The Levels
couldn’t hurt us. My father laughed, heaved himself off his board and went to the tank.
    â€˜You taking me down there?’
    â€˜I don’t think we’re going,’ I said. We had been there for days on end, and were going again the next day.
    â€˜You got something you’re trying to hide, something you don’t want me to know about?’
    â€˜No.’
    â€˜I wouldn’t care what you get up to, just not trouble.’
    â€˜No.’
    A week later, we went down there, Dick, my father, and I. Summer was a week on but the weather windy. We walked into it, leaves, torn from the withies, blew at us, rain flew in our faces, though it was warm and the sun bright between the clouds.
    My father asked Dick if he liked school.
    â€˜No.’
    â€˜Why’s that?’
    â€˜Because we can’t be playing in our — Yoow! ’ I stood on his foot. ‘What’s that for?’
    â€˜Don’t know.’ I was looking straight in his face, trying to stop him saying anything about the tree house.
    My father said, ‘What’s the matter?’ But Dick got the idea.
    â€˜Trod on a stone,’ he said.
    If I was so clever, why did I make sure we didn’t say a word when it was visible for miles? I watched it in the tree for ten minutes before my father saw it at all, swaying in the wind, the door banging against a branch.
    â€˜What’s that?’ he said.
    â€˜Our house.’
    â€˜Your house?’
    â€˜Yes.’
    â€˜And yours?’
    â€˜Yes,’ said Dick.
    â€˜Thank you for inviting me,’ he said.
    Dick didn’t say a word. His father was rough, and would never have sat half way up an apple tree in a chicken house, but mine climbed up and enjoyed it. The wind blew in the front door of Drove House and up the stairs to the landing, where it blew and rustled the curtains a little.
    He cared for everything he did. He helped us down and said he’d bring a better ladder.
    He didn’t breathe a word about this secret to my mother; but she would never go to Drove because no one lived there. She didn’t go anywhere without a reason.
    When winter came, a gale blew the chicken house down, and it lay in pieces in the orchard. I went over to look, but night came so quick, half past four in the afternoon and with the dusk, the rain, you couldn’t see your feet, and I wasn’t staying round there with the ghosts, so came home again.

‌ 3
    The first thing I remember about Dick is the first thing I remember about the first time I went in a harvest field, stalks of cut grass scratching our legs. In those days, no one grew grass for hay like now, not since the EEC gave money to drain land and rip out old withy beds for clean ground for more cows. Since the EEC milk quotas they’ve had to sell their cows and are going back to withies, but it takes years to establish a new bed; they burnt their boats.
    Dick and I helped a bale of hay onto the old cart. I still have the picture in my mind. Before tractor loaders, they had everyone from South Moor to Drayton helping in the fields. We boys larked around some bales and disappeared into the hedge to look at our scabs, and we dropped lines into rhines and caught nothing.
    Dick’s clenched fists were the size of oranges when mine were the size of prunes, but I had the brains; something like the perfect combination for the life of crime that never was. He knew it, so grew thick dark hairs on his arms when he was twelve. ‘What are we doing today?’ I heard him ask a thousand times, over and over again.
    I went elvering with him before my mother let me near the river. I’d say I was going nesting but end up on the bank with his nets. It was day time and we would pretend to catch them in bucketfuls, when anyone who knew anything about it went after dark, when we were in bed. Now, big men from Gloucester vacuum them out of the river for the French and Japanese. Elvers always turned

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