Before Sunrise [3]

The air before sunrise was chilly. A few owls still hooted in the deep gullies. Inside the tent he lay curled on his camp stretcher. Waking was like coming up through water from the strain of dreams to the diffuse light filtered through canvas and the smell and sound of pine branches overhead. For a long time he lay warm in the blankets staring in contentment at the near roof.

As he sat up the stretcher creaked, but his parents deeper in the tent did not move. He stepped out to the grass floor that had been yesterday an unclaimed corner of the camping ground, pulled off his pyjamas and put on his bathing trunks.

Then he slid under the wall. The grass was wet outside, the birds chittered and flew in the fir plantation. He ran his fingers through his hair. The sky was darker to the west and bright above the near mountains. Their shadows lay half way towards the camping ground. As he climbed over the fence on the way to the lake he felt the first chill of the lake wind, and hunching his shoulders for shelter wished he had stayed in the warm tent. He crossed a dry watercourse lined with cutty grass and came out on the shingle banks of the lake shore, picking his way between thorn bushes over moss where ran small grey insects. The sun had almost risen, the sky was very bright. Shaking blades of light were reflected on the water. From where he stood he could see about three miles across the lake, hidden in its upper reaches by the heavy mountain flanks. It was bottomless, and the tracks of light might have been the trail of monsters.

He walked into the small waves at the edge of the lake, down over shelves of sand and shingle. Then out and along the shore to a skeleton jetty where the scooped-out shingle left the water faintly blue and very deep. He climbed the bank at the top of the beach and ran out on the jetty. The grey boards, splintered and worn with gravel, were solid under his feet.

It seemed a long way down to the water. He sat on the low bevelled parapet and hesitated. Then he stood up and jumped with his eyes shut.

He doubled up with the shock of the cold water, and swam under water till he broke surface some way out from the jetty. Then he swam back and held on to the slippery beams with their fine weed washed by the waves. When he had regained his breath he dived again, swimming down where the lake floor sloped to the deeper lake. There the waves hung above like a ceiling, and he could imagine himself a merman or a fish to whom the underwater world was familiar. Out of breath he would come to the surface with weedspage 38 in his hands, then dive again – till at last he found a belt of mussel shells in about twenty feet of water. He carried them in to the shore. As he came to the shallows he swam fast in panic, feeling that something had reached out from the lake to touch him with weakness. A slight cramp seized him as his feet struck bottom, and he walked out stumbling and dizzy.

The sun was a half disc of steel over the mountain. The willow trees stood with their roots in shingle, bark gnarled and broken, but leaves delicate and light-green. He walked up the shore limping, for he had cut his ankle on a stone. He walked on the edge of his foot to keep the raw place from the rough grass. If I had drowned, he thought, no one would have known. He saw his drowned body floating and pitied his father and mother for their distress. He remembered how he had gone shooting with his father the evening before. Behind the cemetery they had walked over a dry creek-bed where the weed crunched under his sandals. His father wounded a rabbit; it screamed and kicked its way to a burrow. He ran across the gully, balancing on the tarred pipeline, and caught it by the hind legs just in time. Its head wobbled at the rabbit-punch, its white belly-fur and brown side draggled like corn flattened by rain. Blood dripped from its mouth. The eyes were sad with the terrible remoteness of all dead things. He had walked back proudly through the plantation with the rabbit hanging heavily. Then the skinning under the willows, the guts thrown on the ground and the bare flesh bruised blue. Rain had come down from the mountains, and small spiders fell on the newly pitched tent.

He crossed the road under high poplar leaves still pale with sleep. Grass was sticking to the gash on his foot. A lorry was in the camping ground, unloading packing cases. The tents were open. A woman washed her hair under a tent- flap. A man crossed the long grass carrying torn branches of broom. Smoke rose from a fireplace of blackened rocks with the smell of frying bacon.

He rounded the tent and undid the flap. His father was dressing and his mother sat up in bed.

Been for a bathe in the lake? asked his father. Yes.

What was it like? A bit cold.

The smell of frying bacon came in the door. The sun had risen. Dew evaporated from the leaves of the blue flannel-flowers. Gulls flew overhead, their feathers glistening, their cries calm music.

1941-48? (31)