Ghost Wall(3)

Whether the gruel was rye or barley, it was still resisting the actions of heat and water when the students turned up. Grains bobbled like dead maggots. Did we put too much water in, I asked Mum, isn’t it meant to be going kind of gluey? You’ll have to be up and about earlier than this tomorrow, you two, Dad said, folk need to eat, this won’t do. I could see he wanted us to do something, speed up the heating of water and the expansion of grain. The agitation of molecules, I thought, remembering Chemistry GCSE. I took the carved paddle and stirred, made the maggots swim in one direction. It wasn’t fair for Dad to tell us off for oversleeping when he’d made us leave our watches at home and kept talking about the benefits of life without clocks. Folk lived by their bellies and the sun, then, weren’t forever counting off the minutes, folk knew patience in the old days.

We heard voices, laughter – I glanced at Dad, who didn’t always like it when people laughed – and the students came up the path. Pete, I remembered, Dan, and the girl was Molly. Last night, the first night, they had been in jeans but today they were wearing their tunics and looking no less silly than I did. Gorgeous legs, said Dan to Pete as they came out of the trees. Yeah well, Pete said, you’re flashing us your tits mate, think you’ve got something a bit wrong there. Tits. I looked again at Dad but he wasn’t looking, wasn’t listening. Molly came behind them, tunic pinned with a CND badge and her fair hair in two plaits secured with elastic bobbles with red plastic cherries on them. There were colours in her hair like the grain in polished pine and you could follow them all the way down the plaits. I’m sorry, said Mum, I’m late with breakfast, it’ll be a while yet. No, said Dan, it’s fine, we don’t have meal times, Jim keeps saying. We just eat when it’s ready. Jim, I thought, Professor Slade. Can I help you, Alison, said Molly, really, there’s no reason you should do it all. Mum’s eyes met mine. Alison. My friends called her Mrs Hampton. No, she said, you’re all right, happen I can stir a pan, you get on. They sat in the sun, the students, chatted, teased each other, used some words I’d only read, laughed when they felt like it. I pottered, gathering kindling, more or less, staying far enough away not to look as if I wanted to join in but mostly near enough to hear what they were saying. Plans for later in the summer, ‘going travelling’ as if just moving around counted as a rational use of time and money. Inter-rail passes, Rome and Paris. Now you can go to Prague and Budapest too, said Dan, my sister did last year, before everyone started going. Pete had already been to Berlin, after his exams, had seen some of the wall come down. I’ve got a chunk of it, he said, at home, it’s pink because there were murals and graffiti on it already, it was dead cool, we sat on it and there were people with guitars and singing, beers all night, they don’t have closing time there. Only it’s actually a bit sad because everyone’s just nicking bits of it now, the wall, and if they keep going there’ll be even less of it left than Hadrian’s by the end of the century, you could kind of see the streets joining up again, fusing. I want to go there, said Molly, I’d like to see it for myself. Going to Berlin, I thought. How do you get to Berlin, can you start at the bus stop, do you take an aeroplane or the train, several trains? I knew many of the British isles, Holy Island and Anglesey, the Orkneys and several of the Hebrides, but I had never been overseas. We didn’t have passports. Where was the money coming from, what did Dan and Pete and Molly’s parents think of these plans? Dad went off into the woods, stiff-necked, and Mum’s face darkened, her shoulders hunched as she stirred the pot, as if there were clouds gathering that only she could see.

The Professor appeared after breakfast and started organising people in a way that made me wonder if he thought there were Iron Age professors, or maybe as if he couldn’t imagine that there were circumstances in which qualities other than being posh and having read a lot might put a person in charge of everyone else. My dad, I thought, knew as much as anyone about living wild off the land, foraging and fishing and finding your way. You and you, go look for edible plants in this area, said the Prof. Make sure you’re back by half-three, the basket-weaver’s coming to do a workshop. Bill, come with me for fishing. Alison – he looked perplexed, perhaps suddenly unsure if he was allowed to tell Dad’s wife what to do – could you maybe, well, sort out the camp a bit, if you don’t mind? What about me, I said, what will I do? Go with the foraging party, said Dad, maybe you’ll learn summat, but you’re not to wander off and don’t make a nuisance of yourself, this might be fun and games to you but it’s these folks’ work, their studies, I’ll not have you messing around. It’s not a game to me either, I said, we have to eat, course I’ll go foraging.

They had the OS map and a forager’s handbook. Well, said the Prof, only compensating for the local knowledge Ancient British youth would have had, your education isn’t going to help you much with what they’d have known since childhood. We each took a skin bag and set out along the footpath towards the moor. There were, of course, dry stone walls and fields of cattle and a line of pylons against the sky and indeed a tarmac road on which one red car crawled near the horizon. If the occupants saw us, I thought, first they’d think we were ghosts and then they might wonder if they’d driven back in time. My hands and teeth clenched with the strength of my hope that they would not see us. The day was already hot, sweat prickling on my back and heather floating in mirage above the nearest rise. Underfoot, the path was soft with dust, white roots jutting like birdbones from the dry earth.