As for Julie and me: we’ve moved away from the sea, and come summer, we won’t be going out in the sun too much or for too long. That helps a little. But every now and then, I’ll wake up in the night, in a cold sweat, and find Julie doing her horrible thing: nightmaring about Dimitrios, hiding from him, holding her breath so that he won’t hear her—
—And sometimes screaming her silent screams…
THE PICNICKERS
This story comes from a long time ago. I was a boy, so that shows how long ago it was. Part of it is from memory, and the rest is a reconstruction built up over the years through times when I’ve given it a lot of thought, filling in the gaps; for I wasn’t privy to everything that happened that time, which is perhaps as well. But I do know that I’m prone to nightmares, and I believe that this is where they have their roots, so maybe getting it down on paper is my rite of exorcism. I hope so.
The summers were good and hot in those days, and no use anyone telling me that that’s just an old man speaking, who only remembers the good things; they were better summers! I could, and did, go down to the beach at Harden every day. I’d get burned black by the time school came around again at the end of the holidays. The only black you’d get on that beach these days would be from the coal dust. In fact there isn’t a beach any more, just a sloping moonscape of slag from the pits, scarred by deep gulleys where polluted water gurgles down to a scummy, foaming black sea.
But at that time…men used to crab on the rocks when the tide was out, and cast for cod right off the sandbar where the small waves broke. And the receding sea would leave blue pools where we could swim in safety. Well, there’s probably still sand down there, but it’s ten foot deep under the strewn black guts of the mines, and the only pools now are pools of slurry.
It was summer when the gypsies came, the days were long and hot, and the beach was still a great drift of aching white sand.
Gypsies. They’ve changed, too, over the years. Now they travel in packs, motorized, in vehicles that shouldn’t even be on the roads: furtive and scruffy, long-haired thieves who nobody wants and who don’t much try to be wanted. Or perhaps I’m prejudiced. Anyway, they’re not the real thing any more. But in those days they were. Most of them, anyway…
Usually they’d come in packets of three or four families, small communities plodding the roads in their intricately painted, hand-carved horse-drawn caravans, some with canvas roofs and some wooden; all brass and black leather, varnished wood and lacquered chimney-stacks, wrinkled brown faces and shiny brown eyes; with clothes pegs and various gew-gaws, hammered trinkets and rings that would turn your fingers green, strange songs sung for halfpennies and fortunes told from the lines in your hand. And occasionally a curse if someone was bad to them and theirs.
My uncle was the local doctor. He’d lost his wife in the Great War and never remarried. She’d been a nurse and died somewhere on a battlefield in France. After the war he’d travelled a lot in Europe and beyond, spent years on the move, not wanting to settle. And when she was out of his system (not that she ever was, not really; her photographs were all over the house) then he had come home again to England, to the north-east where he’d been born. In the summers my parents would go down from Edinburgh to see him, and leave me there with him for company through the holidays.
This summer in question would be one of the last—of that sort, anyway—for the next war was already looming; of course, we didn’t know that then.
“Gypsies, Sandy!” he said that day, just home from the mine where there’d been an accident. He was smudged with coal dust, which turned his sweat black where it dripped off him, with a pale band across his eyes and a white dome to his balding head from the protection of a miner’s helmet.
“Gypsies?” I said, all eager. “Where?”
“Over in Slater’s copse. Seen ’em as I came over the viaduct. One caravan at least. Maybe there’ll be more later.”
That was it: I was supposed to run now, over the fields to the copse, to see the gypsies. That way I wouldn’t ask questions about the accident in the mine. Uncle Zachary didn’t much like to talk about his work, especially if the details were unpleasant or the resolution an unhappy one. But I wanted to know anyway. “Was it bad, down the mine?”
He nodded, the smile slipping from his grimy face as he saw that I’d seen through his ruse. “A bad one, aye,” he said. “A man’s lost his legs and probably his life. I did what I could.” Following which he hadn’t wanted to say any more. And so I went off to see the gypsies.
Before I actually left the house, though, I ran upstairs to my attic room. From there, through the binoculars Uncle Zachary had given me for my birthday, I could see a long, long way. And I could even see if he’d been telling the truth about the gypsies, or just pulling my leg as he sometimes did, a simple way of distracting my attention from the accident. I used to sit for hours up there, using those binoculars through my dormer window, scanning the land all about.
To the south lay the colliery: “Harden Pit”, as the locals called it. Its chimneys were like long, thin guns aimed at the sky; its skeletal towers with their huge spoked wheels turning, lifting or lowering the cages; and at night its angry red coke ovens roaring, discharging their yellow and white-blazing tonnage to be hosed down into mounds of foul-steaming coke.
Harden Pit lay beyond the viaduct with its twin lines of tracks glinting in the sunlight, shimmering in a heat haze. From here, on the knoll where Uncle Zachary’s house stood—especially from my attic window—I could actually look down on the viaduct a little, see the shining tracks receding toward the colliery. The massive brick structure that supported them had been built when the collieries first opened up, to provide transport for the black gold, one viaduct out of many spanning the becks and streams of the north-east where they ran to the sea. “Black gold”, they’d called coal even then, when it cost only a few shillings per hundredweight!
This side of the viaduct and towards the sea cliffs, there stood Slater’s Copse, a close-grown stand of oaks, rowans, hawthorns and hazelnuts. Old Slater was a farmer who had sold up to the coal industry, but he’d kept back small pockets of land for his and his family’s enjoyment, and for the enjoyment of everyone else in the colliery communities. Long after this whole area was laid to waste, Slater’s patches of green would still be here, shady oases in the grey and black desert.
And in the trees of Slater’s Copse…Uncle Zachary hadn’t been telling stories after all! I could glimpse the varnished wood, the young shire horse between his shafts, the curve of a spoked wheel behind a fence.
And so I left the house, ran down the shrub-grown slope of the knoll and along the front of the cemetery wall, then straight through the graveyard itself and the gate on the far side, and so into the fields with their paths leading to the new coast road on the one side and the viaduct on the other. Forsaking the paths, I forged through long grasses laden with pollen, leaving a smoky trail in my wake as I made for Slater’s Copse and the gypsies.
Now, you might wonder why I was so taken with gypsies and gypsy urchins. But the truth is that even old Zachary in his rambling house wasn’t nearly so lonely as me. He had his work, calls to make every day, and his surgery in Essingham five nights a week. But I had no one. With my ‘posh’ Edinburgh accent, I didn’t hit it off with the colliery boys. Them with their hard, swaggering ways, and their harsh north-eastern twang. They called themselves ‘Geordies’, though they weren’t from Newcastle at all; and me, I was an outsider. Oh, I could look after myself. But why fight them when I could avoid them? And so the gypsies and I had something in common: we didn’t belong here. I’d played with the gypsies before.