The Beacon Read Free

and the books she read were always school or fairy stories, but they formed a comfortable pairing.
    Once, May was invited to stay with Patricia Hogg at the gamekeeper’s cottage, which sent Bertha into a spasm of uncertainty and alarm, for no member of the Prime family had been to stay at the house of anyone who was not a close relative as far back as anyone could remember, so that there was the worry of what state May’s clothes were in and how she should carry them and if presents ought to be taken.
    But in the end this was sewn and that was mended and everything was clean and a canvas bag found inone of the upstairs trunks and a jar of honey and a slab of home-cured bacon wrapped in greaseproof and settled among the cotton knickers and white socks.
    She had left with Patricia Hogg after school, walking importantly out of the gate carrying the canvas bag. They walked to the opposite end of the village from the one which led to the Beacon, and waited in the sun for a bus. When it came it was full with people coming back from the market and they had to stand, holding onto the cracked leather seat backs and swaying about as the bus went round the bends. She could remember the feel of the leather in her hand, years afterwards.
    The cottage was on the very edge of the estate and backed onto the woods. It was small and dark with low ceilings and you went in straight from the street. There was no porch.
    There were five of them living in the cottage with the indoors dog and two cats, and with May it was crowded and felt more so when the gamekeeper came in from work. He was a huge man. They were all huge, with large hands and feet, and Mrs Hogg had a great, wide backside which seemed to fill half the kitchen when she bent over.
    May slept in the same bed as Patricia. She had never in her life slept in a bed with anyone else and crept to the far side and held onto the edge in casetheir legs touched. To May, sharing a bed was a strange and unpleasant thing to do, and hot, too, under the heavy quilt.
    The Beacon was never completely silent because of being high up and always troubled by a wind, but here the woods seemed to press into the house like baize, so that no air could get through and the light was oddly green. She could not get to sleep for the stillness and the odd shrieks of creatures out in the darkness, and then she began to want the lavatory. She tried to ignore the pressure of it but in the end she had to whisper to Patricia, and not knowing what to say, asked, ‘Has your dad locked up downstairs?’
    The toilet was outside at the bottom of the thin garden close to the trees.
    ‘Why, what are you frightened of?’
    ‘I’m not frightened. I need to go to the toilet.’
    ‘There’s something under the bed for that.’
    May had been mortified. There were pots under the beds at home too, though also a proper flush toilet in a lean-to beyond the scullery. The idea of using a pot with someone else in the room, even in the dark, was quite shocking. She lay absolutely still on the far edge of the bed and in spite of the discomfort eventually slept. She woke sometime later. It was still pitch black, and Patricia was making tiny snorting sounds. May slid inch by inch from the bed onto thefloor and then felt around for the pot on the rough boards, praying for the other girl not to wake.
    In some ways everything at the Hoggs’ cottage was familiar. The dark. The fact that the outside world seemed to be inside too, the sounds the pigs made and the smells. Otherwise, it was entirely strange, denser and closer, as if everyone and everything was packed tightly together, bodies and clothes, china and pans, cats and chairs and the gamekeeper’s guns and sticks.
    There were the indoor dog, and two cats, but no animals other than two pigs and the gun dogs which lived in outside cages and the ferrets, and the wood came right to the fence and one day might have marched into the house like a wood in a fairy story.
    May learned an