The Grandmothers

When Thomas told them. ‘I have a daughter and I’ve seen her and she’s a poppet,’ it was definitely in the spirit of one catching up in a race.

‘I hope you’ve considered the possible legal consequences,’ said Edward.

‘Oh, hell, don’t be like that,’ said Thomas.

Jessy Staveney sat brooding. The yellow, or golden, hair of Victoria’s imagination was now a great greying bush, tied back by a black ribbon whose strenuous efforts to cope left it creased and greying too. Her face was bony handsome, with prominent green eyes delicately outlined with very white lids. She was staring out into perspectives bound to be fraught with fate, if not doom. Her emphatic hands were in an attitude of prayer, or contemplation, and on them she rested her chin.

‘I have always wanted a black grandchild,’ she mused.

‘Oh, Christ, mother,’ said Thomas, affronted not by the sentiment, but perhaps by the fact she could have done well as a ship’s figurehead, staring undaunted into a Force Eight - at least - gale.

‘What’s the matter?’ said Jessy. ‘Do you want me to throw you out?’

‘Well, Jessy,’ said Edward, humouring them both with a well practised smile, ‘this could be blackmail, have you thought of that?’

‘No,’ said Thomas. ‘Money has not been mentioned.’

‘This is a classic blackmail situation.’

‘Of course we should give her some money,’ said Jessy.

‘No, of course we shouldn’t, not until we know it’s true.’

‘I’m sure it’s true,’ said Thomas. ‘You don’t know her. She’s not the sort of person who’d do that.’

‘There’s an easy way of finding out,’ said Edward. ‘Ask for a DNA test.’

‘Oh, God, how sordid,’ said Thomas.

‘It certainly does introduce a belligerent note,’ said Jessy.

‘It’s up to you,’ said Edward. ‘But this family could be supporting anybody’s by-blow, for years.’

‘No,’ said Thomas. ‘She’s all right.’ And then he added, coming out at last with one reason for the pride which shone from him: ‘Dad’s going to be pleased.’

‘If he isn’t pleased he’s not very consistent,’ said Edward.

‘You can’t expect consistency, not from Lionel,’ said Jessy. She never spoke of her ex-husband except with a careless contempt. This was partly because of the manner of their parting, and partly because of the feminist movement which she energetically supported,

Lionel, very handsome, irresistible in fact, had been so unfaithful that at last she had to heave him out. ‘Love you, love your infidelities,’ she had screamed at him. ‘Well, I won’t. “Fair enough,’ he had equably replied.

They met often, and always quarrelled, describing this as an amicable divorce.

Lionel paid the school bills, and, given the precariousness of an actor’s life, his payments for clothes, food, travel and so forth had been dependable. The parents had quarrelled violently, about the boys’ upbringing, but less now. He was an old-fashioned romantic socialist and insisted on both boys going to ordinary schools, as then was common among his kind. ‘Sink or swim.’ ‘Do or die’ his wife riposted. Although Edward had emerged from the junior school, Beowulf-the same as Victoria’s - pale, thin, haunted by the bullying, hardly able to sleep, and stuttering badly, this had not prevented his father from insisting on the same treatment for Thomas. I lis prescriptions for them had borne fruits, though unequally. Edward had learned a compassion for the underdog, or the other half, that burned in him like a tormented conscience. ‘You’d think you were personally responsible for the slave trade,’ his mother might shout at him. ‘You are not personally responsible for people being hanged for a loaf of bread or stealing a rabbit.’ As for Thomas, he had learned to love black girls and black music, in that order. No one could ever fail to admire Edward, but Thomas? And now here he was, in his last year of university, a father, with a child of six.

‘I think the best thing to do is to ask her here with the child, to meet us all - Lionel included,’ said Jessy.

This being considered too much of an ordeal, Victoria and Mary came one Sunday afternoon, when Edward was there, and Jessy.

It was indeed an ordeal, mostly because Edward was being so grand, so aloof. He cross-examined Victoria as if he did not believe her. He sat at the foot of the table, in the vast room they called the kitchen, Jessy with her sad grey hair at the top, remembering to smile from time to time at Victoria and the child. Thomas, who seemed ready to flirt with her, he was so pleased with himself, sat opposite Victoria. The child, in a white dress this time, with little white boots and white bows, sat on a pile of cushions and behaved with painful care. She had been told she was going to meet her other family, but had not really taken it in.

‘Are you my daddy?’ she asked Thomas, her great black eyes full of the difficulty of it all.

‘Yeah, yeah, man, that’s about it.’ His American phase was useful to fall back into, at such moments.

‘If you are my daddy then you are my granny,’ said Mary, turning to Jessy.

‘That’s exactly right,’ said Jessy, encouragingly,

‘And what are you?’ she asked Edward. She did not miss the hesitation before Edward brought out, ‘I’m your uncle.’ He smiled, but not as his mother did.

‘Am I going to live with you?’ Mary asked,

Edward sent a sharp glance at his mother: was this a clue at last as to what Victoria was after?

‘No, Mary,’ said Victoria. ‘Of course not. You’ll be with me,’

‘And Dickson too?’

The Staveney’s had only just managed to take in that there was another child, from another father.

‘Yes, you and me and Dickson,’ said Victoria.

Considering the difficulties, it all went oft” well, and at the end Jessy kissed Victoria. Thomas gave her a brotherly kiss, and Edward, hesitating again, put his arms around the child, and it was a good hug.

‘Welcome to the family,’ he said, nicely, even though it did sound a bit like a court order.

He had complained that all this was happening before anything had been clarified with the DNA test.

Victoria went home, not knowing what had been achieved, part regretting she had ever rung Thomas, and she wept, thinking of Sam, who had been such a strength when he was alive. It is not only in Rome that saints are created from unlikely material. If Victoria had been able to foresee a couple of years before, how she would be thinking and talking about Sain, after his death, she would have not believed it.

All this was being discussed with Bessie, every twist and turn, usually talking into the dark in Victoria’s bedroom. Bessie’s own flat - Phyllis - had become impossible. The two boys, now sixteen, young men, were out of control. Their mother had managed, just, to keep them in check, but they took no notice of Bessie. The flat was just as much theirs as hers, as they kept telling her, but she paid the bills for it. They stole cars and car parts to get money for their needs. Bessie might come into her home and find it full of young men, drunk, or stoned, the place a pigsty. She regularly had to clean it up. Her bedroom she kept locked, to stop her brothers and their friends stealing her money, but these were not youngsters likely to be deterred by a locked door. The police knew these lads and from time to time took one or two of them off. ‘They’re going to end in prison,’ Bessie said to Victoria, who did not contradict her.’ Then perhaps I’ll get my flat back one day,’ Bessie might be thinking, but did not say. Phyllis’s death had left an absence that told them continually that sonic people are much more than a sum of their parts. Her influence had been enormous, in this building and beyond it. People were always coming tip to tell Bessie how much her mother had done for them. ‘I wish she was here to do something for me,’ Bessie would think, but did not say. There was a laboratory technician from Jamaica she would have invited to share her flat and her life, had it been possible. He was a sane, sensible person of whom Phyllis would have approved - but he did not have a place of his own and neither did Bessie. That was why she and Victoria were sharing a bedroom again.

Bessie said to Victoria that she ought to arrange for a DNA test. Victoria had never heard of it. The two young women made draft after draft of a letter to the Staveney’s, thought safe and correct by Bessie, but stiff and unfriendly by Victoria. The letter Thomas eventually did get had been written by trembling and weeping Victoria, surrounded by all the torn-up drafts. She went down to post it, at four in the morning, daring the dangers of the dark estate, thinking that any muggers or thieves she was likely to meet were bound to be Bessie’s lay-about boys or their friends.

‘Dear Thomas, I am so unhappy thinking that you are thinking I might be trying to put something over on you and your family. I can’t sleep worrying. I would like it best if you and Mary could have the DNA test, the one that proves if a child has a real father. Please write or telephone soon and let me know how you feel. I don’t want to impose.’ This letter too had been torn up more than once, because the first one ended ‘Love’, No, surely, that was a bit of cheek? Then she thought. But what about that summer, how can I put, With good wishes? Love and good wishes alternated and then, worn out with it all, she wrote, ‘With my very best wishes’, ran out to post the letter - and fell into bed.

As soon as Thomas read this, he rang Edward and read it to him.

‘So what do you have to say now?’

‘All right, you win, but I was right to warn you.’

Jessy read the letter and said, ‘Good girl. I like that.’

‘Do I really have to go and have that bloody test?’

‘Yes, you do. We’ve got to keep Edward happy.’

Thus she allied herself with her erring son. ‘A little girl,’ she said. ‘At last. And she seems such a sensible little thing.’

The test was made, but before the result came, Thomas had telephoned to ask what Victoria’s bank account number was. She didn’t have one. He then said she must open one at once, it would make things easier. ‘Things’, it turned out, was an allowance for Mary, of so much monthly, ‘and we’ll see how we all go along’. The money was from Jessy, but when Lionel was informed, he said he would contribute.

There was another afternoon tea, this time with Lionel. Mary was told she was going to meet her grandfather, and went along without fear, thinking of Jessy’s kindly smiles.

Lionel Staveney was a big grand man, in style rather like Jessy, who always seemed to take up the space of two people. He had a mane of silvery hair and wore a shirt of many colours, again like Jessy’s. They sat at either end of the big table, reflecting each other.

Lionel took Mary by the hand and said, ‘So, you’re little Mary. Very nice to meet you at last.’ And he bent to kiss that small brown hand, with a solemn face, but then he winked at her, which made her giggle. ‘What a delicious child,’ he remarked to Victoria. ‘Congratulations. Why have you kept this treasure from us for so long?’ He held out his arms and Mary went up into them, burying her face in the rainbow shirt.

So that was that afternoon, and soon there was another.

‘Here’s my little crčme caramel, my little chocolate éclair,’ was Lionel’s greeting to Mary, and Lionel saw Victoria’s face, whose nervous look was because she was remembering Sam’s culinary endearments. ‘I say I’m going to eat you all up,’ Lionel said to Mary, ‘you must not take it as more than a legitimate expression of my sincere devotion.’

When Victoria and Mary had gone home, Edward said to his father, ‘If you can’t see why you shouldn’t call her a chocolate anything, then you are a bit out of step with the times.’

‘Oh, dear,’ said Lionel, ‘dearie, dearie me. Is that what I am? Well, so be it.’

‘Lionel,’ said his ex-wife, ‘I think you sometimes scare her a bit.’

‘But not for long. What a little sweetie. What a little - I’m in heaven. Now, if we had a little girl, do you think we’d have stuck?’ he enquired of Jessy.

‘God only knows,’ said Jessy, giving the Almighty the benefit of die doubt.

‘Certainly not! said Edward, but this was as much a warning for the present as a judgement on the past.

‘Yeah, yeah, yeah,’ said Thomas. ‘Happy families.’

‘I’m claiming visiting rights, that’s all. Aren’t grandparents encouraged these days?’

‘You’re welcome to visit,’ said his ex-wife. ‘But let’s not push our luck,’

Thomas telephoned Victoria to ask if he could take Mary to his swimming pool. Victoria said the child didn’t know how to swim, and Thomas said he would teach her.

Then it was the 200, the planetarium and a trip on the river-boat to Greenwich.

Meanwhile Victoria was thinking, ‘But I have two children. What about Dickson? ‘What was happening was unfair. Yes, Dickson was still tiny, just three, but he knew his sister was getting treats that he didn’t.

Jessy had remarked that it was not right, when there were two children, if one got more than the other.

Edward said at once, Don’t even think of it, Mother.’ ‘Perhaps we could take him out sometimes with Mary?’ ‘No. One’s enough. I’m sorry, but there are limits.’ Now Mary was in her first year at school and miserable. This made Victoria remember how miserable she had been, though she had managed it by being quiet, and keeping out of trouble and -frankly - sucking up to the big boys and girls. She told Mary to do the same, and suffered herself, knowing that the child cried herself to sleep at nights.

She speculated, amazed, how it was that the Staveney’s could willingly submit their precious children to such nastiness, such cruelty - for she believed that the good schools, the ones children like theirs would attend, would be free of all that. In her most secret dreams, not shared even with Bessie, Victoria was hoping the Staveney’s would send little Mary to a good school where she could learn and become somebody.

Then Jessy telephoned to ask if Mary would enjoy a matinée? Victoria thought of Les Miserables and said Mary would love it. Victoria took Mary to the Staveney house where oft” went Jessy and Mary in a taxi, to be returned, in a taxi, to the council estate. Mary was in a state of babbling incoherent delight. Victoria never came to grips with what the little girl had seen. But the next time she was whisked off to that other land, the Staveney’s, Mary asked Thomas if she could go to another ‘matney’. ‘A what?’ It turned out she thought matney was the name for a theatre. She went to another matney with Jessy and then to the 200 with Edward and Edward’s wife, and their three-year-old. And then, having begged, to another matinee, of a show Lionel was in. She returned to say that her grandfather was a funny man but she liked him. ‘He likes me, Ma,’ she confided in Victoria.

Whenever this grandfather was mentioned grandfathers whirled dolefully in Victoria’s mind. She was being reminded that she must have had a grandfather, but as a fact he had simply disappeared. It was Phyllis’s grandfather she thought of as grandfather, a generic progenitor, an old man with his smelly urine bottle. But - she could not dispute it - Lionel Staveney was her little girl’s grandfather, and when Mary said, ‘She told me I was her grandchild and so I must call her grandmother,’ Victoria felt the earth shaking under her feet. When she confessed how she felt, Bessie reasonably said, ‘But what did you expect, when you told them?’Well, what had she expected? Nothing like this. It was the thoroughness of the acceptance of Mary that was - well, what? It was all too much! Bessie told her she was ungrateful, she was looking a gift-horse in the mouth. Victoria at last came out with: ‘I wouldn’t have thought they’d be so pleased to have a black grandchild.’

‘She’s not black, she’s more caramel,’ Bessie pronounced. ‘If she was my colour I bet they wouldn’t be so pleased,’

About a year after she had first telephoned Thomas, Jessy wrote a letter to say the family were biking a house in Dorset in the summer, for a month, and people would come and go. Would Victoria agree to Mary’s joining them? Edward’s Samantha would be there for the whole month. Victoria was not invited, and she knew it was because of Dickson. Mary was sweet, lovable, biddable and friendly, but Dickson, now nearly four, was a different matter.

The question of colour - no, it couldn’t be evaded - though Victoria could be pardoned for thinking that the Staveney’s, except for Thomas of course, had never noticed that colour could be a differentiator, often enough a contumacious one believing that whatever had happened - regrettably - in the past, was no longer a force in human affairs.

Dickson was black, black as boot polish or piano keys. Somewhere long ago in his family tree genes had been nurtured to cope with the suns of tropical Africa. He sweated easily. Sometimes sweat flew off him as freely as off an over-hot dog’s tongue. He roared and fought; at the minder’s he was a problem, making trouble, causing tears. Mary was able to calm and charm him, but no one else could, certainly not Victoria, who often found herself weeping with exhaustion over Dickson’s brawling and biting. Bessie adored him, called him her little black imp from hell, her hell’s angel, and sometimes he would allow himself to be held by her, but not often. By now he knew that he was excessive and impossible and everyone’s headache, but that made him worse in behaviour and worse in effect, for he acquired pathos, saying things like, ‘But why am I impossible? Why am I a headache, why, why, why, I’m not, I’m not,’ and he would kick out around him until he fell sobbing on the floor.

He could not possibly be an easy guest in any family, black or white. The Staveney’s had scarcely seen the child. It seemed they had enquired of Mary if she would like Dickson to be invited, but Mary had replied, gravely, in her responsible little way, that Dickson would quarrel with everyone and would scratch and bite Samantha. ‘I told her -Jessy - that he would grow out of it,’ Mary told Victoria she had said. Quoting Bessie. ‘Don’t worry, Victoria, he’ll grow out of it.’

But here was a real turn of the screw. Little visits here and there, a matinée, a tea party, but to go away by herself, for a month - they were asking her for a month? Yes, they were. The politician a mother has to be - let alone an economist - told Victoria that the Staveney’s wanted Mary because of Samantha. Mary was good with small children. At the minder’s she was commended for it. Victoria thought - and it was bitter - Mary’s going to be a nurse for Samantha. Bitter and unfair and she knew it. Mary loved Samantha. An unanchored bitterness, ready to become suspicion, floated near enough to the surface in Victoria to be dangerous - she pressed it down. Wasn’t this what she had wanted for Mary? The little girl was being so lucky, and Victoria should be giving thanks for the blessing of it.

This was what Bessie, who was taking to religion, called it. ‘It’s a blessing, Victoria. That family - they’re Mary’s blessing from God.’

Now there was the question of clothes. Samantha’s were different, and Mary knew exactly what she needed. Victoria found herself being taken to a shop, by her little daughter, and instructed on what to buy. So this was what Samantha wore? Cheeky little clothes, and the colours were gorgeous - and it was all so expensive. But there was money in the bank for Mary’s clothes, put there by Thomas, and this was when she must spend it.

Victoria was thinking, I am losing Mary to the Staveney’s. She was able to contemplate this calmly. She did not believe Mary would come to despise her mother: she was relying on the child’s kind heart. She was thinking, as mothers so often seem to do, How is it possible that these two such different children came out of the same womb? A little angel - the minder’s name for Mary - and a little devil. ‘Never mind,’ said Bessie. ‘They’ll both grow out of it.’ And Victoria found she was thinking about her daughter as Phyllis had thought about her. The terrible dangers that lie in wait for girls … the traps, the snares, baited by the devil with a girl’s best qualities - Bessie had just had an abortion. She wanted the baby, but she would have liked a father for it, and while she had a flat to put it in, she didn’t have a home.

Off went Mary, wild with excitement, with the Staveney’s. She rang her mother most days, for Victoria had insisted, and kept saying that it was lovely, oh, it’s so lovely, Ma. And then Victoria was asked to go down for a weekend. She arranged for Dickson to stay at the minder’s and took the train, two hours, into England’s green and pleasant land. But Victoria had hardly ever been out of London. It seemed to her she was being smothered in green, a wet green: it had rained.

She stood on the platform of the station, in her hand her new suitcase full of her best clothes, and waited until appeared Lionel, with Mary on his shoulders. Mary slid down her grandfather to get to Victoria and kiss her, and the three went off, linked hand to hand, to the old car. Lionel’s mane of hair had a leaf in it and Mary’s new dungarees, bright purple, were patched with mud. She was fatter and sparkling with happiness.

Victoria was in the front seat by Lionel, with Mary on her knee. The child smelled of soap and chocolate. Lionel kept up a banter with Mary, a chant of bits of nursery rhymes, references to things Victoria did not recognise, and Mary giggled, sitting on her mother’s lap but watching the big man’s mouth, from whence spilled words like spells. ‘Contrary Mary, smooth and hairy, the spider beside her big and scary …’ ‘That’s wrong, that’s wrong,’ the child shrieked. ‘You’re mixing them all up.’ ‘But Hairy Mary, did not scream, she ate up the spider with curds and cream.’ ‘I’m not hairy, I’m not,’ the child protested, dying of giggles.

‘Mary as smooth as silk, drank up all the milk, none left for her mother, her mongoose and her brother, she …’

He kept it up, while Mary squirmed in Victoria’s arms, and as for Victoria, she was longing for the thing to end. They were driving fast through lanes where the wet green was heavy overhead, splashing down showers of wet around the car. She felt she could not breathe. Soon, soon, they would reach the house, which she imagined rather like the Staveney’s town house, but they had stopped outside a little house all by itself with the trees growing close, and a great squash of garden, where a big tree leaned over a patch of lawn. On the lawn chairs and a table stood waiting. The house seemed to Victoria a nasty little place, not worthy of the Staveney’s. What were they doing here? But Mary was out of the ear, and tugging her mother out, by the hand. It seemed no one was about.

All Victoria wanted was to lie down. Lionel told her to make herself at home: there would be tea in half an hour. Mary tugged her mother up tiny slippy stairs and into a dark little room that had

windows broken up all over into patterns, letting in thin light, there was a big high bed with a white cover, and on this Mary was already bouncing, ‘Oh, it’s lovely, it’s a lovely bed.’

Victoria wanted to be sick. Mary showed her the bathroom, which was tiny, with thatch showing through the window, where things were flying about. ‘Look at the bees, Ma, look, look.’ Victoria was discreetly and tidily sick, and retreated to her room.

“Where’s your bed?’ she enquired, falling into the big white one.

‘I’m with Samantha. We sleep in a room by ourselves.’

Told that her mother felt bad - a headache - Mary kissed her, and ran out.

Victoria lay flat on her back, and saw the ceiling had a crack across it. In the corner of the room was a spider web? Was that a spider’s web? -Victoria fell asleep, just like that, but perhaps it was more like a swoon. She was shocked deeply, painfully, to her core. How could the Staveney’s … and when she woke, Jessy was just putting down a cup of tea on the bedside table.

‘Sorry you’re not feeling too good,’ she said. ‘Come down when you’re better.’ And she left, the big tall woman, who had to bend her head at the door.

Victoria lay and watched dusk invade the room. That meant it must be getting late. She should go down, shouldn’t she? Cautiously she slid from the bed, careful that her feet would not encounter - well, what? She imagined something soft and squishy that might bite. At the window she stood, careful to touch nothing, and looked down. Under the big tree, which had birds in it, making a noise, an assortment of people, not all of them Staveney’s, sat about drinking.

If Victoria went down, she would have to descend those stairs, find her way out, join all those people, who would have to be introduced. She could see Mary sitting on her grandfather’s knee.

Just as Victoria had got up courage, she saw the company rise, variously. Some people went off to cars parked outside in the road. And then the Staveney’s came in to the house and she heard them just below. The house echoed. It was a noisy house. And it was then that she saw, just beside the window, a great spider, making its way - she knew - towards her. She screamed. In no time Thomas had appeared, identified the trouble, and having taken her towel off a chair he enveloped the beast and shook it out of the window. It would climb back!

“Well, Victoria, how are you, you look great …’ How could he see? It was dark in here. ‘Are you better?’ He kissed her cheek, and laughed, a tribute to their past. ‘Come down and have some supper.’

Victoria wanted to say she would get into bed, put her head deep under that wonderful white counterpane and not come out until it was time to go back to London, Instead she began opening her case to find something to wear.

‘Oh, don’t bother about that,’ said Thomas. ‘No one bothers here.’

And off” he went and she heart! him bound down the stairs.

She followed. A big table almost filled another smallish room. Around it already sat Jessy and Lionel, facing each other, from the head and the foot, Thomas, with a chair opposite him for Victoria, Edward and a sharp observing young woman who must be Edward’s Alice, A chair piled with cushions accommodated Mary, near to her grandfather.

Wine bottles stood about, and plates of cold meat and salad. Friday night, she was told: this picnic had been bought, but tomorrow she would see better things.

Jessy had been here for most of the month, which was nearly up, and Lionel had come every weekend. ‘I can’t keep away from your daughter,’ he announced, ‘she’s my lady love,’

Thomas had been several times. Edward not at all (this was his first time), because he was too busy. Alice had come to visit Samantha, who was in bed, young for late nights.

Alice was eyeing Victoria, who felt criticised. In fact it was Alice who believed she was at a disadvantage. She had been brought tip in a provincial lawyer’s family and was sure the Staveney’s criticised her. They were so travelled, worldly, liberal and generous, often in ways that shocked Alice. She thought worse of the Staveney’s for letting the little dark girl call Jessy and Lionel granny and grandfather. She did believe she was in the wrong to feel like this, but could not change. When Mary attempted uncle for Edward, he had told her, ‘No, call me Edward,’ and Mary did so; she was already calling her father, Thomas. If Edward was Mary’s uncle that meant that Alice must be Mary’s aunt, but the little girl had sensed Alice wouldn’t like that.

Victoria was not jealous of Alice. Her Edward, the kind boy of long ago, lived in her mind, unchanged, and the Edward of now she did not much like. In fact these days she thought Thomas was nicer than Edward.

It was a slow sleepy meal. Jessy kept yawning and apologising, and that made it easy for Victoria to say she was tired too.

‘Normally’ Thomas said to Victoria, ‘we spend the evening in healthy parlour games, but tonight we’ll skip all that.’

Victoria went with Mary to her room, where Samantha was prettily asleep in a little bed. Mary had a big bed, like Victoria’s. Mary put up her arms to kiss her mother and smiled and fell asleep.

Victoria went to her room, looked for the spider, did not see it, dived into bed, and pulled up the white cover. In here, she was safe.

Friday night. Two more nights to go - she couldn’t, she wouldn’t, she hated it all. She could hear an owl hooting. Didn’t that mean death? It was in the big tree. The garden was full of horrors. At supper Lionel had said to Mary that she mustn’t forget to take crumbs out for the toad.

‘It’s dark,’ Mary had said, comforting Victoria with this sensible protest, ‘Toads can see in the dark,’ said Lionel. ‘It’s a perverse toad,’

Jessy had said. ‘I don’t expect they see many wholemeal crumbs in their usual diet, so why they like ours, I can’t think.’

‘We’ll find him sonic worms tomorrow,’ Lionel had said.

Victoria did sleep at last and woke early to find Mary had come in the night and was asleep near her, on top of the coverlet. For a long time Victoria lay on her elbow watching her child sleep, rather as she would a ship sailing away over a horizon - if she had ever seen a sea that was not on television or in a film. Behind those tight smooth sealed eyelids was already a world that Victoria did not share.

In the morning Victoria tried to find something in her case that would match Lionel’s old sweater that had a hole in its sleeve, or Jessy’s slacks and grey tweedy skirt. She did not have the right shoes either. They talked of walks and of Mary and Samantha going off on ponies with some other little girls.

Victoria stood at the door of the house and felt that she was surrounded by jungle. She knew all about jungles, the way we do, from the screens, big and small: they were dangerous, full of wild animals, crocodiles, snakes and insects. This jungle had none of those but nevertheless was filled with hostile creatures. If she could just leave, leave now - but she didn’t want Mary to be ashamed of her.

When the long breakfast was over - she drank some tea, and had to listen to Jessy lecture them all on the importance of a proper breakfast - she watched while they all went off to walk in woods that were near, and very wet. She said she would stay sitting under the tree, which was bound to be full of creatures that might drop on her, and tried to find haven in a room they called the sitting-room. She sat in a big chair with her feet drawn up, so that nothing could crawl up on them.

Lunch over, they all piled into cars and drove off some miles to a famous tea-room, where they parked, and everyone went walking again, but Victoria and Mary, who insisted on staying with her mother.

‘Poor Ma,’ said Mary, acutely, and her eyes were full of tears. ‘But I love you always.’

Supper was the same. This time Jessy had cooked stew, which Victoria liked and a big fruit tart had been bought at the tea-room to bring home.

Saturday night. Another night to go. By now Victoria was feeling like a criminal. They knew she was not enjoying herself, though had no idea just how much she was hating it, how she feared it. The spider was back on her wall and it had fled when she stamped her foot at it, into the crack, where it bided its time. She tried to keep her eyes on it, but moths had flown in, before she shut the window tight. A big moth crouched on a wall, making a shadow. She had last seen that hooded shape, a frightening shadow on a wall, in a film about Dracula,

Next morning she went down early, with her suitcase. She did not know how she would get to the station but somehow she would. She found Alice, already up, drinking tea.

‘Do you hate it?’ Alice asked.

‘Yes, I do.’

‘I’m sorry’

‘Don’t you?’

‘No, I wish I could live here for always, never leave.’

‘Oh, dear,’ said Victoria feebly.

‘Yes, it’s true. Edward can’t leave London yet but we will buy a house in the country and then we’ll live m it.’

‘A house like this? Victoria looked incredulous.

‘No, bigger. More comfortable.’ She looked kindly at Victoria and said gently, ‘Don’t mind them. I know they are a bit overwhelming.’

‘It’s not them,’ said Victoria. ‘It’s this place.’

Absolute incomprehension: Alice frowned and was perturbed. Victoria seemed about to cry.

‘I wish I could go home,’ said Victoria, like a child. And then, as an adult, said, ‘I would, only I don’t want Mary to be ashamed of me.’

‘She wouldn’t be. She’s a nice little girl, if there ever was one. Samantha adores her. I tell you what. I’ll drive you to the station and I’ll tell them you don’t feel well.’

‘That’s not a lie,’ said Victoria.

And so Victoria got into Edward and Alice’s car and was driven through the early morning countryside to the station.

Victoria had never driven, had never had to, and the skill and speed of Alice was depressing her. She was actually saying to herself, ‘I3 ut there are things I am good at.’

At the station, Alice took the bag and went before to the booking office, bought a ticket, said, ‘There’ll be a train in half an hour.’

The two stood together, waiting. Victoria had understood that this young woman, who so intimidated her, meant her well, but - did that matter? What mattered very much was that she liked Mary.

‘I feel a real fool,’ she said humbly. ‘I know what the Staveney’s will think. I ought to be grateful - and, well, that’s all.’

‘Poor Victoria. I’m sorry. I’ll explain to them.’ And as the train came in she actually kissed Victoria, as if she meant it. ‘It takes all sorts,’ she added, with a little pleased smile at her attempt at definition. ‘I don’t think they’d ever understand you don’t like the country.’

‘I hate it, hate it,’ Victoria said, violently, and got into the train that would carry her away - for ever, if she had her way.

Mary came home a few days later. Victoria saw the child’s bleak look around the little flat, criticising what Victoria had greeted with such relief: a bare sufficiency, and what there was, in its proper place. And then Mary stood at the window looking down, down, into the concrete vistas and Victoria did not have to ask what it was she missed.

Mary kept saying, rushing to embrace her mother ‘You’re my Ma and I’ll love you always.’ Bessie and Victoria exchanged grim-enough smiles, and then Mary forgot about it.

Thomas took Mary to concerts of African music, twice, but she thought they were too loud. Like her mother, she wanted things to be quiet and seemly.

Then Victoria was invited to an evening meal at the Staveney’s, ‘preferably without Mary - and anyway it will be too late for her, won’t it?’ This, from people who had her up to all hours in Dorset. ‘Without Dickson’ could be taken as read. Victoria put on her nicest outfit, and found herself with a full complement of Staveney’s, at the supper table. Undercurrents, some well understood by Victoria, others not at all, flowed about and around Jessy, Lionel, Edward, Alice and Thomas. Lionel at once opened with, ‘I wonder what you’d think if we suggested Mary went to a different school?’

This was Lionel, who had insisted on both his sons going through the ordeal of that bad school, Beowulf.

Victoria was not afraid of Lionel - she was of Jessy - and did not find it hard to enquire, ‘Then, you’ve changed your mind about schools, is that it?’

At this Jessy let out a snort, of a connubial kind, meant to be noted, like putting up your hand at a meeting to register Nay.

‘You could say our father has changed his mind,’ said Thomas.

‘Yes, you could say that.’ said Edward.

‘I’m not saying I was wrong about you two,’ pronounced Lionel, flinging his silvery mane about while he speared roast potatoes judiciously on to his plate,

‘You wouldn’t ever admit it,’ said Jessy, confronting him, while the concentrated exasperation of years of disputation flared her nostrils. ‘When have you ever admitted you were wrong about anything?’

“Isn’t it a bit late for this altercation?’ enquired Edward.

‘For better or worse,’ said Thomas. ‘But the birds in your nest couldn’t agree.’

‘Oh, worse, worse,’ said Jessy at once, ‘of course worse.’ But from her look at Thomas it could be seen that what she meant was her bitter acknowledgement that his highest ambition was to manage a pop group. ‘As for agreeing, no, we never agreed about that, never, never.’

‘Okay,’ said Thomas, ‘I’ll accept your verdict. I am the worse and Edward is the better,”

‘At least the gap between you two was wide enough for you not to quarrel - that really would have been the last straw.’

This spat ended here, because Edward was pouring wine for Victoria, which she didn’t much like. She put her hand over the glass, and then, since a few drops had splashed, licked the back of her hand.

‘There,’ said Lionel. ‘You do like wine.’

‘You should have some, it does you good,’ said Jessy. ‘The Victorians knew their stuff. At the slightest hint of wasting away or brain fever or any of their ghastly diseases, out came the claret.’

‘Port,’ said Lionel.

‘Best Burgundy,’ said Edward. ‘Like this. Best is always best. If I had been asked - for after all I wasn’t given a choice, was I, father? - I’d have said no. I do not have pleasant memories of that school. It was your school, Victoria, I know …’

At this reminder to her that he did not remember the event which was so present and alive in her mind, tears came into Victoria’s eyes.

She made her voice steady, and said, ‘Yes, it’s not a good place. And it’s worse since I was there. Since we were there,’ she addressed Thomas.

‘There was a stabbing there last week,’ remarked Jessy, aiming this at her ex.

‘Which brings me to my point again,’ said Lionel, addressing Victoria. ‘Suppose we send Mary to a good school? I have to say that there is disagreement in the ranks . .’

‘When is there not?’ said Jessy,

‘Some of us think - I, for one - that Mary could go to a boarding school.’

‘A boarding school?’ And now Victoria was shocked. She knew that people like the Staveney’s did send their children, when they were still little, to boarding school. She thought it heartless.

‘I told you,’ said Thomas. ‘Of course Victoria says no to a boarding school.’

‘Yes,’ Victoria bravely said, smiling gratefully at Thomas, who smiled back, ‘I say no to a boarding school.’ For a tiny moment the current between them was sweet and deep, and they remembered that for a whole summer they had felt two against the world.

Alice broke in with, ‘I was at boarding school and I loved it.’

‘Yes, but you were thirteen,’ said Edward.

Who then of the Staveney’s, would agree to Mary being sent off to the cold exile of hoarding school? Alice and Lionel.

‘Very well, then,’ said Edward. ‘No boarding school. Well, not yet. Meanwhile there’s a good girls’ school, not far, it would be a few stops on the Tube and a short walk.’

Victoria was thinking, She’ll have a bad time. She’ll be with girls who have money and the things the Staveney’s have, and she’ll come home to … it would certainly ask a lot of Mary’s kind heart: two worlds, and she would have to fit in to both of them.

Victoria said to Lionel, who was the author of this plan, which in fact fulfilled her dreams for Mary, ‘I couldn’t say no, how could I? It will be such a big thing for Mary’ And now she dared to turn to Thomas, reminding them all that he was after all the child’s father. ‘What do you say, Thomas? It’s for you to say, too.’

‘Yeah,’ said Thomas. ‘Yeah. That’s exactly right.’ Here his belligerent look at his father, and his brother, told them that he was feeling - as usual - belittled. ‘Yeah, it is for me to say too. And I say, Victoria should have the deciding vote. Providing Mary doesn’t go to Beowulf, that’s the main thing.’

Victoria said, ‘If I say no, I could never forgive myself. Hut I’d like to talk it all over with - she’s not my sister, but I think of her as.’

Bessie heard what Victoria had to tell her, nodding and smiling told you so. She said, ‘They’ll get Mary away from you, but that’s not how they’ll see it.’p>

A central fact was there, out in the open, still unvoiced, with its potentialities for pain and gain. Mary had spent a month with the Staveney’s, and that experience had made it urgent for her to be rescued from her environment and be sent to a good school.

‘Well,’ said Bessie, ‘she’s going to come out the other end educated. Which is more than can be said about Beowulf

‘You went there and you do well enough,’ said Victoria.

‘You know what I mean.’

They were back at what was not being said. For one thing, it was Mary’s way of speaking, which was very far from the Staveney’s. Thomas might speak badly, bis phoney American, or his cockney, as he called it, but she had never heard a cockney - who were they when they were at home? - talk like that. And the Staveney’s spoke posh, and Thomas too, most of the time. Mary’s voice was ugly compared to theirs.

‘She’ll have a hard time of it,’ said Bessie. ‘There’s no pretending she won’t.’

‘I know,’ said Victoria, thinking that she had had a long hard time of it, and yet here she was, she had survived it. Bessie had had a better time, because of Phyllis being her mother, but she was having a hard enough time now - and she would survive it too.

She wrote to Thomas, asserting his rights, ‘Dear Thomas, I agree to your kind suggestion. Please tell your father and your mother thank you for me. It won’t be easy for Mary but I’ll try and explain it all to her.’

Explain what, exactly? And how?

Mary must be thinking many things already that she might not want to say to her mother. She was kind - that was her best quality: she had a good nature. And she wasn’t stupid. Victoria could easily put herself back into herself at Mary’s age. Kids always know more than adults think, even if they know it the wrong way around, sometimes.

And Victoria knew more than the Staveney’s about the future.

Mary would go to that good school where most girls were white. She would have many battles to fight, of a different sort from the tough-housing of Beowulf. The Staveney’s would be Mary’s best support. Probably when the girl was about thirteen, the Staveney’s would ask if she, Victoria, could consider Mary going to boarding school. Neither they nor Mary would have to spell out the reasons why Mary must find things easier, for she would no longer have to fit herself into two different worlds, every day. Victoria would say yes, and that would be that.

There was another factor, which Bessie was reminding her of. Victoria was an attractive woman, not yet thirty. She was going now every Sunday to church, because Bessie did, and there she enjoyed the singing. She had been noticed. She took the lead in some hymns, was no longer just one of the congregation. The Reverend Amos Johnson had taken a fancy to her. Her dead Sam, who with every year became more of a perfect man in her memory, could not be compared with Amos Johnson, who was twenty years older than she was. The incomparable lustre of Sam made it possible for her to consider Amos, She had visited his home, full of God-fearing and sober people, and while she was not particularly religious, liked the atmosphere. She had always been a good girl, Victoria had - like Mary now.

If she married Amos she would have more children. Little Dickson, the child from hell, as he was known generally around and about the estate, would calm down, with brothers and sisters.

And Mary? To match the Staveney world with the world of Amos Johnson - she even laughed about it despairingly, with Bessie.

Yet if she married Amos she would be binding the two worlds together, even if both were careful never to get too close. And Mary, poor Mary, in the middle there. Yes, thought Victoria, she will be pleased to get out of it and into boarding school: she’ll want to be a Staveney. Yes, I have to face it. That is what will happen.

THE REASON FOR IT

Yesterday we buried Eleven, and now I am the only one left of The Twelve. Between Eleven and One in our burial place is an empty site, waiting for me, Twelve. All gone now, one by one. The night Eleven died I was with him. He said to mc, ‘While The Twelve have been dying the truth has been dying. When you come to join us no one will be left to tell our story.’ He grasped mc by the arm, pulling all his strength back into him to do it. ‘Tell it. Call The Cities together and tell it. Then it will be in all their minds and cannot disappear.” And with that he fell back into dark and the Silence.

His mind had gone, otherwise he could not have said, ‘Call The Cities.’ It is a long time since that has been possible, But the substance of his message has been burning inside me. Not that it is a new message. What else have we Twelve been talking about these very many years, always fewer of us. How long is it since we could have said: Let us call The Cities together? Nearly half my lifetime, at least. When I left Eleven I came home here and sat where the scents and sounds of a warm starry night could come wafting over me from the gardens and splashing waters, and I was challenging the indolence in myself, which I have always known was my worst enemy. You could call it - I have called it - many more flattering names, prudence, caution, the judiciousness of experience, even my well-known (once well-known) Wisdom: they call me they used to call me -The Sage Twelve. The truth is it is hard for me to act, to gather up my energies behind a single focus and simply do. I see too many aspects of a situation. For every Yes there is a No, and so, through the long years, while The Twelve have one by one vanished away, I have thought, Is this the time to do it? I have never known, we, The Twelve have not known. We always ended by sending DeRod, our Ruler, yet another message. I remember right at the very beginning of his rule we jokingly called him by our nickname for him, The Beneficent Whip. Long thought, worry, have always ended in the same thing: a message. This was correct, was protocol, no one could criticise us, criticise me. At first casual, almost insultingly casual, messages came back. And then silence. It has been years since he replied, either to me, who am after all a relative, or to The Twelve.

The Ruler he might be, but he has a Council, and in theory at least it is a collective responsibility. Hut so much has been theory that was meant to be substance and reality. Many tunes our cautious approaches to DeRod have seemed to me cowardice, but there was more: to feel the conviction that leads to good action means you must first believe in your efficacy, that good results may come from what you do. As the silence from DeRod persisted, and things went from bad to worse, there was a deadening of hope, of our hopes, which I secretly matched with the darkening mind of The Cities. A paralysis of the Will, I remember we called it in one of our gatherings. But we have met in the ones and twos of special friendship, as well as in the collective, we have met constantly - after all, we have known each other since we were born - and what have we always discussed, if not something which we refer to simply as The Situation. What we have slowly come to see as a kind of poisoning. What has been the constant theme of our talk, our speculation? We have not understood what was happening. Why? I suppose that word sums up our years-long, our decades-long preoccupation. Why? What is the reason for it? Why was it we could never grasp something tangible, get hold of fact, a cause? It is easy to characterise what has been happening. There has been a worsening of everything, and we have seen it as a deliberate, even planned, intention.

That word, analyze … one of our sobriquets (The Twelve) was The Analysers. It is some time since we would have dared use it, for fear of mockery And so much have I (until so recently I could have said we) become infected by the time, that I confess that to me now the wort! has a ridiculous ring to it.

Yet what have we always done, except try to analyze, understand? And since I wrote the above that is what I have been doing and as always coming up with a blank. My instinct is to send another message to DeRod. What is the use?

Something must be done. And by me …

When Koon, or Eleven, spoke last he said soon no one will be left to tell our story. That is how it seemed to him as he died. A story has an end. To him the story was finished. The story: well, our history was something told and retold - when we were still telling our history. And now as the familiar disinclination to do anything invades me I wonder if it is only a symptom of the poisoning. Poison? That was only one of the words we have used. But has our history all been for nothing? The excellence? The high standards? The assumption once shared by everyone in The Cities that the best was what we aimed for?

It is now seven days since Eleven died. I might die in any breath I take. So much I can do: record, at least in outline, our story.

Six lives ago we were conquered by The Roddites, from the East. We. But that has changed. Who were we before the Roddites? Along this shore were scattered villages, of poor dwellings, each thinking of itself as a town, lint they had no proper sanitation, or paved streets, or public amenities, had nothing of what we (we of after The Roddites) take for granted. They were fisherfolk, and the fishing is good, and a great many coveted our fishing shores. The Roddites were desert people, strong, hardy, disciplined, with bodies like whips, and their horses were feared almost as much as the people who rude them. They were taught to trample with their hooves and bite flesh from whatever enemy was before them. Their neighing and roaring and screaming was louder than the shouting of the soldiers or the sound of the trumpets. The Roddites and their horses swept easily over the sea villages, and soon had the fishing and the shore and the boats.

The leader we called Rod, but that was because their system of nomenclature was so convoluted and difficult for us. No one was simply Rod, or Ren, or Blok, or Marr, but to the core name was attached a multitude of suffixes and prefixes: To the Rod, of the Rod, by the Rod, with the Rod, from the Rod; and Rod with its start-sounds and endings could mean ‘Rod who is the third son of so and so has just arrived and is all powerful and commands …” It seems that the first Rod’s names, with its history and his situation and the honorifics, took a day to recite - so the old joke went. Whatever else, that Rod was a strategist of genius. Not that u needed much more than strength and will - and the horses - to make short work of the shallow little towns, but then he used his victories to build them into a whole, and call them The Cities. Flattery served him well. He made bis wild desert raiders into an army that was feared by all the lands we had heard of, and many that we hadn’t, and so, where once we had been at the mercy of every raider or band of thieves, The Cities were safe. This Rod was more than a conqueror. He created a rough but adequate system of laws. An Eye for an Eye and a Tooth for a Tooth was the spirit of it. If The Roddites learned from their defeated enemies how to catch fish, prepare it and eat it, The Cities who before then had owned a few goats, now learned the care and the breeding and uses of sheep, cattle, asses and horses.

So that was the first of the Roddite dynasty, Rod, and his son EnRod succeeded. He lacked his father’s wild energies. He was a consolidator, a preserver, one who sees a potential and develops it. He did away with nothing of his fathers rule, but he made vital changes. The law became gentler, and women were given the same property rights as men. The Cities, which so recently had been crude and primitive, an assembly of villages, were spreading, joining, and by then it would have been more accurate to call them The City. It was felt a mistake - EnRod did - to abolish the identity of places, when each prided itself on an individuality. The old names were kept and the idea of a multiplicity of cities was preserved. It was learned that the nearest city over the mountains, which we heard tales about from travellers, was smaller in area than our city, The Cities. Which was governed as if it were a whole, single, of a piece. You could walk half a day and never leave our streets, while crossing streets that announced, ‘Here begins the village of Ogon.’ Or Astrante. Or Ketasos. Whichever fishing village it once had been.

The rule of EnRod was beneficent. Already people were saying, My father, my grandfather, came with the Roddite invasion.

EnRod’s son was almost at once called by the populace, The Whip, and that characterised him well. He was cruel, easily enraged, arbitrary, and would have destroyed everything made by his father and grandfather. The Cities were saved by his bride, who came from the East, from a tribe kin to The Roddites, a beautiful girl who it was said had not wanted to leave the life of horses and desert and the songs for which they were famous, but it seemed that it had been put to her that it was her duty to marry a savage, The Whip, and civilise him. But in fact that would have been beyond her. The Whip was mad. He died. How fortuitous. Not really, she had him poisoned. The arts of the desert people in poisons and medicine were and are famous. The populace rejoiced. Of course there were mutters and threats, but as the rumours flew about that this smiling gentle beauty was a murderess, the people applauded. F very bod y knew what they had been saved from. There were tyrants in other towns in the peninsula and we heard news of them. Because of the laws introduced by En Rod, she could assume the throne on The Whip’s death and she did so. Soon The Whip was remembered only in tales and songs. The rule of Rod was remembered in epic style, thundering verses like horses’ hoof beats, all bravery and fine deeds, while his son’s reign, so salubrious, good for everyone and for peace, for progress, was less celebrated. Unfortunately a quiet competence is not as attractive a subject for a story or a song as conquest and heroism. Stories about The Whip gave rise to some uneasiness, for in those wiser days it was known that tales and songs could change minds and hearts.

It is from The Whip’s short reign that a whole genre of stories tame, and songs too, of cruelty for cruelty’s sake, of torture, of the screams of people from pits deep under the earth, the screams of horses, of animals, of demons whose task it is to torment people, of witches and witchcraft.

The new ruler was Destra, and it was she who first tried to ban these cruel and perverted tales and songs which created cults among the populace, who used them as a justification for wrongdoing. So I heard, so I was told: Destra was old by the time I was born. I can testify to the power of storytelling: I could never see her as anything but a young and beautiful and kind princess from the desert, because of the tales about her, in her youth. Destra soon put right what had been made bad by her husband. She reinstituted EnRod’s laws. She did not change the management of the army, which The Whip had made strong. She merely gave the soldiers long leaves, very long, she said for the benefit of their families. The army remained a worry to her. She had to have one. Rival cities after all flourished, and wars did go on: The Cities were covetable. But during the reigns of Rod, EnRod, The Whip and then Destra there had been no actual fighting. Marches, manoeuvres, rallies, all kinds of parades and shows of strength, but no actual fighting. There were jokes that if we were invaded our soldiers would scarcely know how to act.

Destra created a College of Storytellers and another of Songmakers.

There were already stories and songs, but she wanted something specific, the story of our people, from the time we became one, under the first Rod, Rod the Progenitor. You can imagine that there was plenty of material, opportunities for every kind of tale, legend, song. Many were, frankly, instructional. Destra wanted what she called an instructed and informed people, and a good part of the songs and tales were for the purpose of teaching. The reign of EnRod, which had been so little of an inspiration, now became a source of all kinds of instructional material about peacetime arts. For instance, the management of herds, or building, of the new practice of crop rotation, and how to control rivers, springs, water generally. From the ruler least used by the tale-makers and the singers, he was the best. EnRod became a synonym for good government, just as The Whip was execrated.

In this short summary of Destra’s encouragement of the arts, I can give no idea of the wealth and complexity of our treasury of songs and tales, but I hope to amplify it all, before I die.

Destra was already old when she called us The Guardians of the people. That was our first and primary name, and afterwards came The Analysers, The Watchers, The Recorders, and so on. I was among them because my mother was a friend of Destra, from one of the families from which Destra chose administrators, governors, generals. There were then twelve or so families. Who knows, now? Then, it was easy to say, Those are the governing people, but now? Families that were famous for their probity and their good sense are now dissolute and their offspring are worthless. The Twelve were at first in fact thirteen, because one of us would succeed Destra. DeRod of course, as Destra’s son, was among the thirteen. We used to call him The Beneficent Whip, as a joke, when he showed signs of petulance and wilfulness and might sulk. But we all had nicknames. When my comrades laughed at me, it was The Sage.

But I am getting in advance of my tale. I am telling it as if it is a tale, just that, and the fact I am makes me uneasy as if I were rolling something up into a ball and throwing it from me. Done. Finished. I want to leave a record. I must. How quickly things do change. Anybody would have thought that the Rule Destra set up must last: it seemed so solid, so efficient, so easily built upon and extended. How easily and well things happened. For instance, it was then enough to say to one of our talented storytellers: make a good song about the terrible horses of the first Rod’, and you would soon hear the song in the inns and the guard houses and the public gardens where the festivals were held. Or Destra would say, ‘Some travellers brought this grain to sell us, they knew we don’t grow it. Take it out to the gardeners and get them to make a trial plot. We must have it here, too.’

It has all gone. What has? For one thing, the simplicity of it all. Once - then - it was all easy and pleasant. Now, nothing is. Even if I don’t know why, I can at least say, This happened.

The events which I described earlier were once known to everybody in The Cities. Each child was taught the core tale, and around that all the tales, repeated them, made his or her version of, lets say, The Terrible Horses, or The Wise Ruler who Changed the Law from Revenge to Kindness. Destra has been dead almost as long as I have been alive, and I have been alive as long as she was. In that stretch of time, two long lifetimes, Destra’s creation of storytelling and songmaking as a means of instruction, refinement, something which lifted up our whole population to a height of culture not matched anywhere else that we knew of, this wonderful education began, grew, reached perfection, held it for a while - and then … But what happened I do not know. None of The Twelve did. Simply, Destra’s adopted son, DeRod, destroyed it. Why did he? How often have we all - all The Twelve that is - tried to understand and failed. And it was not possible simply to ask our old friend and playfellow because he ignored us.

The name DeRod means something wonderful in the language of the desert tribes, but we called him Benny, short for Beneficent Whip. I think we soon forgot how ‘Benny’ began. He was one of those chosen when we were still infants to be instructed by Destra herself. She was a wonderful teacher. She taught us good behaviour, how to make decisions, how to think, how to put the welfare of The Cities before anything else. All this by means of tales and songs. She had tutors to teach us the art of numbers, weights, measurements. The instruction took place in Destra’s house, The Big House, the populace called it. It is the largest of the big houses, but not by very much. The Cruel Whip was going to double it in size but Destra silenced him before he could. If she did.

There is a large room, open on one side, where there is a screen of reeds if there is rain or dust, and there we were educated. Thirteen, who always knew we would be a Council of Twelve. DeRod was taught with us. We were equals. There was never a suggestion that as Destra’s child he would be favoured. And there was the girl, Destra’s adopted daughter, DeRod’s sister, Shusha, later my wife who, if DeRod should die or be killed, would be Destra’s only progeny, brought up as if she were in fact Destra’s daughter. I think we all forgot those two were adopted. It was never assumed that DeRod would be ruler after his mother. On the contrary, Destra told us, and from our earliest days, that from one of us a ruler would he chosen, and that The Twelve would be advisers.

And so it went on, a time of such happiness, and I am sure this is no flattering memory, for i: was shared by all The Twelve and we often spoke of it, saying that this was how every child should be educated. And yet none of our children had anything like as good. Perhaps such an education needs someone like Destra to make it work.

When we were all fifteen years old, or near that age, Destra was ill and was carried into our instruction room, which was usually filled with sunlight and the shadows from the great trees that surrounded The Big House, and so it was that day. Destra told us that she would soon die, and now we must choose her successor. She was sitting up, cushions piled behind her, a tiny old woman with her white hair down around her face, her black eyes burning with urgency - like the urgency I feel now - and with fever. It was a surprise and yet not one. We all knew, had always known, that this day must come. We knew that Destra was very old, and that she was ill. And yet we were taken by surprise and were uneasy and afraid for the future.

I remember we stood about in that room, which was as much our home as our own homes were. We stood about looking at each other, not liking that now we would have to make a choice.

Destra sat up there, with a woman on either side of her, watching us, waiting. And still we did not speak out.

Then she did. ‘Just because DeRod is my son, it does not mean he should be chosen. Nor should Shusha, just because she is my daughter. You must choose the best one, the one you all agree would be best. You must have made your choice. You must have discussed it.’ Well, we hadn’t much. That was the trouble. The trouble was perhaps, we had been discussing it too long, expecting it. We knew our qualities and our deficiencies. Some of us were out of the question as rulers. Shusha was one. This was not because she was a girl - five of us were female. She said herself it wouldn’t suit her. She was a smiling, modest, careful girl, who liked looking after the house animals and tending plants. Later she became responsible for agriculture and the welfare of children. Others had long ago judged themselves to be unsuitable, and so we had not considered them. The others had been discussed, DeRod too. We told him that if he could cure his tendency to sulk and to go off in little fits of petulance, he would do well. I think we were all a little bit in love with DeRod. There was nothing much about him to dislike ever. Perhaps he was too eager to please, always, to fall in, to agree. He was such a beautiful child, and then as beautiful a youth. He was tall and slight, with dark eyes that compelled, and brooded, and with a gleam in them that we joked was because of his desert inheritance: Destra had those eyes too. When we discussed him as a possible Ruler we always joked that he would be all right with us to keep an eye on him, I would say now that five or perhaps six of us would have done well as Ruler. I know that there were those who thought that I would. There was a time, being young and conceited, when I would agree with them - but I know better now. Well I did have some of the qualities. I thought easily m terms of how to govern well, looking at The Cities as a whole; I knew how to manage people, bringing out their good qualities, never demeaning them. I knew the Story of our people better than anyone: that is why later they made me Chief Official Memory. But they didn’t choose me. Nor any of the other good ones - and believe me, I have often imagined one or another in DeRod’s place, and wondered. We chose EnRod. This was, perhaps, a foregone conclusion. So I think now, looking back. He was after all Destra’s heir, in the line Rod, EnRod, Cruel Whip, Destra. There is pleasure in that, a fitness, a pattern, as if you are guarding some inherent order. We chose him though we knew Destra was sincere in saying we must choose the best. We knew absolutely how she would judge the best: she had been telling us for all those years. She had told us tales often about tribes and peoples who, on the death of a ruler chose a successor by vote, sometimes passing over elder sons, more than once choosing a daughter when there were sons. No, we could not blame Destra, for us choosing DeRod. And in fact he was surprised, and we realised he had not expected we would settle for him. He was so pleased. And we took such pleasure in his pleasure. When we said, almost unanimously, ‘DeRod’, he seemed to shine and swell, he stretched out his arms in a movement like a bird about to fly. He then made some little dance steps, first because he had to, and then in jest, laughing at himself and at his pleasure. His eyes were full of tears. He embraced us then, one by one, and as it were as a group. For a few moments we were standing in a sort of heap, with our arms around each other, hugging and laughing, and DeRod there in the middle shouting in triumph. Then he pushed his way out, ran to his mother in that quick wonderfully graceful way he had, and kissed her hand. And then it was we remembered Destra, and that she had been waiting for us to choose. We would have gone to kiss her hand but it was too late. She was already being carried off. ! rein ember she was breathing heavily, a harsh and awful noise. She did not make any sign towards us though we were waiting for one.

I remember how we all stood about, waiting, feeling most terribly let down. Feeling perhaps, too, that Destra’s refusal to acknowledge us then meant she was disappointed, or even angry. In the end DeRod clapped his hands, jumped about in the way he had, as if he were younger than he was, and said he could command a banquet. A funny way of putting it we thought, not Destra’s style at all. And a big banquet there was, and DeRod announced as Destra’s heir. We drank the wine that by now was being grown by us in The Cities, and we all got drunk and - were as happy as I can remember. I would like to be able to say I felt foreboding, or uneasiness. If I had, at the very beginning, by then I had suppressed them. DeRod was so delightful with us that day of the banquet, so simple, and, we could see, grateful. It was a day that marked the end of our instruction: fifteen years of learning and listening and taking in, of pre paring ourselves. And now this was it, when Destra died we would begin to use what we had learned.

And now I must wrench myself away from these pleasant memories and decide what I should do. I have at least begun by making a record - an over-simple, very short one, but a record - of the beginnings of The Twelve. I can fill it all out later if there’s time … and perhaps there isn’t: I had not expected Koon, or Eleven, to die. And why not? He was as old as I am. I would like to have the time to write down the wealth of tales and stories that seem to have been lost. How could they have been lost? I have lived now for nearly a hundred years. For at least half that time die tales and songs were on everybody’s lips. And yet now only old people - my son can be described as old - remember them.

What am I to do? In the past, when in doubt I took myself to the house of one of The Twelve, or asked them to visit me here. I have decided to visit the place where only days ago we buried Eleven. ‘We’? Mourners who had no knowledge of him, or of us, mourners who weep and wail for money.

I stood for a long time at the edge of the great Fall of water, where I have been so often, for the pleasure of watching how the water bounded or crept or frolicked from the top of the Fall to the bottom, its antics measured and ordered by our clever Nine - the water engineer. And then, the pleasure of deciding whether to climb up its course to the top where it gushed over natural rocks, and then over the hill and through the buildings and squares of our public life, or down to see how the water fled into channels for the irrigation of the market gardens. This Fall was created early in Destra’s Rule, over steps like a giant’s stair, so that when I was born the Fall was already a wonder known to everyone and visited by travellers, some of whom had come to The Cities for the purpose. It was much later that The Twelve made a great pool at the foot of the Fall, where the waters crashed down but soon spread out into a great wash always in movement because of the cascade, but so shallow the smallest child could paddle in it. This pool, Shusha’s inspiration, was for children, who had to be under six years old; and for small children a more delightful place has never been The charming ripples from the Fall were of course waves to them, the spray that greened the low bushes around the pool was part of their fun, a mere breath of freshness on the hands and faces of adults, but for the little ones a source of delight because of the way the breezes blew this way and that, unexpectedly dousing them, so that they screamed with delight. This was one of my favourite places. Was.

This morning I stood a long time, remembering that it was on this spot I encountered DeRod for the second time after we had chosen him and celebrated with the banquet. The first was when I married his sister Shusha (Seven), because Destra was recently dead it was a simple ceremony, and that suited us both. DeRod surprised us. I thought he was in mourning, but perhaps … he was all courtesy, formally officiating, kindly, pleasant, but distant. This was our friend DeRod, whom we had known all our lives. Both Shusha and I made excuses for him. We confessed that we could not remember a particular closeness to his mother that could justify a real grief. And this although he was always saying, ‘My mother and I …’We …’, meaning Destra and him, ‘I and Destra …’. No. The fact was, Shusha said, putting into words what I had only felt until then, he was not a loving person. He was affectionate, yes, in a pretty playful way that suited him, as a child. ‘He never loved me,’ I remember Shusha saying then, ‘What? What do you mean?’ i think he is a really cold person,’ she said, to my discomfort, and I seem to remember I put it down to brother and sister rivalry. What a fool I was.

Destra did not die for a year after the day we those him. During that time we did not see him. This day, by the Fall, when I came on him standing there watching the waters, it was some four years after his accession. During that time he did not come to the meetings of The Twelve, was pleasant if he met us in the streets, but was always in a hurry, ignored the usual invitations to suppers or family reunions. When we did meet there was always between us the familiarity of our childhood knowledge of each other, and that was why The Twelve were confused when we asked ourselves and each other, Why? What is it?

What was he doing? Reports came from The Big House, mostly from servants. He played with his zither for hours. A girl from the town, not one of us, or from any of the leading families, was his companion. He often visited the army and took part in its exercises.

We simply got on with our job, which was to do as well as we could for The Cities. Those early years after Destra’s death, building on what she had created, were as successful as any in our history. None of it was owed to DeRod. He was simply not available to us.

I remember when I caught sight of him on that day, standing by the Fall, the rush of old affection I felt for him. There he was, the old DeRod, as handsome as ever. How potent a spell good looks do impose. I don’t think I ever thought of that as a weakness until I was forced to think about DeRod’s effect on us. Seeing him there, brooding, moody, apparently deep in thought, I forgot that for four years every thought of him caused me - caused us all - pain.

And it was from the old ease with him that I walked up to him and embraced him, while he, after a moment, frowning with shock, turned and embraced me. ‘DeRod,’ complained, ‘why do we never see you?’ Now I was close I could have a good look. He was a man, no longer a boy.

He nodded and said with a frown, ‘But I hear you are all doing very well without me.’

Now that was an odd false note to strike, surely?

I said, ‘But DeRod, that sounds as if you are not one of us.’

He made an impatient movement, frowned, ‘I’ve got things to do.’ He was glancing up at the top of the path, expecting someone.

I felt more and more that this conversation did not - fit. He did not make sense. ‘But DeRod, we miss you. We talk about you. We wonder why you never …’

At this he shrugged me off, mí off, brusque, rude, but he felt the rudeness himself, and having already walked off a few paces he stopped and said, half-turning, ‘I’ll see you. Yes … soon.’ At the top of the path a woman had appeared. Presumably his town girl. Nothing much to say about her: she was a nice enough looking woman. But she stood there waiting for him, not looking at me at all. He was hurrying up to her, and the noise of the Fall made it useless to call after him.

And we did not hear one word from him. Not for years. Then it was always messages putting us off. And, always, there was about this communication, if you could call it that, something unexpected, discordant. We couldn’t make sense of it. What was he doing? He had become obsessed with his army. Instead of an institution that we saw as a useful way of keeping young men out of mischief, and discouraging greedy people who might be tempted by the riches of The Cities, it had become a major part of our economy. It glittered and excelled, it was marched and drilled and exercised out of its wits - the soldiers actually complained. He invented new clothes for them, using extravagant colours, scarlet, blue, gold. To stand on one of our little hills watching our army at their exercising down there on the plain - what a spectacle. And for what? He did not go to war, he did not threaten or even use it for his own prestige. He was nominally Commander-in-Chief-a title we knew had not been used before with us - but he did not interfere in the actual exercises and manoeuvres. And this went on. And it went on. We began to be alarmed at the way our wealth was being drained off into the army. And then there was a change, which we would have thought impossible.

But I am describing my visit to the burial place, and here I am still standing on the edge of the Fall, remembering, I walked down the path beside the Fall, hardening myself for what I would see. The pool for infants and small children was now a playground for the youth. It had become the fashion for them to assemble there, day and night, sitting around the edge, lolling in the shallow water, eating, drinking, smoking and - much else. For longer than most of the time these young ones had been alive, small children had not used this pool. It was now the property of The Young Hawks. Their name for themselves.

I walked by, at a small distance, because the noise was horrible, remembering the happy scenes and shrieks of the little children’s play. The Hawks took no notice of me. What they were seeing was a very old man, in the brown garment of The Twelve. Whom they had forgotten, and their parents had too. Sitting on the edge close to me were some girls and boys, about the age I think of when we became The Guardians, as always eating and throwing food about. A girl shouted at me, ‘Hey, old thing, what’s that you’ve got on?’ I went a bit closer, and said, ‘This is what The Twelve wear.’ I heard, as I knew I would, ‘The Twelve? What’s that?’ Then another girl said, ‘Hey, let me look. Would it suit me, do you think?’ Then she laughed and said, ‘I’m only joking, don’t worry. “You could easily make it,’ I said, knowing that none of them knew how to use a needle. And she boasted, ‘I wouldn’t know one end of a needle from the other.’ Her companions were all laughing and applauding. Clearly, she was some kind of leader.

‘You take a length of cloth,’ I said. ‘You cut a hole for the head.

You sew up the sides, leaving room for the arms. You can wear it as it is in hot weather, as I am now, or put it over others if it is cold.’ She was straining to listen, to understand. They know no crafts, have no skills now. They are dependent on the Barbarians. Because she was interested I went on. ‘When Destra chose The Twelve it was thought best that we should wear the simplest garb available. In cotton.’ I omitted to say that this was partly to encourage the use of cotton, which we had just begun to develop.

‘Who’s Destra?’ she asked smartly: she had decided to entertain her comrades by baiting me. ‘And who are The Twelve? I thought you were all dead long ago, ‘Well, she had at least heard of us, if not of Destra.

She began turning it into a song. ‘Twelve old men, they keep it - neat. They wear old sandals on their feet.’

‘Men and women,’ I said.

But she only grimaced, prettily, and began splashing the boy next to her with water.

I said to a youth near her, ‘Did you know this pool was once only for small children?’

He frowned. ‘Really? Oh - shame.’ He began clowning, ‘The Young Hawks have taken the little kids’ pool.’

Much laughter and then some horseplay. These were bored youngsters looking for an excuse to have some fun, as they would put it. The violence in The Cities is growing, and I had no intention of becoming a victim.

They saw themselves as hawks: now that was painful. They were a good-looking crowd, true enough, but they were soft and fatty.

‘Goodbye,’ I said, and walked on, thinking that the girl had been prompt in making up rhymes and singing them: not all of Destra’s legacy had gone.

I walked along the irrigation ditches that run out from the pool, and along the edges of the fields which grow our vegetables. There were people at work, men and women, all Barbarians. Our young despise this work, bending and tending, their hands in earth.

What do they do, then? A good question. Nothing much. They like to dress each other’s hair, tend each other’s bodies, create new kinds of food, new clothes. We are still so rich, though these days it is what we loot from others. We are rich because we don’t make war. We raid and steal and our victims are afraid of us, and do not fight back. Over the mountains that are like a barrier between us and the cities on the opposite edge of the peninsula, they fight each other and are poor. I wondered if their young people call themselves Young Eagles. Panthers, perhaps? Mountain Lions? These sour thoughts took me part of the way up the hill, approaching the burial ground. When I reached the big trees which I saw planted as saplings, I began walking cautiously: there were young people there, among the graves.

It is a beautiful place, surrounded by a triple ring of trees, mostly oaks. In the centre the eleven graves ray out from an empty space, long mounds of yellow earth, each covered with a slab of our dark grey stone. Eleven’s grave, a few days old, still does not have its stone lid. Inside the ring of trees, the soft yellow earth of this hillside is allowed to grow the sparse grass of the region, a mat that keeps the soil from blowing. There are always birds in the trees. The tree shadows move, mass, thicken, grow thin, as the sun moves. A young couple leaned against a tree, embracing. A youth was digging soil from the heap over Eleven. I stood where my grave would be, and said to him, ‘Just a minute, young man, show some respect.’

He was a burly, unappetising youth, wearing an outfit that seemed wrong on him.

He stopped, looked up, and said, Whadyewmean?’ ‘That is where an old friend of mine is buried.’ There was a knife in his belt, and his hand went to it. But he was frowning, apparently thinking: I reminded myself that these days they need some time to take in facts.

I repeated, ‘A friend of mine was buried there a few days ago.’

He looked down at the now damaged mound. I saw that he was imagining how just beneath him … he jumped away from the grave, brushed his hands free of soil, and said, ‘Right, then,’

‘What do you want the earth for?’

‘My house is letting in water. This makes good clay, this soil up here, mixed with a little of the fine chalk near the shore.’

‘Why don’t you make yourself a stone house?’

‘My house does well enough. It needs some patching.’

He yawned, stretched, sat down on a grave. Nine’s. The water engineer who had created the Fall. He pulled some dried meat from his garment and began eating. Over in the trees, the couple were copulating. These days they couple any place they feel like it. The youth sitting on the grave saw them and shouted: ‘Co to it!’ He laughed. Then he said to me, sobering, ‘Oh, go on, it’s only a bit of fun.’

I had remembered what his clothes were. The desert people under the first Rod had worn tunics belted over loose trousers in sandy colours, and these had become a fashion, which must have looked well on those lithe quick people. On this hulk of a youth, with his bulging stomach, they were wrong.

‘So, you’re one of Rod’s warriors?’ I teased him.

‘What?’

I explained. He was interested. ‘That’s green,’ he said. ‘Did you know Rod?’

‘It was getting on for four hundred years ago.’

Again the frown of incomprehension. He shook his head, dismissing it all, stood up. The two copulators, having finished, strolled over, dishevelled but not discomposed.

‘Got your earth?’ asked the young woman.

‘Go on, take some,’ I said. ‘When they come to fit on the slab they’ll have to tidy it all up anyway.’

‘No … no … actually we just came up for a laugh, and then I saw this soil just lying here.’

The three turned, to go off down the hill.

! said, ‘One day I shall be put here just here, where I am standing.’

This embarrassed them. ‘Is this a special place?’ asked the youth who had his arms around the girl.

‘You could say that, I think,’ I said.

‘Green,’ said the girl.

I saw that green was the new in-word.

The two young men gave a kind of salute, but it was a joke, the girl made a joke curtsey, and off they went, running down the hill.

I sat myself down on the stone that covered Shusha and looked at the graves, one after another, thinking of my friends. Then at the lacing of vigorous grass over the yellow soil. Then at the enormous trees around this circle. Here was my life. All my friends, my wife, all gone under the earth.

How much I wished I could just lie down in my place and be done with it. I did not want to stand up, with the creaking effort it costs me these days, walk slowly down the hill, carrying such a load of doubts, fears, sorrow. Everything I had worked for had vanished. There had been that wonderful time, that excellence, which seemed like a dream, it was so far away, so done with. And the future was not anything I cared to think about,

I lay down on my place, on the rough grass, and folded my arms, as they will be, soon. The sun was striking low through the tree trunks, and black spokes marked the grass, the graves. Straight above me the blue air dazzled. I closed my eyes and dreamed.

Twelve youngsters were dancing in a ring that matched the encircling trees, and the almost complete circle of graves. They tripped and stepped and sang, cram-full of the energies and hopes of the very young. There we all were, The Twelve, not much more than children, just about the age we were when Destra died. There I was, too. The sun shone on our hair, on our bare brown limbs, and the happy shouts and singing rose up into the air like birds. I was both one of them and sitting on the grass, supporting my old weight with my hands. I wanted to call out to my younger self, but eon Id not. And then, it seemed, the light dimmed, the sun darkened, and one by one my young companions turned to smile at me over their shoulders as they ran off into the trees, going out like sparks or like fireflies. Each one, the quick flash of a smile, teasing, mocking, affectionate, and then he or she was gone, Shusha too, and I among them. Twelve. But where was DeRod? - and then there he was, strolling along near the trees, not a boy, or even a youth, but a grown man, as he had been long ago that day near the Fall. He was not looking about him, was self-absorbed. Or absent - yes: as if he did not know where he was. He stopped, urinated near one of the graves. This was done so casually, almost absently. He was thinking of something else. He walked off down the hill as the spray of urine came on the breeze to my face. I woke; the dew was falling; and night was falling too. The great clearing was filled with the blueish dark of twilight,

I stood up, trying to loosen my limbs from the stiffness of lying still for what must have been quite a time. I wanted so much to weep. My throat was sore from the tears that choked it. Oh, how brilliant is the Dreamer that lives in us all, how witty, and how well it uses the events of a day for its purposes. What an apt depiction of my situation. Standing there in the half-dark I saw again how each of my old comrades and my young self turned to send me the fleeting, half-mocking goodbye smile and then - out, gone. And DeRod. There was something in that dream of him that said to me: Pay attention. I am telling you something. It was not contempt that he was using, when he urinated almost on the grave of an old friend, no, it was carelessness. You could say indifference. It did not matter to him, that was the point. That was the point. And what a contrast between how we all had been seeing him, talking of him, wondering, speculating: he had come to assume in our eyes the demeanour, the stature, of something not far from that old fabled Whip, who had been so cruel. We had spoken of him more and more as a tyrant, a monster of a ruler, deliberately destroying everything that was good. But the DeRod of my dream was not like that, commonplace, he was; someone you’d not look at twice. A pleasant fellow. Matching him with our years-long deliberations - such complicated and sometimes far-fetched explanations we had found for his behaviour - we had even laughed at ourselves. They nearly always focused on arrogance, on the distortions of sense that come from the loneliness of power. And there was always something that did not fit our thoughts of him. We knew that he lived as simply as his mother had done, that his children were not more privileged than anyone else’s, and that he occupied himself with … and that is what I must now record.

When I was able to move comfortably, I found my clothes too damp for comfort, and imagined I must have wet them with my tears. Though I had not wept, I had been thinking too hard about DeRod. I kept seeing him, indifferent, careless: and now to my memory of the dream I added something else, his smile at me as he turned to go, almost embarrassed, almost irritated, as if at someone importunate, demanding too much. How painful, and how informative that dream had been, and my thoughts about it afterwards.

I walked through the trees and down the hill into the thinly scattered lights of the city which stopped on the edge of the dark of the ocean. I went past the pool, which was still full of youngsters. All around it flared the torches which we, The Twelve, had ordered to be kept always burning. We had imagined, when the infants and the little children and the women who attended to them had gone off to bed, how the flames from the torches would move and shine on the water that was never still, or would sometimes drip fire on a windy night, so that it would be hard to tell if the little waves on the pool were fire or water. Now it was a noisy drunken scene, and it was easy to walk past in the half dark, unnoticed. The girl who had asked about my garment was lying half in, half out of the water, one of a group who it seemed were all copulating together like a tangle of snakes in spring.

A youth on the other side of the pool was trying to grab a girl: she was very young, not more than a child. He was shouting at her, half-singing it, ‘New girl in the pool, fears the push and fears the shove, Come to me, I’ll give you love; …’ I was able to recognise this as a debased version of

New lamb on the hill fears the snow and fears the storm, Put it down and keep it warm, Mend the cracks in barn and shed, The lamb will pine without the ewe The ewe without its lamb pine too, keep them warm and keep them fed …

These days when the wind blows cold across our lulls no one brings the lambs and ewes down for safety, and the white patches that are dead lambs look like the last shreds of snow on the grass, or like white flowers spattered everywhere.

I came into my house in the dark and sat in the dark, alone. My house? It is a long time since I could think of this spreading house as mine. In the middle of my life, half a century - almost - ago, my sou Bora came to me and said that he had a wife and three children and needed more space than he had, in a smallish house in one of the cities from the old time, which meant, in a rough area. There was much more to this than simple practicality. I would not say we were estranged, but for a long time we had not had much to say to each other. My house - poor Shusha had died - is in the part of The Cities where the elite live. I put it like that, simply, without evasions or the usual justifications, because, well, I am too old for all that. I, The Twelve, were a governing elite, but for a long time we have not been. People like my son went in for a lot of vilification and even when The Cities were doing very well indeed. ‘The powerful oligarchy which rules us, ‘That kind of thing. But young people vociferous in this way usually end up standing where the vilified elders stood. For him to move up here, to this house, was a statement to all concerned and we both knew it. A wing of four rooms was built on, and here I moved, the house servants easily accommodating themselves to balancing my meagre wants with the family’s. Our relations were cordial enough. We didn’t see each other sometimes for weeks. And then in his turn my son Bora found he was being faced with - in his case - a daughter-in-law; saying, You don’t need all that room. And he built a wing on the other Side of the house, to let my grandson and his wife and children move in. They were prominent in DeRod’s circles and I would have liked to joke with someone about this new elite - but these days I have no one to enjoy jokes with.

And now i must record the worst thing that happened to us, the most unexpected, and still the most puzzling. A message came from DeRod that he was abolishing The College of Storytellers and The College of Songmakers. It was not possible to console ourselves by saying it must be a mistake. DeRod’s agents had requisitioned the two buildings. This was not long before Shusha died and my son moved in. Shusha was beside herself. She was responsible for the education of the young and the two colleges were what she relied on. For a while we sat together, doing what so often resulted from an order from DeRod: we were trying to understand how he was thinking, why he did what he did.

For a good while after Destra’s death and DeRod’s accession The Cities were at a height of brilliance. A golden age. Our festivals of storytelling, our song festivals, our entertainments, followed each other through that cycle of the sun from a grand climax on the day when it is coldest, but we know it will get wanner, until the generous blaze of the day when we know that from now it will get colder, and that was the other big festival. Mid-Light. People were coming from faraway cities all over the peninsula. People still do come, but they are different people and bring with them strife and disturbance, and their enjoyment is expressed m a raw jeering laughter that was never heard in our time.

DeRod did not take part in these festivities, or not much. Always affable and obliging, he might appear at a festival, but it was as if what was after all the pulse and beat of our communal life did not touch him, had nothing to do with him. He preferred his armies. He had even made up a song for them, catchy, full of a patriotic fervour we had not associated with The Cities until then. It was popular, and sung not only by the soldiers. Just how far this army song was in spirit from our music was shown when it was sung by a young aspirant at a song competition. The audience laughed at it - at the song, not the singer; in those days to mock a performer would have been thought unkind.

The festivals were held not in one place, but in several, in public places everywhere: we were still trying to make sure ancient rivalries were not being fostered. For several days, at these times, you could not walk down a street or enter a garden without finding yourself part of singing, dancing, or some enactment, which might be the joining of the old towns at the time of the birth of The Cities, or perhaps the short reign of The Cruel Whip, But we discouraged the kind of music he introduced, the violence and the crudity of it, though we could not deny it attracted crowds. From small seeds big trees may grow. As we often say but perhaps we do not

think often enough about the meaning. The Cruel Whips effusions and effluences, discouraged by Destra and then by us, have grown into a nasty poisonous flood.

The message from DeRod, ending our prosperity - though at the time we had no idea how thoroughly and soon the end would come - arrived at the height of our happy festival culture.

Shusha said she would go and see him, and went off then and there. After all, her brother, whom she had scarcely seen for years, lived a short walk away. She returned looking as if someone had hit her. Shusha was always a sensitive soul, too much so, for her own good, as she knew; and as I often warned her. And the story, when at last she was able to tell it, did not seem at once to justify such pain. DeRod at first did not recognise her, and then apologised by saying it was a long time since she had visited. She had to swallow indignation: she had once made every kind of attempt to see him. But he did not seem to see that she was angry. It was a family occasion, the room full of people. His children were like my son, with families of their own. Shusha was only just able to put names to the men and women who must be DeRod’s progeny, and there were a lot of children. A long table was loaded with food. Plentiful, reported Shusha, but not very elegant. And this was the note or tone of what she saw: she was puzzled by it and surprised. She said they were a crude and ordinary lot, and you’d never think they were anything more than a gathering of the kind of people you might find in a low-class eating house or inn. ‘I kept thinking, This is Destra’s son, he was brought up by Destra,’ she said, sorrowful, and with that unfailing note of bewilderment that had to accompany our discussions of DeRod. She was introduced as an aunt, to some, who said it was nice to meet her and as a great-aunt to others, They offered her food but she said to DeRod that she wanted to talk to him, even for a minute. ‘Well, talk away,’ he said, as if it did not occur to him that she might have a special reason for needing to talk. ‘It’s about the festivals’ she said. ‘Why are you abolishing them?’ She said she felt like some idiot, the way they all looked at her. “What makes you think I am abolishing anything?’ DeRod enquired, impatient with her. ‘You’ve just taken over the colleges, you’ve taken our buildings.’ ‘Oh, have we?’ said he, not impudently, but as if hearing the news for the first time. ‘Well, never mind, I’m sure you can fix up your festivals.’

Soon she excused herself and came home, weeping.

The Twelve sent him messages of all kinds, and visited him in delegations of twos and threes at his house. He greeted us with his usual affability, making it clear by his manner that we were an irrelevance; he might offer us a cup of wine, but the most we could get out of him was, ‘I’m working on something, I’m sure you’ll like it.’

On my visit to him, with Eleven and Nine, I said to him, ‘You are destroying the very essence of what we are, the soul of The Cities. We are admired for it by everyone. Why are you doing this?’ I remember his look - I’m not likely to forget it] How often I have recalled that look, to see if there was something there I had missed. His look at me, at us, was not angry. Not discommoded. It showed nothing of the discomfort of one who feels inferior. There was a little embarrassment, not on his own account, but on ours. ‘I didn’t say I am doing away with music,’ he repeated. ‘There are plenty of different kinds of songs and music’

‘And the tales? Our story? The history of The Cities?’

Did he shrug? Well, as good as.

‘We teach our children,’ I said. ‘It is how they learn their skills. They learn from them an enquiring habit of mind, how to think, how to make comparisons. How are our children going to be taught?’

How well I remember his long preoccupied stare, at this. He frowned, he fidgeted, his eyes wandered and then returned, he leaned forward to stare at my face, into our faces, and then sat back. He sighed. He must know what he was destroying: he must. And yet he did not seem to.

The festivals were cancelled, and The Cities began to fall into disorder. There was a sullen, angry mood, and that was when began the outbreaks of public violence. As for us, The Twelve, we were as if he had hit us in the heart region: the way fighters do, to disable an opponent. Some of us became ill. Quite soon Shusha died. I knew it was because of shock, of grief.

Then the new thing began. A Festival was announced, and it would be organised by the armies. When it took place, people who were used to the old ways were uncomfortable. It was all military, to do with army exercises, marching, army life, and even fighting, though that was a rather abstract affair, more like games, and it would be hard to associate blood and death with them. Hard to imagine the ceremonies of our festivals, which insisted on the deep seriousness of our lives, our responsibilities for each other and for The Cities. The choirs of DeRod s armies sang wonderfully: after all, many had been trained at our schools. But what were they singing! You could imagine that not very clever children had written these songs, children who had no idea that anything better was possible. They were pompous, or bombastic; they were silly and jokey - the kind of jokes small children like. The audience showed their disappointment. This did not last. A new generation arrives quickly on any scene, and soon the children were youngsters who became adults, and when they said Festivals they meant DeRod s and ours were not much more than a memory insisted on by their parents.

The nastiness of The Cruel Whip came back. Some of the new songs I could hardly bear to listen to, they were so vulgar, so crude, so full of incipient violence.

We, The Twelve, were not surprised that DeRod was threatening the nearest city to ours, over the mountains, with invasion. The strength and reputation of The Cities saved us: the endangered city succumbed at once to DeRod and sent a tribute of slaves.

So, with the next city he decided to master. Soon half the peninsula owed tribute to us, and not a real battle had been fought.

That was the picture not long after Shusha’s death, at about the time of my son’s coming to live in my house. He was employed by the armies as an administrator, and while of course he had been brought up by myself and by Shusha in the old days, it was as if all that had slipped away from him, gone. I used to marvel that a young man who had had such an upbringing could now see nothing of value in it. His look at me when I tried to remind him that there had been better times was like DeRod’s: it was I, it was we, who were out of place, out of step. And so it was with all the children of The Twelve. The new spirit in The Cities had wiped their memories clean.

When that rich feast of tales and music had so suddenly been silenced, all kinds of superstitions sprang up, and new gods flourished. Our tales and songs had not celebrated Deity, not more than the basic truth of our interconnectedness, under the Sun, our Creator. Now there was a moon cult, and with that ceremonies of a bloody kind which even now I don’t know much about. My son Bora doesn’t either, but my grandson is an initiate. Bora told me, ‘He’s into some weird stuff, I can tell you. Better not be out at night with that lot around or you’ll find yourself with your throat cut and stretched out on a stone to please the moon.’ He laughed. You could think he admired that sort of thing. It was the violence he admired. That he does admire.

At the inns and drinking houses the songs were like wails or bawlings or battle cries, and where the gentle tones, the subtleties, of our songs had been, was now, louder than anything, a loud drumming, like the heartbeat of a criminal. When I walk past such a place I hurry, because I can feel my whole self being aroused to

anger, threat, even murder. And yet our people can now spend all evening in such places, with that loud thumping in their ears, drinking, sometimes dancing. It is hard to believe that some of them must remember a different, gentler time.

I missed and miss more and more, the sounds of the games and songs that once you could hear everywhere, as you went about.

There was a skipping song that went like this:

Make a hole As deep will go The long wing feather Of an old black crow. Water and grain Go in together. Cover it well. Watch the weather.

Noil’ make new holes,

Two feathers span Tour points around The first, and so The field is covered With a net of grain.

The seeds will sprout, Their roots in mud. But if there’s drought, Reluctant rain The sprouts will die.

Begin again. Make a hole …

All the little children used this song in their games, and then, a little older, found themselves in the fields, knowing exactly how to plant. It was wonderful to see their delight, as they realised they had so quickly and simply become part of the world of work, contributing their share. There were hundreds of such songs, some simple like this planting song, increasingly deep and more difficult, to match the growing into understanding of the child.

And always The Twelve met and asked ourselves and each other Why? Why? How many ingenious reasons we did find. We imagined far-reaching policies, sometimes benevolent, sometimes malevolent. We credited him with amazing powers of foresight, but this was when we were seeing him as Destra’s son. But he was also The Cruel Whip’s offspring - and perhaps he had inherited his father’s qualities? Why, why, why? What did he want to achieve? What was his aim? Surely not to dominate the whole of the peninsula, become despot over all its cities? Why destroy something as perfect, as harmonious, as The Cities? What was, what could be, the reason?

Somewhere along the dolorous road we did consider the possibility that Destra had hoped we would not choose her son. We did not like this conclusion. We had chosen the monster who was destroying everything his mother had created, it was our fault … but it was too painful to think like this. Because it was painful we refused to see the obvious.

I do not want to give the impression that from the moment DeRod became Ruler everything went wrong. On the contrary. For a while everything got better, on a momentum of success. And The Cities were so beautiful then, so prosperous. I remember walking up from the shore one evening with a flaring sunset behind me and thinking I could imagine I was approaching trees and gardens. But I was approaching the most populous part: the dark grey stone from our quarries that made our heavy and solid houses - made them strong against earth-shakes - was absorbed into the green and the colours of the flowers. You walked up thinking that a garden would open in front of you but as you turned a cunningly-placed bend in the path you saw a house or a group of houses. And all this is still true, even if the houses and gardens are not so well-maintained. Suppose - fancifully - we were able to sweep like birds low over The Cities surely what we must see would be the heavy crowns of trees, massed bushes, flowers, and then, half-concealed, our houses.

It was in that period when in fact everything was going wrong, something like fifty years ago, that we, The Twelve, made the great pool at the foot of the Fall for the small children. We were making new farms and forests, and ponds for fresh-water fish. We built silos for the safekeeping of grain, or rather grains, for we were always acquiring new kinds: when DeRod sent off his raiding parties we quietly approached some soldiers and ordered them to bring back any seeds of crops we did not already grow. We created a lake from a river that ran into the sea near The Cities. We imagined Destra was watching us and approving. She did not seem to care what we did. He never commented, whether to approve or not.

About the time my son took my place as head of our household, we, The Twelve - by then eleven, and soon to he ten - decided to undertake the biggest challenge yet. We were going to transform the oldest part of The Cities, where the first villages had been along the shore. It was the poorest area. There were still some shabby buildings - huts, really - of wood and reeds. Some people, believing themselves to be more sensitive than the rest, find them attractive. But it was - and is - squalid. When there are had storms the seas rise and the whole area can flood. We planned to build a sea wall of our wonderful and accommodating stone, to keep out the sea, and to straighten the streets, make good sewers and a new public park. It would take years. We were all elated, delighted with the plans, and then, at the height of our achievement, when we sent down overseers to arrange for the labour we found they had already been contracted. There was no labour. Who was to blame? DeRod. We sent messengers, asking him why, for by now we were unwilling to face him ourselves, for he had assumed such an intensity of arbitrary destructiveness for us. Never before had we faced a situation where we could not carry out a plan for lack of labour. His reply was, ‘he had use for die labour force’. We sent another messenger asking for explanations, and he said he had plans. We should not worry, he said, he was thinking of raiding the cities across the mountains for slaves. That confounded us. We could not believe it. Never had The Cities made captives of free people. Even The Cruel Whip had not done this.

The lower suburbs on the seashore remained at risk from flooding, stayed in their squalor, and we heard that DeRod was building a wall. He planned a long strong tall wall that would run from one arm of the sea to another, several days’ walking long, cutting off The Cities from the outside and accessible only through armed gates. He had made his raids, and his captives were in camps guarded by soldiers, and they had begun working in the hills to fetch boulders to break up for the wall. This force was not badly treated. They were prisoners but adequately fed and not overworked. Some, we heard, were pleased to be here, part of the most powerful state in the peninsula, no longer subject to the extortions of The Cities, no longer liable to be snatched from their families to become part of DeRod’s work force. Already there was a strong movement among them to get DeRod to bring their families. And DeRod was listening. After all, the young women could work, if they were not breeding. And there were all kinds of skills we, The Cities, did not yet have. We wondered if he had thought of the problems of feeding all these new people? If he had considered that there must be overcrowding, with space limited by his wall?

And soon there were shortages of food. So many of our workers on the fields and with the animals had been conscripted either for his armies or for the wall our food supplies were suffering. Our silos, for the first time, were half empty. Again we sent messengers, and his reply was to send lis women, the wives of the new captives, to work at growing food and with animals. They were mostly pregnant and had families. DeRod was encouraging them to have children. These new people had no skills for agriculture, and it was hard to teach them, because our old ways of teaching by tales and songs and narrative poems were being forgotten. It hurt to compare the standards of husbandry to be seen in our fields now, with the past. These were comparatively barbarous people, coarser, clumsier, ignorant compared with - well, with our people in the past. We had to say that, at least to each other: compared with us, but in the past.

This was the moment of evident, apparently irreversible, change, when DeRod decided to build his wall. After that, the falling off was swift and in every possible way.

About that time there was a confrontation between me and my son Bora. That is how I remember it, but I am sure he would not particularly remember it, or think it important, I wanted him to comment on the pleasure garden we had made on the river that escaped from the dam into the sea. How absurd it is, this need of the old for approval from their children. I noticed it among my friends - I used to, when they were alive. Bora had never mentioned the Fall, the pool, the silos, the gardens - nothing of the things we had done, and I am sure I was always hoping for him to say something.

The day of the encounter I saw him walking up the path and hurried to fall in beside him. I came straight out with, ‘Have you seen the new river gardens yet?’ When he only nodded, I persisted, ‘What did you think?’

‘Oh, we always do things well.’ This took me so aback I actually stopped, but hurried after him. ‘Bora, come into my quarters, I want to talk.’ He agreed. Amiably enough. I felt it as a kind of indifference. And while we walked to my verandah that I had built to overlook the gardens and the sea, I thought what that ‘we* could mean.

We sat, I clapped my hands for refreshments and I looked for signs of impatience in my son and thought that I saw them. It was some time since we had talked. Years, I think. This was because when we did talk I always felt I was knocking on a locked door.

‘Bora,’ I said, ‘there will be no more gardens, or projects for buildings, or anything at all. You must know we have been denied labour, except for field work.’

At this he turned on me eyes which seemed puzzled. He even scratched his head, an oafish gesture he had certainly never learned from us, his parents.

‘But we are building the wall. That will be a fine sight, when it’s done.’

‘Hut the wall won’t make fields and gardens and dams. There is need for labour for maintenance. The silos are dilapidating. The roads are too.’

‘Well, we’ll attend to it.’

That we again.

‘Bora, DeRod has never repaired anything, mended anything, planted so much as a tree.’

Again he seemed to be working something out. ‘But Father, everyone admires DeRod. When we had the Feast of Praise for him all the armies were singing about the new garden and the new silos too.’

I understood. It was such a blow to my sense of probability: Bora believed - they all believed - that DeRod was the originator of wonderful accomplishments.

‘Why didn’t you come to the ceremony? It was noticed. You and the old gang never do come.’

‘Were we sent invitations?’

And now he was openly irritated. ‘Since when did the old ones need invitations.’

‘The Twelve,’ I said. ‘The Council of Twelve. The ones that look after The Cities.’

‘But you are family,’ he said. ‘You are part of The Family.’

I had not heard that term.

‘Now, listen to me,’ I said, ‘It’s important that you should understand: And I listed our achievements over the past few cycles. ‘This is what we did. The Twelve. Not DeRod. And now we cannot get on with the work we should be doing.’

‘Well, it’s all part of the same show,’ he said at last.

I did not know how to counter this, how to explain. Instead I saw the heart, the very heartbeat, of our complaint. The festivals of songs and tales. Bora would remember all that. He would have to. He was brought up with it. I did not often talk to his wife, who was a decent enough woman, though without any depth to her, because when talking about anything but the children or practical things I met with incomprehension. Bora did not meet me with the perfect understanding of shared experience. But it was not with her ignorance, her blankness.

‘When DeRod abolished the old festivals,’ I said, knowing my voice was full of bitterness, ‘he killed the heart and soul of The Cities.’

‘But we have festivals,’ he said. ‘There was a big army rally and there were some fine songs.’ And on his face appeared a grin, as if he were laughing with some accomplice I could not see. ‘We’ve got some great new songs.’

‘Bora,’ I said, ‘don’t do this. You must remember. It was different then - wasn’t it?’

He screwed his face up, he leaned forward, his forearms on his thighs, as if about to jump up and go off. He gave me glances he was not trying to conceal. He knew what I was talking about. I could see that at some time, probably when offered a job in DeRod’s armies, he had come to some accommodation with his conscience, if not his memory.

‘I don’t see the point of that,’ he said. ‘But that was then. And the old gang did it well. I’m not denying it.’

‘The old gang - your grandmother, the great Destra, and the Council of Twelve.’

‘But DeRod was part of all that, wasn’t he?’

He did not know just how painful a question this was. How often had I tried to remember just how much DeRod had been part of it. I could remember him singing. Not the storytelling, though: he had no aptitude for that. To what extent had he been part of it?

Bora got up, ending k.

‘[ don’t see what you are worrying about,’ he said.

It was shortly after that he too built himself a wing to retire into and my grandson, Ins son, became head of the household, this young man brought disgrace on the family, which was after all DeRod’s too, because he chose a wife his father, Bora, told him he would not acknowledge. She was a Barbarian from one of the cities over the mountains, captured as loot. She was beautiful in their wild immodest way, and had been a dancer in one of the taverns. My grandson was wild, mocked his father and mother, and earned his living buying and selling the unwanted babies of the new immigrants, the Barbarians. He did until DeRod heard of the marriage, and that his father had disowned him. DeRod gave him a job as supplier to the armies, where he makes his living still just on the edge of legality. Bora does not speak to either his son or his daughter-in-law.

This new woman, Raned, has achieved what every Barbarian girl wants, marriage with a citizen, and, in her case, into the leading family. If my grandson had not been such a poor type of fellow he would have aimed higher, perhaps at one of DeRod’s descendants. When challenged - by me - he babbled and boasted about love. In my experience love doesn’t come so cheap, though I have to say she is a beautiful thing. And there is more. She had none of the manners used by us - I should say, once used by us - and is free and easy with everyone, and thinks nothing of running up to me as I wander in the gardens to show me some garment she had acquired or made for her children - my great-grandchildren - or to tell me in her pretty voice that seems to sing some of the gossip from the lower town. I knew I could easily be in love with her myself. I thought her too good for my grandson. One day she came laughing into my wing of the house, her arms full of branches, and began setting them about in vases, saying it was the Festival of the Wall.

She said there were some fine songs but she thought that they - her city - had better. And she told me a story which had originated from us, from The Cities. I could recognise it though it had become distorted and lost its humour and its subtlety. Its humanity, too. It was the tale of a beautiful princess, captured to marry a barbarous ruler, but she had killed him to secure succession for her son. This was how the story of Destra had changed. I asked if this princess had become a good ruler, but Raned only laughed and said she was beautiful, wasn’t that enough? I said to her, complimenting her, that Beauty is always enough. She liked that, though I meant something different from what she thought I did.

I asked for other tales and heard more of ours, similarly transformed and debased, but recognisable. The Cruel Whip had become a magician who filled his coffers by selling magic tales, wicked tales, of power. And they certainly were wicked and cruel: she told me some.

I asked if she would like to hear some of our old tales, and she brought in her oldest child to listen. She enjoyed them, and so did he, but I thought the kinder aspects disappointed her. She liked the brutality of the magician’s stories. She had not learned to hear anything but the simple and obvious.

She asked me how I knew all these tales, and I said that they were in my mind, but a few had been written; by then I had begun to record them, afraid they would be lost when I died.

The idea of writing excited her: she had never heard that one could make letters, then words, then whole stories. She asked to be shown. And I had the pleasure of taking out the scrolls of reed with their smoothed inner skins ready to take the ink. I set out the sharpened reed, for writing, and the bowl of ink. She was awed. I have never seen such an admiring young woman. She wanted to know how I had learned. I said that in the old days a few of us had been taught to write, to keep the skill alive, but now there were only three still alive, myself and two of The Twelve who were then still living.

Would she like to learn? I asked, for not the least of my anxieties was that soon no one would be left to teach youngsters the .in. Our commercial managers used notches on sticks to measure and count.

She was tempted, I could see, but laughed, and said she was too stupid, she was just an ignorant woman, I told her that if she wanted to fit in to The Cities she would not talk about women as inferior. I saw from the look on her face that she did not understand me, or thought I was ill-informed. The women of The Cities are not as free as once they were. The change had been slow, and at first not noticed. It was the armies, you see: a military state is all hierarchies and ranks and steps of achievement, jealously guarded, and where did women fit into all this? Not only ordinary women, but the singers and the storytellers were not the independent, graceful, skilled women of the old days, under EnRod and then Destra. They do not impose or expect respect or admiration.

I asked Raned if she would like one of her children to be taught to write. ‘Or all of them.’ I said. She liked that idea, very much. She said they were too young but she would think about it, and look for signs of aptitude in that direction. That made me laugh: what would one look for in a small child to indicate an innate gift for the art of writing? She rebuked me, politely, saying that if one of her children - she already had three - seemed to be quieter and more noticing than the others, then she would bring this paragon to me. ‘Surely,’ she said, ‘you wouldn’t expect a child who is good at running about and fighting to have the patience for this.’ And she picked up one of my pens, as if it were a snake or a lizard that could bite.

This was not so long ago. And now I am the only one left who has the skill of writing and I am more than ever anxious because soon there will be no one. After all, while we know that north there lives a people with a whole class of scribes who have their history, their transactions and their tales kept on their reed-rolls there is no reason why we should expect another wanderer from their mountains to come our way. That is - was - one of our tales, how this ragged starving man appeared and taught us the art of writing in return for protecting him. He had run away to avoid some punishment for a crime we were careful not to ask him about.

I again asked Raned to let one of her children study with me, and she said she thought two might be suitable. They will start with me soon. They had to be prepared to accept the idea of writing. When I was young, under Destra, the men and women who could write were admired. It was a great day for me when I was chosen. Some people used to say that there was no need for the new skill, writing, because we had all our knowledge, our history, our tales, in our memories, and every child knew it all. Writing was a clumsy and cumbersome thing compared to that. I am sure no one then could have believed that our heritage of songs and tales could be lost, could disappear, and in such a short time. Now only old people remember.

If I still had the power to do it I would call all The Cities together and ask the old people who did remember to come forward and tell everything to young people enough interested; surely there must be some left?

What a weight it all is, this anxiety, this sorrow. I do sometimes wonder why old people bother to keep alive, it is such an effort. Being old is a tedious business. How I love watching Raned’s young ones skip and dance about, the ease of it: above all, that is what one loses, the pleasure in simple movement.

And yet I mean to make sit down at least two of them, immobilising them long enough to learn their signs, that will open the world of The Word to them.

I sent out to find people who know the old skills of preparing reeds for writing, and a very old woman came up the hill to me, and I gave her money to teach others to do it, before she dies. She was so pleased to hear of anyone who needed her skills that she wept. She at least remembers how things once were.

‘It is so ugly now,’ she whispered, glancing about for fear of unfriendly listeners - and that, too, is a new thing. ‘Why is everything so loud and so ugly? Sometimes I sit and sing the old songs to myself, but I find a time when the youngsters are not about because they laugh at me. They say the old songs are insipid.’

‘I understand very well,’ I said, and so we went on, as the old do, remembering, until the servant came in, and we stopped talking. I know that my son asks his servants what I am doing and who I am seeing. He sends doctors to me when I am quite well. It is all meant kindly, I expect, but it makes me feel imprisoned.

And now ! have reached the present. I wrote the word ‘imprisoned’ last night.

Bora remarked yesterday that DeRod was not well: people were

speculating who would succeed. This took me aback, I know it will seem ridiculous and even impossible, but I bad not been thinking of him as an old man - my age, in fact. My mental image of him has been for a long time of something not far off The Cruel Whip, supplanting memories of a charming handsome fellow - one of those people who, when you think of them, make you smile. An old man. Well, of course he must be … I sent him a message that I would like to see him, exactly as if nothing of the sort has happened for such a long time - getting on for half a century. Is that really possible? Well, yes, it must be nearly that. No reply. Did I expect one? Yes. This is because since the death of Eleven my mind has been filled so much with memories of us all, mostly of us as young things. I was so full of affection for the past, for us all, DeRod too, as he was.

I waited. And then, today, I simply took my stick from its place where it leans in the corner, and set off. Not far. Walking distance, even for me. I have never used the new chairs that are lifted and carried by porters. Pardy because I don’t need them and partly because among the young they have become a sport: they race each other, as if the porters are animals, whipping them along. I think this shameful, but know that in this new spirit that reigns in The Cities my objections would seem merely another example of an old man’s whimsy.

It was a fine afternoon. My way went up to the top of the hill, by the Fall, and then through the public squares and places, and then through a wood, which we, The Twelve, had planned and planted. Fine trees now, and spacious shady places where in summer you can find coolness and shade.

I had been walking in my now slow careful way for as long as it took the sun to drop a level in the sky, striking direct through the trees, when I heard the loud laughter and jeering that these days means the youth are near. A gang of seven young men appeared, running up through the trees towards me; they saw me, and then with cries of excitement, as if they had glimpsed a running animal, came towards me. I stopped and faced them. They stopped, a few paces away. Each face was distorted into that sneer which is obligatory now.

‘What have we got here?’ said the leader.

I knew him, I was sure, right from that first moment.

‘Look, an old beggar,’ said another boy. Beggars, once impossible with us, are now common.

‘I like his fwock,’ said the first. This is the new fad among them: they lisp, and put on effeminate airs.

They were wearing a fashion derived from the Barbarians: leather trousers and jerkin, showing their shoulders and chests. I was wearing, as always, my old brown robe.

‘Give me your fwock,’ said the leader.

I stared. I could not help it. Those faces, they were familiar to me anyway, because they were not the now so familiar Barbarian face, which is sharper, bolder, strongly incised, often beautiful, or handsome, where our generic face is broad, frank, open, honest, the face of a perhaps not over-subtle people, but one you trusted. On this face, one so likeable, the sneers and jeers were like a mask which did not fit, and the raucous derision of their style of speaking did not suit their voices either.

Who was he? Who could he be, this boy?

He snatched my stick away, so that I stumbled and nearly fell, and then used it to lift up the bottom of my robe far enough so they could admire my ancient sex: what they were seeing, what I saw every day m the bath, was something like a lump of dried mushrooms. They pointed and sneered and sniggered.

Then I remembered: I knew that face so well. It was part of my oldest, dearest memories: I said, ‘Are you Rollard’s son … grandson … great-grandson?’ I amended.

That face, born to be pleasant and agreeable, returned to this condition for just a moment, then he went deep scarlet, and dropped the stick.

‘Green,’ he muttered. ‘Good green, he’s got the Sight,’

They clustered around me, mouths open, awed, staring.

‘I knew your great-grandfather well,’ I said, and my voice was unsteady, and my eyes wet, seeing that loved face there, before me. He, Rollard, had been one of The Twelve.

They turned and sped off, on one impulse, like birds or fishes. I stood alone in that glade in the wood, and wept, thinking of Rollard, thinking of us all. I picked up my stick, and went on, carefully, through the leaf litter, to DeRod’s gate. There two armed men stood forward, to stop me. I said to them, ‘Stand aside, this is one of The Twelve.’ My emotion had given me an impatience with them, and the unfamiliar words did seem to link up with some chord of memory. They stepped aside, and watched me toil up the path, to the house where appeared to stand watching nie a tall striking woman, obviously a Barbarian, who as I arrived in front of her said, ‘I know who you are.’

‘Tell De Rod I am here,’ I said, understanding that he had not received my message. She hesitated, then went inside. I followed her. She did turn to stop me, but there across the room, staring at me, was a very old man, who lifted his stick to point at me and said, ‘Oh, it’s you at last. Why did it take you so long?’

This knocked the stuffing out of me.

He is a jolly old thing, with puffs of white hair at his ears, a bald pate, and his eyes were full of tears, like mine.

I sat, without being asked.

‘I sent you a message,’ I said. The woman was standing close, hands folded in front of her, watching me.

‘I didn’t get it,’ he said, glancing at her. ‘They take very good care of me, you see.’

He did not seem to be particularly feeble, let alone ill.

‘What’s this about your being ill?’

‘I did have a bit of a turn.’

‘He must not get over-tired,’ she said.

I said to her, ‘I am sure he is capable of deciding when he is tired.’

I don’t think anyone had spoken to her like that for some time. She seemed to gather herself in a movement like a snake about to strike, then resumed her watchful pose.

I said, ‘I would like to talk to DeRod alone.’

Touch and go , . . Then, ‘Yes, leave us.’

I could see this was not a tone he used to her. Her look at me was pure enmity. But she turned and went.

Who was she? I knew that his wife, ‘the town girl’, had died long ago.

‘That is my new woman,’ he said. ‘She is good to me.’ And he giggled.

This was the fearsome, feared DeRod; he was a giggling old man, an old buffer, naughty, like a child.

‘I’ve come on serious business,’ I said.

‘Of course you have, dear boy. You wouldn’t come just for fun, dear old Sage.’

‘DeRod, as I walked heir I saw die Fall is running low. That means the water channels are silting up. There are big cracks in the silos and the rats are getting in. The irrigation ditches need attention. The roads are going into potholes.’

He could easily have giggled, become a child, called for that woman, but he looked harassed, even annoyed, and said, ‘You know how labour is now. They are lazy and irresponsible and incompetent.’

‘But DeRod, what do you expect? They get no training, they haven’t done for a long time.’

‘That’s why we use the Barbarians, they are used to work.’

Again it seemed as if he simply wanted me to keep quiet … go away … stop bothering him. Yes, that was it, he was like someone irritated with an importunate or pestering person.

I went on. ‘DeRod, when you put an end to the instruction, to the teaching, when you ended the storytelling and the songs - obviously this was going to happen?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘When your mother died she left behind her a system of education, of training … you ended it.’

Again, he stared, and, there was no doubt of it, was surprised.

‘Don’t you remember, DeRod?’

And that was the moment I understood. Oh, all kinds of enlightenment came flooding, rather late, but there it was, right in front of me. It was not that he had forgotten. Not that he had deliberately destroyed what was good. He had never known it was good. He had never understood. He had seemed to be part of it all, but he, Destra’s son, the graceful and charming and delightful DeRod, whom we had all admired, had been a blind person among us. From some spirit of emulation he had gone along with it all, as children do, but he had understood nothing at all.

Oh, yes, the scales were indeed falling from my eyes.

I sat there looking back over my long life, and thinking how we, The Twelve, had not seen the first most obvious thing. We had deluded ourselves with all kinds of imaginings and resentments and suspicions: we had seen this man here, DeRod, as a villain, a scheming, ambitious, unscrupulous scoundrel. The truth, had always been - he was stupid. That’s all. We had never seen it. But clearly, his mother had … and that was something I had to think out.

When that formidable woman, his jailor, came in, I got up and said to her, ‘Thank you. You must take good care of him. ‘And to DeRod, ‘Did you know I am the last of The Twelve?’

‘Are you? No, I didn’t know. No one told me.’

‘Who are The Twelve?’ she asked, suspicious.

‘It doesn’t matter.’ And to him, ‘Eleven died a few days ago.’

‘I’m sorry’ he said, and it sounded as if he really was. ‘We had good times, didn’t we?’ he said, the tears starting. ‘Do you remember our games in the teaching room?’

‘Yes, I do remember.’

‘It was such fun.’

‘Yes, it was.’ And as I turned to go, ‘I have arranged with some youngsters to teach them how to write and read. They are my great grandchildren.’

‘Oh, are you?’ He seemed puzzled and I saw he had forgotten about writing. Then he said, and I remember he said it in the old days, ‘What use is it, when we’ve got Memories who keep records of the past, and all that?’

‘I don’t think many people now know about our history. Or only in a distorted kind of way. ‘And then I could not help adding/Your mother, Destra, is remembered as a sort of clever courtesan.’

At this the woman carne in with, ‘She was a bar girl. She was a singer in the bars. What’s wrong with that?’

So, I knew what her past had been.

‘Nothing wrong. But she would have been very surprised to hear that she was a bar girl. Destra was a great woman,’ I said, knowing this woman would have no conception of greatness. Then to DeRod, ‘She was a great woman and a fine ruler and there is nothing left of what she created.’

I turned and left, not wanting to see his face, though I expect it didn’t show any real comprehension.

And I walked home slowly through the wood, almost dark now, and dangerous, but I did not see anyone there.

That was last night. I did not sleep. The old are familiar with how memories can shift and change their meanings. A scene from childhood that you have often visited can suddenly say to you, ‘No, you’ve been wrong. This is what was going on.’ But now it is not a question of a scene, a day, but a lifetime, and it will need more than a night or two of sleeplessness to understand it all.

It is Destra, first of all, who commands my attention. When she first came to us all those years ago we knew no more about her people than a few rumours could tell us, so far away did everything seem that was not The Cities. But since then the other cities of the peninsula have come close to us, because of DeRod’s raids, and we know a great deal about peoples and places, and Destra’s story is well known. Her father was a minor chieftain of the Roddite tribe, with several wives. Destra did not marry as the other daughters did, obedient to custom, going to a husband’s clan as early as ten or eleven. Destra was eighteen when she came to us, old, according to her people’s ideas. She refused many suitors. She was headstrong, wilful, and very beautiful. Why did she at last agree to marry? She must have known something of The Cruel Whip’s reputation, but the fame of EnRod’s reforms had travelled everywhere: Destra wanted to live where women were as free as men. Not everyone admired these reforms! Through all the cities of the peninsula and further, where the Roddite tribes live, people were saying that women given their own way must bring ruin on everyone. Or perhaps it was that she saw The Cruel Whip as a last chance for a husband. Whatever she expected, what she got was a drunken, brutal man who beat her - and worse. Free she was not. And then - fortuitously, he died. Let us give her the benefit of the doubt. I know what I believe; and The Cities were well rid of him.

From being a nuisance of a girl in a minor tribe, she had become ruler of a powerful state. I think that we all of us know, even if it is only an inkling, what we could be capable of: I am sure Destra exulted. She knew her capacities. She at once set about putting right what The Cruel Whip had done wrong and making plans for prosperity, success, achievement. She planned not only for her time but for the future. And here she found her difficulty and it was one that could ruin everything. She had had no children. To whom could she entrust what she was creating? She adopted two children from among the Cruel Whip’s illegitimate progeny. There was plenty of choice: DeRod was a delightful baby: he was always a charmer: that was his quality. And my Shusha was always sweet, kind, loving, smiling at everyone. I think I fell in love with Susha when we were both not much more than infants. Destra watched the two, watched and waited. Remember that Destra had been brought up surrounded by children and infants, had learned early to judge, knew that a child shows its nature from the first breath. Shusha could never be a ruler, she did not have the iron that it takes. And DeRod - well, Destra must have watched, and waited, and hoped - he was the most attractive little child: I remember him. He did not have the sweetness of his sister, her warmth, but he did have a brilliance of good looks. One year, two years, three, four … An empty brilliance. One had only to compare him with his sister. Well then, Destra must have hoped, if not lovable and kind, then clever, quick, intelligent.

She must have seen pretty early that DeRod was - he was feebleminded. I have come out with u though it hurts even to think it. We have many words for this condition and most are unkind. He was an idiot. But there are degrees of the condition. Put him in the army as a soldier, obeying orders, it would not matter. He reminds me of a certain idiot to be seen around the streets, good-looking, and smiling, so thai you do nm at once realise he has link-intelligence.

The poor idiot often sits near a little pool fed from a crack in the dilapidating wall of the Fall. He plays with leaves and bits of rubbish. He puts a leaf on a stick, or a stick through a leaf, until he has a little army of - to him - people, and he makes speeches at them, his audience. He sounds like I )el

I am seeing again something from that long ago meeting with DeRod by the Fall. How he kept looking up to the top as we walked, and how his face went slack with relief when the woman appeared, and how he ran up to her - exactly as a child runs to its mother, for safety.

Somebody has been advising DeRod, guiding him. His town girl? Other women, when she died? His present one is his jailor. It is possible that all these years he had not been getting our messages.

Imagine that poor idiot who amuses himself in the puddle made by the leak from the Fall, in DeRod’s place. He would play with his armies, make up simple songs, and speeches beginning, ‘And now I am going to tell you …’

We have been getting information for some time now from the other peninsular cities, and very eagerly did The Twelve listen to accounts of their rulers. I would say that the word for most of them is - incompetent. We have the comparison with Destra: we know what competence is. You would easily think some of them were

idiots, so stupid are their decisions. A stupid person, or an idiot, in a place of power provided he (the only in The Cities, no one else has our laws honouring women) has an attractive personality, can compel eyes, make people smile, may easily not be seen for what he is. DeRod has always had that. There were times when you simply had to watch DeRod, the child, the boy, the youth, so winsome, up to a hundred charming tricks, charming us - and knowing that he did. But not his mother, no.

The idiot by the pool is nice-looking, and a lot of people don’t seem to see that he is simple. ‘He’s a bit eccentric, you know.’

Destra must have been frantic with despair. She would not marry again, not after her experience with her first husband. Of course not. She might have considered adopting another cleverer child. But we have all seen what a chancy thing that can turn out to be. She quietly made her plan: the Council of Twelve. She would choose children from the ruling families, which could be expected to try and oust her if she ever showed weakness. This would disarm them. She made it known from the first that these children would administer The Cities, and one of them, not necessarily her daughter, or son, would become Ruler. It was Destra who introduced the word, and the idea, of Democracy, building on what her father-in-law EnRod had done. There would be thirteen children, brought up and taught by her, in her home, and at the right time they would choose the one most suited to be Ruler. Who better than those who had known each other all their lives, to choose right? She must have thought her plan foolproof, but it was not. I look back now on those days, in Destra’s house, and at us all there. What a delightful lot of children we were. And among them two, both so pretty, Destra’s children, I remember DeRod, a bit of a show-off, but so charmingly eager to please, to be liked: yes, and even then it was easy to contrast him with his sister. Well, we did, of course. But the fact was we were always a bit dazzled by DeRod. Beauty is a terrible thing. When it is matched with a fine nature, a mind, then certainly it is something to bow before, to hold out one’s hands to, in supplication. But that beautiful empty boy, so pleased with himself, his charm was a poison. And surely Destra must have laid awake at nights, fearful for him and for us. But among us, as it were supported by us, his emptiness did not show. I remember we were hurt on his behalf if he did not do well in some lesson, or did not understand: we all rushed to help him, explain, make him one of us. I remember so well that smile of his, wondering, a little embarrassed, his always-on-the-watch eyes, trying to understand, to be as good as we were. And so it went on, that charmed childhood of ours, which was presided over by Destra, whom we loved. We did not ever see her as anything but something like our Sun, unfailingly bathing us with light and warmth. We took that effulgence for granted, never questioning, or making judgements for ourselves. In a sense, we were Destra, as we do become what we admire.

In some of the cities across the peninsula they pay allegiance to a female deity, so we hear; she goes under various names. We in The Cities have always scorned such backwardness, worshipping, as we do, The Sun, our progenitor. We know that our view of things is the true one. But were we so different, with our uncritical love for Destra?

Beauty is a terrible thing: but it is dangerous too for a person to be seen as the sum of his or her admirable qualities. What is left out, the shadow, has to be understood. But there rises a question, not without relevance here: if Destra had been too good, too noble, to get rid of The Cruel Whip, our affliction, the result would have been her continuing wretchedness and our misery as The Cities fell into ruin under him. Well, they have fallen into ruin, under his son, who is stupid. But The Cities enjoyed more than a hundred and fifty years of prosperity, high public morality and culture. Of course, a lot of people are satisfied with the crude raucous violent times we have now. because we eat well - most do - and enjoy the plunder from the Barbarian cities. And we have all our dirty work done for us, by the captured Barbarians. Good times: ‘We are having a good time,’ you often hear people say.

So, which of us would Destra have liked us to choose? Looking back now, it is easy. She was always gently, tactfully, drawing attention to one of us, citing his good qualities, but not in a way that would make us look bad in comparison. It is easy to see now: I think we spent our childhood in a state of unconditional love: we were dazzled, eyes blinded. She would have liked the one who became our water engineer. Nine. And she was right: he would have made a fine ruler. Why did she not ever say This is my choice? She did, as openly as she could. But if she had said, I want this one to succeed me, then the other families would have complained, made an alliance against her. Then they would have fought among each other to make sure their own offspring succeeded. A civil war - that is what would have happened, lint to arrange things so that all of us were chosen to choose, meant that our families would be responsible with us. I cannot now remember what was being said in my family: the truth is, memories of my family life are dim and dull compared with Destra’s home and her lessons. I am sure my family were excellent people, but they did not matter to me. Destra was my mother. She was our mother.

I wonder if she was anxious about our affection for her son, about how we always supported and helped him? It was natural to behave like that, with kindness; she had taught us kindness.

When she was ill, at the very end, and was carried in on the day that we had to choose, how she must have suffered. I do remember her face, though I see it now differently from how I have all these years. She was ill - that was all I saw. But she was also ill with anxiety. She lay there, held up on her pillows, and watched us choose, thoughtlessly, gaily, her silly son, her charming, delightful silly son - and now I see her face, that old grim face, set hard. She knew what was to come.

And now it is easy to see why we, The Twelve, never did like to call things by their proper names. We complained of DeRod, feared him, speculated Why, but we never said, ‘We, The Twelve, are responsible for everything that has happened because we chose him, and we didn’t have to.’ Any one of us would have done better than DeRod. None of us was wicked, all of us revered Destra, and would have done what we thought she would have wanted. Even I, slow and lacking in resolution, would have done better.

We let her down. It was our fault. We are responsible. The famous Twelve, so busy with our efforts on behalf of The Cities, proud of our accomplishments, we, and no one else, were the cause of The Cities’ downfall. And, very likely, of breaking Destra’s heart, before she died.

Before sealing this away I have to record one more thing, a strange thing. There have been rumours from across the mountains of strong earth shakings, that have brought down whole cities. We know that rumours always exaggerate, and so we await confirmation. And at the same time, came news that workmen, building a new section of DeRod’s wall, found the ruins of a buried city. We do not yet know how extensive these are. They are at the depth of about two ordinary pickaxe handles. The construction of the buildings is different from ours, more elaborate, and they used very small stones in different colours as pavements and floors and ceilings. This is a craft we know nothing of. We hear that DeRod is wild with excitement and has ordered all other work to cease, so as to dig out the city. All of it,’ he ordered. ‘It will be a wonder people will come to see’ Meanwhile our people have reacted with forebodings. They are remembering that among the tales from the old part of The Cities are some that speak of earth vomiting, rivers swallowing mountains and changing their courses, the sea inundating coasts. Strange to see the old tales, scorned by this sensation-loving people who want only the new and the exciting, coming back into favour, but only because they match with new anxieties. ‘Once there was a fine city here, under where we are now,’ they say. ‘And what is to stop it all happening again? Look what is going on on the other side of the mountain.’

Note to the published manuscript, by the Archaeologist

The site we are excavating is certainly not less than seven thousand years old. Over it is a layer of pumice and ash. We have not yet unearthed anything similar anywhere in the world. This is a civilisation of a type new to us. The manuscript is of inestimable value in reconstructing the ordinary life of that time. We have taken due note of the fact that under this city, which is still only part exposed, is another. In due course we shall reach that too.

This manuscript was found in a recess in a thick wall, which had been partly toppled. The script was unknown before a group of experts found that there are in some places analogies with cuneiform - enough to unlock the rest. The translation has been made for our easy reading. Words such as ‘time’ would translate as ‘that which is passing and which carries us from birth to death on the rays of the sun’. A year: ‘a cycle of changes in the colours of the vegetation, matching the sun’s movement from hot to cold’. A stupidity: ‘that which is missing from the nobler parts of the mind’.

Our usages, less picturesque, are at least speedier.

We have been labouring over this excavation for four years now. What we see, what we work with, is rock, rocks, hard grey stone, a type of granite. Rock and stones. But what is described by the author in this manuscript are gardens, trees, water, and above all the Fall of water over great blocks of stone which we at first, before the finding of the manuscript, described as a great ceremonial ascent of steps to - we expected a temple or something on those lines.

A LOVE CHILD

A young man descended from a train at Reading and his awkwardness swung the suitcase in his hand so that it nearly clipped the face of a youth who turned, putting a hand to his head to add force to a protest, but then his scowl vanished and he shouted, ‘James Reid, it’s Jimmy Reid,’ and the two were shaking hands and clapping each other about the shoulders in a cloud of steam from the shrieking engine.

Two years ago they had been schoolboys together. Since then James had been taking a course in office management and accountancy, greeting news that Donald was ‘doing politics’ with ‘Fair enough, they’ve got money’. For Donald had always been able to take advantage of treats and trips and opportunities, whereas, he, James, was kept watching pennies.

‘I’m afraid we have to watch the pennies,’ was what he heard at home, far too often, and, he now believed, often unnecessarily.

Donald had shone in debates and the dramatic society, and started a magazine called New Socialist Thought. James had had no idea what he wanted to do, provided it wasn’t sitting from nine to five at a desk. His mother had said, ‘Just get the certificates, dear, they’ll come in useful.’ His father said, ‘Don’t waste time at university, you’ll learn more in the school of life.’ But they couldn’t have afforded university.

Now Donald said, ‘Where are you off to?’

‘I’m off home.’

‘You do look glum. What’s up?’

With Donald, this affable person whose round and smiling face invited frankness, with the guarantee of understanding, it was easy to say what he could not remember even hinting to anyone else, ‘Isn’t that reason enough?’

Donald laughed out loud, and at once said, ‘Then, come along with me. I’m off to the Young Socialist Summer School.’

‘But I’m expected at home.’

‘Ring them. Come on.’ And he was already on his way to the tea-room where there would be a phone.

James remembered that Donald always assumed everything was easy, and so for him it was. To ring home and say, I’ll not be home this weekend, was for himself a big deal, something to think about, plan, steel himself for, consider the ifs and buts, but here he was at the telephone, while a waitress smiled at the two youths, Donald grinning encouragement. He said to his mother, ‘Will it be all right if you don’t see me till Monday evening?’

‘Yes, of course, dear.’

He knew she thought he should get about more, make friends, but it had needed Donald. The two got on a train returning to where James had just come from, but now, instead of the dismal-ness of, Oh God, another day pen-pushing, they were off on an adventure.

So began the wondrous summer of I938 that changed everything for James. That weekend summer school for which Donald wangled his attendance - it was booked out, but James knew the organisers - was about the war in Spain, but as far as James was concerned it could have been about the conditions of tin-miners in South America (a later lecture). He was dazzled by this largesse of new ideas, faces, friends. He slept in a dormitory of a college that catered for summer courses and schools, and ate in the dining-room, with young men and women from all over the country, in a cheerful argumentative atmosphere that accommodated every conceivable shade of left-wing opinion. Defining one’s exact nuance on everything from Spain to vegetarianism was an essential duty to oneself. The weekend after it was the pacifists, where Donald was speaking to provide opposition. For Donald was a communist. ‘But I’m not a joiner, I’m with them in spirit.’ He felt it his responsibility to combat wrong-thinking everywhere. I us duty was politics, but his pleasure was literature, particularly poetry, so James found himself at a weekend of ‘Poetry as a Weapon in the Struggle’, and another of ‘Modern Poetry’, then ‘The Romantic Poets as Precursors of Revolution!’ He heard Stephen Spender speak in London and recite his own poetry in Cheltenham. And so the summer went on, ‘The Communist Party for Freedom! “American Literature’, which meant Dos Passos, Steinbeck, Lillian H oilman, meant Waiting for Liffy, and Studs Lonigan. ‘Whither the British Empire?’ ‘India’s Right to Self-Government’. And it was not just weekends. After his day at the business college he would join Donald somewhere for an evening’s lecture or debate, or study group. He was going home to pick up clean clothes, have a bath and tell his mother where he had been. She listened all interest, and there was no end to her questions. A year ago he would have been irritated and evaded her, hut he was beginning to understand the indigence of her emotional life and was learning patience. His father listened -James had to suppose - but did not comment more than a grunt or a snort at what he disagreed with.

James seemed to be meeting only vivid personalities who made him feel lack-lustre and timid, and the girls were unlike any he had known, talkative, free with their often alarming opinions, and with their kisses too: he was at first surprised they did not mind his approaches to them and even teased him for his hesitations. Easy with kisses, but parsimonious with everything else: this reassured him for he certainly did not believe in Free Love, the subject of one of the debates. He was not only living in a dream of companionship and quick friendships, but above all he was seeing himself in ways that surprised, shocked or shamed him. Chance remarks, overheard, a sentence or two from a lecture on ‘The Fascist Threat to Europe’ or ‘The Working Conditions of Miners’ left him with ears throbbing with what he had heard: for they seemed sensitised to hear words that might have been designed for him personally.

At a pacifist weekend he had his childhood put into perspective as neatly as in a cartoon: ‘The soldiers from the Great War, they either can’t stop talking about it, they’re obsessed …’ ‘Like my Dad’ came from the floor, ‘… or they won’t talk about it at all’ - ‘Like my father,’ contributed another.

James’s father, a survivor of the Trenches, wounded at the Somme, was one who never opened his mouth. Not about the war, and not much about anything. A large man, a rock, with shoulders and hands surely too powerful for what he did - he was in the office of an engineering firm - he could sit silent from the beginning of a meal to its end. Most evenings he went to the pub, to meet his mates, and James had often seen them, all old soldiers, sitting in a group around the fire, not saying much. James had grown up with silence. His mother could not talk if his father didn’t, but once, going home for a weekend for the sake of good feeling, he saw her at a social that followed the summer fęte, animated, flushed, a glass of sherry being generously replenished by Mr Butler, the local vet, and … was she flirting? Actually flirting with him? Surely not; it was just that James had not really noticed her as a woman that could talk ten to the dozen and laugh. ‘I’m a bit tipsy,’ she remarked, walking home, her flush of social animation already gone.

He did remember through his childhood sometimes being secretly ashamed of his mother’s animation at public occasions, so unlike was she to herself at home. But now he thought, My God. being married to my father, to be married to a man who never speaks unless you put a question direct, and not even then! And she’s not like him, she’s good fun, she’s … but this was his mother, and an impulse of violent pity suppressed thoughts that were unbecoming about one’s mother. What she must have suffered all these years: for that matter, what had he suffered, the silent child of a man who had known such horrors in the Trenches that he could be himself only with other soldiers from that old war.

This uncomfortable view of himself and his family was only a beginning. He learned at ‘The English Class Structure’ that Donald was middle class and he lower middle class. What had he been doing at the same school as Donald, then? He had got a scholarship, that was it, though he hadn’t thought about it much before. His mother had wangled the scholarship, writing letters and then pulling strings, wearing her best dress. He knew now his mother had good taste, in simple dark dresses and her little string of real pearls, where other women were in loud florals and too much jewellery. She had impressed - well, who? - with the urgency of her son going to a good school. His mother was a cut above his father, so he could see now. He had been in a daze and a dream about all this sort of thing until Donald had woken him up.

He went home with Donald for a weekend and found a large house crammed with family and friends. Two brothers, older; two sisters, younger; a noisy fun -loving lot. The mother and the father argued - in his home it would be called quarrelling - about everything. The father was a member of the Labour Parry, the mother a pacifist, the children called themselves communists. Long loud abundant meals; James thought of the frugal decent meals his mother cooked, with the Sunday joint as high point of the week; but it was a small joint, for it wasn’t right to waste money. In Donald’s home a large ham stood always ready on the sideboard, with a fruit cake, and bread, and a slab of cheese and a pile of yellow butter. They played games in the evenings. The two girls had boyfriends and were teased, not very nicely, thought James, but his ideas were changing and he wondered if it was right to be shocked. Surely he was shocked too often?

‘Good to have you home, son,’ said his father, on the weekend when James attended the Sunday joint (two potatoes each and a spoon of peas), and this so surprised both son and mother they exchanged glances. What could have got into the old man? (His father was not yet fifty.)

‘And so you’re getting into politics, are you?’

‘Well, I’m listening, mostly.’

The big man, with his large red face, moustache cut close (trimmed every day), short grey hair neatly parted (cut weekly by his wife), his big blue eyes that were usually abstracted, as if concentrated on keeping his thoughts in their place, now focused fully on his son, and he was certainly taking him in, judging.

‘Politics is a mug’s game. You’ll find that out for yourself.’ And he returned to the business of loading his fork with beef.

‘James is only finding things out for himself, dear,’ said Mrs Reid, as always conciliatory, surely too much so, as much as would justify a secret fear her husband would one of these days explode and demolish her and everything in their life.

‘That’s what I said, wasn’t it?’ said Mr Reid, presenting an angry face to her, and then to James, chin forward: he might have been expecting a punch on it, ‘Crooks and thieves and liars.’

This was a tierce choking cry, in a voice the son did not remember ever hearing. Had his mother? He saw her lower her eyes, play with a bit of bread on the tablecloth, then knead it with her knuckles.

James thought: this has been going on all my childhood, and I never noticed. And now it was the pain he felt for both of them that took him out of the house, as much as his fascination with this brave new world of politics and literature.

Donald was lending him books which he was reading as if literature were food and he was starving. The books were in a pile on the hall table. He would take one up to his room to read, then return it to its place and choose another. He saw his mother stand by the books, then open one. Spender,

“‘I think continually of those who were truly great”,’ he said, sharing with her something of the richness he had discovered; and he thought that this was the first time he had let her in to his private self. She nodded, smiling. ‘I like that,’ she said. There were books in a bookshelf, but he did not remember her reading them. They were mostly war books, and that was the reason he had not touched them. They were his father’s and shared with him the aura of Don’t Touch.

Now his mother said, ‘I saw a host of golden daffodils, fluttering and dancing in the breeze.” I learned that at school.’

He said, lowering his voice - his father was in the room next door -‘“It seemed that out of battle I escaped”. And she looked over her shoulder, and said, in a whisper, ‘No, don’t, don’t, he wouldn’t …’ And she walked quickly away.

When his father had gone to the pub and his mother was upstairs, James knelt by the bookcase and pulled out the books one by one. All Quiet on the Western Front. And Quiet Flows the Don. The Battle of the Somme. Passcliendale. Goodbye to All That. An Old Soldier Remembers. If They Should Die … They Should Ask Us …Three shelves full.

In spring I939 James was called up, with the young men in the age group 20 to 2I. His father said, ‘That’s right, that’s what young men are for,’ And he got to his feet with emphasis and went to the pub.

Donald had been called up, and when James went to visit he found that boisterous house clamorous with argument, even more than usual. The two older brothers assumed they would be next. The girls were in tears because their boyfriends were in the same age group as Donald and James.

‘There can’t possibly be a war, it would be too terrible,’ said the pacifist mother, and one daughter. ‘We have to stop Hitler,’ said the father and sons and the other daughter. These were the points of view to be heard on the wireless, in the newspapers, exchanged everywhere. ‘With the weapons there are now, no one could be stupid enough to go to war.’

The two young men actually about to be shovelled into the army, smiled a lot and went off together to a debate in the nearby town: ‘Is It too Late for Peace?’ Donald spoke passionately from the floor that Hitler must be stopped now, otherwise we would all be slaves. A woman in the audience stood up to say that her fiancé and two brothers had been killed in the last war, and if the young ones present knew what war was like they would be pacifists like her. A man of her age, that is to say one presumably schooled in war, asked her sarcastically if she believed her fiance and brothers would have liked the idea of living like slaves under Hitler, and she shouted at him, ‘Yes, yes. Better alive than dead.’ An old woman said that it was time they remembered the white feathers that were handed out to cowards in the last war: that was how she felt. The arguments grew so loud and bitter the platform bad to call for order, and then ask the ushers to escort out a youth who said the white-feather woman should be shot, she was disgusting.

His father told James, ‘They’re going to lick you into shape. That’s what they call it. They’ll make a man of you. You get yourself made an officer. You’ll have it easier that way. You’ll be officer material, with your education.’

James and Donald went together to the call-up centre in Reading. James had run and played cricket and football for the school, and expected to be told that he was a hundred per cent fit. He was, with the proviso that he must watch out for an old football injury, a torn ligament in his knee, which now could be seen as a thin white scar. Donald was told he was overweight, but the army would cure him of that. All day they were in a large hall, in a mill of sweaty, smelly young men, many from homes that had no bathroom. All the same age: Donald joked that they had reached the age for the slaughterhouse, like lambs or calves. He sounded cheerful about it. The same age, but far from the same shape. Many were thin, and most were short: Donald and James were taller, and their bones were well-covered. Their assiduous attention to the facts of British life had taught them that the working classes subsisted on bread and margarine sprinkled with sugar, and bread and dripping, with cups of very strong tea, full of sugar. ‘Sugar is food.’ Here were the results, these pallid, undersized men. Some were being discarded because they had rickets, many sent to the dentist because of rotting teeth.

Plans were made for another visit to Donald’s, but the summons came first. The war was boiling up while people still talked pacifism, it heated debates and the contents of the News, it seethed in people’s veins and in their minds, and it ejected James and Donald out from ordinary life into camp.

James spread his uniform on his bed, and fitted bits of it to himself. His room, usually a quiet, unassertive place, was littered with martial reminders in khaki.

James was a tall, slim young man, quick and alert, everything about him fine and nervy. He had a thin nose, a long curved beautiful mouth, too often made narrow with the tension of determination. His eyes were long, a luminous blue, and his hair was a pale shining brown. His brows were delicate, glistening. He had about him the sleekness of a healthy animal. But when he at last had got the uniform on himself, he was made dull and awkward. He looked at himself in the long mirror on the landing and thought that the girl at the Socialists for Justice Summer School who had said, but you’re lovely, you’re like a film star,’ would not say that to him now. He went downstairs, saw his mother sitting under the lamp, with a magazine, the radio jiggling dance music. She glanced up, and her hand flew to her mouth and she said in a gasp, ‘Oh, no.’ Then she stood up, all apology, and said, ‘Darling, you look very nice, it was the shock, that’s all.’ And she tried to embrace this soldier, but the thickness of the cloth he was inside absorbed the embrace, negated it.

His neck was already being chafed and his boots were too large. They were blocks on his feet. She said she would try to soften them, and she warmed them in the steam from the kettle, and rubbed fat into them, while he stood in his socks, his long feet curled towards each other like creatures trying to escape their fate. She warmed and rubbed for an hour or more, and he tried the boots on and said they were better. His feet were narrow, that was the trouble.

Next day he put the uniform on ‘for the duration’, joking with the new phrase that made people who used it feel full of fortitude and modest courage,

‘But perhaps there won’t be a war,’ said his mother.

‘Yes, perhaps it’ll all come to nothing.’

His father said goodbye, barking at him that he mustn’t believe them if they said it would be over by Christmas. ‘They’re full of their own nonsense.’ Meaning? The War Office? The Government? His eyes were mad with the anguish of the old war.

‘Bye, Dad,’ said James, gently, and went to the gate and turned to see the parents standing together, his mother’s arm through the old soldier’s, patting it. Like a postcard, he thought, defiantly refusing pathos. ‘Off to War.’ He was thinking, as he had done pretty often during the last year of ferment and discovery that it would have been better if his dad had been killed in the Trenches. Well, wouldn’t it? What a misery his life had been … wouldn’t he himself say so? But at least his mother had got a husband, which was more than could be said for many women. No one can imagine themselves not born. With his father dead in the last war, then James would not be marching along the pavement in his painful hoots. His derisive mind was commenting, Cannon fodder for the next war. Funny how many phrases out of stock he had used all his life, but never thought about them.

He met Donald at the train and they travelled together in a carriage full of young men in new uniforms, and then in two buses, soldiers with civilians, whose faces told them they were now in a category apart. Feared? Disliked? Pitied’ Wary faces, and some eyes reminded James of his father’s. Twenty years: some of these people had been through the last war. Then they were at the gates of a camp where a couple of corporals stood, to wave them on. The youngsters walked in ones and twos, straggling along to a large hut, where they gave their names, and new numbers, and were directed again through lines of Nissen huts, set out as regularly as the squares on a chess board. At a junction in lanes between huts, Donald had to go in one direction and he in another. This was a blow to James, but he knew not so much to Donald, who went off with a bunch of young men he had never seen before as if they were all old friends. It seemed that the alphabet was dividing them, ‘An R and an E - never the twain shall meet,’ James tried to jest. He went alone to a hut that would hold twenty men. Ten beds on one side and ten on the other, with a kind of cubicle or cubby-hole for the supervising corporal. Like school. The young men were moving about, standing about, constantly looking around, like animals in a new place who do not yet know from what quarter danger will come. Corporal Jones was giving them time to settle in, with only mild instructions about kit and the proper maintenance of their bunks, when a sergeant arrived and behaved exactly as expected, shouting directions at them which might just as well have been given in an ordinary voice. Then supper, in a big shed: too large to be called a hut. The first shift, a couple of hundred young men, the food not to their liking, or too much of it for anxious stomachs: a lot was left on the plates, and a sergeant, standing with his hands on his hips, yelled at them that he would personally see to it that soon they would be so hungry they’d not be leaving anything on their plates.

In the hut twenty young men tried to combat the dismay of unfamiliarity, their equipment and clothes all over the place, while the corporal threatened them with the imminent appearance of the sergeant.

The youths were complaining they were not used to sleeping so early, when the sergeant arrived to say he would overlook their crimes tonight, but from now on if he saw such a scene as this they’d all be for the high jump. That was his first message to them: the second was that they were not so much as to think about asking for sleeping pills if they slept badly, because it would be his happy duty to see to it that they would be so tired from this day on they would sleep as their heads hit their pillows.

All this was as expected, for most of these young men had fathers or relatives from the last war, who had instructed them in the ways of the army. ‘Their bark is worse than their bite,’ most of them had heard.

Now the corporal retired to his kennel and the men talked in low voices, grumbling about the hard bunks and pillows, and James knew that, never mind about the school of life, the school of school was turning out to be a blessing. One youth, Private Jenkins, said that anything would be a picnic after boarding school: in this way James located the other person in his hut who might turn out to he officer material. They took each other’s measure in some facetious remarks, and the silence that followed told James that this scene might be put into a lecture on Class Structure. Most of these young men could never have dreamed of the amenities of boarding school. ‘Nice work if you can get it,’ summed up the youth, Paul Bryant, in the bunk next to James, but without hostility. It turned out that James and Private Jenkins had little to say to each other: whereas this Paul, whose father delivered coal to the cell are of Sheffield, became his friend.

Next day the men from this hut and four others, one hundred of them, met in a building that had been a village hall and took lessons in equipment and how to look after it. From the windows they saw the spreading camp, whose severity of regularity nevertheless gave an impression of the improvised, the impermanent. It was raining so hard in gleaming rods that water was jumping up white and frothy to knee height: the knees of a platoon marching through it on their way to somewhere. All that day instruction went on, and when James confessed his boots hurt, hardening himself for blows of contempt from the sergeant’s tongue, he was ready to hear that he had better get the right fucking boots this time because he wasn’t going to hear any fucking excuses about sore feet tomorrow, when drilling would begin.

The equipment corporal took trouble over him, lifting down from shelves boots and more boots, saying, ‘You’d better get your feet right, because if feet are not right then nothing is.’ James’s feet were difficult, all the boots were too wide. He was going to have to wear two pairs of socks. He felt like a penguin he had watched walking with its feet apart along the edge of a pool, as if its crotch were sore, as his was. Everywhere the thick uniform rubbed and chafed.

Then the drilling began, two platoons from this hut, and the young men were made one because of the intensity of their exhaustion, their anger against the sergeant; and James’s discomfort in his uniform and his unhappy feet became absorbed into a general torment. But, deeper than that, he was sustained by a pride that he was sticking it out. As were they all.

Ten weeks. He drilled with his platoon, then with the company. He ran at straw sacks representing human beings with his bayonet, and came to know his equipment so well his rifle was - as the sergeant told them it would be - his best friend. All this, while a quietly derisive private commentary ran in his head, which he could not share, because it was in the language of his education, and he could not match the half-inarticulate communications of his fellow soldiers, all obscenities and the ritualised angers of the common soldier.

Twice he offended, once by not cleaning his hoots properly, and once by not standing quickly enough to attention, which crimes he expiated by peeling potatoes for a day, and doing guard duty at night.

Towards the end of this endurance test his knee played up, and it was strapped tight, like a mummy’s. A bloody ligament was not going to get in the way of Sergeant Baxter’s intention to turn him into a soldier. And so they emerged, a camp full of young men, several hundreds of them, licked into shape, made men of, made one, and they were informed they were off to another camp, west, while their training camp accepted another batch of recruits whom James’s lot looked on with compassion and ritualised jeering for form’s sake. ‘They don’t know what they’re in for, poor sods,’ etc, while they were marched off to buses and trains.

Before that there was a weekend leave at home, which James hated. He knew his father did, and suspected his mother did too. He tried to imagine what it could be like, seeing your precious young that you’ve fussed over for twenty odd years sent off to war as cannon fodder; but like many thoughts about his mother, he could not persist with them. They did not fall into the category of the mockeries that accompanied his days and nights at the way things were managed, the jeers at Authority - the soldier’s necessary offset to obedience. His mother’s life - oh, no, he didn’t want to think about it. He saw her on those evenings at home, sitting under the lamp, the radio jiggling or crooning away at her elbow, knitting a sweater. For him, he wouldn’t be surprised. Her eyes were lowered to her work: she didn’t knit automatically, as some women do, their hands apparently able to read patterns by themselves while their owners chat or even read. Or perhaps his mother kept her eyes hidden so people couldn’t see what she was thinking. What thoughts? And she looked defenceless, sitting there alone, her husband in the pub with his war pals, waiting up for him. It made James angry, but angry with what? This was not like being angry at the army or the sergeant. For twenty years his mother had sat there under the lamp alone, then his father would come in, smelling of beer, go and wash his face and brush his teeth, because she hated the smell, and the two went off to bed. Being angry with his father was hardly the point. But he could have taken a bayonet and stuck it into someone - who? Gone shouting about the streets, No, no, no, no.

Instead he kissed his mother goodbye, gave his father’s obdurate shoulder a friendly and filial clout, and went off to the West Country.

There, several hundred young men exercised and drilled, but not as obsessively as in the first camp. It was boring. In between the drills and exercises he lay on his bed and read poetry, and so did Paul Bryant. He had become for Paul what Donald had been for him. This man, who had left school at fourteen, took to poetry as James had done. He had more difficulty, though: long words were a problem. But James relived his own final intoxications with words when he saw Paul Bryant’s eyes shine, thanking him for the loan of a volume.

‘I like this one,’ he would say. ‘I do like this one …’What the coalman’s son who had scarcely been out of a town liked was poems about the country.

Loveliest of trees, the cherry now Is hung with bloom along the bough or went out to the hazel wood Because afire was in nty head …p>

‘Have you got any more like that?’ he would ask, shy, but determined, in a way that reminded James of his younger self, of a couple of years back.

They and a few others were luckier than the majority, who were bored, bored. There was nothing to amuse them. Not enough girls, and beer ran out in the pubs, when there were evening passes. Bored and frustrated young men, hundreds of them, but then began the war, which at first dawdled and delayed, but at last there was the first invasion of France, and off they went, to end on the beaches of Dunkirk. James missed it all. His knee had swelled up and he was in hospital, having it drained.

Of his platoon five were killed and two wounded. His platoon was merged with another, similarly diminished. His unit - his family - gone. And Haul, his friend, was in hospital with a head wound. James heard that Donald was wounded while in a boat coming back from Dunkirk. He got weekend leave to visit Donald, whose head was bandaged, and so was his arm. He looked pretty bad, but before James had even entered the ward the nurses told him that Donald was the life and soul of the place. ‘He keeps us all cheerful’ People came in to Donald’s room to joke, to have a laugh, and a youth was there when James arrived, and was there when he took his leave, sitting on a visitor’s chair watching Donald, bemused with admiration. James thought: that was me. Donald needs his acolyte, he needs someone to educate, well, fair enough.

He stayed as long as visiting hours permitted, watching his younger self, and admiring Donald, to whom he owed everything - so he reflected, while admitting that probably Donald never thought of him at all. But as James left, Donald did give him books and pamphlets.

The Battle of Britain began, Churchill made his stirring speeches, but things were not much improved in the camps of the West Country: the fighting was going on in the skies further over towards Europe. James could have gone into the airforce. Why hadn’t he? It was because his father had been a soldier, and it hadn’t occurred to him. If it had, he would probably be dead by now, or would be soon. Those fliers in the RAF were his age. By now he would have bought it over the sea, and been lost in the drink; he might have pranged over land and burned in a pyre of flesh and Spitfire. The RAF slang was now pervading language: a form of homage to dead heroes.

Because his father had been a soldier, he had become one. Because his father had not been an officer, he had refused to go to Andover to take the War Office Selection Board examination to find out if he was officer material. He had not wanted to leave his platoon, his mates, particularly Paul. It occurred to him that he must have been lonely, to feel that if he left his platoon he would be leaving his family.

James’s company, much changed from since before Dunkirk, heard a rumour they were to be sent off out of Britain into action, and home leave was announced and then cancelled. Instead of North Africa - not that they knew then North Africa was where the fighting was to be - they were despatched to a camp in Northumberland. The trouble was, too many men had been called up. Not knowing how the war was going to shape ‘They’ had overdone it. Hundreds of thousands of young men were in camps ready for action. The sergeants and corporals shouted that they didn’t know their luck: they could have been sent down coal mines. Would they have liked that better, perhaps? Had they fancied a career at the coalface? Well, then, count your blessings. Boredom. They were so bored that some believed they were ill. Boredom in some undefined and undiagnosed way undermines, slows minds, and skews thinking. Rumours, even the most stupid, flourish like newly evolved viruses.

Concert parties came to cheer them up. Vera Lynn’s voice solaced them from the radios in every hut. An Education Officer organised all kinds of useful lectures and everybody went because it was something to do. Again, there wasn’t much for them in the local town, when they were issued passes. In the half-a-dozen pubs, the beer was always running out. The cafes offered dubious sausages and scrambled eggs made out of dried egg from America. Some food was better, because of vegetables and fruit from the local towns: the countryside was close here. Paul would have liked that, but he had been posted to another company. Meat and eggs went to London, where rich people danced and ate in restaurants in which rationing was unknown. So they all believed. There were few girls. James’s first sexual experience was standing up with a landgirl against a wall in an alley. He hated it, the girl and himself, but this nasty little event made him dream more than ever of the real girl, his girl, who was waiting for him. He silenced his ever-ready mocking voice when it threatened his dreams of tenderness, and of a love that could not be anything like his parents’. Nor like the noisy combative marriage of Donald’s parents. No, like every soldier in that great camp of hungry young men, his girl was going to be different.

James had sometimes drunk a beer with his father or a sherry with his mother, but now he tried to drink to get drunk, and hated that too. ‘Not everyone is cut out to be a soldier, ‘jeered his inner interlocutor, while he observed his mates drinking themselves sodden, and taking anything they could get from the too few girls.

There was a pleasant interruption in the boredom. From the camp, soldiers who volunteered went to the local farms to help with farm work at harvest time. James always volunteered and wondered if his destiny was to be a farmer. He actually managed a few hours’ lovemaking with a farmer’s daughter who was sighing with remorse all the time because her fiance was in North Africa, fighting. ‘I love him, I do!’ The harvest ended. Germany invaded Russia and Japan attacked the States. Things were looking up, so the pundits said, though one could be excused for thinking they were at their worst.

‘You’re being saved for the best,’ jested the sergeants, more matey now, perhaps because they were as bored as their charges. James spent any spare hour on his bed reading. He read the books Donald had given him, the usual mix of poetry and real literature with pamphlets. ‘The Second Front - No “Let India Go” - through these he merely leafed, feeling guilty, his mind freezing with boredom, but listening to Walten our two souls have left this mortal clay, And seeking mine, you think that mine is lost - Look for me first in that Elysiatt glade …

Beautiful, bleak Northumberland: perhaps this would be their final resting place, perhaps they would die here forgotten by humanity and the War Office. Why should they ever leave it, if they hadn’t yet? Such are the slowed mad thoughts of people who have had to be patient too long.

And then, for no apparent reason, it was over. They all believed they were oft” to yet another camp, because of the law that what is seems as if it must always be. Their regiment had been forgotten. ‘Someone had blundered,’ is the soldier’s perennial thought.

But no, they were going to India. Not that they were told it was India: careless talk costs lives, but they could figure it out. The Japs were coming closer to India, and the Indian army was set to fight them. Anything, anywhere, just get us out of this place, waiting, drilling for hours every day to keep fit.

James put his things in his kitbag, with his precious books of poetry. He knew that if he hadn’t had poetry and books during the last months - no, years, now - he would have found himself in the bin. And he had Donald to thank for it, thank for everything. That summer, just before the war, it shone there in his memory, as strong a dream as his dreams for a future of love and peace, peace and love. He thought, ‘After the war, it will be like that.’ Meaning, like the happy months of summer schools, friendly debates, a bitter argument, the frank and fair exchange, all hope and excitement and promise. What was this war for, if not to create that, a world of generous friendship and comradeship and generous girls, among whom would be his girl, the one girl.

He went to say goodbye to his parents. His father asked if he had had the chance of being an officer, and he replied yes, but he hadn’t wanted it. ‘Then more fool, you,’ said his father. His mother, weeping, told him to take care of himself.

The great ship in its camouflage dress, designed to make it look from a distance like a blur or a cloud or perhaps a school of flying fishes, at any rate something ephemeral, now seemed solid, sinister, even furtive, standing there in the dock, and those who had known it as a luxury ship of the famous Union-Castle Line, in peacetime always decked in bright holiday colours, would not now have owned it. ‘That the Bristol Castle*.’

Five thousand soldiers, with their attendant officers crammed the dockside and backed up into the surrounding streets, waiting to board. Of these it is safe to say the majority had scarcely seen the sea, except perhaps for a day’s outing (the Thirties did not run much to holidays for the poor) nor had they seen ships and shipping. Luxury ships had not occupied their imaginations as even remote possibilities for themselves, seen only on newsreels or as headlines in newspapers. ‘The Queen Mary arrived in New York this morning, bauds playing to welcome the Duke of…’ a film star … an opera singer … a boxer.

Five thousand soldiers and their officers would fit into a space designed for 780 passengers and crew, and they were embarking on a seven-thousand-mile journey to Cape Town and then on, thousands of miles, to - where else? - India.

The Bristol Castle had no name now just as their destinations had none.

She stood in her tiers, or decks, a neat symbol of the society they were defending, the two top layers, the best, where their officers would go, with the ship’s officers, then down, down, down, deck after deck, until a mass of soldiers would fill the worst parts of the ship. Just like the world, if it comes to that - to be tedious.

Up the gangways they stepped, while their sergeants and corporals stood above, watching, barking directions, which they had been given by the ship’s officers, for they knew as little about the geography of a ship as their charges.

James Reid was at the tail end of the embarking, with his platoon, their corporal beside them, as dismayed as they were. Corporal ‘Nobby’ Clark (soldiers called Clark are always Nobby), eyes on the watch for error, a fleshy man often in a perspiration with anxiety, was one of those who find organisation difficult, and have to overdo it. His men put up with him: they had had plenty of time for patience in those months and months of waiting. Beside James was Rupert Fitch, a farmer’s son from Kent. He was a lean flat-bodied young man, a horseman, with bold fine features, lightly freckled, and pale hair already receding from a high forehead. James, still dreaming sometimes of perhaps finding himself (how?) a farmer, felt towards Rupert something of the wistful admiration that Paul Bryant had felt for himself, and he, long ago (three years), for Donald. Rupert Fitch never had to be told the why or how of anything: it was as if the army was an extension of his young life planting and reaping. ‘Permission to speak, Corporal,’ he would say to a corporal or a sergeant as an equal, familiar - at ease. ‘Wouldn’t it be better, Sergeant, if we …’ took that direction, instead of the one ordered; suggested to Supplies that such and such a dubbin - for boots - would be better than what they had. Certainly officer material, but like James, he had refused. ‘Not my style,’ he had said. On the farm he had mucked in with the men, and that was what he liked.

A tall stooping dark youth, with hot defensive eyes and a way of clenching his fists like a boxer expecting attack, was Harold Murray, who worked in his father’s shop, selling men’s cut-price clothes. Johnnie Payne sold vegetables with his father from a stall in Bermondsey. He had been taking lessons from James in bookkeeping, which would come in useful after the war. These five men knew each other well, but the other five of B Platoon were new, moved in some reshuffle ordained from above that the soldiers could see no reason for.

Corporal Clark at last shouted the order to march, to his platoon, and on to the ship they went, low down, E Deck, just above the water line. Then down a ladder, and they were in their quarters, a space that had a table wedged between bulkheads, and a cupboard with china, and another where their hammocks were. The space not filled with the table accommodated the ten of them standing up with a few inches between them, as it would when they would be lying down horizontal in their hammocks. Their gear piled up against a wall seemed to take half of what room there was. ‘Up on deck’ came the order, and B Platoon, with hundreds, thousands of men, watched England slide away, white cliffs and all, while the gulls squawked around the ship. Waves were already sending up spray. The light was going. An obscured sunset stained a brownish sky red. On E Deck a minute flicker of light showed the steps going down. And down they went again, into stuffy darkness smelling of paint and new wood. Dark. In peacetime this ship blazed light as it moved, gilding and silvering the sea. Once these ships had taken a month for a voyage, but the time shortened to three weeks, and then the aim of two weeks was in sight - but why not dawdle, take your time, in a ship designed for pleasure? Now no light was supposed to show, the ship was blacked out, like the homes in England, like England, and down in their quarters B Platoon took in the fact that there was a single dull yellow bulb.