On the Black Hill

  ‘Stay there!’ she called and rushed to the rescue, only to miss her footing and almost fall into the scummy brown flood-water. Pale and dishevelled, she ran to the twins and hugged them.

  ‘Never mind, Mama,’ they said. ‘We never liked The Dump.’

  Nor, in the following autumn, did they like their new baby sister, Rebecca.

  They had pestered their mother to give them a baby sister; and when, at last, she arrived, they climbed up to the bedroom, each carrying a coppery chrysanthemum in an egg-cup full of water. They saw an angry pink creature biting Mary’s breast. They dropped their offerings on the floor, and dashed downstairs.

  ‘Send her away,’ they sobbed. For a whole month, they lapsed into their private language and it took them a year to tolerate her presence. One day, when Mrs Griffiths Cwm Cringlyn came to call, she found them writhing convulsively on the kitchen floor.

  ‘What’s up with the twins?’ she asked in alarm.

  ‘Take absolutely no notice,’ said Mary. ‘They’re playing at having babies.’

  By the age of five, they were helping with the housework, to knead the bread dough, shape the butter-pats, and spread the sugar icing on a sponge cake. Before bedtime, Mary would reward them with a story from the Brothers Grimm or Hans Christian Andersen: their favourite was the story of the mermaid who went to live in the Mer-King’s palace at the bottom of the sea.

  By six, they were reading on their own.

  Amos Jones mistrusted book-learning and would growl at Mary not to ‘mollycoddle the kids’.

  He gave them bird-scarers and left them alone in the oatfield to shoo away the woodpigeons. He made them mix the chicken-mash, and pluck and dress the birds for market. Fine weather or foul, he would sit them on his pony, one in front and one behind, and ride around the hill-flock. In autumn, they watched the ewes being tupped: five months later, they witnessed the birth of the lambs.

  They had always recognized their affinity with twin lambs. Like lambs, too, they played the ‘I’m the King of the Castle’ game; and one breezy morning, as Mary was pegging up her laundry, they slipped under her apron, butted their heads against her thighs, and made noises as if suckling an udder.

  ‘None of that, you two,’ she laughed, and pushed them away. ‘Go and find your grandfather!’

  9

  OLD SAM HAD come to live at The Vision, and slipped into second childhood.

  He wore a moleskin waistcoat, a floppy black cap, and went around everywhere with a buckthorn stick. He slept in a cobwebby attic no bigger than a cupboard, surrounded by the few possessions he had bothered to keep: the fiddle, a pipe, a tobacco-box and a porcelain statuette picked up somewhere on his travels – of a portly gentleman with a portmanteau and an inscription round the base reading, ‘I shall start on a long journey.’

  His principal occupation was to look after Amos’s pigs. Pigs, he said, ‘was more intelligent than persons’; and certainly all his six sows adored him, snorted when he rattled their swill-pail and answered, each one, to their names.

  His favourite was a Large Black called Hannah; and while Hannah rootled for grubs under the apple-trees, he would scratch behind her ears and recall the more agreeable moments of his marriage.

  Hannah, however, was hopeless as a mother. She crushed her first litter to death. The second time, having swelled to a colossal size, she produced a solitary male piglet, whom the twins called Hoggage and adopted as their own.

  One day, when Hoggage was three months old, they decided it was time to baptize him.

  ‘I’ll be vicar,’ said Lewis.

  ‘I bags be vicar,’ said Benjamin.

  ‘All right! Be the vicar, then!’

  It was a boiling hot day in June. The dogs lay panting in the shade of the barn. Flies were zooming and zizzing. Black cows were grazing below the farmhouse. The hawthorns were in flower. The whole field was black and white and green.

  The twins stole out of the kitchen with an apron to wear as a surplice and a stripy towel for the christening robe. After a mad chase round the orchard, they cornered Hoggage by the hen-house and carried him squealing to the dingle. Lewis held him, while Benjamin wetted his finger and planted a cross above his snout.

  But though they dosed Hoggage with worm-powders, though they stuffed him with stolen cake, and though Hoggage made up for his smallness with an amenable personality – to the extent of letting the twins take rides on his back – Hoggage remained a runt; and Amos had no use for runts. One morning in November, Sam went to the meal-shed for barley and found his son sharpening the blade of a meat-cleaver. He tried to protest, but Amos scowled and ground his whetstone even harder.

  ‘No sense to keep a runt,’ he said.

  ‘But not Hoggage?’ Sam stammered.

  ‘I said, no sense to keep a runt.’

  To get them out of earshot, the old man took his grandsons mushrooming on the hill. When they came home at dusk, Benjamin saw the pool of blood beside the meal-shed door and, through a chink, saw Hoggage’s carcass hanging from a hook.

  Both boys held back their tears until bedtime; and then they soaked their pillow through.

  Later, Mary came to believe they never forgave their father for the murder. They acted dumb if he taught them some job on the farm. They cringed when he tried to pet them; and when he petted their sister Rebecca, they hated him even more. They planned to run away. They spoke in low, conspiratorial whispers behind his back. Finally, even Mary lost patience and pleaded, ‘Please be nice to Papa.’ But their eyes spat venom and they said, ‘He killed our Hoggage.’

  10

  THE TWINS LOVED to go on walks with their grandfather, and had two particular favourites – a ‘Welsh walk’ up the mountain, and an ‘English walk’ to Lurkenhope Park.

  The ‘Welsh walk’ was only practical in fine weather. Often, they would set out in sunshine, only to come home soaked to the skin. And equally often, when walking down to Lurkenhope, they would look back at the veil of grey rain to the west while, overhead, the clouds broke into blue and butterflies fluttered over the sunlit cow-parsley.

  Half a mile before the village, they passed the mill of Maesyfelin and the Congregational Chapel beside it. Then came two ranks of estate workers’ cottages, with leggy red-brick chimneys and gardens full of cabbages and lupins. Across the village green a second, Baptist Chapel squinted at the church, the vicarage and the Bannut Tree Inn. There was a screen of ancient yews around the Anglican graveyard: the half-timbering of the belfry was said to represent the Three Crosses of Golgotha.

  Sam always stopped at the pub for a pint of cider and a game of skittles with Mr Godber the publican. And sometimes, if the game dragged on, old Mrs Godber would come out with mugs of lemonade for the twins. She made them bawl into her ear-trumpet and, if she liked what they said, she’d give them each a threepenny bit and tell them not to spend it on sweeties – whereupon they would race to the Post Office, and race back again, their chins smudged over with chocolate.

  Another five minutes’ walk brought them to the West Lodge of the park. From there, a carriage-drive looped downhill through stands of oaks and chestnuts. Fallow deer browsed under the branches, flicking their tails at the flies, their bellies shining silvery in the deep pools of shade. The sound of human voices scared them, and their white scuts bobbed away through the bracken.

  The twins had a friend in Mr Earnshaw, the head-gardener, a short, sinewy man with china-blue eyes, who was a frequent guest at Mary’s tea-parties. They usually found him in the potting-shed, in a leather apron, with crescents of black loam under his fingernails.

  They loved to inhale the balmy tropical air of the hothouse; to stroke the bloom on white peaches, or peer at orchids with faces like monkeys in picture books. They never came away without a present – a cineraria or a waxy red begonia – and even seventy years later, Benjamin could point to a pink geranium and say, ‘That’s from a cutting we had off of Earnshaw.’

  The lawns of the castle fell away in terraces t
owards the lake. On the shore stood a boathouse built of pine-logs and, one day, hiding in the rhododendrons, the twins saw the boat!

  Its varnished hull came whispering towards them through the waterlilies. Combs of water fell from the oars. The oarsman was a boy in a red-striped blazer; and in the stern, half-hidden under a white parasol, sat a girl in a lilac dress. Her fair hair hung in thick tresses, and she trailed her fingers through the lapping green wavelets.

  Back at The Vision, the twins rushed up to Mary:

  ‘We’ve seen Miss Bickerton,’ they clamoured in unison. As she kissed them goodnight, Lewis whispered, ‘Mama, when I grow up I’m going to marry Miss Bickerton,’ and Benjamin burst into tears.

  To go on the ‘Welsh walk’ they used to tramp over the fields to Cock-a-loftie, a shepherd’s cottage left derelict since the land-enclosures. Then they crossed a stone stile on to the moor, and followed a pony-trail northwards, with the screes of the mountain rising steeply on the left. Beyond a spinney of birches, they came to a barn and longhouse, standing amid heaps of broken wall. A jet of smoke streamed sideways from the chimney. There were a few contorted ash-trees, a few pussy-willows, and the rim of the muddy pond was covered with bits of goose fluff.

  This was the homestead of the Watkins family, Craig-y-Fedw, ‘The Rock of the Birches’ – better known locally as ‘The Rock’.

  On the twins’ first visit, sheepdogs barked and yanked at their chains; a scrawny red-haired boy ran for the house; and Aggie Watkins came out, blocking the doorway in a long black skirt and an apron made of gunny-sack.

  She blinked into the sun but on recognizing the walkers she smiled.

  ‘Oh! It’s thee, Sam,’ she said. ‘An’ you’ll stay and have a cup of tea.’

  She was a thin, stooped woman with wens on her face, a bluish complexion and strands of loose, lichenous hair that blew about in the breeze.

  Outside the door were the stacks of planks that Tom Watkins used for making his coffins.

  ‘An’ it’s a pity you missed Old Tom,’ she went on. ‘Him and the mule be gone with a coffin for poor Mrs Williams Cringoed as died of her lungs.’

  Tom Watkins made the cheapest coffins in the county, and sold them to people who were too mean or too poor to pay for a proper funeral.

  ‘And them be the twins!’ she said, folding her arms. ‘Church-folk, same as Amos and Mary?’

  ‘Church,’ said Sam.

  ‘And the Lord have mercy! Bring ’em in!’

  The kitchen wall had been freshly whitewashed, but the rafters were black with soot and the dirt floor was scabbed with dried fowl-droppings. Ash-grey bantams strutted in and out, pecking up the scraps that had fallen from the table. In the room beyond, a box-bed was piled with blankets and overcoats; and above it hung a framed text: ‘The Voice of One Crying in the Wilderness. Prepare Ye the Way of the Lord, make His Paths straight …’

  In another room – in what had once been the parlour – two heifers were munching hay; and an acrid smell oozed round the kitchen door and mingled with the smell of peat and curds. Aggie Watkins wiped her hands on her apron before putting a pinch of tea in the pot:

  ‘An’ the weather,’ she said. ‘Bloomin’ freezing for June!’

  ‘Freezing!’ said Sam.

  Lewis and Benjamin sat on the edge of a chair, while the red-haired boy crouched over a kettle and fanned the flames with a goose’s wing.

  The boy’s name was Jim. He stuck out his tongue and spat. ‘Aagh! The devil!’ Aggie Watkins raised her fist and sent him scampering for the door. ‘Take ye no notice,’ she said, unfolding a clean linen table-cloth; for, no matter how hard the times, she always spread a clean white linen cloth for tea.

  She was a good woman who hoped the world was not as bad as everyone said. She had a bad heart brought on by poverty and overwork. Sometimes, she took her spinning-wheel up the mountain and spun the wisps of sheep’s wool that had caught in the gorse and heather.

  She never forgot an insult and she never forgot a kindness. Once, when she was laid up, Mary sent Sam over with some oranges and a packet of Smyrna figs. Aggie had never tasted figs before and, to her, they were like manna from Heaven.

  From that day, she never let Sam go back without a present in return. ‘Take her a pot of blackberry jam,’ she’d say. Or ‘What about some Welsh cakes? I know she likes Welsh cakes.’ Or ‘Would she have some duck eggs this time?’ And when her one scraggy lilac was in bloom, she heaped him with branches as if hers were the only lilac in creation.

  The Watkinses were Chapel-folk and they were childless.

  Perhaps it was because they were childless that they were always looking for souls to save. After the Great War, Aggie managed to ‘save’ several children; and if anyone said, ‘He was raised at The Rock,’ or ‘She was reared at The Rock,’ you knew for sure the child was illegitimate or loony. But in those days the Watkinses had only ‘saved’ the boy Jim and a girl called Ethel – a big girl of ten or so, who would spread her thighs and stare at the twins with glum fascination, covering one eye, then the other, as if she were seeing double.

  From The Rock a drovers’ trail wound up the north shoulder of the Black Hill, in places so sharply that the old man had to pause and catch his breath.

  Lewis and Benjamin gambolled ahead, put up grouse, played finger-football with rabbit-droppings, peered over the precipice onto the backs of kestrels and ravens and, every now and then, crept off into the bracken, and hid.

  They liked to pretend they were lost in a forest, like the Twins in Grimms’ fairy-tale, and that each stalk of bracken was the trunk of a forest tree. Everything was calm and damp and cool in the green shade. Toadstools reared their caps through the dross of last year’s growth; and the wind whistled far above their heads.

  They lay on their backs and gazed at the clouds that crossed the fretted patches of sky; at the zig-zagging dots which were flies; and, way above, the other black dots which were the swallows wheeling.

  Or they would dribble their saliva onto a gob of cuckoo-spit; and when their mouths ran dry, they would press their foreheads together, each twin losing himself in the other’s grey eye, until their grandfather roused them from their reverie. Then they bounded out along the path and pretended to have been there all the time.

  On fine summer evenings, Sam walked them as far as the Eagle Stone – a menhir of grey granite, splotched with orange lichen, which, in the raking light, resembled a perching eagle.

  Sam said there was an ‘Old ’Un’ buried there. Or else it was a horses’ grave, or a place where the ‘Pharisees’ danced. His father had once seen the fairies – ‘Them as ’ad wings like dragonflies’ – but he could never remember where.

  Lifting the boys onto the stone, Sam would point out farms and chapels and Father Ambrosius’s monastery nestling in the valley below. Some evenings, the valley was shrouded in mist; but beyond rose the Radnor Hills, their humped outlines receding grey on grey towards the end of the world.

  Sam knew all their names: the Whimble, the Bach and the Black Mixen – ‘and that be the Smatcher nearby where I was born’. He told them stories of Prince Llewellyn and his dog, or more shadowy figures like Arthur or Merlin or the Black Vaughan; by some stretch of the imagination, he had got William the Conqueror mixed up with Napoleon Bonaparte.

  The twins looked on the path to the Eagle Stone as their own private property. ‘It’s Our Path!’ they’d shout, if they happened to meet a party of hikers. The sight of a bootprint in the mud was enough to put them in a towering rage, and they’d try to rub it out with a stick.

  One sunset, as they came over the crest of the hill, instead of the familiar silhouette, they saw a pair of boaters. Two young ladies, arms akimbo, sat perched on top of the stone; a few paces off, a young man in grey flannels was bending behind a camera tripod.

  ‘Keep still,’ he called out from under the flapping black cloth. ‘Smile when I say so! One … Two … Three … Smile!’

  Suddenly, before Sam could sto
p him, Lewis had grabbed his stick and walloped the photographer behind the knees.

  The tripod lurched, the camera fell, and the girls, convulsed with giggles, almost fell off the stone.

  Reggie Bickerton, however – it was he who was the cameraman – turned crimson in the face and chased Lewis through the heather, shouting, ‘I’ll skin the blighter!’ And though his sisters called out, ‘No, Reggie! No! No! Don’t hurt him!’ he bent the little boy over his knee and spanked him.

  On the way home, Sam taught his grandsons the Welsh for ‘dirty Saxon’, but Mary was crestfallen at the news.

  She felt crushed and ashamed – ashamed of her boys and ashamed of being ashamed of them. She tried to write a note of apology to Mrs Bickerton but the nib scratched and the words would not come.

  11

  THAT AUTUMN, ALREADY wearied by the weight of the oncoming winter, Mary went on frequent visits to the vicar. The Reverend Thomas Tuke was a classical scholar of private means, who had chosen the living of Lurkenhope because the squire was a Catholic, and because the vicarage garden lay on greensand – a soil that was perfect for growing rare Himalayan shrubs.

  A tall, bony man with a mass of snowy curls, he had the habit of fixing his parishioners with an amber stare before offering them the glory of his profile.

  His rooms bore witness to a well-ordered mind and, since his housekeeper was stone-deaf, he was under no obligation to speak to her. The shelves of his library were lined with sets of the classics. He knew the whole of Homer by heart: each morning, between a cold bath and breakfast, he would compose a few hexameters of his own. On the wall of the staircase was a fan-shaped arrangement of oars – he had been a Cambridge rowing blue – and in the front hall, ranked like a colony of penguins, were several pairs of riding boots, for he was also Joint Master of the Rhulen Vale Hunt.

  To the villagers their vicar was a mystery. Most of the women were in love with him – or transported by the timbre of his voice. But he was far too busy to attend to their spiritual needs, and his actions often outraged them.