, a young American couple called Johnny and Leila bought the old farmhouse at Gillyfaenog in which to set up a ‘community’. They had private means. Already their health-food shop in Castle Street was the talk of the town; and when Lewis Jones inspected it, he said it looked ‘a bit like a meal-shed’.
Some members of the commune wore loose orange robes, and shaved their heads. Others wore pigtails and Victorian costume. They kept a herd of white goats; played the guitar and flute; and were sometimes to be seen in their orchard, cross-legged in a circle, saying and doing nothing, with their eyes half-closed. It was Mrs Owen Morgan who put around the rumour that the Hippies slept together ‘like pigs’.
That August, Johnny built a strange scarlet tower in the vegetable garden, from which hung ribbon-like banners, printed with pink flowers and intertwined with black lettering. These, according to Mrs Morgan, were the symbols of the cult. Indian, she thought it was.
‘Something to do with the Pope, then?’ said Lewis. He hadn’t heard her above the noise of the tractor.
They were standing outside the Chapel at Maesyfelin.
‘No,’ she shouted. ‘That’s Italian.’
‘Oh!’ he nodded.
A week later he gave a lift to a red-bearded giant, dressed in a homespun jerkin, with his feet bound up in sackcloth: his beliefs, he said, forbade him the use of leather.
Lewis dropped him at the gate, and asked about the letters on the flag. The young man bowed, raised his hands in prayer, and chanted very slowly: ‘OM MANI PADME HUM’ – which he translated equally slowly, ‘Hail, Jewel in the Lotus! Hum!’
‘Thank you very much,’ said Lewis, touching his hat-brim and engaging the gear-shift.
After this encounter the twins revised their opinion of the Hippies, and Benjamin suggested they were ‘taking some kind of rest’. All the same, he wished young Kevin wouldn’t mess around with them. Halfway through a greenish sunset, the boy had tottered up the garden path, reeled into the kitchen with a glazed and faraway look and dumped his yellow crash-helmet on the rocking chair.
‘Been drinking?’ said Benjamin.
‘No, Uncle,’ he grinned. ‘I been eating mushrooms.’
45
IN THEIR SEVENTIES, the twins found a new, unexpected friend in Nancy, the last of the Bickertons, who now lived at the old Rectory in Lurkenhope.
Arthritic, myopic and with scant control of the foot-pedals, she had somehow persuaded the licensing officer that she was fit to drive her ‘rattletrap Sunbeam’, and was forever going off on trips. She had known about The Vision all her life, and now expressed a wish to see it. She came once, and then again and again, always unheralded, at teatime, with an offering of rock cakes, and her five spluttering pugs.
The gentry bored her. Besides, she shared with the Jones twins certain memories of the happier days before the First World War. She said The Vision was the prettiest farmhouse she’d ever set eyes on, and that if Mrs Redpath gave ‘one iota of trouble’, they should show her the door.
She pressed them to come to the Rectory, which they hadn’t seen since the death of the Reverend Tuke: it took them weeks of hesitation before they consented to go.
They found her halfway down the herbaceous border, in a pink smock and raffia hat, yanking at some convolvulus that threatened to smother the phlox.
Lewis coughed.
‘Oh, there you are!’ She turned to face them: she had long ago lost her stammer.
The two old gentlemen were standing, side by side on the lawn, nervously fingering their hats.
‘Oh, I am glad you came!’ she said, and took them on a tour of the garden.
A thick layer of make-up covered the blotches on her face; and a pair of ivory bangles flew up and down her wasted arm and clacked as they hit her hand.
‘That!’ she gestured to a cloud of white blossom. ‘That’s crambe cordifolium!’
She kept apologizing for the chaos: ‘One can no more find a gardener than the Holy Grail!’
The pillars of the pergola had fallen; the rock garden was a mound of weeds; the rhododendrons were leggy or dying, and the rest of the clergyman’s shrubbery had ‘gone back to jungle’. On the door of the potting-shed, the twins found a horse-shoe they had nailed up there for luck.
A breeze blew clouds of thistledown across the lily pond. They stood on the margin and watched the goldfish moving under the lily-fronds, lost in a reverie of Miss Nancy being rowed across the lake by her brother. Then the housekeeper called them in for tea.
They passed through the French windows into a sea of memorabilia.
On one wall of the drawing-room hung a moth-eaten tapestry, of Tobit; on another, a vast canvas of Noah’s Ark and Mount Ararat, its treacly surface bubbling with welts of bitumen. There were ‘gothick’ cupboards, a bust of Napoleon, half a suit of armour, an elephant’s foot, and any number of other big-game trophies. Potted pelargoniums shed their yellowing leaves over the piles of pamphlets and Country Lifes. A budgie clawed at the bars of its cage; demijohns of home-made wine were busy fermenting under the console, while, dotted here and there over the carpet, were the urine stains of generations of incontinent pugs.
The tea things came rattling in on a trolley.
‘China or Indian?’
‘Mother lived in India,’ said Benjamin, abstractedly.
‘Then you must meet my niece, Philippa! Was born in India! Adores it! Goes there all the time! I mean the tea!’
‘Thank you,’ he said. So to be on the safe side, she poured them two cups of Indian with milk.
At six, they moved out on to the terrace. She served them elderberry wine, and they sat reminiscing of the old times. The twins reminded her of Mr Earnshaw’s peaches.
‘Now he’, she said, ‘really was a gardener! Wouldn’t like it nowadays, would he?’
The wine loosened Lewis’s tongue. Flushed in the face, he confessed how, as boys, they had hidden behind a tree-trunk and watched her ride past.
‘Really,’ she sighed, ‘if only I’d known …’
‘Aye,’ Benjamin chuckled. ‘And you should have heard what this one told Mother!’
‘Tell me!’ She gave Lewis a square look.
‘No. No,’ he said, smiling sheepishly. ‘No. I couldn’t.’
‘He said,’ said Benjamin, ‘“When I grow up, I’m going to marry Miss Bickerton.’”
‘So?’ She gave a throaty laugh. ‘He has grown up. What are we waiting for?’