The new house was in the middle of a long row inhabited mainly by miners working at Wollaton Pit. Merton sold up and moved in, George and Lydia glad because, apart from being comfortingly nearer the town, there was less work for him to set them to. Brian walked there along the main road and down by the canal side, went for the first time one afternoon and found no one in but his grandmother, who dozed by the fire. He sat on the sofa waiting for her to wake up. The kitchen was arranged exactly as at the Nook, with the same mixed pervading aroma of tea and spices, kindling wood and tobacco, baked bread and stew. Brass candlesticks towered on the shelf, with two black and white statue dogs that reminded him of Gyp about to leap for birds before Merton had killed him, and white pot ornaments were placed between seaside souvenirs of Cromer and Skegness, Cleethorpes and Lowestoft. A magnifying glass hung from a nail, waiting for Merton to come back from his walk and look closely at the photographs in tonight’s Evening Post: Brian always hoped to borrow it, to set fire to a piece of paper in the garden by holding it under the sun. On the other side of the room was a glass-faced cupboard of tea-services, and rows of Merton’s prize horseshoes. His grandmother sneezed and woke up. “Hello, Brian, I di’n’t ’ear you come in.”
“Well, I knocked first, grandma.”
She looked at the clock: “I’d better get some tea ready for when the others come. I’ll get the sack if I don’t.” She went into the scullery to put the kettle on the gas. Brian wondered where his grandfather was, pushed the cat away from the fire with his foot: “Shall I get some coal up from the cellar, grandma?”
“Yes, you can do that. Fill me two buckets, there’s a good lad. It’ll save your grandad doing it later.” He clattered down the steps whistling. Sunlight came through the grating, showing many small pieces of coal at the foot of the neatly stacked heap. But he pulled down an unwieldy lump and smashed the half-hundredweight of it to pieces with the hammer. Then he filled the buckets and trundled them back up. “Wash your ’ands and I’ll gi’ you a piece o’ jam pasty,” his grandma said.
Black liquid streamed down the sides of the white sink, and his hands smelt pleasantly of carbolic. The table was laid, and a half-pasty and a cup of tea waited for him. “Pull up a chair and get that down you,” Mary said. The Evening Post had just clattered through the letter-box, and she went to get it. He interrupted her reading. “I’m going up to the Nook tomorrow to see what’s ’appened. Then I’ll go over the Cherry Orchard to see Ken and Alma Arlington.”
The paper rustled to her knees: “You’ll find it altered. The Nook’s down already, and I did hear that the Arlingtons was going to have to leave as well.”
He slept at home that night, and woke up the next morning with Fred on one side and Arthur on the other. Pushing Arthur’s knee from his back, he remembered he was to explore the Cherry Orchard, and an hour later he set off down the street, turning over the Lean towards New Bridge. From its summit he saw that, apart from the immediate fields below, the countryside had gone. Nothing was the same, and beyond the broad new boulevard were houses, in which direction there seemed no set point worth searching for any more. He could go on walking on and on and not meet anyone he knew, could lose himself in the mountains of Derbyshire and reach the Atlantic at Wales without being able to stop a friendly face and say: “Hello, how are you” and “Which is the way back to Nottingham?”
He leapt streams and climbed over stiles in the pocket still left. Flowers hid among hollows and hedgerows, or stood in the wind of hillocks. His hair blew about, and most of the sky was blue. A horse nibbled at clover, and Brian thought it was the same horse that had nibbled there during the last four years he had passed through the field on his way to the Nook.
Across the boulevard he entered streets of new houses, and at the corner where he should turn and see the Nook, neither smoke nor roof was visible. The hedge had been trampled down, and the gate torn from its hinges, and instead of ochred walls he looked through into space towards the dark shade of the yet untouched wood. Nettles and thorns caught his ankles, and only the foundations of the house remained, and he stood in them, walking from section to section, kitchen to parlour, and down into the pantry — filled with bricks, filth, and glass fragments that had once been part of windows showing him marvellous fields and gardens. It hadn’t taken them long to flatten it, he thought, and imagined it being done, beginning with roof and chimney-pots cascading into the yard, then the slow ripping down of walls, and lorries carting everything away.
The garden was a jungle, and he walked through it to the well. The fairytale headstock was no longer there, and he dropped stones down the depths still left: the noise of stone sailing down to stone hypnotized him as he lay over the parapet of rubble, a great pace sounding between the stone leaving his hand and striking the depths below.
The Cherry Orchard was untouched, still in the country. Noises of machinery fell away, giving place to the whistling of birds, and bushes bending in the wind. The silence made him afraid. In the distance he could see the two cottages of the Lakers and Arlingtons, but as he got near there was no sound of water being drawn from the squeaking pump.
Their gate was also smashed. The cottage doors were boarded up and chimney-pots hung slantwise, as if youths had taken shots at them with bricks. He stood still, unable to speak his thoughts that were too deep to be fished up by the bent pin of sentiment. But the disappearance of his friends disturbed him, and trying to put his thoughts into speech was like an iceberg that grows hands in the middle of the ocean attempting to lift itself out of the water. The wood at the end of the garden sent out bird sounds: but no twigs cracked unexpectedly under other children’s feet.
He went into the wood. Where had the Arlingtons and Lakers gone? He knew the land of Nottingham and a few miles beyond, but all was unexplored after that, and his consciousness of it slid over the rim of the world like the sailors in olden days who had no maps. But there were farms, he supposed, other towns and woods and fields, mountains and oceans that went on for ever and ever, until you came back to where you were standing now.
Clear water ran along the stream, and he leapt over. Where had they gone to live, though? He had been to Skegness on a train when he was three, and vaguely remembered the rhythm of the wheels, a green blur of fields as he fell into sleep on his mother’s knee. Then the grey boiling sea burst on to the sand. He brushed fingers over yellow ripples of bittersweet, unknowingly trampled the curved vetch. They’ve gone to another farm, I expect. I wish I could go somewhere, a long way off, to jungles and mountains, and islands. I’ll draw a map when I get home. He ripped leaves from an elderberry bush and rubbed the stain over his hands.
He lay down for a long drink, legs outspread and knees bare against humps of dried earth. Stones on the bottom were of different sizes and shades, with sand and green weed between, like a landscape, a miniature world under glass, uninhabited by minnows or waterboats: an ideal country of No-One-Else, ripe for filling and exploration. His eyes bulged as he swallowed and caterpillars of stone-cold water jerked into his stomach.
Reaching the footpath, he kicked loose stones about, running them gloriously into imaginary unguarded goal-posts. Whistling out of the wood, he charged over the new road and across the field, sat on the embankment fence to watch an express train go fleeing by. Must be going to Skeggy, he thought, forgetting to count the carriages. I wish I was on it.