Greybeard

Although he was not a man ever to grumble extensively, Pitt found few consolations in their way of life. Whatever his success as a trapper of animals — and he derived satisfaction from outwitting and slaying them — he saw himself as a failure. Ever since he had proved himself unable to kill Greybeard, a dozen years before, he had lived an increasingly solitary life; even his gratitude to Greybeard for sparing him was tempered with the thought that but for him he might now be controlling his own body of soldiers, the remains of Croucher’s command. He nourished this grievance inside himself, though he knew there was no real substance in it. Earlier experience should have convinced him that he could never fulfil the proper duty of a soldier.

As a child, Jeff Pitt used to make his way through the outskirts of the great city in which he lived to a stretch of common land beyond the houses. This land merged with moorland, and was a fine place for a boy to roam. From the tops of the moors, where only an occasional hawk rode the breezes, you could look down on to the maze of the city, with its chimneys, its slaty factory roofs, and the countless little millipedes that were its houses. Jeff used to take his friend Dicky on to the common; when the weather was fine, they would go there every day of their school holidays.

Jeff owned a large rusty bike, inherited from one of his elder brothers; Dicky had a white mongrel dog called Snowy. Snowy enjoyed the common as much as the boys did. All this was in the early 1970’s, when they were in short trousers and the world was at peace.

Sometimes Jeff and Dicky played soldiers, using bits of stick for rifles. Sometimes they tried to capture lizards with their cupped hands; these were little brown lizards that generally escaped, leaving their wriggling bloody tails in the boys’ palms. Sometimes they wrestled.

One day, they wrestled so absorbedly that they rolled down a bank and into a luxuriant bed of nettles. They were both badly stung. However much it hurt, Jeff would not cry before his friend. Dicky blubbered all the way home. Even a ride on Jeff’s bike could not silence him completely.

The boys grew up. The steel-cowled factories swallowed young Jeff Pitt, as they had swallowed his brothers. Dicky obtained a job in an estate office. They found they had nothing in common and ceased to seek each other’s company.

The war came. Pitt was conscripted into the air force. After some hazardous adventures in the Middle East, he deserted, together with several of his fellows. This was like a token to other units in the area, where dissatisfaction with the cause and course of the war was already rife. Mutiny broke out. Some of the mutineers seized a plane on Tehran airport and flew it back to Britain. Pitt was on the plane.

In Britain, revolution was gathering momentum. In a few months, the government would collapse and a hastily established people’s government sue for peace with the enemy powers. Pitt found his way home and joined the local rebels. One moonlit night, a pro-government group attacked their headquarters, which was in a big Victorian house in the suburbs. Pitt found himself positioned behind a concrete bench, his heart hammering dreadfully, firing at the enemy.

One of his mates in the house brought a searchlight into play. Its beam picked up Dicky, wearing the government flash and coming towards Pitt’s position at a run. Pitt shot him.

He regretted the shot even before — as if by magic — a wound burst over Dicky’s shirt and he spun round and pitched on to the gravel. Pitt crawled forward to him, but the shot had been a true one; his friend was almost dead.

Since that time, he could never nerve himself to kill anything much bigger than a beaver. Cramped in the tent, they ate well and slept well that night, and sailed throughout the next day. They saw no living person. Man had gone, and the great interlocking world of living species had already knitted over the space he once occupied. Moving without any clear sense of direction, they had to spend another two nights on islands in the lake; but since the weather continued mild and the food plentiful, they raised very little complaint, beyond the unspoken complaint that beneath their rags and wrinkles they regarded themselves still as modern man, and modern man was entitled to something better than wandering through a pleistocene wilderness.

The wilderness was punctuated now and again by memorials of former years, some of them looking all the grimmer and blacker for lingering on out of context. The dinghy bore them to a small railway station, which a board still announced as Yarnton Junction. Its two platforms stood above the flood, while the signal-box, perched on its brick tower, served as a look-out across the meads.