Skip to main content
Read page text
page 16
8 Ro ckery My neighbour’s telling me what I could grow there but my mind is unrolling the word and here attached to the end of it is ‘stones’, and at once I’m five, playing in the garden with toy animals, setting them up in hollows of damp gravel between limestone peaks. So many ages they’ve stood forgotten – ‘You’ll find plenty of things to plant there,’ he says. Behind the camels and elephants, in a wartime window, a baby sucks at my mother’s breast. Yesterday I was allowed to watch but today the twins are sickly and I’m out here among sharp-edged rockery stones, seeking company. War comes from outside but not their illness. My jealousy caused that. Days later it’s dark. I’m in the armchair trying to cuddle the fierce blue rabbit. The twins have died. Guilty, I clutch its unloved head and stare through no longer blacked-out windows past the humps of the rockery where the malevolent crocodile and tiger crouching neglected await their resurrection decades later when a bewildered neighbour in another garden suggests aubretia but is thanked with tears.
page 17
ilk War’s end: we were resuming, in a shadowy world, the burden of peace; patiently, patiently beginning. Outside the infants’ dining hall two air-raid shelter humps (haunted, they said) resembled graves. Milk, white among dampness, waited for playtime. Job’s Dairy, the bottle told me: a patriarch, unseen in early morning, clattering to school with rough crates tangling his windy beard. Then a first ha’porth of learning took hold of me: it was job, like a job, like something simple you get up and do. War finished, you begin on peace like a favourite pudding. Later I was told, no, it was Jōb. Peace harsh on the tongue, chewy and difficult, was cold and necessary like milk. Single planes overhead at night droned like speeches; through lanes at evening went canvassers foraging for votes. 9

Page Text

View plaintext

8 Ro ckery

My neighbour’s telling me what I could grow there but my mind is unrolling the word and here attached to the end of it is ‘stones’, and at once I’m five, playing in the garden with toy animals, setting them up in hollows of damp gravel between limestone peaks. So many ages they’ve stood forgotten – ‘You’ll find plenty of things to plant there,’ he says. Behind the camels and elephants, in a wartime window, a baby sucks at my mother’s breast. Yesterday I was allowed to watch but today the twins are sickly and I’m out here among sharp-edged rockery stones, seeking company. War comes from outside but not their illness. My jealousy caused that. Days later it’s dark. I’m in the armchair trying to cuddle the fierce blue rabbit. The twins have died. Guilty, I clutch its unloved head and stare through no longer blacked-out windows past the humps of the rockery where the malevolent crocodile and tiger crouching neglected await their resurrection decades later when a bewildered neighbour in another garden suggests aubretia but is thanked with tears.

read next page

My Bookmarks

Buy this Book
Skip to main content