The Buried Circle - Jenni Mills [210]
‘He wasn’t my grandfather, was he?’ I say.
She shakes her head. There’s a long silence. Finally she says, ‘Might be time for me to tell you about him.’
CHAPTER 59
January 1945
Life rolls on, dun’t it? Either you get on with it or you fall to bits, and I could hear our mam in heaven, whispering to stiffen the spine, Frances. There was bad things happening every day in the war; didn’t seem right to dwell on what had happened or what might have been.
In the last winter of the war, a cottage came free and I moved back to Avebury for a while, with Dad. There was no more digging in the circle, no more stones put up. Come the beginning of 1943, Mr Keiller had sold all the land he owned at Avebury to the National Trust, 950 acres, bar the Manor, twelve thousand pounds for the lot. Wasn’t much of a return for all the money he’d spent digging. He claimed he’d been planning it since the war started, but something had knocked the heart out of him. Maybe it was financial worries, maybe it was Mrs Keiller carrying on in London, but I thought I knew better. He went on living in the Manor, and the Scottish soldiers and airmen from the convalescent home still came for tea. The tall Glasgow boy with the tin foot had been given a desk job at Lyneham, and he appeared at the Manor whenever he could, waiting to be allowed back to operations with his squadron up north.
Hadn’t been in Avebury a month before I knew coming back had been a bad idea. Getting off the bus at night, by the Red Lion in the blackout, I’d hear the fizz of a match under the trees. No matter how fast I turned, I was always too late to see more than a dying gleam of flame out of the corner of my eye. Sometimes, when I walked alone across the high Downs, I’d hear a splash in a puddle behind me, or a stone rolling along the track like somebody’d kicked it.
See, they never come back, but I think they try sometimes. They in’t no more than a set of dreams and yearnings, lifted like ash on the wind, but they follow us, the best they can, hoping someone’ll leave a door open for them to slip through, so one day they can come home.
New Year’s Eve, I went to a dance at Lyneham with the boy who had the tin foot. He was a lovely lad, minded me of Davey in some ways. He got himself drunk, and in the car park outside the mess he told me how much he missed his girl. As 1945 came in, I held his head and stroked his thick dark hair, then gave him a regretful kiss and told him she was lucky to have someone care for her that much. He was posted north the next week, and I never saw him again, never knew whether he went back to his sweetheart, whether he survived the last months of the war or not.
Next day I walked over to Yatesbury to leave flowers by Davey’s headstone. The church door was open. It was a still, icy day, so cold that, kneeling in the front pew, there was mist in the air between me and the altar. I wanted to ask God to help those boys lie quiet, but all I could think of was the emptiness in there, and the chill of the stone floor striking up into my knees. Coming out again, I caught a flicker of movement over by the box tomb. Knew then for definite I’d have to leave, maybe for a few years, maybe for a lifetime, hoping that by the time I came back what was left of them would finally have blown away like fog on the wind.
Hardly more than a couple of weeks after that, the Manor barn caught fire in the night. By morning the stink of burned thatch and charred wood had crept through the whole village, hanging on the frosty air. It was the place Mr Keiller had garaged his cars, where Davey used to polish them to a brilliant gloss, and cover them with tarpaulins to stop the bat droppings spoiling the paintwork.
I left Dad listening to the wireless, where Alvar Liddell was talking about the brave Russians fighting their way inch by inch into Warsaw, and went to see what was left of the barn before I caught the bus to work.
Parts of the building were still smouldering. There were pools of water between the blackened timbers,