The Devil's Larder

42

THIS WAS THE challenge that they faced. To cook their meal without a cooker or a pot. The boys had brought their tents out to the island in the stream for just three nights of liberty. It had been heavy work, toiling up the valley with their gear. They had their sleeping bags, their cartons of packaged, tinned and foil-wrapped food, their plastic plates and cutlery, their gas bottle.

But someone — let’s not spoil their weekend yet by naming names — had failed to put the little cooker and the pots and pans into his bag. It didn’t matter on day one. They ate the fruit, the biscuits and the bread, the chocolate, the cereal. That night they made a fire — at least the boy we should not name had packed the matches — and dined on toast and jam. Next morning they ate the bacon and the meat goujons, roasted on a flat stone in the fire. Their lips were singed and ashy. They drove away the taste with candy bars.

By the evening of day two they were immensely hungry, bored as well. They had misjudged their rations.

All that remained to eat were eggs and rice. The boys knew that it was possible to fry an egg on the bonnet of a 1950s car. They’d seen a photograph — a silver Buick, four spitting eggs, sunny side up, the bluest sky, the baking hills of Stovepipe Wells in California. But this was not America, nor was it warm, nor were there any cars. If only they could find an old tin can, then they could boil their supper. But this was untouched countryside. The sort of people who liked this kind of landscape did not leave their trash behind.

At first they thought these deprivations would be fun. They’d have to hunt for food, catch fish, like cavemen, cook their conquests on an open fire. But there were no fishing rods or nets. There were no traps or snares. There was no wildlife other than themselves, as far as they could tell.

The only option, then, was to find some way to boil their eggs without a pot or pan. It could be done. It had been done, so many times, 4,000 years before. Their island was an ancient place, a proven refuge for the night, where hunters, travellers might camp in those far days before the larder and the fridge. If those ancestors had some eggs, then they’d not have to wait until a Buick limousine turned up. All they’d have to do was dig a hole and line it with clay from the river bank, then fill it with water carried in skins. A constant supply of red-hot stones baked in their fire would make the water tumble-boil and cook the eggs to perfection. Indeed, the challenge could be met quite readily, but not by boys who hadn’t studied their prehistory.

So they sat round the fire that second night and contemplated something worse than hunger. They contemplated river, night and clay, the broken landscape and the perfect eggs, the foolishness of camping by this unceasing and unfeeding stream. They dreamed of being more courageous than they were, of being braver boys. And when the rain began to fall they contemplated their defeat of going home as soon as it was light, a whole day earlier than planned, and smuggling back that box of eggs into the simpler, chilling, less historic place from which they’d taken it.