Out of the Ashes (6 page)

The fire is out, and the people are gone. It’s done. It’s over. I talked to Jay on the phone again today. She’s been ringing a lot in the last few days.
It’s been really good to talk to her. She never talks about foot and mouth. She’s the only reminder I’ve got that there are other things happening out there. I’m still
quarantined, still not allowed out, not allowed back at school. This morning she told me that everyone in my class has written to me and that, if I liked, she could bring the letters to the farm
gate after school and hand them over.

So we met up this afternoon at the end of the farm lane. She looked the same. I don’t know why, but I expected her to be different. We chatted for a long time. It was difficult at first,
like we were strangers almost – even though we’ve spoken often on the phone. She gave me all the hot gossip. Apparently Sally Burton’s boast­ing that she’s going out
with Peter Mitchum, who’s now got a Mohican haircut and fancies himself rotten, but Jay knows for a fact that Peter is already going out with Linda Morrish. I laughed, not just because she
laughed, but because it sounded like news from another planet. Then she handed me this huge brown envelope with all the letters from school. She told me that Mrs Merton had been in tears when she
heard about our farm, and that she’d written a letter to me too. It was great seeing Jay again, hearing her voice. For a short time I was part of the world again, the world outside. I watched
her cycle off until she disappeared round the corner, and then suddenly I felt very alone.

I’ve been sitting on my bed reading the letters from school again and again. Some were written to all of us, to Mum and Dad and me, but most just to me.

Mrs Merton wrote this: ‘It must all seem very grim and hopeless at the moment. But you mustn’t lose heart. You tell your family that we’re thinking of them, and that one day
soon all this misery will be over. There’ll be animals on the farm, and life will be as it was once again. There will be a life for you all after foot and mouth, and a good life
too.’

The church bells are ringing. Someone else must be ringing Dad’s bell.

I’ve never been ill, not seriously ill, just colds and toothache. But I think this is like being really ill, so
ill you can’t forget it for a single moment. And the illness has changed everything. None of us can do what we used to do. Mum can’t go to work at her school, I still can’t go to
my school nor see my friends, Dad can’t milk his cows nor make his cheese.

Our fire may be out, but when I looked out of the window first thing this morning I could see the smoke from three fires drifting down the valley. It’s like the whole
world is sick. And Dad is trying to wash it away. He’s out there from dawn to dusk working like a madman. Ever since the ministry told him that every building on the farm has to be cleared
out and disinfected, he hasn’t stopped. He’s out there now – and it’s nearly nine o’clock at night – cleaning off the rafters in the lambing shed. He’s
been at it all day. Mum has tried to stop him, to slow him down. But he won’t listen. I told Mum today how I’d heard him talking to Grandad in the cow barn. She looked very worried, but
then she told me something that explained it a bit. Apparently it was in the cow barn that Grandad had died all those years before. He was feeding the cows one day and just dropped dead of a heart
attack. Mum said it was the smell of the dead animals that upset Dad, that made him work like he was. He just wants to get rid of the smell.

Mum and I are better together than we’ve ever been before. There’s no pretending any more, on either side. Before this I never really thought of her as a person, just Mum, Mum
pestering me, Mum organizing me, organizing Dad. But she’s not like that now. She cries like I do. I think she really needs me, as much as I need her.

Mum and I went down to the farm gate to get our shopping. Auntie Liz brings it out to us every other day. Big Josh was with her – he likes me calling him ‘Big Josh’. He asked
me if I’d got ‘leg and mouth’, and we laughed. I just wanted to hug him, he’s so sweet! I couldn’t hug him or even touch him just in case I’ve got the virus on
me somewhere. So I blew him a kiss over the gate and he blew me loads back.

I think all the time about Little Josh. I see him as I saw him for the last time being carried off, still bleating. Was he crying out for help? Was he saying goodbye? Did he know what was
happening? I hope not.

I dreamed about Hector last night. I can’t remember all of it, only that he came into the barn and bellowed, and all the cows rose from the dead and followed him out into the field. And
Dad was there, laughing like he used to.

On the way back from the farm gate with the shopping this afternoon we saw Dad out on Front Field. He was standing by the mass grave. He had a single daffodil in his hand.
Suddenly he just fell on his knees and began crying. Mum and I ran to him, and took him home. He cried into his hat all the way. Mum sat him down in the kitchen, and talked to him, but he
couldn’t stop crying. I came up here to my room. It’s like foot and mouth isn’t satisfied with killing all our animals. It’s killing Dad too.

I thought after the fire had burnt itself out that the worst would be over. I was wrong.

When we woke up this morning Dad was gone. We looked everywhere, but we couldn’t find him. I noticed the Land-Rover was gone, and then Mum discovered his shotgun was gone too. She called
the police. After that we sat at the kitchen table and waited. Mum said she knew she should have made him see a doctor, that she knew he wasn’t well. He hadn’t been eating. He
hadn’t been sleeping. All he did was scrub the sheds and cry. She kept blaming herself, and I kept saying it would be all right, that Dad would come home, that he’d be fine. But I
didn’t believe it. Every hour we waited there in the kitchen seemed like a day. Both of us thought the worst – that he’d gone off somewhere and killed himself – but neither
of us dared say it.

We sat by the phone all day just holding hands, hoping and praying and crying. And then this evening we had the phone call. They’ve found him. He was out at Stoke Church in Hartland,
sitting by Grandad’s grave. He was very upset and very confused, they said. They’ve taken him to North Devon Hospital at Barnstaple, and he’s been given some pills to help him
sleep. He’s fine. We can go in and see him tomorrow.

So the worst wasn’t the worst. Some prayers do work after all.

I hate hospitals. I hate the look of them. I hate the smell of them. Lying in a huge hospital bed Dad looked very small and sunken and sleepy. When I gave him his bananas
– he loves bananas – he tried his best to smile, but it very soon turned to tears. He kept saying over and over again that he was sorry and that he shouldn’t have gone off like he
had, that he didn’t know what he was doing.

We didn’t stay long, so as not to tire him, and then Mum went off to see the doctor and left me outside in the corridor. She told me what they’d said on the way home in the car, that
Dad’s not likely to be out of hospital for at least a couple of weeks. He’s depressed, badly depressed. It’s not something Dad ever liked to talk about, she said, but he had been
depressed once before when he was much younger. And depression isn’t just sadness, she told me. It’s an illness that makes you feel very bad about yourself, that makes you feel
completely useless and lost, as if you’re living at the bottom of a deep dark pit of hopelessness that you can see no way out of. They’re giving Dad medication and treatment to make him
feel better, and he’ll be seeing a psychiatrist to help him come to terms with everything that’s happened, but it might be a long time before he’s completely better.

I think Mum and I talked more about Dad on the way home today than we ever have before; but not like mother and daughter, more like best friends holding hands through a nightmare we long to wake
up from, but can’t. We know that all we’ve got now is each other.

Dad’s still in hospital. I really miss him being about the place. Mum goes in to see him every day after work, and I go with her at weekends. Today, for the first time,
he seems more like his old self. He was still a bit sleepy, but the crying has stopped. He even laughs a little. He’s been doing a few sketches each day, to stop himself from going mad with
boredom, he said. He didn’t want to show me at first, but I bullied him till he did. He’s done pages and pages of lovely pen portraits of the animals that died, Hector, Jessica, Molly
– every one of them, with their names underneath each one. ‘It’s so’s I don’t forget them,’ he told me. He didn’t seem at all sad when he said it, just
matter of fact. He’s so much better, but I’ve noticed that he drifts away from us sometimes into his own thoughts, into a world of his own. A shadow seems to fall over him, but then it
passes and he’s back with us again.

He says the food in hospital is horrible. His friend in the bed next to his says they all call him ‘chimp’ on the ward, because he only eats bananas.