The Death of Grass, Page 2

  The Death of Grass is also remarkably prescient. Christopher’s worries at the impact of human activity on the environment were a decade ahead of their time, and his account of pandemic panic was prescient by half a century or so. The rise in the 1990s of GM crops; the spread of monoculture (prompting the establishment of the Svalbard Global Seed Vault); the pathogenic consequences of factory farming; climate change; insecure food, water and energy supplies; the spectre of the end of oil, and the drastic collapse of the supply chain that this would bring about – all of these developments have made his account of a shattered England feel increasingly possible. Unmistakably, the novel’s time has come again – or at least has come to pass. It has grown into the status of a classic. In 2007 The Death of Grass was named in a Bookfinder survey as one of the top ten out-of-print British books (where it kept company with titles as various as Madonna’s Sex (1992) and Peter J. Neville Havins’s Forests of England (1976)). First editions in sharp condition now sell for more than £300; cracked Penguin paperbacks for no less than £20. Auction sites see fierce competition between bidders for the few copies that crop up. There is a new and contemporary hunger for the novel, and for the grim clarity of its scenario.

  The significant difference between Christopher’s England and today’s England, of course, is the high degree of competence in life-skills that his characters demonstrate (presumably acquired during the years of the Second World War). They know how to fix cars, navigate across open country, hunt, track, shoot, farm, establish road-blocks, and fortify a house. Given our present dependency on supermarket food, our petrol addiction and the specialization of manual skills, it’s hard to think that we would react to such a crisis with the adaptability of Custance and his troops. But then perhaps this is for the good.

  And what of John Christopher – Sam Youd – himself ? Well, he went on to write almost fifty more novels after The Death of Grass, including the bestselling Tripods sequence, which was adapted by the BBC into a highly popular and influential television serial during the 1980s. Finally, he moved to live on the south coast of England in Rye – the only town in Britain with the same name as a genus of grass.

  Robert Macfarlane, 2009

  PRODROME

  As sometimes happens, death healed a family breach.

  When Hilda Custance was widowed in the early summer of 1933, she wrote, for the first time since her marriage thirteen years before, to her father. Their moods touched – hers of longing for the hills of Westmorland after the grim seasons of London, and his of loneliness and the desire to see his only daughter again, and his unknown grandsons, before he died. The boys, who were away at school, had not been brought back for the funeral, and at the end of the summer term they returned to the small house at Richmond only for a night, before, with their mother, they travelled north.

  In the train, John, the younger boy, said:

  ‘But why did we never have anything to do with Grandfather Beverley?’

  His mother looked out of the window at the tarnished grimy environs of London, wavering, as though with fatigue, in the heat of the day.

  She said vaguely: ‘It’s hard to know how these things happen. Quarrels begin, and neither person stops them, and they become silences, and nobody breaks them.’

  She thought calmly of the storm of emotions into which she had plunged, out of the untroubled quiet life of her girlhood in the valley. She had been sure that, whatever unhappiness came after, she would never regret the passion itself. Time had proved her doubly wrong; first in the contentment of her married life and her children, and later in the amazement that such contentment could have come out of what she saw, in retrospect, as squalid and ill-directed. She had not seen the squalidness of it then, but her father could hardly fail to be aware of it, and had not been able to conceal his awareness. That had been the key: his disgust and her resentment.

  John asked her: ‘But who started the quarrel?’

  She was only sorry that it had meant that the two men never knew each other. They were not unlike in many ways, and she thought they would have liked each other if her pride had not prevented it.

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ she said, ‘now.’

  David put down his copy of the Boy’s Own Paper. Although a year older than his brother, he was only fractionally taller; they had a strong physical resemblance and were often taken for twins. But David was slower moving and slower in thought than John, and fonder of things than of ideas.

  He said: ‘The valley – what’s it like, Mummy?’

  ‘The valley? Wonderful. It’s… No, I think it will be better if it comes as a surprise to you. I couldn’t describe it anyway.’

  John said: ‘Oh, do, Mummy!’

  David asked thoughtfully: ‘Shall we see it from the train?’

  Their mother laughed. ‘From the train? Not even the beginnings of it. It’s nearly an hour’s run from Stavely.’

  ‘How big is it?’ John asked. ‘Are there hills all round?’

  She smiled at them. ‘You’ll see.’

  Jess Hillen, their grandfather’s tenant farmer, met them with a car at Stavely, and they drove up into the hills. The day was nearly spent, and they saw Blind Gill at last with the sun setting behind them.

  Cyclops Valley would have been a better name for it, for it looked out of one eye only – towards the west. But for this break, it was like a saucer, or a deep dish, the sides sloping up – bare rock or rough heather – to the overlooking sky. Against that enclosing barrenness, the valley’s richness was the more marked; green wheat swayed inwards with the summer breeze, and beyond the wheat, as the ground rose, they saw the lusher green of pasture.

  The entrance to the valley could scarcely have been narrower. To the left of the road, ten yards away, a rock face rose sharply and overhung. To the right, the River Lepe foamed against the road’s very edge. Its further bank, fifteen yards beyond, hugged the other jaw of the valley.

  Hilda Custance turned round to look at her sons.

  ‘Well?’

  ‘Gosh!’ John said, ‘this river… I mean – how does it get into the valley in the first place?’

  ‘It’s the Lepe. Thirty-five miles long, and twenty-five of those miles underground, if the stories are to be believed. Anyway, it comes from underground in the valley. There are a lot of rivers like that in these parts.’

  ‘It looks deep.’

  ‘It is. And very fast. No bathing, I’m afraid. It’s wired farther up to keep cattle out. They don’t stand a chance if they fall in.’

  John remarked sagely: ‘I should think it might flood in winter.’

  His mother nodded. ‘It always used to. Does it still, Jess?’

  ‘Cut off for a month last winter,’ Jess said. ‘It’s not so bad now we have the wireless.’

  ‘I think it’s terrific,’ John said. ‘But are you really cut off? You could climb the hills.’

  Jess grinned. ‘There are some who have. But it’s a rocky road up, and rockier still down the other side. Best to sit tight when the Lepe runs full.’

  Hilda Custance looked at her elder son. He was staring ahead at the valley, thickly shadowed by sunset; the buildings of the Hillen farm were in view now, but not the Beverley farm high up.

  ‘Well,’ she said, ‘what do you think of it, David?’

  Reluctantly he turned his gaze inwards to meet her own.

  He said: ‘I think I’d like to live here, always.’

  That summer, the boys ran wild in the valley.

  It was some three miles long, and perhaps half a mile wide at its greatest extent. It held only the two farms, and the river, which issued from the southern face about two miles in. The ground was rich and well cropped, but there was plenty of room for boys of twelve and eleven to play, and there were the surrounding hills to climb.

  They made the ascent at two or three points, and stood, panting, looking out over rough hills and moorlands. The valley was tiny behind them. John delighted in the feeling of height, of isolation a
nd, to some extent, of power; for the farmhouses looked, from this vantage, like toy buildings that they might reach down and pluck from the ground. And in its greenness the valley seemed an oasis among desert mountains.

  David took less pleasure in this, and after their third climb he refused to go again. It was enough for him to be in the valley; the surrounding slopes were like cupped and guarding hands, which it was both fruitless and ungrateful to scale.

  This divergence of their interests caused them to spend much of their time apart. While John roamed the valley’s sides, David kept to the farmland, to his grandfather’s increasing satisfaction. At the end of the second week, boy and old man, they went together to the River field on a warm and cloudy afternoon. The boy watched intently while his grandfather plucked ears of wheat here and there, and examined them. His near vision was poor, and he was forced to hold the wheat at arm’s length.

  ‘It’s going to be a fair crop,’ he said, ‘as well as my eyes can tell me.’

  To their right there was the continuous dull roar as the Lepe forced its way out of the containing rock into the valley.

  David said: ‘Shall we still be here for the harvest?’

  ‘Depends. It may be. Would you like to be?’

  David said enthusiastically: ‘Oh, yes, Grandfather!’

  There was a silence in which the only intrusion was the noise of the Lepe. His grandfather looked over the valley which the Beverleys had farmed for a century and a half; and then turned from the land to the boy at his side.

  ‘I don’t see as we shall have long to get to know one another, David boy,’ he said. ‘Do you think you would like to farm this valley when you’re grown?’

  ‘More than anything.’

  ‘It’ll be yours, then. A farm needs one owner, and I don’t think as your brother would be fond of the life, any road.’

  ‘John wants to be an engineer,’ said David.

  ‘And he’ll be likely enough to make a good one. What had you thought of being, then?’

  ‘I hadn’t thought of anything.’

  ‘I shouldn’t say it, maybe,’ said his grandfather, ‘since I’ve never seen ought of any other kind of life but what I glimpse at Lepeton Market; but I don’t know of another life that can give as much satisfaction. And this is good land, and a good lie for a man that’s content with his own company and few neighbours. There’s stone slabs under the ground in the Top Meadow, and they say the valley was held as a stronghold once, in bygone times. I don’t reckon you could hold it now, against guns and aeroplanes, but whenever I’ve been outside I’ve always had a feeling that I could shut the door behind me when I come back through the pass.’

  ‘I felt that,’ David said, ‘when we came in.’

  ‘My grandfather,’ said David’s grandfather, ‘had himself buried here. They didn’t like it even then, but in those days they had to put up with some things they didn’t like. They’ve got more weight behind them today, damn them! A man should have the rights to be buried in his own ground.’

  He looked across the green spears of wheat.

  ‘But I shan’t fret so greatly over leaving it, if I’m leaving it to my own blood.’

  On another afternoon, John stood on the southern rim and, after staring his fill, began to descend again into the valley.

  The Lepe, from its emergence to the point where it left the valley altogether, hugged these southern slopes, and for that reason they could only be scaled from the eastern end of the valley. But the boy realized now that, once above the river, it could not bar him from the slopes beneath which it raced and boiled. From the ground, he had seen a cleft in the hill face which might be a cave. He climbed down towards it, breaking new ground.

  He worked his way down with agility but with care, for although quick in thought and movement he was not foolhardy. He came at last to the cleft, perhaps fifteen feet above the dark swirling waters, and found it to be no more than that. In his disappointment, he looked for some new target of ambition. Directly over the river’s edge, rock swelled into something like a ledge. From there, perhaps, one could dangle one’s legs in the rushing water. It was less than a cave would have been, but better than a return, baulked of any satisfaction, to the farmland.

  He lowered himself still more cautiously. The slope was steep, and the sound of the Lepe had a threatening growl to it. The ledge, when he finally reached it, gave little purchase.

  By now, however, the idea had come to obsess him – just one foot in the water; that would be enough to meet the objective he had set himself. Pressed awkwardly against the side of the hill, he reached down with his hand to unfasten the sandal on his right foot. As he did so, his left foot slipped on the smooth rock. He clutched frantically, aware of himself falling, but there was no hold for his hands. He fell and the waters of the Lepe – chill even in midsummer, and savagely buffeting – took him.

  He could swim fairly well for a boy of his age, but he had no chance against the violence of the Lepe. The current pulled him down into the deeps of the channel that the river had worn for itself through centuries before the Beverleys, or any others, had come to farm its banks. It rolled him like a pebble along its bed, as though to squeeze breath and life from him together. He was aware of nothing but its all-embracing violence and his own choking pulse.

  Then, suddenly, he saw that the darkness about him was diminishing, yielding to sunlight filtered through water still violent but of no great depth. With his last strength, he struggled into an upright position, and his head broke through to the air. He took a shuddering breath, and saw that he was near the middle of the river. He could not stand, for the river’s strength was too great, but he half-ran, half-swam with the current as the Lepe dragged him towards the pass that marked the valley’s end.

  Once out of the valley, the river took a quieter course. A hundred yards down, he was able to swim awkwardly, through relatively calm water, to the farther bank, and pull himself up on to it. Drenched and exhausted, he contemplated the length of the tumbling flood down which, in so short a time, he had been carried. He was still staring when he heard the sound of a pony-trap coming up the road and, a few moments later, his grandfather’s voice.

  ‘Hey, there, John! Been swimming?’

  He got to his feet unsteadily, and stumbled towards the trap. His grandfather’s arms took him and lifted him.

  ‘You’ve had a bit of a shaking, lad. Did you fall in then?’

  His mind remained shocked; he told as much as he could, flat-voiced, in broken sentences. The old man listened.

  ‘It looks like you were born for a hanging. A grown man wouldn’t give overmuch for his chances if he’d gone in like that. And you broke surface with your feet still on the bottom, you say? My father used to tell of a bar in the middle of the Lepe, but nobody was like to try it. It’s deep enough by either bank.’

  He looked at the boy, who had begun to shiver, more from the aftermath of his experience than from anything else.

  ‘No sense in me going on talking all afternoon, though. We must get you back, and into dry clothes. Come on there, Flossie!’

  As his grandfather cracked the small whip, John said quickly: ‘Grandfather – you won’t say anything to Mummy, will you? Please!’

  The old man said: ‘How shall we not, then? She can’t but see you’re soaked to the bone.’

  ‘I thought I might dry myself… in the sun.’

  ‘Ay, but not this week! Still… you don’t want her to know you’ve had a ducking? Are you feared she’ll scold you?’

  ‘No.’

  Their eyes met. ‘Ah, well,’ said his grandfather, ‘I reckon I owe you a secret, lad. Will it do if I take you to the Hillens and get you dried there? You shall have to be dried somewhere.’

  ‘Yes,’ John said, ‘I don’t mind that. Thank you, Grandfather.’

  The wheels of the trap crunched over the rough stone road as they passed through the gap and the Hillen farm came into view ahead of them. The old man broke the sile
nce between them.

  ‘You want to be an engineer, then?’

  John looked away from his fascinated watching of the rushing Lepe. ‘Yes, Grandfather.’

  ‘You wouldn’t take to farming?’

  John said cautiously: ‘Not particularly.’

  His grandfather said, with relief: ‘No, I thought not.’

  He began to say more, but broke off. It was not until they were within hail of the Hillen farm buildings that he said:

  ‘I’m glad of it. I love the land more than most, I reckon, but there are some terms on which it isn’t worth having. The best land in the world might as well be barren if it brings bad blood between brothers.’

  Then he reined up the pony, and called out to Jess Hillen.

  1

  A quarter of a century later, the two brothers stood together by the banks of the Lepe. David lifted his stick and pointed far up the slope of the hill.

  ‘There they go!’

  John followed his brother’s gaze to where the two specks toiled their way upwards. He laughed.

  ‘Davey setting the pace as usual, but I would put my money on Mary’s stamina for first-over-the-top.’

  ‘She’s a couple of years older, remember.’

  ‘You’re a bad uncle. You favour the nephew too blatantly.’

  They both grinned. ‘She’s a good girl,’ David said, ‘but Davey – well, he’s Davey.’

  ‘You should have married and got a few of your own.’

  ‘I never had the time to go courting.’

  John said: ‘I thought you countrymen took that in your stride, along with the cabbage planting.’

  ‘I don’t plant cabbages, though. There’s no sense in doing anything but wheat and potatoes these days. That’s what the Government wants, so that’s what I give ’em.’

  John looked at him with amusement. ‘I like you in your part of the honest, awkward farmer. What about your beef cattle, though? And the dairy herd?’