Then Rummins’ voice, louder than usual, edged with an unmistakable apprehension that the loudness did nothing to conceal: ‘Some of them haymakers is too bloody careless what they put on a rick these days.’
He paused, and again the silence, the men motionless, and across the road Claud leaning motionless against the red pump. It was so quiet suddenly we could hear a woman’s voice far down the valley on the next farm calling the men to food.
Then Rummins again, shouting where there was no need to shout: ‘Go on, then! Go on an’ cut through it, Bert! A little stick of wood won’t hurt the soddin’ knife!’
For some reason, as though perhaps scenting trouble, Claud came strolling across the road and joined me leaning on the gate. He didn’t say anything, but both of us seemed to know that there was something disturbing about these two men, about the stillness that surrounded them and especially about Rummins himself. Rummins was frightened. Bert was frightened too. And now as I watched them, I became conscious of a small vague image moving just below the surface of my memory. I tried desperately to reach back and grasp it. Once I almost touched it, but it slipped away and when I went after it I found myself travelling back and back through many weeks, back into the yellow days of summer – the warm wind blowing down the valley from the south, the big beech trees heavy with their foliage, the fields turning to gold, the harvesting, the haymaking, the rick – the building of the rick.
Instantly I felt a fine electricity of fear running over the skin of my stomach.
Yes – the building of the rick. When was it we had built it? June? That was it, of course – a hot muggy day in June with the clouds low overhead and the air thick with the smell of thunder.
And Rummins had said, ‘Let’s for God’s sake get it in quick before the rain comes.’
And Ole Jimmy had said, ‘There ain’t going to be no rain. And there ain’t no hurry either. You know very well when thunder’s in the south it don’t cross over into the valley.’
Rummins, standing up in the cart handing out the pitchforks, had not answered him. He was in a furious brooding temper because of his anxiety about getting in the hay before it rained.
‘There ain’t gin’ to be no rain before evening.’ Ole Jimmy had repeated, looking at Rummins; and Rummins had stared back at him, the eyes glimmering with a slow anger.
All through the morning we had worked without a pause, loading the hay into the cart, trundling it across the field, pitching it out on to the slowly growing rick that stood over by the gate opposite the filling-station. We could hear the thunder in the south as it came towards us and moved away again. Then it seemed to return and remain stationary somewhere beyond the hills, rumbling intermittently. When we looked up we could see the clouds overhead moving and changing shape in the turbulence of the upper air, but on the ground it was hot and muggy and there was no breath of wind. We worked slowly, listlessly, in the heat, shirts wet with sweat, faces shining.
Claud and I had worked beside Rummins on the rick itself, helping to shape it, and I could remember how very hot it had been and the flies around my face and the sweat pouring out everywhere; and especially I could remember the grim scowling presence of Rummins beside me, working with a desperate urgency and watching the sky and shouting at the men to hurry.
At noon, in spite of Rummins, we had knocked off for lunch.
Claud and I had sat down under the hedge with Ole Jimmy and another man called Wilson who was a soldier home on leave, and it was too hot to do much talking. Wilson had some bread and cheese and a canteen of cold tea. Ole Jimmy had a satchel that was an old gas-mask container, and in this, closely packed, standing upright with their necks protruding, were six pint bottles of beer.
‘Come on,’ he said, offering a bottle to each of us.
‘I’d like to buy one from you,’ Claud said, knowing very well the old man had little money.
‘Take it.’
‘I must pay you.’
‘Don’t be so daft. Drink it.’
He was a very good old man, good and clean, with a clean pink face that he shaved each day. He had used to be a carpenter, but they retired him at the age of seventy and that was some years before. Then the Village Council, seeing him still active, had given him the job of looking after the newly built children’s playground, of maintaining the swings and see-saws in good repair and also of acting as a kind of gentle watchdog, seeing that none of the kids hurt themselves or did anything foolish.
That was a fine job for an old man to have and everybody seemed pleased with the way things were going – until a certain Saturday night. That night Ole Jimmy had got drunk and gone reeling and singing down the middle of the High Street with such a howling noise that people got out of their beds to see what was going on below. The next morning they had sacked him, saying he was a waster and a drunkard not fit to associate with young children in the playground.
But then an astonishing thing happened. The first day that he stayed away – a Monday it was – not one single child came near the playground.
Nor the next day, nor the one after that.
All week the swings and the see-saws and the high slide with steps going up to it stood deserted. Not a child went near them. Instead they followed Ole Jimmy out into a field behind the rectory and played their games there with him watching; and the result of
