But not with this lot.
Approaching the copse, I saw a boy my own age and a woman, probably his mother, taking water from a spring. They heard me coming, even though the slight summer breeze off the sea favoured me, and looked up. I waved…but their faces were pale under their dark cloth hats, where their eyes were like blots on old parchment. They didn’t seem like my kind of gypsies at all. Or maybe they’d had trouble recently, or were perhaps expecting trouble. There was only one caravan and so they were one family on its own.
Then, out of the trees at the edge of the copse, the head of the family appeared. He was tall and thin, wore the same wide-brimmed cloth hat, looked out at me from its shade with eyes like golden triangular lamps. It could only have been a sunbeam, catching him where he stood with the top half of his body shaded; paradoxically, at the same time the sun had seemed to fade a little in the sky. But it was strange and I stopped moving forward, and he stood motionless, just looking. Behind him stood a girl, a shadow in the trees; and in the dappled gloom her eyes, too, were like candle-lit turnip eyes in October.
“Hallo!” I called from only fifty feet away. But they made no answer, turned their backs on me and melted back into the copse. So much for ‘playing’ with the gypsies! With this bunch, anyway. But…I could always try again later. When they’d settled in down here.
I went to the viaduct instead.
The viaduct both fascinated and frightened me at one and the same time. Originally constructed solely to accommodate the railway, with the addition of a wooden walkway it also provided miners who lived in one village but worked in the other with a shortcut to their respective collieries. On this side, a mile to the north, stood Essingham; on the other, lying beyond the colliery itself and inland a half-mile or so toward the metalled so-called ‘coast road’, Harden. The viaduct fascinated me because of the trains, shuddering and rumbling over its three towering arches, and scared me because of its vertiginous walkway.
The walkway had been built on the ocean-facing side of the viaduct, level with the railway tracks but separated from them by the viaduct’s wall. It was of wooden planks protected on the otherwise open side by a fence of staves five feet high. Upward-curving iron arms fixed in brackets underneath held the walkway aloft, alone sustaining it against gravity’s unending exertions. But they always looked dreadfully thin and rusty to me, those metal supports, and the vertical distance between them and the valley’s floor seemed a terribly great one. In fact it was about one hundred and fifty feet. Not a terrific height, really, but it only takes a fifth of that to kill or maim a man if he falls.
I had an ambition: to walk across it from one end to the other. So far my best attempt had taken me a quarterway across before being forced back. The trouble was the trains. The whistle of a distant train was always sufficient to send me flying, heart hammering, racing to get off the walkway before the train got onto the viaduct! But this time I didn’t even make it that far. A miner, hurrying towards me from the other side, recognized me and called: “Here, lad! Are you the young ’un stayin’ with Zach Gardner?”
“Yes, sir,” I answered as he stamped closer. He was in his ‘pit black’, streaked with sweat, his boots clattering on the wooden boards.
“Here,” he said again, groping in a grimy pocket. “A threepenny bit!” He pressed the coin into my hand. “Now run! God knows you can go faster than me! Tell your uncle he’s to come at once to Joe Anderson’s. The ambulance men won’t move him. Joe won’t let them! He’s delirious but he’s hangin’ on. We diven’t think for long, though.”
“The accident man?”
“Aye, that’s him. Joe’s at home. He says he can feel his legs but not the rest of his body. It’d be reet funny, that, if it wasn’t so tragic. Bloody cages! He’ll not be the last they trap! Now scramble, lad, d’you hear?”
I scrambled, glad of any excuse to turn away yet again from the challenge of the walkway.
Nowadays…a simple telephone call. And in those days, too, we had the phone; some of us. But Zachary Gardner hated them. Likewise cars, though he did keep a motorcycle and sidecar for making his rounds. Across the fields and by the copse I sped, aware of faces in the trees but not wasting time looking at them, and through the graveyard and up the cobbled track to the flat crest of the knoll, to where my uncle stood in the doorway in his shirtsleeves, all scrubbed clean again. And I gasped out my message.
Without a word, nodding, he went to the lean-to and started up the bike, and I climbed slowly and dizzily to my attic room, panting my lungs out. I took up my binoculars and watched the shining ribbon of road to the west, until Uncle Zachary’s bike and sidecar came spurting into view, the banging of its pistons unheard at this distance; and I continued to watch him until he disappeared out of sight toward Harden, where a lone spire stood up, half-hidden by a low hill. He came home again at dusk, very quiet, and we heard the next day how Joe Anderson had died that night.
The funeral was five days later at two in the afternoon; I watched for a while, but the bowed heads and the slim, sagging frame of the miner’s widow distressed me and made me feel like a voyeur. So I watched the gypsies picnicking instead.
They were in the field next to the graveyard, but separated from it by a high stone wall. The field had lain fallow for several years and was deep in grasses, thick with clovers and wild flowers. And up in my attic room, I was the only one who knew the gypsies were there at all. They had arrived as the ceremony was finishing and the first handful of dirt went into the new grave. They sat on their coloured blanket in the bright sunlight, faces shaded by their huge hats, and I thought: how odd! For while they had picnic baskets with them, they didn’t appear to be eating. Maybe they were saying some sort of gypsy grace first. Long, silent prayers for the provision of their food. Their bowed heads told me that must be it. Anyway, their inactivity was such that I quickly grew bored and turned my attention elsewhere…
The shock came (not to me, you understand, for I was only on the periphery of the thing, a child, to be seen and not heard) only three days later. The first shock of several, it came first to Harden village, but like a pebble dropped in a still pond its ripples began spreading almost at once.
It was this: the recently widowed Muriel Anderson had committed suicide, drowning herself in the beck under the viaduct. Unable to bear the emptiness, still stunned by her husband’s absence, she had thought to follow him. But she’d retained sufficient of her senses to leave a note: a simple plea that they lay her coffin next to his, in a single grave. There were no children, no relatives; the funeral should be simple, with as few people as possible. The sooner she could be with Joe again the better, and she didn’t want their reunion complicated by crowds of mourners. Well, things were easier in those days. Her grief quickly became the grief of the entire village, which almost as quickly dispersed, but her wishes were respected.
From my attic room I watched the gravediggers at work on Joe Anderson’s plot, shifting soil which hadn’t quite settled yet, widening the hole to accommodate two coffins. And later that afternoon I watched them climb out of the hole, and saw the way they scratched their heads. Then they separated and went off, one towards Harden on a bicycle, heading for the viaduct shortcut, and the other coming my way, towards the knoll, coming no doubt to speak with my Uncle Zachary. Idly, I looked for the gypsies then, but they weren’t picnicking that day and I couldn’t find them around their caravan. And so, having heard the gravedigger’s cautious knock at the door of the house, and my uncle letting him in, I went downstairs to the latter’s study.