Ash Road (2 page)

Despite all the acclaim, Southall was criticised for the novel's potential effect on the nerves of children. But it is the nervous energy of the book that makes it so successful—the mayhem, the panic, the desperate muddling through in the realisation that danger is real and immediate, and the courage that emerges.

As a child of the Depression and a bomber pilot of many harrowing missions, Southall knew what it was like to be so fearful that rational thought gives way to blind groping. To press on in spite of such fear is, in Southall's terms, true valour.

Ash Road

Author's Note

For years I lived on a long hill on a winding country road. It wasn't called Ash Road—or was it, I wonder? For all I know, it could have been called by that name once.

All the people who lived on that road I called my friends, and I still do; but I have peopled the Ash Road of this story with men and women and boys and girls who live on it only in my imagination. They are real in the sense that every character in a story must grow out of people the author knows or out of himself, but none of them is intended to represent an actual person.

Even Lorna—to whose memory I dedicated
Ash Road
with love—was another Lorna, a Lorna I knew first in my childhood and lost only a short time ago.

But the event upon which the story is based is not invented. When it started we all knew it had started, and when it ended we could not believe it.

I.S.

1

The North Wind

On Friday, 12th January, in the late afternoon, the three boys camped in the scrub about a mile from Tinley. It wasn't the best spot to pick but at least there was water; and they were very tired.

They had escaped from the city for a glorious week of freedom in the bush. They had never done it before. They had planned it for months. At first their parents had said no, firmly no, but the boys had nagged and nagged. At last they had hit upon the ruse of encouraging the idea that Harry's parents would agree if Graham's parents would agree if Wallace's parents would agree. In the long run the ruse had worked. The different parents—who rarely saw one another—were not anxious to be regarded by the others as overprotective. After all, the boys were all soon to be fourth-formers—old enough, surely, to take care of themselves and to keep out of trouble for a few days. Not so many years back boys of that age had been out in the world earning a living.

They caught a morning train to the hills, got out at Barkley station, hitched up their packs, and started walking. They felt marvellous, unrestricted, like young colts bred and raised in the home paddock for whom the gate to wide green pastures had been thrown open for the first time.

They were on their own. No one to say, ‘Do this', ‘Do that'. No one to say, ‘Come here', ‘Go there'. They smiled at one another, confidentially, conspiratorially, flushing with elation. They were too excited to speak logically; thoughts raced ahead of their tongues and confused their speech. Harry broke into song and Wallace whooped for the sheer joy of living. They wouldn't have exchanged their week in the bush for two weeks or three at the beach with their families; they wouldn't have wished to be anywhere on earth but where they were, striding up the road from Barkley towards Tinley.

There was a bus to Tinley, but they didn't want to take it. A car stopped and the driver offered them a lift, but they waved him on. They wanted none of the trappings of the adult world. They wanted freedom from home, from reminders of school or study, from the endless round of errand-running, music practice, sisters, lawn-mowing, and hot showers. No dressing up for visitors or for Sunday. No shoe-cleaning or rigorous tooth-brushing after each meal. No going to bed while still wide awake. No getting up while still half-asleep. Graham, who had a flair for that sort of thing, made up a poem about it. It came out of the rhythm of his heels striking the road. For a single glowing moment he saw it as a whole, but when he tried to give voice to it, so that he could share it with Wallace and Harry, he lost it. It was one of those rare moments when all the things of heaven and earth are private and personal property, a moment so rare that it might come to him again only once or twice in his lifetime. It was a feeling, not really a thought, and the poem that belonged to it was never to be spoken or written down; it belonged wholly to the moment and would remain a part of the warm and personal mystery of realizing that he was someone different from everyone else in the world, someone separate from everything and everybody that ever existed. Separate, but not cut off. Separate, but belonging.

The north wind blew, gusting, a hot and oppressive summer wind, and there was not a cloud in the sky, and away to their right were the mountains hazed on the high horizon, not particularly grand and rugged, but a range of old mountains worn smooth, folded by numerous deep gullies, timbered by forests of great eucalypts, peppered with rooftops; slashed by the broad scars of the firebreaks, surmounted at the highest point by tall steel towers that transmitted television signals to the city on the plain in the west. On the foothills, the soil in places was thin and yellow and the trees were only twenty or thirty feet high. Farther up in the folds of the hills there were trees with enough timber in each of them to build a house; there were ferns three times the height of a man, and springs of clear water, and orchids growing wild and curious fungi and thousands of birds and tiny creatures and vegetation so dense that neither man nor boy could push through it. There were gentle slopes and saddles between the hills and other slopes that went up at very steep angles for a thousand feet or more. There were pockets of unspoiled country, wild, uninhabitable, where a boy could be king of the earth.

Perhaps this last thought had not occurred to Graham before. He had never really expected his parents to give way. His parents were straight-laced people, extremely old-fashioned about some things. Wallace might have been allowed to grow his hair a little longer than usual, Harry might have been able to wear casual clothes a little more ‘extreme' than usual, but not Graham. Graham had to be respectable, neat and tidy, an example. He wearied terribly of having to be an example, because he was sure he wasn't one at all. No one took any notice of him. In his own opinion he was a nobody. He often wondered why Wallace and Harry accepted him, but he didn't wonder too deeply, in case he broke the spell and they stopped being friendly to him. It was good being near Wallace, because Wallace was a big chap, burly, almost as rugged as a man; a strong character, Graham thought. Harry, on the other hand, was clever, but no one sneered at Harry's cleverness, because he was also the best runner for his age in the school. Graham was neither burly nor clever. All he had was sensibility, a feeling for other people, an unusual gentleness for his fifteen years, though he tried very hard to hide it. He often spoke roughly and laughed loudly so that others would think he was manly. And they did think it, too, when they bothered to notice him at all; they thought he was loyal and dependable and sensible. They weren't completely wrong.

The boys walked on along the road to Tinley in the blistering heat of the sun, and their packs became heavier and their pace slower. Sometimes they sat in the shade to cool off and to ease their shoulders. More cars stopped to offer them a lift, but each of them they waved on. They were on their own. They wanted no one.

For their lunch they dug a shallow hole and gathered sticks and made a small fire at the roadside to grill their sausages and boil water for instant coffee. Coffee, they felt, good and strong, was the sort of drink a fellow would have when he lived on his own, when he was a man. The water hadn't even started bubbling in the billy-can, the sausages were not even spitting, when a car pulled up and a woman called to them: ‘Put that fire out!'

The boys stared at her. She looked like an angry schoolmistress. ‘You heard me,' she said. ‘Put it out.'

‘We're only havin' our lunch, lady,' said Wallace. ‘What's wrong with that?'

‘You boys are old enough to know better. Put it out at once or I'll report you to the police. There's a £200 fine and a jail sentence for lighting a fire in the open on a day like this.'

‘Crikey, it's only a little fire,' complained Wallace. ‘We've dug a hole an' all. We're watching it.'

‘Put it out quickly. Tip your water over it.'

‘Fair go, lady,' said Wallace. ‘What are we supposed to drink? It's a hot day.'

It was Harry who lifted the billy off with a stick and emptied the water into the hole, for he had suddenly become aware of the heat and the strength of the north wind, of the way it fanned the flames, of the way the smoke scattered.

‘Now stamp on it,' the woman called. ‘Get it out. The last spark. Put it all out.'

She watched them with a set face until they had done it; then she said, ‘If you want hot water on a day like this, go into a house somewhere and ask for it nicely. Fire is a dangerous plaything at this time of year. Don't forget it.'

She drove on, and the boys were left looking at one another glumly. ‘Plaything, my fat aunt,' said Wallace.

‘Wouldn't it make you sick?' snorted Graham.

‘I suppose she was right, though,' said Harry.

‘We were watchin' it. It couldn't have done any harm.' Wallace was very upset. ‘If we can't light a fire, what are we goin' to eat and drink? What about our sausages an' all?'

‘I don't know,' said Graham.

‘It's
stupid.
All right for her. She can go home and switch on the stove. Grown-ups. You can't get away from them. Two-hundred pound fine for cookin' your lunch! Go to jail for drinkin' coffee! I suppose we're expected to starve to death.'

‘We've got some buns,' said Harry.

‘
Buns!
'

‘And we can drink water.'

‘Whose side are you on? I want
coffee
and
sausages.
'

Another car heading in the opposite direction pulled up. It was a utility truck, and at the wheel was a man who looked like a farmer. ‘You boys aren't lighting a fire, are you?' he said.

‘No,' said Wallace sullenly.

‘Make sure you don't.'

They had buns for lunch, and water. Much of the magic of the day had already gone sour on them.

There had been a time, not so long ago, when people went to Tinley for holidays, but the rapid growth of the city had robbed the place of its few modest charms and its isolation. From a quiet little township in the western foothills of the ranges, it had become a straggling and untidy outer suburb of unmade streets and low-cost houses. Speculators had put up signs everywhere (
Choice Home Sites, Elevated Building Blocks, Land on £5 Deposit
)
.
Surveyors had marked the bush with a maze of blazed trees and little white pegs hard-driven into the hungry yellow earth to define new roads and lot numbers. Here and there in the middle of it all, in the dusty wilderness, a few timber-framed houses had taken shape or were partly built.

It was scrubby country, rocky, and the indigenous trees were not tall and straight-grained but twisted and stunted and tough. It was brittle country. The grasses were sharp and wiry, and the tangled growth fostered by the warm spring rains was by mid-January a firetrap, a fuse waiting to be lit by a spark or a flash of lightning. The bush behind Tinley as far as the lower slopes of the ranges was a gigantic bomb set to explode.

It had been like that around Tinley almost every January for generations, and for generations men had treated this country with the utmost respect. Only once had it got away. That was back in 1913. The forests had dissolved in fire. Pillars and sheets of flame had swept into the ranges, up through the folds, along the saddles, over the top, and down the other side. Scores of houses had vanished from the earth. Tens of thousands of acres of forest had been stripped bare. Fourteen people had died.

So now no tractor drove without a spark-arrester, no householder dared burn rubbish out of doors, no one threw a match away until it was cold and black, smokers deliberately screwed their cigarette stubs into the dust, no one dropped broken glass or bottles that might by chance concentrate the sun's rays on to an inflammable substance, every wisp of smoke and every glimmer of flame seen by day or by night had to be accounted for and accounted for quickly. When the north wind blew there was not a second to lose, for in midsummer the north wind came hot and hard and fiercely dry. Behind its every gust lay two thousand miles of the continental land mass, a land mass baked brown and crisp by the burning sun. The north wind itself was like fire without the flame.

Soon enough the resentment eased out of the boys. They were too young and too free at heart to be miserable for long. Each had several pounds in his pocket (saved over a period of months), and they felt like millionaires. When they got to Tinley they bought pies and cokes and ice-creams to fill up on and more buns and more sausages to take away with them, and for a few shillings a tiny heater, no larger than a shoe-polish tin, that burned methylated spirits with a hot blue flame and no smoke. ‘Works just like a gas stove,' the man in the shop said. ‘Clear the ground, scoop out a hole, put some stones around it to break the wind and it'll be as safe as houses.'

They hadn't gone much more than a mile beyond Tinley towards the ranges when Wallace said, ‘I'm dog-tired. Let's find a creek or somethin' and camp.'

‘Good idea,' said Graham, thankfully, for he would never have suggested it himself.

They fried sausages and made coffee, and talked, and swatted at mosquitoes, and watched the stars come out, and listened to the hot dry wind creaking and crackling through the trees. Then they shone their torches into the undergrowth and up over their heads through the foliage. Insects glowed and flickered in the beams. ‘Light bends, you know,' said Harry, waving his torch from side to side. ‘But it won't bend for me.'