The Gift of Stones

2

IT HAD BEEN my father’s task, some months before the arrow struck his arm, to help with the opening of a new shaft on the hill beyond the village. All the boys and girls were ordered there. It was their job to stand in line with baskets and tip the disturbed topsoil — and the useless stones, the surface flints made unworkable by frost — into disused workings. What they sought was the undisturbed floorstone of flint at depths unknown to worms. This was the act that underpinned the village. If the stone was good then there were profits to be made. The hefters and the craftsmen, the women in the workshops pacing the five-pointed star between the spit, the anvil, the bellows, the cradle, and the pot, could expect good prices for their finished flints from the traders in the marketplace. This is how it worked: there were two breeds existing side by side, the stoneys and the mongers, the villagers who dug and worked the flint, the traders who hawked and peddled it with the world beyond.

‘You’ll never guess,’ my father said, ‘which breed was fat and wealthy, which gave the orders, which named the price, which (for the opening of that new shaft) did not stand and shiver in the line with baskets full of earth.’

The stoneys’ children had been told to start at dawn. It was the light that woke them, and then the noise as all the able-bodied people cleared their throats and noses for the day or stretched their limbs or greeted their families and their neighbours. It was another working day but an exciting one for the children there. The usual routines could be discarded. The village and the workshops would be empty until the new shaft had been dug and the quality of the new stone tested.

The hill was reached by taking paths across the coastal, cliff-top bracken until a bluff of chalk with seams of flint was met. Then the paths converged as there was only one route forward, a steep track with two rock sentries. The youngsters reached it first and for reasons of their age took the gradient at a sprint. Behind, the older men and women, still half awake on this latest day of labour, were less eager to begin. They made their way through the bracken, some singly, some in pairs, so that to a hawk — be grateful to my father for the image — their progress would seem like a waterfall of people, a dozen slow streams meeting in an impatient, fresh cascade.

My father’s ornateness as a storyteller cannot obscure the one plain truth that needs no hawk for decoration — that the village was obsessed with work, with industry, with craft. It made the people purposeful, wealthy, strong. It made them weary too, and a little jealous of the outside world beyond the hill, beyond the warren of mineshafts, its drifts of unworked flint.

‘There were outsiders close by on that morning,’ said my father. ‘As we came onto the hill, breathless from the climb, all could see a distant, breakfast fire, plaiting a rope of smoke for the sky. There was the sneeze of tethered horses. There was the smell of meat.’

Here, perhaps, we should raise an eyebrow. Beware of father’s tongue. He has led us in his story to the hill and what we might expect is some detail of the labour there, the firing of the grass and gorse and heather, the loosening of the turf, the breaking of the chalk, the shifting of the stones as a hundred people went to work, the tedium. Instead, my father said, he slipped away. No one missed him. He walked towards the smoke. The men there called him over. They let him feed the horses with long grass. They gave him bread and rabbit. There was more laughter amongst these dozen than amongst the hundred on the hill. They blew birdsong with blades of grass. They were in no hurry to begin the business of their day.

Later they put him on a horse and rode away from the coast. He visited their encampment of houses made from skin and wood and played with boys of his own age whose hair was long and tempers short. Some time later he returned to the hill along the landmarks that he had noted in the morning, the fallen tree, the rookery, the clearing with the spongy path, the bluff. The villagers were hard at work. Men were disappearing underground to shoulder height and loosening the chalk with antler picks for the children and the women to load in baskets and dispose. No one had remarked on his departure or greeted his return. For all they knew or cared he had been relieving himself behind a bush. That was his day of labour. And though our eyebrows may be raised when we consider the facts that father conjured for us, the challenge that he made was this: Who there, amongst the hundred on the hill, did not take a journey on that day? The eye is focused on the stone that must be lifted to the shoulder and then pushed onto the broken turf at the rim of the pit. And then the next stone. And the next stone too. All day. That is how the job is done. The body is engaged. But the mind is like the hawk that father summoned for the image of the paths and the waterfall. It can fly. If one of the men had clapped his hands at one instant in the deepening of the pit and asked, ‘Where are you?’, not one would answer, ‘Hard at work upon the hill.’ They were elsewhere. Kings and heroes. Young again. Out at sea. In love. Winning arguments that they had lost the night before. Eating well. Rich. Walking in the forest to the plume of smoke that beckoned there. Hunting scallops with their toes.