Читать книгу The Buried Circle - Jenni Mills - Страница 10

Next morning everything seems brighter. Frannie has her hat on, ready to stump off to church with a sunny grin on her face, carrying two cans of carrot soup as her harvest offering.

‘Off to do good works?’

‘Being good in’t what takes a body to church. You don’t want to come?’ Dying to show me off to her friends. My granddaughter, works in telly…

‘I’d prefer to get straight first. Unpack, maybe go for a walk. Tell you what, I’ll stroll with you to Big Avebury’

It’s glorious weather: deep blue sky, and the beech leaves shivering in a gentle wind, the first loving nip of autumn. The stones have already snagged the day’s first minibus-load of visiting hippies, who are wandering through the inner circle behind the Methodist chapel-cum-tourist office. Another half-dozen people are marching fat-tyred pushchairs round the top of the banks. Frannie meets one of her friends in the high street, and the pair of them totter through the churchyard together to St James’s. I sit on the bench by the lich-gate, to check the map for the route of my walk. A ragged ‘We plough the fields and scatter…’ floats from the church as I set off.

It takes me nearly half an hour from Avebury at a brisk clip. The fields either side of the broad, level track are indeed ploughed, greyish-white flint scattered across the brown earth. I’m ever hopeful that one day I’ll spot a prehistoric stone arrowhead, a perfect leaf shape, lying on the surface, and every so often something catches my eye–disappointingly, when I stoop to check, always a leaf.

Yatesbury boasted an airfield used during the First and Second World Wars, mostly for training. The RAF closed the base some years ago, and microlights fly out of there now. The church, crouched like a grey rabbit among trees, is silent; Sunday services must rotate from parish to parish. Ancient yews shade the path to its door. An old box tomb leans at an angle defying the laws of geometry. The grass between the graves hasn’t been cut for a while, and the hems of my trousers are soon soaked.

It isn’t difficult to find Grandad’s memorial. At the far end of the churchyard there are several rows of white stones with RAF insignia. Young men’s graves, blank tablets of unlived lives. Like Steve’s. For a moment, I have a creepy sensation of him here too, behind me, sitting with his back against the box tomb watching me as I walk slowly along the ranks of headstones.

Grandad is about halfway along the third row–at least, I assume this is Grandad, because he’s the only Davey or David among the Second World War graves. David Fergusson. Stupidly, I’d been expecting his surname to be Robinson, even though I knew that was Fran’s family name. Either she’d reverted to her maiden name or maybe she’s coy about him because they were never married. No big deal now, but I suppose she’d have wanted to keep it quiet then.

Blackbirds chirp and commute from yew trees to hedge. Autumn sunlight glints on dewy cobwebs slung between the headstones. Davey’s is simple: his name, his age–twenty-four, making him, when he died, a year younger than I am–the date of his death, the words In loving memory. How little there is left to know of a person, then: not even his birth date. I didn’t bring flowers, and I’m sorry for that now. My eyes fill as I imagine what it must have been like for Fran, already pregnant, hearing the news that her baby’s father had been killed, somewhere over England, or France, or Germany. Not even a body to bring home and bury. Then years of coping alone, a widow in her early twenties (or pretending to be), never marrying, earning a living as a clerical assistant in a meat-processing plant, struggling to bring up a wild-child daughter who’d never known her dad…

The daughter. A smoky crystal twists, turns to the light, revealing a pale ghost of itself inside. Something I’d almost forgotten.

My mother’s birth date. Margaret was born in October 1945.

Davey Fergusson was killed in August 1942.