The Buried Circle - Jenni Mills [108]
So the last place I saw my mother was…
Tolemac. The wind rushes with a noise like floodwater through the branches of the little wood, stripping the blossom from the wild cherries. Beads of pearly water cling to the barbed wire of the fence. Still a few threads from my torn jeans wrapped around it. Don’t remember any decision to come here, or any of the walk. The rain’s easing off; when I push back my hood, my hair clings to my wet face. There’s a glow through the trees. Someone has lit a fire.
Gunmetal cloud, racing above the tossing branches, makes the wood an even gloomier prospect than usual. I should phone Graham, not tackle this myself…Only there probably wouldn’t be any signal on the mobile, even if I hadn’t left it in the car in the staff car park.
Quickly, so I don’t have time to change my mind, I hop over the fence, careful not to leave my trouser seat there this time.
The wet leaves on the ground muffle my footsteps. The grey ghost shape of a bender looms between the trees, the polythene rattling and flapping. The fire’s the other side, in a clearing. Whoever lit it has found dry kindling: it’s a good blaze, whipped up by the wind racing through the branches.
The dog looks up, tilting its head and cocking its ears as if it had been expecting me.
On the other side of the fire, cool eyes with flames dancing in them watch my approach. Now I remember where I saw those eyes before: at the full-moon ceremony, yes, but before that on the Ridgeway, a cold clear afternoon at Imbolc. A trilby jammed over those corkscrew curls, and a perfect arse, side-stepping down the hillside.
‘Go on,’ he says. ‘It’s May Eve. Jump.’
So I grin at him, and take a flying leap over the fire.
CHAPTER 27
1940–1941
Seize the day, Frances, my dad used to say, when I visited them in Devizes. Enjoy yourself while you can, it’s later than you think.
Only way to be in wartime. That first winter of the war, seemed like time was at a standstill though everything was changing. Village school became an air-raid shelter. Land girls at Manor Farm; evacuees in the Manor house–kept well out of Mr Keiller’s way, needless to say. The whole country was on the move, people crammed into buses and trains, silent, morose, bored, shunting through stations with no names, through landscapes where the signposts had all been took down. The weather froze, great festoons of ice hanging from the telegraph wires, inches thick, bowing the lines almost to the ground. One of the men who’d raised the Barber Surgeon’s stone died of pneumonia. The sound of trees cracking was like gunshots. Mr Keiller was now a police inspector with the Special Constabulary, and Miss Chapman–Mrs Keiller, I should say, still couldn’t get used to that–went to London to be a nurse. Mr Piggott was in the army, to everyone’s surprise. ‘Thought he was a blinking pacifist,’ said Mr Keiller. ‘I used to tell him he’d be the first to be shot.’ There was next to nothing going on by way of excavation, though Inspector Keiller was first on the scene, measuring the craters and poking round in the mess, when Jerry ditched a bomb on the East Kennet long barrow.
A room came free in the attic of the Lodge, in the heart of the village. So I give up my place down the road in the draughty old house in Winterbourne Monkton, that I’d found after Mam and Dad went to Devizes, and moved in sharpish before it could be requisitioned for unhappy Londoners. That was the day the thaw started. Spring came. From my window I watched the evacuees learning to maypole dance, somebody’s damn fool idea of making them feel at home. They kept getting the ribbons tangled, and picked fights with the village children for laughing. Eventually they were all moved back home.
Every morning I caught the early bus to Swindon, to work at the hospital. My war was fought on a sea of paperwork, chitties for this, dockets for that. I did the rounds of the wards, handing out chocolate and cigarettes to the wounded