The Devils Children

III

GOOD LAND, CLEAN WATER

A PLACE where they could live.

They came to it eight days later, but did not recognize it at first. They thought it was just a sensible place to stop for a few days so that Rani, Neena’s sister-in-law, could have her baby. On the left of the lane stood a raw, ugly, square brick farmhouse with metal-frame windows; then, a little further up the hill, was a brick shed; then a tiny brand-new bungalow; and then, for them to camp in, an old brick farmyard built like a fort with a single gateway, an old barn down one side, and on the others single-story cattle sheds and grain stores. A hundred yards on, right on the ridge of the hill, loomed two vast new asbestos and concrete barns and a cluster of grain towers. On the other side of the lane there was only a single house, opposite the farmyard. Once it had been two old cottages for farm laborers, but someone had run them together and smartened them up for an artist to live in.

He’d gone, and so had all the other people. Every house was empty. No cattle lowed for milking, no cat miaowed on any doorstep. Hundreds of birds clattered in the hedges round the artist’s cottage, but the farmer had hauled out every other hedge on his land to make it easier to cultivate the flowing steppes of hay and wheat and barley that now stood rippling in the upland wind across six hundred acres.

A mile and a half down the hill you could see the tower of Felpham Church, warm brick, rising amid lindens, seeming to move nearer when the afternoon sun shone full on it, and then to drift away when a cloud shadow hit the sun. You could see only a few roofs of Felpham, although it was quite a big village. Beyond that was distance.

And the distance really was distance, although the farm stood barely a hundred and fifty feet above the plain which stretched to the northeast. For twenty miles there was nothing else as high. There were no real landmarks, except the now useless electric pylons. A double row of these swooped across the slope between the farm and the village, but Nicky tried not to see them. Instead she gazed out beyond them to the mottled leagues, blue and gray and green, that reached toward London. Though they had been settled here for weeks she felt that she still could count every footstep of the road they had come.

It was the people she remembered most. First the old tramp who had come, snuffling like a hedgehog, up to their camp on Esher Common and asked for food. The Sikhs had simply made room for him, dirty as he was, and fed him all he wanted. He must have been half crazy, for he seemed to notice no difference between them and other people, nor between these times and other times, but just mumbled and chewed, and at last lurched away into the dark without a word of thanks.

But the first real people they’d met — ordinary English people, wearing English clothes — had been at Ripley. And they’d been enemies. A dozen men and women had run out of a pub at the sound of the iron wheels on the road. For a while they’d simply stared as the march of Sikhs moved slowly past, but then one of the women had said something mocking to the men, then a man had shouted and all the men were throwing stones and bottles at the Sikhs while the women cursed and jeered. Kaka had been hit by a stone, but had managed not to cry. Nicky had rushed from the line, shouting to the men to stop it; their attitude changed, and for a moment she’d thought they’d heard her and understood, until the rear guard of the Sikhs rushed past her, staves whirling. The Englishmen had broken and run, while their women cowered against the wall. As the procession moved out of Ripley there were catcalls from behind walls, and clods of earth lobbed into the line, but no one had followed them. And the people working the fields paid no attention as they marched by, grim and silent.

They’d camped that night in a field north of Guildford, on the banks of the river Wey, and had held another council. The discussion sounded earnest and subdued, and after it a party of men had gone night-raiding into Guildford, though there’d still seemed to be plenty of food left in the cardboard boxes on the carts. (Seeing a tin opened made Nicky uneasy, but the meat inside tasted all right.)

They’d decided to head for the coast, but to avoid towns and villages even if it meant going the long way around. However, the houses in the Home Counties are so close sown that they were bound to pass some of them, and at the very next hamlet two or three faces had leaned out of windows and called cheerily for news, just as though columns of bearded foreigners passed that way so often that there was nothing strange about it. So for a while they’d felt more optimistic, but as they steadily trudged the days away they’d learned that every village was different, and that the frowning ones were commoner than the smiling ones. And people seemed to have little idea of what was happening more than a mile or two from their own doors.

No more stones were thrown at them, but they had thrown some themselves. This was in their second battle, on the outskirts of Aldershot, a much nastier business than the skirmish at Ripley. The enemy had been a wandering gang of robbers, though at first they’d looked like another procession, trundling down the sunk road toward the Sikhs; but almost at once a dozen young men armed with pick helves had charged shouting and yelling, forcing the Sikhs’ advance guard back against the group of women and children. Uncle Chacha had brought the rear guard up in a counterattack. While the grunts and bellows rose Nicky stared wildly around for something she could do. Gopal grabbed her elbow and pointed to the flinty chalk at the top of the embankment, and the next moment they were scrambling desperately up. There’d been seven of the children up there, screaming and hurling flints, by the time the robbers broke and ran back to where four or five dirty women had been watching the fun from among their own prams and barrows. The angry Sikhs had driven the lot of them on down the road, hitting as hard as they could. Nicky had stopped to look at the robbers’ baggage, which had turned out to be a hoard of cheap, looted jewelry, a lot of boxes of sweets and some moldy loaves. The Sikhs left it all where it was.

Mr. Gurchuran Singh had hurt his leg in the battle, so they’d decided to rest for a couple of days where they next found water. They had posted extra sentries that night, and after supper the big uncle, whose name was Mr. Jagindar Singh, had spoken very earnestly to Nicky.

“We think you should leave us,” he said, “as soon as we next meet friendly people. You will be safer with them than with us. We propose to try to reach the sea and go away to France. We listened to the Paris radio in London, and they are free from this madness there.”

“But what will you do for a canary?” Nicky had said.

“Oh, we shall be careful. You have taught us much.”

“I’d rather come with you for a bit longer, Mr. Singh.”

“We do not consider it wise.”

“What does your mother say?”

“Ha, you have bewitched her, Nicky. She says that it is no business of ours, and that you are to make up your own mind.”

Nicky had looked toward the cushioned cart and seen the bird-bright eyes watching her through the gloom.

“Please then,” she’d said. “I’d much rather stay. I don’t want to have to learn to know a new lot of people. Have you still got the . . . the thing you listened to France with?”

“Kaka knocked it off the table and none of us knew how to mend it.”

“Good.”

She’d meant what she’d said about the new people. They would be English, like her, and the kindlier they were the worse it would be, day after day probing to pierce through the clumsy armor she’d built around her heart. They would try to be mothers, and fathers, and perhaps even the sisters and brothers she had never had. And only she would know, all the time, in waking nightmares as well as the deeps of dream, how such a home can be smashed in a single morning. She couldn’t live through that again.

Besides, against all her reason, she had made a new friend. Kaka’s elder sister Ajeet was a very quiet girl whom Nicky had at first thought was seven or eight; in fact the two of them had been born only a week apart, though on opposite sides of the world. They had fallen into that instant, easy friendship which feels as though it had begun before any of your memories and will last until you are so old that the humped veins on the back of your hands show dark blue-purple through your wax-white skin. Ajeet’s mother — Uncle Chacha’s wife — was the fat frowning woman, and she seemed anxious to know about every breath her children drew, but they all seemed happy enough when you got to know them. At least she didn’t try to be a mother to Nicky.

They had to move before Mr. Gurchuran Singh’s leg was properly healed, because a passing horseman had shouted to them that there was plague in Aider-shot. That had meant a long journey round the northern edge of that ugly, shambling town, so in the end they had come to Felpham from the north, taking eight days to get there from London. Felpham was a frowning village, but not a stone-throwing one, so they had trudged silently through and begun the long push up Strake Lane, never guessing that they were nearly home. In fact Nicky almost refused to pass the double line of pylons, because they seemed so much worse than the single ones which she’d crossed with a slight shudder before, but Gopal cajoled her under.

It had rained twice that day, and there were looming clouds about, so they were glad of the farmyard roofs and the dry hay beneath them. Four of the men pushed a cart laden with pots to Strake, two miles further along the road. There was a pond marked on the map at Strake.

It was Nicky who found the old well, which had enabled the farm to be built there in the first place. The close eye which the Sikh parents kept on their children irked her, though she didn't like to say so; but she tended to drift off and explore as soon as she had done what she could to help set up camp; it was her way of saying that she wasn’t going to let herself be watched and pampered like that. Once or twice Gopal had slipped away and come with her, only to be scolded when they got back, but this time she was alone.

The artist’s cottage was locked. Nose against windows, Nicky could see a low-ceilinged kitchen and another big room which had been made by knocking down several walls. Light streamed into it through a big skylight in the far roof. She didn’t feel like visiting the huge barns because they’d be full of engines, and everywhere else was nothing but rippling wheat; so she sat on a low circular flint wall, topped with a line of brick, and thought about nothing much. The shouting and chatter of the encampment washed over her unheeded. The center of the flint wall was covered with a four-foot round of wood; she thought vaguely that it must be some sort of garden table, uncomfortable because you couldn’t get your knees under it. She slapped the timber with her palm.

A slow boom answered, as though the whole hill were speaking, the million-year-old chalk answering her knock in tones almost too deep to hear. Each slap or rap produced the same bass reply. She got her fingers under the edge of the wood and it came up like a lid.

The hole in the center of the circle was black. It was a tunnel of night defying the gay sun. The palms of her hands went chilly as she clutched the brick rim and peered in. At first she could see nothing, but then there was a faint light, a circle of sky with a head and shoulders in the middle. The rough chalk walls dwindled down, becoming invisible in darkness before they reached the water. She dropped a stone but it fell crooked, clacking several times from wall to wall before the splash. She went to fetch Kewal.

He dropped three or four stones, with his other hand feeling his pulse. Even when the stones fell straight it seemed ages before the splash answered.

“About fifty feet to the water,” he said. “If we can get it up, and if the water is good, it means we can stay here for a while. The women say that Rani’s baby will be born in two or three days.”

They found a rope and bucket in the sheds, but it took a lot of trial and error and a lot of many-voiced arguments before the men rigged up a method of getting a bucket down all that distance and making it lie sideways when it reached the water, so that it filled, and then tilted upright when it was full. Hauling a full bucket up from fifty feet was tiring, too, but it was better than walking to Strake. And the water when it came was so sweet and clean that Cousin Punam decided it was safe to drink without boiling.

It was Gopal who found the corn. While Rani was in labor, three days later, the older children were shushed away. Nicky didn’t follow them up to the big barns because she felt uncomfortable there. She was looking, with little luck, for late wild strawberries in the matted grass on the banks of the lane when Gopal came hurrying past, his hands cupped close together as if he was trying to carry water. Nicky thought he’d caught a bird and ran to look.

“Nicky, you’re a ninny,” he said. “This is food. I climbed an iron ladder up one of those round towers and opened a lid at the top and it is full of corn. There is enough to feed us for a year. Look, it is dry and good.”

He ran on to show his treasure to the menfolk, while Nicky returned to combing through the weeds for strawberries. She found no more of the little red globules of sweetness, but caught a grasshopper instead, let it tickle her prisoning palms for a moment, then held it free and watched it tense itself for its leap, and vanish.

The baby was born in a cow byre. It was a boy. That night the Sikhs held full council. It was just as noisy and muddled with cross talk as any of the ones they’d heard on the road, but Nicky got the feeling that even in the middle of rowdy arguments they were being more serious, paying more attention to what the others said. From time to time they would ask her a question.

“We cannot use any of the tractors, can we Nicky?”

She shook her head.

“But we can reap and plow and dig and plant by hand?”

“Oh yes.”

“And there is nothing wrong with this wheat?” “Wrong?” She looked through the gateway to where the beautiful tall blades waved, gray as fungus under the big moon, but already tinged with yellow by daylight as the year edged toward harvest.

“Oh yes,” said Mr. Surbans Singh, “this is a modern crossbred variety of wheat, and another of barley. The madness does not apply to them, you think?”

“Oh no!”

Another long fusillade of Punjabi followed. Then . . .

“Nicky, would the madness make the villagers come and destroy us if we were to set up a blacksmith’s shop?”

“What would you do?”

“Make and mend spades and sickles and plows and other tools.”

“I mean, how would you do it? What would you use?”

“We would have to make charcoal first, which is done by burning wood very slowly under a mound of earth. Then we would have to contrive a furnace, with bellows to keep the charcoal burning fiercely. And when the iron was red-hot we would hammer it, and bend it with vises and pincers, and then temper it in water or oil.”

“Water,” said Nicky. “Where would you get the iron from?”

“There is plenty lying around the farm.”

“I think that would be all right. You could try, and I could always tell you if I thought it wasn't. Why do you want to know?”

“First, because if we are to stay here we shall need hand tools. This farm is highly mechanized, which is no doubt why the farmer left; he felt he could not work it without his tractors. But secondly, we shall need more to eat than wheat. We shall have to barter for meat and vegetables until we can produce our own. Some of us have seen smithwork done in India, in very primitive conditions; Mr. Jagindar Singh was a skilled metalworker in London, and two more of us have done similar work in factories and garages; so we think we can set up an efficient smithy. But perhaps the villagers will not have our advantages, so we shall be able to barter metalwork with them in exchange for the things we need.”

“That's a good idea,” said Nicky, astonished again by the amount of sense that seemed to come out of all the clamor and repetition. “But do you think the villagers will actually trade with you? They didn’t look very friendly when we came through, and they haven’t come up here at all.”

“If we make something they need, they will trade with us,” said Uncle Jagindar somberly. “It does not matter how much they dislike us. We have found this in other times.”

The whole council muttered agreement. Kewal gave a sharp, snorting laugh which Nicky hadn’t heard before.

“We must be careful,” he said. “If we become too rich they will want to take our wealth away from us.”

“I expect there are quite a lot of robbers in England now,” said Nicky. “Like those ones we fought on the other side of Aldershot — men who’ve got no way of getting food except by robbing the ones who have.”

This set off another round of argument and discussion in Punjabi. The men seemed to become very excited; voices rose, eyes flashed, an insignificant uncle even beat his chest. Nicky edged back out of the circle to ask Gopal what they were talking about. He was allowed at the council, but he was thought too young to speak (Nicky wouldn’t have been listened to either if she hadn’t been the Sikh’s canary).

Gopal laughed scornfully, but he looked as excited as the rest.

“They are going to make weapons,” he said. “Swords and spears and steel-tipped arrows. A Sikh should carry a real sword when times are dangerous. But I will tell you a joke — we Sikhs won most of our battles with guns; we used to run forward, fire a volley and then run back until we had time to reload. It does not sound very brave, but all India feared us then. What is the matter, Nicky? Oh, I’m sorry, I forgot. But they will not make guns now;

instead they will turn this farmyard into a fort which we can defend against the robbers.’’

After that the council became less serious, dwindling into boastings and warlike imaginings. Gopal translated the louder bits.

“My Uncle Gurchuran says we must capture horses and turn ourselves into cavalry, and then we can protect the whole countryside for a fee. A protection racket. We often lived like that in the old days . . . Mr. Parnad Singh says his father was Risaldar at an archery club in Simla, and he will teach us all to shoot. A risaldar is a sort of sergeant . . . My Uncle Chacha makes a joke of him and Mr. Parnad Singh is angry . . . My Uncle Jagindar is trying to smooth him down; he says it will be useful to have a good shot with a bow for hunting, and that Uncle Chacha must be careful what he says, because he is so fat that he will make a first-rate target. That is unfair because Uncle Chacha is the quickest of them all, and the best fighter. You saw how he fought against those robbers. Now he is pretending to be angry with Uncle Jagindar, but that does not matter because it is inside the family . . . My grandmother is speaking. She says we must all be careful how we talk to one another, because we are in a dangerous world and we cannot afford to have feuds with one another. My goodness, she says, we Sikhs are a quick-tempered people. She is beginning to tell a story. She tells very good stories, for children and adults too.”

The council had fallen silent at the creak of the old woman's voice. There had been a brief guffaw of laughter at her second sentence, but that was all. One of the men turned to glare at Gopal because his translation was spoiling the silence. He too stopped talking.

The story was not long, but the old woman told it with careful and elaborate gestures of the hands, as though she were the storyteller at some great court and had been sent for after supper to entertain the princes. Nicky could hear, even in the unknown language, that it was the story of a fierce quarrel between two proud men. She looked along the outer circle of children and saw Ajeet sitting entranced, mouth slightly parted and head craning forward as she listened and stared at the elaborate ceremony of the fluttering hands. Ajeet’s lips were moving with the words, and her hands made faint unconscious efforts to flutter themselves.

All the Sikhs laughed when the story ended, then broke into smaller chattering groups. Nicky crossed to where Ajeet still sat staring at the orange firelight.

“What was the story about, Ajeet?” she said.

“Oh, I do not know/’ said Ajeet in her usual near whisper, shy and confused.

“Please tell me. I like to know anything your grandmother says. She is so . . . so special.”

“Oh, it was a tale of two Sikh brothers, farmers, whom my grandmother knew in India, and how they quarreled over a dead pigeon, and in the end lost their farm and their wives and everything. Listen. It was like this.”

Her voice changed and strengthened. She drew her head back and sat very upright, freeing her hands for gestures. The history of that forgotten feud rolled out in vivid, exact words, each phrase underlined with just the same gesture of finger or wrist that her grandmother had used. Once or twice she hesitated over a word, and Nicky realized that she was turning familiar Punjabi into English which didn’t quite fit. When she finished Nicky found herself laughing at the ridiculous disaster, just as the men had laughed, and heard more voices laughing behind her. Kewal and three of the other men had been standing around in silence to hear the same story all over again.

“Very excellent,” said Kewal, only half mocking. One of the men called in Punjabi over his shoulder, and was answered by a pleased cackle from the open stall where the old woman lay on her cushions;

she had been watching the show too. Ajeet accepted the compliments gravely, without any of her usual shyness, then took Nicky off to say good-night to the old lady.

This had become a sort of ritual for Nicky, a good-luck thing, wherever they were. They couldn’t say much to each other, even with Ajeet to translate, because their lives had been so different, but somehow it ended the day on a comfortable note.

As they crossed the yard back to the shed where the women slept, Nicky looked round the firelit walls and the black-shadowed crannies. So this was home, now.

Provided nobody came to drive them out.

They settled in slowly. The bungalow had been left unlocked, and the first thing the Sikhs did was to redecorate the bedroom with rich hangings. They took their shoes off when they went into the room. Uncle Jagindar carried the old lady in when it was finished, and she clucked her satisfaction, though she wanted several details changed. Nicky watched fascinated from the doorway.

“It is a place to keep our holy book,” explained Kewal. “My family are very orthodox Sikhs. Before these troubles some of us younger ones did not treat our religion as earnestly as the elders, but now it seems more important. It will help to keep us together.”

“We’ll have to use the other houses to sleep in when the winter comes,” said Nicky. “It’ll be too cold to sleep out in the sheds.”

“You are very practical-minded. That was how the English ruled India. They would go and admire the Taj Mahal, but all the time they were thinking about drains. Anyway, my uncles do not feel it proper to break into other people’s houses, even if the people have gone away.”

“They’ll have to in the end,” said Nicky. “I don’t mind doing the burgling, and then once the doors are open you could all come and use the houses like you are doing this one.”

Kewal laughed and pulled his glossy beard.

“That would be an acceptable compromise,” he said. “But I think we will not tell my uncles until you have done it. I will attend and supervise, because in my opinion your techniques of burglary are a little crude.”

But you have to be crude with metal-framed windows. They fit too tight for you to be able to slide a knife or wire through to loose the catch. Nicky broke two panes, opened two windows, climbed into two musty and silent houses, and tiptoed through the dank air to unbolt two doors. The artist’s cottage was full of lovely bric-a-brac — a deer head, and straw ornaments that were made for the finials of hayricks, and Trinidadian steel drums. Kewal delightedly began to tonk out a pop tune, but Nicky (frightened now of what she’d done) dragged him away.

And the uncles were cross when she told them. (She left Kewal out of her story.) But when the women found that there was an open hearth in the cottage and a big closed stove in the farmhouse, in both of which you could burn logs, they told the uncles to stop being so high-minded. Here was somewhere to bathe and attend to small babies in the warm. And though the electric cookers were useless, a little bricklaying would turn the artist’s drawingroom fire into a primitive but practical oven and stove for a communal kitchen.

Even so, Uncle Jagindar spoke very seriously to Nicky.

“It is difficult for us,” he said. “If you were my child, or one of my nieces, I would punish you for this. Perhaps you are right and we will have to use these houses in winter, but you are wrong to take decisions on your own account against the wishes of us older people. If you continue to do this, then perhaps our own children will start to copy you, and then we will have to send you away. We will be sad, but we will do it.”

“I’m sorry,” said Nicky. “My own family weren’t so . . . so . . .”

“If your own family were more like us,” said Uncle Jagindar, “you would not have become separated from them as you did, even though a mad priest caused a panic.”

Nicky was surprised. Ajeet was the only person she’d told about that wild Dervish who’d pranced red-eyed beside the retreating Londoners yelling about fire and brimstone; and the thunderstorm; and the hideous mass panic; and the long, sick misery of loss. Ajeet must have told her frowning mother, who must have passed the story on. But Uncle Jagindar was being unfair — anybody could have got lost in that screaming mob.

“All right,” she said. “I’ll try not to be a bad influence.” That was her own and secret joke —■ Miss Calthrop at school used to talk about girls who were bad influences, but had spoiled her case by always picking on the girls who were most fun to be with. Uncle Jagindar nodded, and Nicky went up across the fields to the wood to see how the charcoal burners were getting on.

They had made an eight-foot pyramid of logs, covered them with wet bracken, and then sealed the pile with ashes and burned earth. Then the pile was lit by the tedious process of dropping embers down the central funnel and carefully blocking them in with straight sticks. A pockmarked man was in charge, because he had done the job in India. Nicky hardly knew him, as he was one of the Sikhs who was not related to the main families and spoke little English; but now he leaned on his spade by the water hole he had dug and gave orders to the two men who were building a second pyramid of logs.

Gopal came into the clearing with his father, shoving a handcart laden with more logs for the pile.

“Wouldn't it be better sense to burn the charcoal near the log stack?” said Nicky. “Or to cut your wood from these trees here?”

“Wrong both times,” said Gopal. “Nought out of ten. You must have seasoned wood, and we were lucky to find that big stack up by the road. And you must have water to quench the charcoal with when you take the pile to bits. If Mr. Harbans Singh had not found that spring, we might have had to carry the wood all the way down to the well.”

“How long before you get any charcoal?”

“Three days, Mr. Harbans says, but the first lot may not be very good. Have you finished your bow, Risaldar?”

They all called Mr. Parnad Singh Risaldar now. It was a joke in a way, but he seemed to like it. Perhaps it reminded him of the glories of his father’s Simla club. He was an older man than the others, his beard a splendid gray waterfall. He looked up from where he was whittling at a long stave and spoke in Punjabi.

“He says he might be able to make a good bow in a year’s time, when he has seasoned some ash, but this will be good enough to kill a man with at twenty yards. Nicky, if we found some tempered steel on the farm, would it be safe to make a bow with that?”

“I think so,” said Nicky uncertainly.

“Let’s try,” said Gopal. “There’s all sorts of metal littered about the barn.”

Halfway down the huge field two bright-colored figures were working, a man in a crimson turban and a woman in an orange sari. When the children came nearer they saw that it was Mr. Surbans Singh and his wife Mohindar, he scything, she raking. Mr. Surbans Singh had appointed himself head farmer. “What are you doing?” called Gopal.

Mr. Surbans Singh straightened up, but his wife (whom Nicky thought the prettiest of all the Sikhs) went on tedding the grass he’d cut into a loose line.

“I found this scythe in a shed,” he said. “It is very bad, and the hay is grown too coarse to be good feed, but poor hay will be better than none if we are to keep sheep through the winter.”

‘‘Sheep?” said Nicky, surprised.

“I hope so,” said Mr. Surbans Singh. “I would not like to eat nothing but chapati all the year round. Eh, my dear?”

Mrs. Mohindar stopped raking and smiled at him.

“I have married a greedy man,” she said.

Mr. Surbans Singh looked at the tiny patch he had cut, and then at the vast sweep of the hayfield.

“We have a long way to go,” he said ruefully, and bent to his scything.

From the gray-white hulk of the barns came an erratic clinking of metal. Nicky noticed Gopal looking at her out of the corner of his eye as they walked down the slope.

“What are they up to?” she said nervously.

“Come and see.”

She wouldn’t actually go in under the big roof, but the barn was open at both ends and she could see the whole scene. All down one side a rank of bright-colored engines, gawky with insectlike joints and limbs, stood silent. Other machines and parts of machines littered the floor of the barn, leaving only just enough passageway for the tractors to haul the attachments they needed in and out.

“This farmer liked gadgets,” said Gopal. “Three combines, two hay balers, six different tractors, all the latest devices.”

“What are the men doing?” said Nicky, quivering. Uncle Jagindar was walking about among the engines with a hammer. From time to time he would tap at one, which produced the clinking, and call a man over to him, point and explain.

“Iron and steel are funny stuff,” said Gopal. “There are lots of different kinds. Some you can work with, and some you can’t — it is too hard, or its softening point is too high, or it comes from the forge too brittle. My Uncle Jagindar wants ordinary mild steel, and he’s looking for bits he can use; the others are trying to take them off the tractors and attachments.”

“And the things won’t go when they’re taken to bits?” said Nicky.

“That would suit you?”

“Yes, but it’s not as good as smashing them.”

She was quite serious, but Gopal laughed and Uncle Jagindar heard the noise and came out into the sunlight. He was interested in the idea about the bow, but said he didn’t think they’d find steel whippy enough, and he didn’t think he could temper a rod to that state either. Besides, it would be very dangerous to the bowman if it snapped under tension. Then he shouted to one of the men who brought out an old sickle without a handle which they’d unearthed. Uncle Jagindar sharpened it with a stone and bound sacking tightly around the tang until it was comfortable to hold. Gopal, much to his disgust, was sent up to help Mr. Surbans Singh in the hayfield, and Nicky went with him to turn the hay.

It was surprising how much got cut, provided you didn’t stop every few minutes to look and see how you were getting on.