The Buried Circle - Jenni Mills [51]
Mrs Sorel-Taylour rose straight-backed, flapping a hand to tell me I should stay sitting. She stalked over to the window–there was only one, in the end wall, with faded chintz curtains–but I dare say she couldn’t see much, not being very tall.
There was another bang like the crack of doom.
‘It in’t the trees again?’ I asked. Two years ago, they’d cut down the trees that grew over the banks and dynamited the stumps. A gurt piece of wood had gone clean through Mr Peak-Garland’s cowshed roof, and Mr Keiller liked to tell the story of how Mr Piggott had been hit on the head by another lump. Pity it didn’t bash some of his brains out, I thought. He had far too many of them, and knew it. I’d seen cartoons he’d drawn of people in the village and it seemed to me he always made us out to look fools.
‘Isn’t, Frances.’ Mrs Sorel-Taylour was waging war on my Wiltshire ways. ‘That wasn’t explosives, it was a demolition ball. It’ll be the blacksmith’s.’
‘Can we go and look?’
She checked her watch. ‘It’s almost lunchtime. Make sure you’re back a few minutes before half past one.’
I was down the steep narrow stairs and out across the cobbles before you could say Fran Robinson. I wanted to see this.
The blacksmith’s wasn’t the first building to go. Rawlins’s garage, hard by the Adam and Eve stones, which Mr Keiller called the Cove, had already gone. Mr Rawlins didn’t mind. Shabby wooden shack, yard full of old tyres and bits of cars, backed by a row of four cottages with leaky thatch. Rawlins needed space for his new petrol pumps, his second wife and all his kids, so he thought it a great deal when Mr Keiller offered him in exchange a piece of land outside the village on the Swindon road. Even lent him three hundred pounds to build a gurt new flat-roofed house that looked like an Egyptian picture palace. Our dad was impressed, but our mam used to wince every time she went past it. Mr and Mrs Tibbles from the cottages, Curly and Mary King, and the old lady who always wore black, who also lived in the row, faded out of our lives. I thought they’d all gone to Marlborough, but I wasn’t sure.
There was another bang as I came round the side of the church. It looked like there was a fog rolling down the village street, and the lich-gate was shrouded in yellow dust. A cheer went up, there was a creaking noise, then a crash.
By the time I was through the gate, there was no thatch left on the blacksmith’s shop, except for one corner, and no front, and not much by way of side walls either. The straw clung to the last bit of chimney-stack like Mr Hitler’s moustache. Half the village had gathered, far as I could tell, including all the lads who should’ve been in school, and the teachers with them too. There was a crane swinging a wrecking ball, and a group of our men, wearing dungarees and thick leather belts, were going to work with sledgehammers on what was left. The dust caught the back of your throat.
I was standing next to old Walter, who lived up Green Street. He shook his head. ‘What a day. Never thought I’d live to see this.’ His lip was trembling, and he wiped at the corner of his mouth with a wrinkled arthritic hand. ‘Pigsties are coming down too before nightfall. An evil day. I’m going home while I still have one to go to.’ He began shuffling up the street, blinking against the cruel dust. He’d served in Sudan under General Gordon, they said, and been wounded in the head, then come home and lived with his old mother until she died on the same day as the King two years ago. Suddenly he stopped and turned, taking in this time who I was. ‘Why d’you work for that ol’ devil? It’ll be your’n next.’
Another great crash and the back wall of the blacksmith’s came down. Now there was nothing left but a jagged amputation, a ghost of a house, rubble where people I knew had once lived and worked and had babies. And all the little boys in the village were cheering.
CHAPTER 13
He’s waiting for me by the Land Rover, leaning against the open passenger door with one foot on the step. Jeans this time, black ones. A pair of aviator sunglasses.