When you have to warn the children
John heard the clack of heels as she came down the stairs.
He stood to open the wooden door at the bottom of them. “Mind your head,” he
said. She ducked as she stepped out into the living room. “I’m sorry, a 17th-century
cottage isn’t really practical at a time like this, is it.”
“Not terribly.”
“How are things?”
“Well, I think you know. I’ve just spoken to your daughter.”
She was efficient, bloodless. “Jess is your daughter? Or daughter-in-law?”
“Daughter.” John made as if to escort her to the door, but:
“I’ll see myself out, don’t worry.” She stalked down the drive to a clinical
white Audi.
Jess was coming down now. “Did she say anything useful?” he
asked her.
She shook her head. “Not really. Just checked the IV drips
and everything. She said, 48 hours at most. So it could be today. Any time
really.” Her eyes had dark rings. He could hear the day nurse clumping around
above.
Then an argument erupted in the dining room.
“Give it here! It’s mine!”
“No it isn’t! Nanny gave it me!”
“Liar! Liar! Pants on fire!”
She strode to the door of the dining room and he heard her
yell, “Shut up! Both of you! Just SHUT UP!” She half-fell back into the living
room. “God almighty, the pair of you!”
John peered into the dining-room to see the two of them sitting
on the floor and staring at the door open-mouthed. The toy car they’d been
arguing about was upside-down on the carpet.
He glanced outside and saw that the rain had stopped and there were cracks in the clouds.
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| Chris Morgan/Creative Commons |
“Go and get your welly-boots,” he said. “We’ll go down to
the river and give Mum some peace.”
“Thanks Dad. For pity’s sake get them out of my hair for an
hour or two,” she said.
“They’ve been cooped up a bit,” he said.
“And Dad… I’ve done nothing to prepare them, really. Can you
try and talk to them? I’m sorry.”
“I’ll try.”
So he chivvied them out of the house, down the street past
the church hall and left into the bridleway that led down to the water meadows.
The rain clouds had mostly cleared away and the patches of blue were spreading,
but the ground was soft underfoot and there were lots of puddles and the
children jumped in them, trying to splash each other. Soon Paul jumped into an
especially deep puddle that seemed to have contained cow dung. The resulting
slurry spread over his cords and his sister’s jeans. “Ow!” she cried. “You
beast!” She was about to begin a run-up to a puddle of her own when John
intervened. “Stop that, Ellen,” he said, his tone a little sharp. ”Don’t make
more work for Mummy. Not now.”
He caught them both by the arms and pulled them towards him.
“Do you know what kind of path this is?”
“Dad said once it’s called a hollow way,” said Paul.
“That’s right. Look to either side. The hedges are very
high, aren’t they? And the fields are above the level of the path. Do you know
why that is?”
“It’s because lots of people came down here for years and
years and years,” said Ellen.
“A thousand years,” he said. “Since before the Normans.
Peasants with their simple tools and later with their ponies and then with the
great shire horses. We saw one of those, didn’t we? At the County Show last
year.”
“It was HUGE, wasn’t it, Grandad,” said Paul. “Its hooves
were like – like Mars landers.”
He thought about this. Yes, I see the analogy, he thought,
then had a vision of a Suffolk Punch descending slowly to the surface of the
Red Planet, whinnying quietly. Out loud he said:
“I wonder how many people have walked down this hollow way
before us. Did you know that the world’s population is 8 billion? But about 117
billion of us have walked the earth? That means 109 billion people have gone
before us. So for everyone alive today, 13 have passed before.”
“Wow,” said Paul. “I wonder what happened to them all?”
Geoff Charles/National Museum of Wales
“Well, they’ve died.” John paused for a moment, then said:
“Do you think they’re somewhere watching us? After all, they came down here
time after time after time for ten centuries or more. They marched up here to
go to Waterloo, the Transvaal, Passchendaele and Agincourt. Can they really
just have gone away?”
“Has Barker just gone away, Grandad?” asked Ellen.
“I think he’s in dog heaven, dear,” said her grandad. “I
expect he’s chasing lots and lots of rabbits.”
“But if that’s dog heaven, isn’t it also rabbit hell?” she
said, wide-eyed.
“Not if the rabbits are in on it,” said Paul. “He never
caught one, anyway. Or a squirrel. Of course, we do know Barker’s dead, don’t
we? I mean, we never saw his body. Dad just lifted him into the hatchback ’cos
his back legs didn’t work anymore, Barkers not Dad’s, then he didn’t come back
from the vet’s.” He thought for a moment. “Have you ever seen a body, Grandad?”
“Yes,” said John. “When I was in the Army.”
“Ooooh,” said Ellen. “Where was that?”
“In Northern Ireland,” he replied.
“What did it look like?” she asked.
“Not very nice,” he said. He patted her on the back. “Wars
aren’t very nice, you see.”
“I bet that’s what’ll happen to Dad,” said Paul. “The
doctor’ll put him in the boot and drive him off to the vet.”
“That’s horrible,” said Ellen, and started crying.
She was pummelling her brother with her fists and he was laughing. “Off to the
vet! Off to the vet!” he said.
“Paul,” said John, “that’s enough. Ellen, come here. Have
you got a hanky? You haven’t have you?” He dabbed her tears with his own
handkerchief.
“Is Nanny in heaven, then, Grandad?” asked Paul.
“Oh yes, I think so,” he said, after just a second’s
hesitation. “I expect she’s sitting with Great-Aunty Mavis now, and they’re
complaining about my habits. And I bet they’re drinking lots of sherry.”
“Does everyone believe in heaven though,” said Paul,
frowning. “Mrs D came to tea once and said there’s no hell either and it was
all silly nonsense to frighten people and make them give the Church lots of
money.”
There is a hell, thought John, and it’s tea with Mrs D. Out
loud he said:
“Lots of people believe in different things. Some religions
believe in reincarnation.”
They had come to the end of the lane and Ellen was climbing
the gate into the water meadow beyond. “Ellen, climb near the hinge,” he called
out. “You’ll put less strain on it.” She dropped down onto the other side.
Together they walked across the water meadow, lumpy and rough with thistles.
“Reincarnation’s when people come back as someone else,
isn’t it?” said Paul.
“Sort of,” he replied. “Different faiths see it in different
ways. To Buddhist people sometimes, you don’t exactly die but your spirit
merges back into a big life force. Other people do believe you can come back
though, and if you’ve been good you’re something nice and if you’ve been bad
you might be a dung beetle.”
“Paul’ll be a dung beetle,” said Ellen. “Not that he’d smell
any better.”
“I bet you’d be a rat or something,” said Paul. “A plague
rat. Anyway, I shan’t be a dung beetle. I’m going to go back in time and be a
Goth, and I shall sack Rome.”
“A Goth?” Ellen wrinkled up her nose. “Like Dina from the
Old Rectory? With black lipstick and that funny nail through her nose.” She
frowned as she tried to imagine Dina with a sword, hacking away at slaves in
togas.
“Not that kind of Goth, silly.” He looked at his grandad.
“They were big warriors, weren’t they, with long pigtails and lots of armour.”
John was about to answer this but his phone vibrated. He
knew what the message was before he checked. He didn’t say anything for a
moment.
“Grandad?” said Ellen.
“We’d better go home now,” he said.
He crouched down in front of them. “Listen, you two. The
world is changing, every moment of every day, and people enter it and they
leave it, and we don’t know what happens to them but we know it’s nothing bad.
Those of us who stay, we feel sad but we’ll be happy tomorrow. And one day
someone will walk along the hollow way and wonder who we were, and it’s
all right. Do you understand?”
“I think so,” said Paul.
“Come on then,” he said, but before they left the water meadow he turned and looked back across the tussocky grass at the river beyond. The sky was more blue now and the sun shone between grey clouds that had brilliant white edges; the river, more a stream really, was lined with trees and the raindrops still glistened on the leaves, caught in the afternoon sun. There were oaks, and here and there a young wych elm, fighting back after the disease that had devastated them when he was a young man. I imagined we’d never see them again, he thought. I suppose everything changes; everything goes but then it comes back – yes, like people, time after time after time.
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