Cobweb Walking

Chapter 1

When I was five I began to have moments of sudden silence. Then, after some time, I never could tell how long, out of the silence would come a kind of humming sound.

After the bomb fell, when I was seventeen, I could no longer hear that humming sound more beautiful than music. When I was little, I would lie in bed for hours listening to the sound, wondering what it was, and wondering too if the bats that rushed round the steep roofs of my home could hear it. But of course the bats could hear it. They could hear almost everything, Daddy told me. You’ve got the sharpest hearing of anyone I know, Morgan, he said. But you’re still a person, and people can’t ever hear as well as bats.

I could hear better than Daddy, though. He came into my room one night, drew the heavy lace bedspread up to my chin, and kissed me on my forehead.

Daddy’s kisses were very warm, and stayed on for hours. There had been some really special times when I had woken at dawn to feel them still there, and could lie back with my eyes closed feeling the kiss tingle a little just above my eyebrows.

What is that humming, Daddy? I asked that night.

Which humming, Fairy? Then, before I had time to answer, he said, his voice muffled now, Morgan! You were just waiting till I had gone to let George on to the bed! And to under the bed I heard Daddy say, Come on out, George! Come on out, fellow!

There came a scrabbling of claws on the linoleum as my dog guiltily emerged. I lay as still as I could, eyes tight shut, trying to remember how my breath came when I was asleep and do it now.

My eyes were closed but I could feel Daddy bend over me, scrutinise me, and I could hear George’s whiskers crackle, and haunches shuffle, as he sat by Daddy still hoping he might be able to spend the night on a comfy bed, instead of in the cold gumboot room.

Down, George, said Daddy, so that I knew George had been preparing to leap on to the bed. And to me Daddy said, Come on, Fairy, I can tell you aren’t asleep. You know how upset Maggie gets when George sleeps on your bed. You’ve got to give her some consideration, old girl. If Maggie left us we’d really be in trouble. He made it sound as though there were certain people whose departure had put us in no difficulties at all.

Daddy only ever called me old girl when he was a bit cross, so I gave up pretending to be asleep, sat up, hugged my dog George who was looking very sad at having been done out of his comfy night. Then I hugged Daddy, letting my cheek linger a little against his rough one that still smelled slightly of the herb aftershave lotion I had made for him, mingled with the wood smoke from our fire.

After Daddy had left the room, I lay back in bed and listened. But no humming came now. There were many other sounds, though. The joints and joists, wainscots and lintels of the old house settled down for the night with their many tongues. Oak groaned like someone whose joints ached; horsehair plaster whispered and dreamed of trotting where the beams nudged it. The bricks of our house, caressed by five hundred years, arched themselves slightly like cats begging to be stroked, and the moat water made the leaded cellar windows grunt. The wind mumbled in our chimneys’ smoky throats, and the bats that circled them had voices as bright and sharp as new pins.

Even the furniture spoke in my house. The silk-covered ottoman with tasselled ends, that stood in the panelled oak room, used to shift its feet like a tired shop assistant in tight shoes. Once, soon after Cora came, I burst into the oak room and found Daddy and Cora embracing each other on the striped silk ottoman. They sat upright and sprang apart, like two children caught doing something naughty. Daddy’s hair, I remember, was standing on end, as though Cora had been running her hands through it. And his face was red. Cora laughed in a way that made me think she was half cross, and half embarrassed.

I didn’t care. I shouted at them, You shouldn’t sit on her! You shouldn’t! You shouldn’t!

They both looked at me as though I had gone mad. Cora said to me in a cool voice, as though addressing a hysterical child, We don’t know what you’re talking about, darling.

The ottoman! I cried. She is very very old, and her feet get tired. You are too heavy for her. Only very light people should sit on her.

Later I heard Daddy tell Cora, Morgan is such a fanciful little thing. I suppose it’s because she’s so much alone. She makes friends out of even the furniture!

Wouldn’t she be better at school? Cora asked. I’m sure it would be good for her to play with other children.

It was two or three days before another opportunity came to discuss the humming with Daddy.

Humming! he said, alarmed, and looked up into the roof beams. I hope it’s not the death watch beetle.

Oh, it’s not the death watch beetle. I felt tears of frustration begin to prickle behind my eyes because Daddy would not, or could not, hear the lovely humming. The sound I hear is beautiful.

I expect the voice of the female death watch beetle is beautiful to the male, Daddy said humorously.

Listen, Daddy. Listen. I can’t hear it this minute, but if both of us keep very very still I’m sure it will come again, and then you will hear it too.

We stayed there for ages, and Daddy was as good as gold, not moving at all, but sitting, his ears straining, on the end of my bed. Once I felt him swallow back a cough that made him nearly choke. Then, after a long time, he said, It’s time you went to sleep, Fairy. And I’ve got things to do. The noise must have been sap singing in the wet apple logs. They’ve dried out now, and that’s why you can’t hear it any more.

He poked the fire, sending out little showers of scarlet sparks, and making the ends of the logs crackle and blurt. Piling the hot and glowing embers into a heap, he drew the nursery fender in front of the fireplace, and stood up, dusting his hands. Before he left the room he said, Good night, daughter. Sleep well. If you hear that noise again, call me. But I bet it was the wet old apple logs.

After Daddy had gone I lay staring at the ceiling which glowed rosily in the fire’s dying. I knew that the humming had not been the sound of sap bubbling.

That year there had been a hot hot summer, I remember, and the medlar tree became so laden with fruit and birds fighting for it that some of the branches broke. All that September Daddy, Maggie and I worked to bring in the medlar crop and convert it into jam. Through the wasp buzzing afternoons we sliced and scalded, scoured and stewed, until we had almost a hundred jars of bright jelly. As we arranged the sealed jars in rows in Maggie’s huge cool larder, I happened to mention the humming to her. As soon as the words were out of my mouth I knew I had made a mistake, and should have kept silent.

Putting down her sticky ladle, wiping her hands on her apron, Maggie glared at me as though I had just confessed to some awful crime. There you are! she said, a note of triumph in her voice. I always said you didn’t eat enough to keep body and soul together. If you’d eaten proper you’d have growed like a normal person and that’s your whole trouble, Morgan. Now you’ve got head ringing. Because of weakness. Paying no attention at all to my protests, Maggie put me on a regime of Primrose milk and homemade herbal concoctions. These latter were something Maggie specialised in, and even people from neighbouring cottages would come to her for something to soothe a cough, quench a toothache, or cure a tummy ache. Daddy was a great believer in Maggie’s medicines, and Billy, Maggie’s husband, never went to a doctor at all. He found Maggie’s cures much more effective, and less trouble, than a trip to the doctor requiring an hour’s bus journey.

For several days I was required to swallow down these terrible tonics.

It’s absolutely gone, I lied, after four almost unendurable days. Actually, to say that the hum had gone was almost true. I noticed that I never heard the hum unless I was absolutely well, and Maggie’s rich and awful tasting tonics, made from local herbs and fungal residues, had made me feel a little queasy.

Maggie’s medicine was almost, but not quite, as effective in silencing the hum as the bomb had been, though. I had been hearing the hum on and off for twelve years when the bomb left me in silence. All the time we were in the fall-out shelter I waited to hear it. But I never did. I began to wonder if the gas that the explosion had released might have had something to do with the humming being silenced.

This gas had made everyone, including animals, who had been in the area of the bombing, become very sick for a few days. There had also been a huge column of dust thrown up by the explosion, that had looked a little mushroom-shaped, so that at first many people had thought that the bomb was an atom one. Daddy and Cora had felt sure it was an atom bomb, and Daddy had rushed us all into the fall-out shelter that had been built on our land many years ago and never used before.

It was because of Mummy that we had a fall-out shelter.

I remembered Mummy and Daddy arguing about it when I was little.

But, Louise, Daddy would say, do we want to survive a nuclear attack? Can you imagine what the world would be like after such an event?

Then Mummy would start shaking, and crying, and turn her head away from Daddy, so that in the end Daddy said, All right. I think it’s a silly waste of money, as there isn’t even going to be a nuclear war, but I will get a shelter built for you.

For a few years Daddy even called it Mummy’s fall-out shelter, but later it became known as Morgan’s little hideyhole. We never, neither Daddy nor I, expected for one moment that we should ever really use the fall-out shelter. As the years passed it became a secret joke between Daddy and me, and Daddy even bought little stocks of tinned food, saying to me with a wink, as he put them in a corner of Maggie’s larder, Emergency rations, Fairy.

I think that, when the bomb did go off, Daddy, in spite of being so worried, also felt a little bit of excitement at being able to make use of the expensive fall-out shelter after so long.

The bill for constructing the shelter had arrived after Mummy left us.

Daddy said with a little laugh, though his face was tight, Well, Fairy, we’ve got a nuclear shelter, but no Mummy to put into it!

When I was nearly fourteen we got another Mummy, Cora, for our nuclear shelter.

But in between the mummies were golden years of George and wandering and Daddy, and every year was remembered with a jam.

Maggie’s larder was a diary of jams and jellies, for each year there was one that stood out above the others, either because of its abundance, or its exceptional flavour, or colour.

There was the year of the plum jam, when I was eight and the wasps were so bad we hardly dared enter the orchard till dark and the devils had gone to sleep. The plum was dark and mysterious, with a light coming from its heart in a red glow, as though a jewel was hidden there. Nine years later there are still a few jars of that beautiful jam in the larder.

Then there was the year of the gooseberry, when I waged war with a single blackbird who apparently considered only he had the right to enter our fruit beds. The blackbird shrieked, ruffled up his feathers, glared his shiny yellow eyes, and came at me from the air in a puff of cross feathers, and from the ground in a cloud of furious dust. The gooseberry jam was perfumed with elderflower, and was as green and luminous as spring grass, but sharp with a little of that heroic blackbird’s anger.

Redcurrant jelly was the year the plaster in the hall fell, and we discovered that my home was made of horse dung, willow herb, and dandelion clocks.

Oh, let’s eat some raspberry from the year Daddy rescued the baby moorhen from the moat. And I would bring the bright pip-specked bottle, blowing off the dust from its shoulders.

Jam as old as that is sure to be poison, Maggie would say darkly. And don’t imagine getting that mould off is going to cure anything. As my mother always used to say, ‘If there’s muck on top, there’s ten times under.’ And she would watch, very disapproving, as I skimmed off the green growth that always hazes ancient jams no matter how carefully you make them.

But Daddy and I never got ill eating old jam.

The year of Cora had been marked by marmalade.

You have never made marmalade before? Cora asked incredulously. And she seemed happy to be showing us how to do something for a change.

She made a special trip to town to buy oranges, though I told her that we would be getting plenty of fruit in our own garden in due course, and that we never made jam from