The Gift of Stones

23

NOW I CAN remember for myself. I do not need my father’s floating eyebrow or his single, restless hand or the baiting and dramatic contours of his voice to shape and ornament my life. I do not need his hawks for commentary. I have my own.

My witness-hawk took wing when I was two or three. Each dawn it rose above the village, my feathered memory, to hover and to scrutinize what passed for life below. I see myself, a little plainer and a little plumper than my mother ever was. I see her, too. My mother was not happy there. She had good cause. In father’s boyhood there had been two breeds existing side by side, the stoneys and the mongers, the craftsman dynasties who worked the flint and the traders whom the stone made rich. My father now had introduced a third and wretched breed, the pair of homeless vagrants from the heath. What could we do?

At first we simply shivered to the welcome that the villagers gave us. Their indifference was prying. There were no greetings, but they raised their eyes as we walked by and paused above their stones. They clearly disapproved. Of what? Our meagre clothes, our weathered skin, our helplessness, our voices which — more used to shouting in the wind than trading whispers by the hearth — were loud? Here were people with the eye to penetrate a stone, to look beyond the crust of smoky, mottled chalk and spy the tool within. Yet that eye was blind if required to pierce a stranger’s skin, to judge a woman by her face, to spot the empty stomachs and the empty hearts which could be filled and warmed as much by smiles as food.

My father said that they were shy, suspicious, that they were only used to dealing with new faces over trade. ‘It will take time,’ he said.

‘It will take time for them to change? Or us?’ my mother asked. She was dismayed at everything she saw, and father took the blame. She had no wish to be like them, tied and bound by the regulation of the working day. What kind of life was that? To live like tethered goats in one small sphere of grass; to do and say exactly as the neighbours; to not touch this or that, to not go here or there; to intervene all day between your heart and tongue; to turn out, at dawn, and climb the flint-pit hill in listless, yawning lines because some merchant had the force to say, More stone.

Still, we had to stay.

‘There is no choice,’ my father said. ‘We’ll have to make here home.’ But making homes was not his skill. The one-armed man who seemed to manage on the heath was here — a cousin’s phrase — just like a cuckoo, good at Talk, not Do. For all his plots and promises he could not build four walls of stone, a roof, a house. He could not lift with his one hand. My mother could. Despite her paleness and the shallow flesh that hid her bones, she was tough. And tougher here, with people all around, than she had been upon the heath, disarmed and addled by her widowhood.

My father’s plot was this — that Doe and I were now his family; that we would settle into love, with Doe his sister, mistress, friend entwined with him; that, given time, his uncle and his cousins would provide. He thought his tongue would build a home for us.

My mother’s toughness was an axe that had two blades. Its second edge was petulance. She could not wait for father to conjure up stone walls. Her back was cold. She had a child to feed. She had no time for father’s fondness, his clumsiness, his tales. She found his presence irksome. She pushed him far away because she was too overwhelmed by cares for gentleness. All she yearned for was a home that could not be broken down with sticks.

And so, while father went hunting with his toes for shellfish in the sand and wondered whether the water in his eyes was spray or tears, Doe cleared a site of bracken in between the last house of the village and the hill. This was the spot where the many clifftop paths converged into one steep track and passed between the two rock sentries to climb the bluff of chalk and reach the warren of mine shafts beyond and the drifts of unworked flint. She was no fool. It was a simple task to find flat building stones amongst the spoils and then to slide them downhill from the summit of the track until they settled on her bruised and flattened bracken.

The hill was on her side. The villagers were not. She could not hope to help herself to stone without some stoney raising the alarm. A delegation came of busy-bodies and of idlers. They pushed Leaf to the front and whispered what they’d want to say if they were him. Leaf was not pleased to be summoned from his work to deal with such affairs. The wind was lifting all his hairs and making knots. My mother met him with a look that said, You’re less than geese. You don’t scare me.

‘These stones are ours,’ he said. ‘Who said that you could take these stones?’

‘These stones are mine,’ she said. ‘I found them on the hill. I brought them here. They’re mine. How are they yours?’

‘You’re not from here. That hill is ours, not yours.’

‘And the air round here is yours as well,’ she said. ‘I breathe; I steal your air. And the wind that’s making such a skimpy harvest on your head? Is that your wind? How can it be that it blows my hair, too?’

Leaf was not equipped for Doe. He shrugged and cursed the wind.

‘We’ll let these stones be gifts from us,’ he said. ‘But do not fool yourself. That hill is ours. If you take stone, what then? Then anyone can come and help themselves and build a wall. But still, you are a woman with a child. We’ll close our eyes on you and what you do.’ He turned and led his delegation back to work. My mother built her walls.