Blackberry Wine

18

Pog Hill, Summer 1977

SEPTEMBER CAME. JAY WENT BACK TO SCHOOL WITH A SENSE OF finality, a feeling that something at Pog Hill had changed. If it had, then Joe’s short, infrequent letters gave no sign. There was a card at Christmas – two lines, carefully inscribed with the round printing of the barely literate – then another at Easter. The terms crawled to an end as usual. Jay’s fifteenth birthday came and went – a cricket bat from his father and Candide, theatre tickets from his mother. After that came exams; dorm parties; secrets told and promises broken; a couple of hot-weather fights; a school play, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, with all the parts played by boys, as in Shakespeare’s time. Jay played Puck, much to the chagrin of the Bread Baron, but all the time he was thinking of Joe and Pog Hill, and as the end of the summer term approached, he grew jumpy and irritable and impatient. This year his mother had decided to join him in Kirby Monckton for a few weeks, ostensibly to spend more time with her son, but in reality to escape the media attention following her most recent amorous break-up. Jay wasn’t looking forward to being the focus of her sudden maternal interest, and said so clearly enough to provoke an outburst of outraged histrionics. He was in disgrace before the holidays had even started.

They arrived in late June, by taxi, in the rain. Jay’s mother was doing her Mater Dolorosa act, and he was trying to listen to the radio as she passed between long, soulful silences and girlish exclamations on seeing forgotten landmarks.

‘Jay, darling, look! That little church – isn’t it just the sweetest?’ He put it down to her being in so many sitcoms, but maybe she had always talked like that. Jay turned the radio up a fraction. The Eagles were playing ‘Hotel California’. She gave him one of her pained looks and thinned her mouth. Jay ignored her.

The rain came down non-stop for the first week of the holiday. Jay stayed in the house and watched it and listened to the radio, trying to tell himself it couldn’t last for ever. The sky was white and portentous. Looking up into the clouds, the falling raindrops looked like soot. His grandparents fussed over both of them, treating his mother like the little girl she had been, cooking all her favourite meals. For five days they lived on apple pie, ice cream, fried fish and scollops. On the sixth day Jay took his bike down to Pog Hill, in spite of the weather, but Joe’s door was locked and there was no answer to his knocking. Jay left his bike by the back wall and climbed over into the garden, hoping to look in through the windows.

The windows were boarded up.

Panic washed over him. He hammered on one of the sealed windows with his fist.

‘Hey, Joe? Joe?’

There was no answer. He hammered again, calling Joe’s name. A piece of red flannel, bleached by the elements, was nailed to the window frame, but it looked old, finished, last year’s magic. Behind the house a screen of tall weeds – hemlock and wormwood and rosebay willowherb – hid the abandoned allotment.

Jay sat down on the wall, regardless of the rain which glued his T-shirt to his skin and dripped from his hair into his eyes. He felt completely numb. How could Joe have gone, he asked himself stupidly. Why hadn’t he said something? Written a note, even? How could Joe have gone without him?

‘Don’t take on, lad,’ called a voice behind him. ‘It’s not as bad as it looks.’

Jay whipped round so fast he almost fell off the wall. Joe was standing some twenty feet behind him, almost hidden from sight behind the tall weeds. He was wearing a yellow sou’wester on top of his pit cap. He had a spade in one hand.

‘Joe?’

The old man grinned.

‘Aye. What d’you think, then?’

Jay was beyond words.

‘It’s me permanent solution,’ explained Joe, looking pleased. ‘They’ve cut off me lectrics, but I’ve wired mesself up to bypass the meter, so I can still use em. I’ve bin diggin a well round back so I can do waterin. Come over and tell me what you think.’

As always, Joe behaved as if no time had passed, as if Jay had never been away. He parted the weeds which separated them and motioned the boy to follow him through. Beyond, the allotment was as ordered as it had always been, with lemonade bottles sheltering small plants, old windows arranged to make cold frames, and tyres stacked up for potato-planters. From a distance the whole thing might just have been the accumulated detritus of years, but come a little closer and everything was there, just as before. On the railway banking, fruit trees – some shielded with sheets of plastic – dripped rain. It was the best camouflage job Jay had ever seen.

‘It’s amazing,’ he said at last. ‘I really thought you’d gone.’

Joe looked pleased.

‘You’re not the only one that thinks that, lad,’ he said mysteriously. ‘Look down there.’

Jay looked down into the cutting. The signal box which had been Joe’s greenhouse was still standing, though in a State of dereliction; vines grew out of the punctured roof and tumbled down the peeling sides. The lines had been taken up and the sleepers dug out – all but the fifty-yard stretch between the box and Joe’s house, as if overlooked by some accident. Between the rust-red tracks weeds were sprouting.

‘Come next year no-one’ll even remember there were a railway down Pog Hill. Praps people’ll let us alone then.’

Jay nodded slowly, still speechless with amazement and relief.

‘Perhaps they will.’