On The Black Hill (Vintage Classics) (6 page)

They slept in a truckle bed, in a low-beamed room along the landing, where, in another early memory, they woke one morning to find that the ceiling was an unusual shade of grey. Peering out, they saw the snow on the larches, and the snowflakes spiralling down.

When Mary came in to dress them, they were curled, head to toe, in a heap at the bottom of the bed.

‘Don’t be silly’ she said. ‘It’s only snow.’

‘No, Mama,’ came two muffled voices from under the blankets. ‘God’s spitting.’

Apart from Sunday drives to Lurkenhope, their first excursion into the outside world was a visit to the Flower Show of 1903 when the pony shied at a dead hedgehog in the lane, and their mother won First Prize for runner beans.

They had never seen such a crowd and were bewildered by the shouts, the laughter, the flapping canvas and jingling harness, and the strangers who gave them pickaback rides round the exhibits.

They were wearing sailor-suits; and with their grave grey eyes and black hair cut in a fringe, they soon attracted a circle of admirers. Even Colonel Bickerton came up:

‘Ho! Ho! My Jolly Jack Tars!’ he said, and chucked them under the chin.

Later, he took them for a spin in his phaeton; and when he asked their names, Lewis answered Benjamin and Benjamin answered Lewis.

Then they got lost.

At four o’clock, Amos went off to pull for Rhulen in the tug-of-war; and since Mary had entered for the Ladies’ Egg-and-Spoon Race, she left the twins in charge of Mrs Griffiths Cwm Cringlyn.

Mrs Griffiths was a big, bossy, shiny-faced woman, who had twin nieces of her own and prided herself as an expert. Lining the boys up side by side, she scrutinized them all over until she found a tiny mole behind Benjamin’s right ear.

‘There now!’ she called out loud. ‘I found a difference!’ – whereupon Benjamin shot a despairing glance at his brother, who grabbed his hand, and they both dived through the spectators’ legs and hid in the marquee.

They hid under a cloth-covered trestle, under the prize-winning vegetable marrows, and so much enjoyed the view of ladies’ and gentlemen’s feet that they went on hiding until they heard their mother’s voice calling and calling in a voice more cracked and anxious than a bleating ewe.

On the way home, huddled in the back of the dog-cart, they discussed their adventure in their own secret language. And when Amos bawled out, ‘Stop that nonsense, will ye?’ Lewis piped up, ‘It’s not nonsense, Papa. It’s the language of the angels. We were born with it.’

Mary tried to drill into their heads the difference between ‘yours’ and ‘mine’. She bought them Sunday suits – a grey tweed for Lewis and blue serge for Benjamin. They wore them for half an hour, then sneaked off and came back wearing each other’s jackets. They persisted in sharing everything. They even split their sandwiches in two, and swapped the halves.

One Christmas, their presents were a fluffy teddy-bear and a felt Humpty-Dumpty, but on the afternoon of Boxing Day, they decided to sacrifice the teddy on a bonfire, and concentrate their love on ‘The Dump’.

The Dump slept on their pillow, and they took him for walks. In March, however – on a grey blustery day with catkins on the branches and slush in the lane – they decided that he, too, had come between them. So the moment Mary’s back was turned, they sat him on the bridge, and tipped him in the brook.

‘Look, Mama!’ they cried, two stony faces peeping over the parapet at the black thing bobbing downstream.

Mary saw The Dump get caught in an eddy and stick on a branch.

‘Stay there!’ she called and rushed to the rescue, only to miss her footing and almost fall into the scummy brown flood-water. Pale and dishevelled, she ran to the twins and hugged them.

‘Never mind, Mama,’ they said. ‘We never liked The Dump.’

Nor, in the following autumn, did they like their new baby sister, Rebecca.

They had pestered their mother to give them a baby sister; and when, at last, she arrived, they climbed up to the bedroom, each carrying a coppery chrysanthemum in an egg-cup full of water. They saw an angry pink creature biting Mary’s breast. They dropped their offerings on the floor, and dashed downstairs.

‘Send her away,’ they sobbed. For a whole month, they lapsed into their private language and it took them a year to tolerate her presence. One day, when Mrs Griffiths Cwm Cringlyn came to call, she found them writhing convulsively on the kitchen floor.

‘What’s up with the twins?’ she asked in alarm.

‘Take absolutely no notice,’ said Mary. ‘They’re playing at having babies.’

By the age of five, they were helping with the housework, to knead the bread dough, shape the butter-pats, and spread the sugar icing on a sponge cake. Before bedtime, Mary would reward them with a story from the Brothers Grimm or Hans Christian Andersen: their favourite was the story of the mermaid who went to live in the Mer-King’s palace at the bottom of the sea.

By six, they were reading on their own.

Amos Jones mistrusted book-learning and would growl at Mary not to ‘mollycoddle the kids’.

He gave them bird-scarers and left them alone in the oatfield to shoo away the woodpigeons. He made them mix
the
chicken-mash, and pluck and dress the birds for market. Fine weather or foul, he would sit them on his pony, one in front and one behind, and ride around the hill-flock. In autumn, they watched the ewes being tupped: five months later, they witnessed the birth of the lambs.

They had always recognized their affinity with twin lambs. Like lambs, too, they played the ‘I’m the King of the Castle’ game; and one breezy morning, as Mary was pegging up her laundry, they slipped under her apron, butted their heads against her thighs, and made noises as if suckling an udder.

‘None of that, you two,’ she laughed, and pushed them away. ‘Go and find your grandfather!’

OLD SAM HAD
come to live at The Vision, and slipped into second childhood.

He wore a moleskin waistcoat, a floppy black cap, and went around everywhere with a buckthorn stick. He slept in a cobwebby attic no bigger than a cupboard, surrounded by the few possessions he had bothered to keep: the fiddle, a pipe, a tobacco-box and a porcelain statuette picked up somewhere on his travels – of a portly gentleman with a portmanteau and an inscription round the base reading, ‘I shall start on a long journey.’

His principal occupation was to look after Amos’s pigs. Pigs, he said, ‘was more intelligent than persons’; and certainly all his six sows adored him, snorted when he rattled their swill-pail and answered, each one, to their names.

His favourite was a Large Black called Hannah; and while Hannah rootled for grubs under the apple-trees, he would scratch behind her ears and recall the more agreeable moments of his marriage.

Hannah, however, was hopeless as a mother. She crushed her first litter to death. The second time, having swelled to a colossal size, she produced a solitary male piglet, whom the twins called Hoggage and adopted as their own.

One day, when Hoggage was three months old, they decided it was time to baptize him.

‘I’ll be vicar,’ said Lewis.

‘I bags be vicar,’ said Benjamin.

‘All right! Be the vicar, then!’

It was a boiling hot day in June. The dogs lay panting in the shade of the barn. Flies were zooming and zizzing. Black cows
were
grazing below the farmhouse. The hawthorns were in flower. The whole field was black and white and green.

The twins stole out of the kitchen with an apron to wear as a surplice and a stripy towel for the christening robe. After a mad chase round the orchard, they cornered Hoggage by the hen-house and carried him squealing to the dingle. Lewis held him, while Benjamin wetted his finger and planted a cross above his snout.

But though they dosed Hoggage with worm-powders, though they stuffed him with stolen cake, and though Hoggage made up for his smallness with an amenable personality – to the extent of letting the twins take rides on his back – Hoggage remained a runt; and Amos had no use for runts. One morning in November, Sam went to the meal-shed for barley and found his son sharpening the blade of a meat-cleaver. He tried to protest, but Amos scowled and ground his whetstone even harder.

‘No sense to keep a runt,’ he said.

‘But not Hoggage?’ Sam stammered.

‘I said, no sense to keep a runt.’

To get them out of earshot, the old man took his grandsons mushrooming on the hill. When they came home at dusk, Benjamin saw the pool of blood beside the meal-shed door and, through a chink, saw Hoggage’s carcass hanging from a hook.

Both boys held back their tears until bedtime; and then they soaked their pillow through.

Later, Mary came to believe they never forgave their father for the murder. They acted dumb if he taught them some job on the farm. They cringed when he tried to pet them; and when he petted their sister Rebecca, they hated him even more. They planned to run away. They spoke in low, conspiratorial whispers behind his back. Finally, even Mary lost patience and pleaded, ‘Please be nice to Papa.’ But their eyes spat venom and they said, ‘He killed our Hoggage.’

THE TWINS LOVED
to go on walks with their grandfather, and had two particular favourites – a ‘Welsh walk’ up the mountain, and an ‘English walk’ to Lurkenhope Park.

The ‘Welsh walk’ was only practical in fine weather. Often, they would set out in sunshine, only to come home soaked to the skin. And equally often, when walking down to Lurkenhope, they would look back at the veil of grey rain to the west while, overhead, the clouds broke into blue and butterflies fluttered over the sunlit cow-parsley.

Half a mile before the village, they passed the mill of Maesyfelin and the Congregational Chapel beside it. Then came two ranks of estate workers’ cottages, with leggy red-brick chimneys and gardens full of cabbages and lupins. Across the village green a second, Baptist Chapel squinted at the church, the vicarage and the Bannut Tree Inn. There was a screen of ancient yews around the Anglican graveyard: the half-timbering of the belfry was said to represent the Three Crosses of Golgotha.

Sam always stopped at the pub for a pint of cider and a game of skittles with Mr Godber the publican. And sometimes, if the game dragged on, old Mrs Godber would come out with mugs of lemonade for the twins. She made them bawl into her ear-trumpet and, if she liked what they said, she’d give them each a threepenny bit and tell them not to spend it on sweeties – whereupon they would race to the Post Office, and race back again, their chins smudged over with chocolate.

Another five minutes’ walk brought them to the West Lodge of the park. From there, a carriage-drive looped
downhill
through stands of oaks and chestnuts. Fallow deer browsed under the branches, flicking their tails at the flies, their bellies shining silvery in the deep pools of shade. The sound of human voices scared them, and their white scuts bobbed away through the bracken.

The twins had a friend in Mr Earnshaw, the head-gardener, a short, sinewy man with china-blue eyes, who was a frequent guest at Mary’s tea-parties. They usually found him in the potting-shed, in a leather apron, with crescents of black loam under his fingernails.

They loved to inhale the balmy tropical air of the hothouse; to stroke the bloom on white peaches, or peer at orchids with faces like monkeys in picture books. They never came away without a present – a cineraria or a waxy red begonia – and even seventy years later, Benjamin could point to a pink geranium and say, ‘That’s from a cutting we had off of Earnshaw.’

The lawns of the castle fell away in terraces towards the lake. On the shore stood a boathouse built of pine-logs and, one day, hiding in the rhododendrons, the twins saw the boat!

Its varnished hull came whispering towards them through the waterlilies. Combs of water fell from the oars. The oarsman was a boy in a red-striped blazer; and in the stern, half-hidden under a white parasol, sat a girl in a lilac dress. Her fair hair hung in thick tresses, and she trailed her fingers through the lapping green wavelets.

Back at The Vision, the twins rushed up to Mary:

‘We’ve seen Miss Bickerton,’ they clamoured in unison. As she kissed them goodnight, Lewis whispered, ‘Mama, when I grow up I’m going to marry Miss Bickerton,’ and Benjamin burst into tears.

To go on the ‘Welsh walk’ they used to tramp over the fields to Cock-a-loftie, a shepherd’s cottage left derelict since the land-enclosures. Then they crossed a stone stile on to the moor, and followed a pony-trail northwards, with the screes of the mountain rising steeply on the left. Beyond a spinney of birches, they came to a barn and longhouse, standing amid
heaps
of broken wall. A jet of smoke streamed sideways from the chimney. There were a few contorted ash-trees, a few pussy-willows, and the rim of the muddy pond was covered with bits of goose fluff.

This was the homestead of the Watkins family, Craig-y-Fedw, ‘The Rock of the Birches’ – better known locally as ‘The Rock’.

On the twins’ first visit, sheepdogs barked and yanked at their chains; a scrawny red-haired boy ran for the house; and Aggie Watkins came out, blocking the doorway in a long black skirt and an apron made of gunny-sack.

She blinked into the sun but on recognizing the walkers she smiled.

‘Oh! It’s thee, Sam,’ she said. ‘An’ you’ll stay and have a cup of tea.’

She was a thin, stooped woman with wens on her face, a bluish complexion and strands of loose, lichenous hair that blew about in the breeze.

Outside the door were the stacks of planks that Tom Watkins used for making his coffins.

‘An’ it’s a pity you missed Old Tom,’ she went on. ‘Him and the mule be gone with a coffin for poor Mrs Williams Cringoed as died of her lungs.’

Tom Watkins made the cheapest coffins in the county, and sold them to people who were too mean or too poor to pay for a proper funeral.

‘And them be the twins!’ she said, folding her arms. ‘Church-folk, same as Amos and Mary?’

‘Church,’ said Sam.

‘And the Lord have mercy! Bring ’em in!’

The kitchen wall had been freshly whitewashed, but the rafters were black with soot and the dirt floor was scabbed with dried fowl-droppings. Ash-grey bantams strutted in and out, pecking up the scraps that had fallen from the table. In the room beyond, a box-bed was piled with blankets and overcoats; and above it hung a framed text: ‘The Voice of One Crying in the Wilderness. Prepare Ye the Way of the Lord, make His Paths straight …’