Pieces of Light Read online

  So I leapt at the idea of walking with her, this time. We hadn’t been alone very much on this leave, since she was away a lot shopping in big stores or staying with old friends from school or the sanny; I was allowed to accompany her on one or two of these trips, but I hated shops and most of her friends had children younger than me.

  I asked her if she needed some poetry and she thought I was teasing her, but laughed anyway. We set off and to my dismay she wanted to see what the old mill called Pottinger’s looked like these days. It was an abandoned mill just outside the village and was full of bats, but it wasn’t that that scared me; it was the boys with shaven heads who used it as their base. They weren’t really a special gang because all the boys in the village used it, off and on. If they were there, they threw stones at you and yelled out that they were going to capture you and tie you head-down on the mill-race. I told my mother that I didn’t want to go past the mill but she didn’t seem to hear me; she was a few paces ahead with her hands in her skirt pockets, looking worried about something. It was very hot, even by the river, and the river was so low the grass that waved about underneath was now withered on top. We carried on up the overgrown path along the bank and even here it was dusty. I prayed to God and Yolobolo that the boys wouldn’t be there today. I had bad butterflies. All that was left of my fetish packet were a few crumbs of palm leaf, the penny stamp stained with chain-oil, and the red circle cut from my mother’s bloody handkerchief, kept in a matchbox: the tiny bone, the pebble, Tarbuck’s wafer and the feather had been lost through the disintegrating banana-leaf wrapping. I hadn’t brought the matchbox with me.

  We crossed the slippery little bridge with the missing planks you could fall through and came out near the mill. The mill-wheel had a bird standing on it and weeds dangling from its hub. I couldn’t hear much over the sound of the mill-race, but the water kept turning into shouts and jeers. I knew the very last miller had heard voices from it shouting at him to jump in and that’s what he’d done, but no one had seen his spirit except Mrs Jefferies, who also said that she had seen an angel in the church.

  The path went round the front of the mill with a weedy yard between; my mother said she remembered it being full of waggons with fat sacks. I tried to speed up, but my mother was dragging her feet. The mill looked huge. She said she remembered it working as if it was yesterday, it made a big booming noise and now it was quiet. She said it was like a Constable. I tried to see it as PC Cox, but I couldn’t: he was thin with such long legs that when he pedalled, everyone said, his knees would deliver uppercuts to his chin (I’d not seen this myself). The mill made paper in her grandfather’s day, she went on, but she only knew it as a corn-mill, full of grain and powdery meal that turned her black eyelashes white.

  That’s my great-grandfather, I thought. It seemed queer never to have met him, and he wouldn’t even recognise me if I stood in front of him and stuck out my hand. She had stopped, now. She probably wanted to go inside: that had been my chief dread. I stopped as well, trying to invent a good excuse. Then a stone landed at my feet. At first I thought a bird had dropped it. I didn’t want to tell my mother, for some reason. She was still looking at the mill.

  ‘There’s somebody in it,’ she said.

  Then there were shouts. I wanted to run away but my legs were stuck. They might capture us both and tie us to the mill-race with our heads down in the water. We’d drown together. I saw a shaved head bob up at one of the windows and then out of the big black entrance a boy appeared. He was running towards us through the weeds and grass and waving his arms.

  ‘He’s going to capture us,’ I said, but not loud enough.

  Before I could do anything about it, he had reached my mother and was shouting at her and actually tugging her sleeve. I wasn’t sure what he was saying, but she understood the local accent better than I did. I knew the boy by name: it was Reggie Cullurne, he was older than me but shorter and his voice was still high. He would call me a toff in the street but never touch me. Now he was capturing my mother. I looked up and down the path and in the grass and weeds for something to use as a sword, as I had just been reading a long poem about Sir Galahad. When I looked up again, with a knobbly stick in my hand, my mother was disappearing into the big black open door. It was a door big enough for waggons and tractors to pass through without touching.

  I waited a few moments and then walked towards the mill. I’d thought of going for help, but remembered Sir Galahad and decided it was better to die than to leave my mother at the mercy of the gang. I walked quite slowly. No stones were thrown and nobody ran out to capture me. The mill was even bigger and there were bunches of weeds in the brick walls. A notice next to the door said Private Property, Keep Out. By Order. The big dark door was around and over me and then it was all black.

  Into this black there rose a shaft of golden light full of hay dust; I began to see furry ropes hanging in loops like liana, tall ladders with rungs like sausages, a huge hook hanging from the beams. There were some heads, shaved for the summer or for lice. They were on top of bodies standing in a circle: with a start I realised that they were the village boys. I came close but they didn’t notice me. I thought: if they’ve sacrificed my mother, I’ll tear them to pieces one by one.

  In the middle of the circle stood my mother. She was holding a boy from behind so that his head dangled forward. Her hands were under his arms and she was bent back. I knew the boy: it was Ted Dart. He was slow and thin and got croup and made a noise when he breathed; I wasn’t afraid of him. Now he’d had a fight with my mother and my mother had won. I didn’t know what to do with my stick. One of the boys asked if he was ‘a goner’. My mother bobbed Ted Dart up and down and he gave a great shudder and hacked badly. Sputum dribbled from his mouth. The air was full of dust. The shaft of sun made it look like a church and my mother was the Virgin Mary, not Guinevere. Ted Dart was Jesus. He looked up blinking and said, ‘Larks. Blimey.’ Everyone laughed except me.

  Because she’d saved his life (it wasn’t croup, he was ‘asthmatic’ and had had a ‘crisis’ from the mill’s dusty air), I thought the boys would stop calling me names in the village, but they didn’t. Ted Dart’s mother came round with a basket full of onions and some homemade biscuits. My mother told her that her son ought to be seen to in London because she’d heard a leopard growl. This meant that his windpipe was inflamed. I never liked meeting Ted Dart after that; he still growled without meaning to and I felt as if he was going to jump on me and claw me to death, but instead he would smile and say, ‘Your old mum’s a shiner.’ She wasn’t old, of course. I ought to have appreciated him being nice about her but I didn’t: I started wishing that I could have asthma and would imagine collapsing on the lawn with a crisis in front of her, wheezing and growling. I listened to my breath but there was nothing, not even a purr.

  My uncle was always very absorbed in his work, so I spent a lot of time, when at the house, hanging about Susan or Jeremiah Jessop, or the new red-faced cook called Mrs Stump, or watching the various workmen who came and tinkered with odd bits of the house – ‘keeping the ship afloat’, as my uncle put it. Much of my knowledge of the wider world came from these people: most of them had never been further than Netherford. Anyway, my spirit was not here but at home, and home was somewhere I could not find on the most detailed of the maps in my uncle’s study, or in the Geography classroom at school. Not even the river was marked, let alone its creeks and bays and villages – but the brambled seep that marked the end of my uncle’s garden had, so he claimed, been mentioned in an Anglo-Saxon charter some thousand years before.

  One day, testing a new wooden-handled penknife in the orchard up the lane, I found that one half of my apple had just two or three little withered seeds in it, while the other was crammed tight with fat ones. And this is how I was divided; one half had all the seeds and lived in Africa, the other half was being ‘occupied’ by me in England, as Gauls ‘occupied’ forts. I didn’t think this at the time, exactly, but I knew that not
all of me lived here. But this ‘here’ was too strong to unstick from, like this side of the mirror was too strong to unstick from. So when I woke up morning after morning and didn’t find myself back in my room at Bamakum – where I could have called there ‘here’ – I’d have problems not crying for a few moments.

  Most of all I wanted to rest my head against Mother’s chest, because it said the name of my home: bamakum, bamakum, bamakum. I heard it once through her cotton shift, the first time I had a fever. Ted Dart must have heard it, too.

  Letters from my parents had arrived quite a lot at first and then not so much; sometimes if I hadn’t heard anything for two months, I would wonder whether I had ever really been in Africa, except in some long dreams. When you were in a dream you didn’t know it was a dream.

  My mother was ill, or well; my father was ill, or well. Quiri was never mentioned in the news of the servants, though I sent him postcards of local scenes. Joseph had died, suddenly, falling on to a pan of sweet potatoes he’d been carrying across the yard. Mawangu had lost a finger when chopping a new pole for the flag with his panga. Baluti, the laundry boy, had run off into the bush one day, after a row, and had never come back. My mother found all this ‘very trying’, on top of the ‘awkwardnesses’ that ‘emanated’ from the Colonial Office. My mother was very successful in her medical work, and my father’s road was ‘coming along’ despite the usual setbacks, but the ‘CO bureaucrats in London’ didn’t approve of their staying beyond the period they felt was ‘the statutory maximum’ for this kind of station, which was as many years as I had when I left Africa. I didn’t quite understand all this when she wrote this sort of thing to my uncle, but I’d always ask him to read his letter out after I’d read mine (which was usually too short). He never let me read them myself, and I noticed (looking at his eyes) that he would skip bits. Then the letters would disappear, probably into his locked desk. He wanted my mother to tell him more about African customs, which were beginning to interest him.

  He only ever really frightened me once, and this was to do with what my mother wasn’t telling him enough about. Now and again Mrs Stump would come and take me to church, ‘for your own good, Master Hugh’. This amused my uncle. He had a worm-eaten crucifix in his study and one Sunday, standing in the garden, I plucked up courage to ask him why, if he never came to church, he had a cross in his study.

  ‘It reminds me of something very important,’ he said.

  ‘Love and forgiveness,’ I suggested.

  ‘No. It reminds me that the gods want only your nearest and dearest.’

  ‘What’s your nearest and dearest?’

  ‘Sacrifice isn’t sacrifice unless you miss what you’re sacrificing. A sheep is pathetic – unless it’s your last sheep and you’re starving. God gave His only begotten Son. He didn’t really, because God is an invention, but Jesus knew the ropes. He outwitted the gods at their own game and they’ve never recovered.’

  I didn’t really understand this thing about Jesus and the gods, but I pretended I did.

  ‘Who would you sacrifice, then?’

  ‘All depends on what I wanted from the gods.’

  I thought for a moment.

  ‘To make the wildwood spread faster.’

  He gave a little start. I knew he thought of the wildwood as a sort of seed, the seed of the great forest that was going to cover Britain from end to end, as it did long ago before farmers cut it all down – except for the bit in our garden. That’s why I wasn’t allowed in.

  ‘That’s a good example, Hugh. I would have to please the gods an awful lot, wouldn’t I? Yes, in that particular case, I would do as your Africans do. Nearest and dearest. Give my favourite child, or my wife, or whatever.’

  ‘You haven’t got children, and Aunt Joy’s dead.’

  He looked at me steadily, puffing on his pipe. I felt my stomach go queer.

  ‘That leaves me,’ I added, trying to turn it into a joke.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I’m your nephew. I’m next.’

  He nodded almost without moving his head, still staring into my eyes, as if I had sparked off a train of thought or given him the start of an idea. Then he gave a sigh through his nose, blowing out smoke, and looked away. We were standing by the unweeded tennis court, which he was wondering what to do with: it had no net and the white lines had disappeared under clover. The high wire-netting around it had come down in places and there were lots of twigs and branches stuck in the wire from the gale a few weeks before: they looked like hands and fingers. Aunt Joy had held tennis parties here, even though she was mostly too sickly to play. I suddenly blushed, aware that I might have said something rotten: if I was next, then who was just before me? I saw Aunt Joy in her white frock and cardigan turning round and staring at me, as if the net was in place and the tennis party was real. I began to say that I hadn’t meant what I’d said, but my uncle was already walking away in big strides towards the house, from where the smells of Mrs Stump’s roast were drifting.

  From that moment a part of me was always waiting to be leapt on – at least until I was old enough to see what nonsense this secret fear was.

  One day a letter came from my parents, saying their tour had been ‘renewed’ again for another three years. Although the time between my leaving Africa and that day was also three years, and seemed like a whole life, I was still afraid that they might leave the station before I had a chance to return. I couldn’t imagine Bamakum without my parents there. I began to think of my stay in England as a ‘tour’, and that it was ‘statutory’, renewed by some unseen bureaucrat. ‘Statutory’ made me think of statues. I was stuck in a kind of block of marble, and couldn’t find the hole that would let me out. This block of marble grew thicker with thick clothes, and although I felt the cold more than the others, I would deliberately underdress. When I think of my English childhood, I think of cold – which seemed to start inside me and work out to my nose and my fingertips and my chapped knees.

  I would go down to the village only about once a week, to buy sweets and run little errands for Mrs Stump or my uncle, or to post my letters to Bamakum. I liked to post them myself, imagining them setting out on their long voyage and finding it hard to believe that they would end up in a canoe paddling into the bay in under a month’s time. The village stores were run by a young woman called Gracie Hobbs, who smelt of flour and gave me ‘a little something’ extra each time; seeing her lean towards me on the counter, with what my uncle would call her ‘full figure’ squashed against the polished wood, reminded me of the women in Africa, and I had no problem imagining what was under her sweater. Apart from the Post Office in the square and the village stores and of course the church when Aunt Joy was alive, I didn’t know Ulverton itself all that well; even if I took bread to feed the ducks in the pond, I could only do it when there were none of the crop-headed gang about. There were quite a few lanes that I had never been down at all.

  Because children were hardly ever invited to the house, I read a lot and walked a lot and played on my own a lot. The centre of my island was the beechwood, but it included the orchard on one side and a long rough coomb beyond the two mounds in the Jennets’ field. To go to the Jennets’ farm, which I did often because I liked Mrs Jennet’s byre-smelling friendliness and the shuffly warmth of the cows and pigs, I had to pilot the SS Grace.

  There was no Aunt Joy now to tell me off; my uncle hardly noticed me. Because my mother couldn’t come at all one summer (something to do with accompanying my father on a ‘grand tour’ into the northern parts of the country, which were said to be ‘remarkable’), I spent the whole of my longest holidays constructing a cabin in the beechwood. I called it my ‘cell’ because my favourite poem in Latin lessons was by a man called Alcuin: he was leaving his ‘holy cell’ which was surrounded by apple trees and fields full of herbs and blossoming streams and white lilies and red roses and singing birds. It reminded me of Bamakum when I read it, even though we had none of those things except the birds. Alc
uin was sad, too, because of leaving: ‘O mea cella, mihi habitatio dulcis, amata,/Semper in aeternum, ‘O mea cella, vale.’ Building my own cell out of planks and branches and old leaves and grass stopped me thinking of the fact that my mother would never see me being ten years old, because she wasn’t due to come until I was eleven. (My father had promised to come, too. He hadn’t seen me being nine, either.) She’d written to me at school a few months before that, telling me the bad news (although she was excited about the tour); I was quite ‘cut up’ when I read the letter, and had a mild return of my malaria as a result.

  Strangely, I was much more cut up then than when my uncle told me the much worse news less than two years later.

  Although I saw or at least talked very little with my uncle at this period, we went along together now and again to the village hall to see another type of ‘touring’: these were actors, and they were ‘touring’ plays. My uncle had started a mumming troupe, and wanted to see how the ‘pros’ dealt with the hall. I saw my first Shakespeare play there the same summer I was building my cell; A Midsummer Night’s Dream was going to be performed in the hall’s garden, against the birch saplings, but rain forced it inside. Despite the rain, it was very hot and crowded. It had the same effect on me, however, as the golden show my mother had taken me to in London. At the end, the thin one called Puck stepped forward in his long green slippers of felt and said, in a soft voice, ‘You have but slumbered here.’ My uncle was snoring, and this made people laugh. But I wasn’t embarrassed. There was a man next to the stage with a big glass jar in front of him, filled with water, and a pulley above it, like my Meccano crane, dangling a metal cone; when he lowered the cone into the water, the lights went down very slowly. Somebody was playing a gramophone record of soft violins at the back: as it rustled and moaned, Puck’s face disappeared without moving, a green-gloved finger to his grinning mouth, until darkness swallowed him up.