On a knoll on the far side of the water stood one of the five old round towers the Hamsters called giants' gaffs, foglight flashing from its chipped wall. Good, solid Ingish names - all from the Book, all established on Ham from time out of mind, as rooted as smoothbark and crinkleleaf.Īt the top of the slope the land formed a sharp ridge, which fell away in narrow terraces to the waters of Hel Bä. Between them the nine lads represented all the six families of Ham, the Brudis, Funches, Edduns, Bulluks, Ridmuns and Dévúshes. Then Gari Edduns uttered the salutation, and Peet Bulluk made the response - and so it went along the line. Ware2, guv, Sam Brudi chipped in - and his brother Billi chimed up: Ware2, guv, said Billi Brudi, catching Carl's eye as they reached the linchet bordering the next rip and together stepped over it. Now the ripening wheatie stood as high as his knees, and it looked as if it would be a good crop this year - not that Carl would necessarily be there to see the mummies grind it under the autumn foglamp, their bare breasts nuzzling the hot stone of their querns as they bent sweatily to the graft. There were no wheels on Ham - save for symbols of them - and therefore no cars or vans either, so the Hamsterwomen tilled the long rips themselves - a team of six yoked to the island's sole plough, with its heavy irony share. Next the mummies laboriously dragged truckle after truckle of the mixture up from the manor, before spreading and digging it into the earth with their mattocks. The motos had deftly laid their own fresh dung, but the other ingredients had to be dug from the byres, scraped from the rocks and gathered from the shore by the older girls and opares. Despite everything, Carl remained the acknowledged gaffer of this group, and, as he swerved off the path along one of the linchets dividing the rips, the other eight followed suit, so that the whole party were walking abreast, following the bands of wheatie as they rolled up the rise.Ĭarl remembered how this ground had been in buddout, each rip mounded with a mixture of moto dung, seaweed, birdshit and roof straw. Up from the manor in a line behind Carl came the older lads - those between ten and fourteen years old - whose graft it was to oversee the motos' wallowing, before assigning the beasts their day's toil. Reedy whoops of joy reached Carl's ears, and he wished he could go with them into Norfend, galumphing through the undergrowth, sloshing into the boggy hollows to flush out the motos, then herd them towards their wallows. Carl saw brown legs, tan T-shirts and mops of curly hair flashing among the trunks as the young Hamsters scattered into the woodland. These thick-trunked, stunted crinkleleafs bordered the cultivated land with a dark, shimmering froth. The little kids who'd left the manor with Carl had run on ahead, up the slope towards the Layn, the Avenue of trees that formed the spine of Ham. To the south a few gulls soared above the denser greenery of the Ferbiddun Zön. Bees, drugged by the heat, lay down in the flowers, ants reclined on beds of leaf mould, flying rats gave a liquid coo-burble - then stoppered up. The real island was quite as vivified as any toyist vision, the southeast-facing undulation of land audibly hummed. The whole lustrous shell was picked out by a palisade of blisterweed, the lacy umbels of which trimmed the entire shoreline.
The waters intensified the beetle island's myriad greens: its golden wheatie crop, its purple, blue and mauve flowering buddy spike, its yellowy banks of pricklebush and its feathery stands of fireweed. Wot if Eye woz up vair, Carl thought, up vair lyke ve Flyin I? He put himself in this lofty perspective and saw Ham, floating like a water beetle, thrusting out angled legs of grey stone deep into the placid waters of its ultramarine lagoon. The sea mist had retreated offshore, where it hovered, a white-grey bank merging with the blue screen above. As he gained height and looked back over his shoulder, Carl saw first the homely notch of Manna Bä, then the shrub-choked slopes of the Gayt rising up beyond it. Although it was still early in the first tariff, the foglamp had already bored through the cloud and boiled the dew off the island. Edward Thomas, The South CountryĬarl Dévúsh, spindle-shanked, bleach-blond, lampburnt, twelve years old, kicked up buff puffs of sand with his bare feet as he scampered along the path from the manor. Pitifully up, adding flowers - as an unknown hand added them to Sheet and her worms to fill in the graves, and her grass to cover it I like to think how easily Nature will absorb London as sheĪbsorbed the mastodon, setting her spiders to spin the winding
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