While the Doddoes were discouraged from the Nook, Vera’s children were welcomed. For some reason Harold Seaton’s reputation had grown in Merton’s eyes; he was now considered a quiet sort of man who thought a lot of his family and looked after them as best he could, worked hard when there was work to be had, and didn’t throw his wages away on ale while his children marauded for what they could lay their thieving hands on — like the Doddoe tribe, for instance.
On the far side of Cherry Orchard, under the clouds of cloud and trees at the edge of Serpent Wood, were two farm-labourers’ cottages, and Brian was acquainted with only a fraction of the children who spewed occasionally from the doors of both. On Saturday he walked over the open roughs, mesmerized by the long dark strip of forest crossing his horizon, drawn to it more than to the pair of cottages and often mapping it with an explorer’s mind — though rarely going to open country beyond.
A gaggle of girls rose out of a hollow, wearing similar pink frocks and holding up hands made of daisies and buttercups. They came towards him, but stopped at an intervening patch of flowers to kneel and pick them. Brian went closer, paused. One of the girls looked up and said:
“Hello.”
He felt uneasy, thrust hands deep into pockets, dug holes in the turf with his shoecaps. “Hello,” he responded.
“You live at the Mertons’, don’t you?” she said knowingly.
“How do you know?”
“We’ve seen you playing in the yard when we’ve walked past, haven’t we, Fanny? Our Alma’s towd us about you, as well.”
“I’ll help you to pick some flowers,” he said.
She didn’t like his manner, because he hadn’t asked. “If you like. You ’elp our Fanny, ’cause I’ve got a lot already.”
Fanny turned shy, but he ripped up handfuls from the moist grass, throwing them into a heap for her to sort out. “Do you want any clover? I know where there’s a lot.”
“No,” Brenda replied, “I don’t like clover. Fanny don’t either.”
“Hey, our Brenda,” Fanny shouted from a hundred yards. She was all flowers now, yellow and white, a walking cornstack with arms and pockets full. “Let’s go and get some bluebells. I know where there’s ’undreds in our wood.”
Brenda pointed to a distant hedge, and nodded. “We’ll shout Ken and John first.” Cupping hands over her mouth she screamed: “Our Ken! We’re goin’ ter get sum bluebells. Cum on!”
The boys were running up and down over the hollows. “What’s your name then?” Brenda asked. He told her, grudgingly. “Brian Merton?”
“No, Seaton. I don’t live at the Mertons’, I on’y go up there when I’m not at school.”
He was astonished, almost angry, at how much Brenda knew of him: “I knew you didn’t live at the Mertons’. He’s your grandad, ain’t he? I know your grandad, and your gra’ma because sometimes they go out with our mam and dad and the Lakers into Wood’uss, boozing.” They walked towards Ken and John near the cottages. “Your grandad sometimes goes shootin’ and I saw him at the Farm Show last year. Once, when you wasn’t there, I went an errand for him into Woodhouse, and Fanny went with me, didn’t you, Fanny?”
The mute Fanny walking by their side managed a muted affirmative. “He sent us to fetch some fags and a pint of ale.”
The boys came up. “You don’t go to our school, do you,” said Ken Arlington, a statement, not a question.
“I go to one in Nottingham,” Brian said.
“Ours is a rotten school,” Brenda complained. “Miss Barber allus gives us the strap.”
Ken pushed her in the back. “That’s because you’re cheeky.”
“I’m not cheeky,” she shouted.
“Yes, you are. I heard you chelping her off when I walked by your class window one day carrying a case of milk bottles. No wonder you get the strap every day.”
“You’re a liar,” Brenda screamed. “You tell big fibs.”
“I’ll paste yo’,” Ken said, “if you call me a liar.”
“I’ll tell your mam if you do”—which she knew would put a stop to his threats.
“Coward,” he grumbled. At the cottages Brian was fascinated by the waterpump in the Lakers’ backyard. “We don’t have one of them,” he said to Brenda. “We’ve got a well instead.”
“It’s better having a pump,” she claimed.
“Can I have a go on it?”
“No,” she said in a righteous and holy voice, “you mustn’t. It’d be wastin’ water.” They stood aside when Mr. Laker came out of the door carrying a white enamel bowl. A few vigorous ups and downs sent water belching from the iron spour, flooding the bowl he held beneath. “Gerroff an’ play, kidders,” he said. His short hair stuck out like chaff, went suddenly limp under a sluice of water.
Brian set off across the Cherry Orchard. A few hundred yards from the houses he sat down and took out a packet of cigarette-cards: flowers, sorting them into seasons.
Brenda appeared, and he gathered them back into his pocket. “I’ve found some primroses,” she announced, falling beside him. “In the wood.”
“I don’t care.”
“You would if you found them,” she taunted.
“No, I wouldn’t.”
“Yes, you would.”
“No, I wouldn’t,” he repeated, “because I don’t like primroses. They mek me sick.”
“No, they don’t. Yes, they do.”
“No, I don’t.”
“Yes, you do,” she went on with stark uncompromising persistence, almost crying. He turned away. “No, I don’t like them.”
“I’ll bash yer,” she cried, her face red with rage.
“I’ll bash yer back,” he said.
She stood up. “Well, if you don’t like primroses you’re daft, ’cause anybody who don’t like primroses is daft.”
Deadlock. They looked at each other with blank faces.
Then she said: “I love yo’, Brian.”
He was baffled. Love? His mam and dad loved each other: black eyes, split heads, table tipped over, black looks, and no fags for ever and ever. His teacher said that God loved everybody: Italians gassing blackies and mowing ’em down with machine-guns: dole, thunderstorms, school. That picture in his gra’ma’s parlour was about love.
They looked at each other.
“What have we got to do?” he asked.
She glared at him, angry again. “If you don’t like primroses, you’re daft”—and ran back towards the wood.
He gazed across the Cherry Orchard, the Nook chimneys just visible over bushes and trees. Wind bent back the longer patches of grass, and thick clouds lay across the sky. Far away, along Colliers Pad, a man was riding on a bicycle, his figure flickering through gaps in the bushes.
He advanced, but behind outposts. The Cherry Orchard was vast, remote, unfenced, a continental mile from house to house, treeless scrub and rise and dip breaking its green surface against the pillars and towers of Serpent Wood. It stained his unwary slippers or shoes with the juice of cowslip and celandine, hid him, exposed him, made him tired after a while, frightened him, but lured him on, into the wood where each leaf was alive and each stepped-on twig exploded through his vibrant nerves. By the stream bank he pulled smooth pebbles from the sand, loaded his pockets before passing between bushes and tall trunks, sometimes stopping to find a toadstool or an already rifled nest, or to skim his ammunition at a quick unhittable bird.
He crept under a fallen tree. In the wood’s centre, from where no fields could be seen and no sound heard except himself, he pulled his body into the lowest fork of a many-pronged tree, bark dust marking knees and hands, twig stumps scraping his groin as he went up. In a sitting position bushes were surveyed from above while many treetops were at eye-leveclass="underline" green humps and bracken dips of the jungle, his refuge from the punctuating black gulfs of school year and home-life that didn’t bear thinking about at times like these. Sounds came to him, the stream running, a cuckoo’s rhythmic and fluting whistle, a mooing cow from some bordering field. Primroses grew to each side of the track, and where the stream turned into a morass, tree spaces were flecked with bluebells. It was a wet wood after a long winter, soil and fungus smells weighing heavily on the air, though sun in more open spaces had turned the soil a drier colour.