JON'S WAR
From the top of Hockington Hill, higher still in the branches of McNair's beech tree, Jon could see the coast road. A convoy of army lorries rolled silently away towards the distant coast and France. Two lorries had stopped in the forecourt of The Bull Hotel and soldiers were standing and squatting on the tarmac. Studying the tiny figures Jon couldn't imagine his father seeming so anonymous in khaki, laughing and chatting and drinking beer. But he was a colonel and a veteran of the Great War; these were boys, fresh from school and factory, bound for Normandy in the wake of last month's invasion. Jon chewed green beechnuts and tried to picture his lather fighting Germans. Once again the intrusive image of him lyingdead in a shellhole superseded the comic‑book pictures. The short hairs on the back of his neck bristled in panic. Would his father cry out in his agony as the bullets hit him? Jon spat violently, watching the pulpy saliva striking the leaves as it fell. He sung a snatch of `Stand Up, Stand Up for Jesus' with the rude last line he'd learned at school and began to climb down through the branches, thinking of tea at the cottage.
Alter tea ‑ seed cake with glace cherries from before the war ‑ he freewheeled down Moon Lane, snatching at bushes and tucking his feet beneath the handlebars. He braked gently so as not to miss the view as the lane turned revealing the railway embankment across the fields and the long line of the poplars. A train was gliding over the four arches of the bridge. The early evening air was still and Jon could hear the faint hammering of the locomotive as it hauled the green corridor coaches back to London. Jon watched it until it disappeared. Idly kicking the front wheel of the bike, he recalled his own journey three weeks earlier, the train passing through the south‑east of London: terraces of houses with occasional ragged gaps latticed with scaffolding and wooden buttresses; queues outside boarded‑up shop hours; the beetle‑shaped humps of Anderson shelters. Somewhere beneath the tonnage of red and yellow bricks his mother still lay. Where the three‑storey house in Greenwich had once stood there was now a corrugated iron fence; behind that, choked with slabs of limestone, was the devastated lily pond.
Barham's Wood lay away from the lane on the other side of an apron of light dusty soil fringed with ragged gorse and cow parsley. Jon pushed the bike up the verge and across the ribbon of scrub and he leaned it against a tree. Clambering over the wire lence, he followed the path that he had cut with Granddad's old bayonet earlier in the week. He planned to clear a route all the way through the wood to the railway cutting where he could watch the trains in hiding, guarding the south coastline with his cricket bat machine gun.
He smelt the presence of strangers before lie saw them ‑ the tang of woodsmoke and hot tar. Peering round a clump of rhododendrons and into a clearing he saw three wooden caravans drawn up end to end. Two of them were square‑built, colouted green and yellow, one of them brightly as if only recently painted. The third was barrel‑shaped and in poor condition with faded, stained green cloth hanging loose from the framework. Between Jon and the caravans a brisk fire was burning. Standing close to its edge, a short, dark man was thrusting a fence paling deep into its heart. Jon sidled into the shelter of the bush and watched. The short man straightened up and barked rapidly at some children sitting near the fire. He gesticulated curtly with his free hand. Jon couldn't understand what he called out: the language was strange and he spoke rapidly. Two women were squatted at the other side of the fire binding up bunches of flowers made from wood shavings and a few yards away between the two wooden caravans three young men crouched smoking cigarettes.
Jon had never seen Gypsies before. The vicar had told him that they were back in the area for the fruit‑picking. Most of the farmers tolerated them at least, he had said, but many local people feared them for their wildness and secrecy and they locked up their sheds and outhouses at night against theft. Jon studied them, fascinated. The men seemed ordinary enough on the outside, nearly all wearing the weather‑beaten clothes and shapeless boots of the labourers in the yard at Vincent's farm But there was an exotic cast to their features, a high cheekboned swarthiness that put him in mind of Red Indians. Thick black hair was swept back from the foreheads of the men and it hung in loose plaits or was gathered in loops and coils on the heads of the women. Even seated there was a foreign grace and poise about them, an integration with their surroundings that filled Jon with a strange unease. One old man sat on the steps of a caravan wore a long-skirted, high-buttoned jacket. He wore gaiters too like a gentleman farmer and when he opened the jacket to push his fingers into the slit pocket of his moleskin trousers Jon saw a double‑strung watch‑chain threaded across his waistcoat. The women all wore gold earrings; firelight twinkled briefly as they moved their heads in conversation. One of them toyed with a gold necklace and when she opened her mouth in laughter a gold tooth flashed. Twisting a leaf absently between his fingers, Jon watched them from his hide, awkward and lumpish in his school blazer and heavy corduroy shorts.
As he rose to steal away in search of an alternative route to the railway cutting he saw a face staring impassively at him from a neighbouring rhododendron bush. He froze, jaw sagging in animal shock, his throat dry. It was a dirty face, sharp and brown, a boy's face. On the right check was a patchwork of scar tissue and the eyes were as blue as chips of glass. The boy stepped out of the bush and slid over to Jon, seizing him by the wrist with firm, grimy fingers. Jon looked down at them and then up again into the expressionless blue eyes.
"Well?" drawled the boy, the accented voice at once familiar as local and yet resonant of other regions far away. Jon lifted his free arm in a vague directional gesture.
"I live up the hill", he muttered, eyes flickering away from the fixed stare. "I play here sometimes".
The boy stood motionless for a moment arid then he suddenly released Jon's wrist and turned away as if bored. He sliced at the bracken tops with a peeled stick that he drew from his belt and whistled tunelessly. Jon watched him, his mouth still furry with fear. He glanced down at his hairless wrist to where the white bracelet of compressed flesh was now fading. Suddenly voices were raised around the fire and Jon turned to look. A woman in a long striped dress laughed harshly and threw the contents of a teacup into the flames. He turned back and the boy was watching him unblinkingly. Abruptly the boy turned away again and, jerking his head sideways, melted into the undergrowth, crouching low.
"You comin’?” he grated over his shoulder, holding a branch back for Jon. Awkwardly, with one arm crooked over his face for protection, Jon thrust forward behind, his feet tearing at brambles and his ankles turning on hidden roots. The Gypsy slithered in between the grasping branches. Jon followed clumsily, watching the flickering red patch on the seat of the boy's grey flannel trousers. He began to sweat, grappling blindly with thin creepers lashing his cheeks. He was angry too at the sudden betrayal of the warrior image: no longer was he the prince of his own jungle, surefooted, unnoticed by the woodland creatures. Now he felt like an alien in a hostile environment; the bushes conspired against him as he plunged blindly through the foliage on an unexplained quest. (Continued)
1:50:18 PM 
|
|
