The Fourth Pig (25 page)

“Brook, brook, hide me,

So the fairies won't find me.

By power of thirst and hunger and pain,

So the fairies won't find me again.”

I am not sure how that spell came into my head, but I suspect that it had been left lying in the air of the Debateable Land for more years than even the brook could tell. At least it worked, for the brook said: “Very well, my girl, you jump in and be one of my trout.”

So in I jumped and was a trout. This was very pleasant and slippery and I saw all kinds of things which I liked, such as bright pebbles and roundnesses, and delicious nosing places under roots, and I blew bubbles out of my mouth and I ate three worms and a wriggling fly cleverly lipped from the dazzling brink of air. But when the fairies came rushing and hulloing over the bridge I was frightened and darted about, though I did not know why, and when one of them threw a pebble down into the brook I darted into the comfort of my deepest nosing place.

And then I was myself again, and I thanked the brook and went on. But I was still hungry and when I saw a bramble covered with big ripe blackberries, I began to eat them. The bramble said, in a scratchy, snarly voice: “What right have you to eat my blackberries?”

“Please, bramble,” I said, “I was hungry.”

“All right,” said the bramble, “but don't cut me back to make any of your tidy hedges.”

“Please, bramble, I haven't got a farm,” I said, and carefully unhooked the trailer that had caught in my skirt. But as I was doing this, I heard the sound of a second pursuit and knew by the singing that those who came now were the very best of my fairy friends in the old days: the one who had broken the necklace, the one who had been master of birds, and the one into whose eyes I had looked too deep. So I pressed my lips down on the thorns and whispered:

“Bramble, bramble, hide me,

So the fairies won't find me.

By power of thirst and hunger and pain,

So the fairies won't know me again.”

“Very well, my girl,” said the bramble, “you jump in and be one of my beetles.” So I jumped into the bramble bush and before the thorns had pricked me much I was a very small beetle with six black legs and a double pair of red and purple wings. I was walking up the stem of a bramble because I had started walking up the stem of the bramble, and I went on walking with all my six legs until the fairies rushing and singing by twitched at the
branch and I fell through immense hollows and lights and darknesses, bouncing lightly from stem to stem until I fell flat on my back on a great leaf. And there I lay, kicking my six legs in the air because when I was on my back my six legs naturally kicked. In time one of these legs might have met with a grass-blade onto which it might have clung, or indeed a puff of wind might have blown the whole upset beetle right side up. In time any of the limited number of things which can happen to beetles might have happened to the beetle I was, but while I was still kicking I became myself again, lying under a bramble bush wild with rage and self-pity because my fairy friends had passed me by. In this frenzy I would have leapt up to run after them, but the bramble bush had me by the hair, hooked me by the wrist and ankles. By the time I had loosed myself the frenzy had faded, I thanked the bramble and went on.

It was, of course, possible that the pursuit might turn and come racing back on me again, so I went warily through the pleasant country where Spring and Autumn mingled from one bend of the road to the next. Yet the look of things was getting more ordinary; I noticed fewer unicorns and hippogriffs grazing among the dairy herds or the solid plough-horses; earlier on I had seen a witch at her cottage door beating a recalcitrant broom-stick, but now the old ladies I passed were doing nothing more strenuous than knitting or shelling peas. However, when I saw someone coming towards me down the road I stepped back behind a wall, gripping my hazel staff, and watched. He was a middle-aged man in ordinary working clothes, with a cap and blue woollen muffler knotted round his neck, and thick boots; his face was heavily lined, especially round the eyes and mouth,
and looked worried, and his hair was going a bit grey, especially where it was clipped short at the back of his neck—though I did not notice that until later. It was clear that he was not one of the fairies, so I stepped out from behind the wall, and he said: “Well, you've been long enough coming!”

“Were you looking for me?” I asked.

“All day,” he answered, “and most of this last year as well. Come on now, or we shall be late.” And he turned round again in the direction he had been going, plainly expecting me to follow him.

“Are you my deliverer?” I asked, and I think my voice must have shaken a little, for I had been informed by Serpent of the necessary relationship between deliverer and delivered.

“Aye,” he said and nodded, grinning at me a little from gapped teeth. “Did you think you'd get a better one?” And he stretched out his hand at me. It was quite clearly the hand I had grasped out of the funnel in the forest, and it was a strong hand; but it was not the questing, beautiful hand of the fairy men, the harp players, the cunning strokers of young leopards. He took my hazel stick out of my hands then, and hit me lightly over the shoulders with it. “Get on!” he said. “We're bound to be out of the Debateable Land by nightfall.”

“And then?” I said.

“Why then,” said he, “we're man and wife as we're bound to be now the rest of our days on Middle Earth, and what have you to put in to the housekeeping?”

“Well,” said I, “if that is so, so it is, and I shall bring my mother's pink and blue teapot and the rest of the crockery, and as many sheets and table-cloths as we're likely to need, the two of us (though it's the truth that most of them are darned here and
there), and some bits and pieces of furnishing, the like of a horse-hair sofa (though I have always wanted a good sofa in plush), a flap-table and four cane chairs, an arm-chair that was my Granny's and a hearth rug not much worn. There's upstairs furniture as well—”

“I'll be getting the bed,” said he, and put an arm through mine. He was limping a little, and I asked him why. “That's just my leg,” he said, “it was plugged by a machine gun at Givenchy. I was thinking the Jerrys had got me that time. I was there bleeding in a shell-hole—ach, hours I was. I can't go running races with you now.”

“Never heed,” I said, and stroked his arm, “you've got all the blood in you that you need. What's gone's gone. Well then, I've got some kitchen things, saucepans and that, and a good girdle, and I've a nice sewing machine, and what's more, if you lose your job I might still go back to mine, for I used to get four pounds a week in my best time.”

“But that was the good years,” he said, “you'd never get that now. Not near. But mine's steady. Seems so, anyway, not that there's telling, these days.”

We walked along in silence then for a little time, I fitting in my step to his slower one. And I remembered fitting my steps once before to a man's whose arm was round mine. Whit Sunday it was, and a clear day, and we'd walked out miles beyond the bus stop, and he wore a pink tie, the colour of pink hawthorn almost, at least I thought so, and he was a checker at the warehouse up behind my office, and we were going to get a ring and all and he was saving up. And that was seven years ago, before Fairy Land. And I'd been in love with him like the girls in the pictures, and
Mother'd have hot supper ready for us, with scones and jam and a good pot of tea, against the time we got back, for a girl can only be young once. And that was seven years ago.

My deliverer looked round, a bit awkward, and began speaking and stopped, and then said: “One thing. I do like a quiet evening. Not gadding off. You know. Once a week, well, that's all right, but there's a fine lot of books I've got. More than a hundred books, and serious. Would you ever be doing any serious reading, now?”

“That's all right,” I said. “I used to be well up in the old days. Evening classes: economics and all that. Though maybe I've dropped out of it lately. But I could pick up.”

“Well, there's a bit of luck for me,” he said, “you mightn't have been that sort at all for all I knew. But now I look at you, lass, why, I wouldn't wonder if we mightn't go to a meeting now and again, you and me?”

“I used to do all that,” I said, “and I did my bit of regular canvassing Election times.”

He stopped and took me by the shoulders and said: “We're in luck, the two of us. Why, lass, I mightn't have been that kind of a man at all, and you might have been just any bit of skirt. Not my sort. But you're the kind—” He seemed to be seeking for words, frowning over them, but I didn't know at all what he wanted to say, so I could not help him. At last he went on: “What I was meaning to say was, you're the kind of a lass who might get herself shot. I can see you shot,” he said, “with a bullet fair through your head!” And he began to tremble, holding onto me. So I put my arms round his neck and stood close, kissing him. His skin was rough and weathered, sagging a little over the jaw; the grey
stubble pricked my cheeks; he smelt of tobacco and machine oil and his own smell. In time he stopped trembling and kissed me harder than I much liked, and said: “That's shell-shock, that was! Never you heed, it comes on all of a sudden and then it's gone. You'll need to get used to it. But I'll be fair right with you.”

Evening was now closing down on us, and before us there was a little wood of larches and hazel, with the late primroses between, oh as simple and pretty as could be, and here and there mosses and sometimes fern fronds, lady fern and broad buckler fern, and the bare earth showing, old leaves and good loam. “It was hereabouts I came to cut my stick,” said my deliverer. “Sundays we'll come. It's bonnier than the pictures and not so wasteful.” He took my hand again and I was not unwilling to feel his strong fingers pressing on mine.

And then out of the wood with a swirl and a crying and a shining of eyes swept the returning pursuit of the Fairies, and in a moment they were all round and clutching at me. I had so utterly forgotten them that I screamed out and caught hold of my deliverer with my other hand and buried my face in his coat.

“Come back! Come back!” they sang quiveringly, softly, and the evening was full of them, tender with memories of delight and magic. Their hands caressed my hair and the nape of my neck, but I burrowed further into the coat between the flannel shirt which I knew well I would be washing next Monday and the inner coat-pocket with the pipe and matches and insurance cards. And I heard deep under the calling of the fairy people the steady mortal heart of my deliverer, the heart strained by war and work but still strong for enough years to see my children growing up and maybe a better world for them.

I lifted my head, and his head too was lifted and white in the evening light, and tough against danger. And the Fairies were gone. We walked through the wood very quietly and down the winding path between the ferns and out over the brae-side, a right bonny path, I thought, and we would go there often, Sundays and Bank Holidays. Lower down, near to the first houses, was the place where the three roads joined, though there was no choice, going this way, of which one we should take. And so we were out of the Debateable Land; and to-morrow would be a working day.

FURTHER READING

For readers interested in discovering more about Naomi Mitchison's oeuvre, here are some references to critical writings not cited in my Introduction.

Bignami, Marialuisa, Francesca Orestano, and Alessandro Vescovi, eds.,
History and Narration: Looking Back from the Twentieth Century
(Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2011).

Hubble, Nick, “Naomi Mitchison: Fantasy and Intermodern Utopia,” in Alice Reeve-Tucker and Nathan Waddell,
Utopianism, Modernism, and Literature in the Twentieth Century
(Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 74–92.

Lassner, Phyllis,
British Women Writers of World War II: Battlegrounds of Their Own
(New York: St. Martin's Press, 1998).

Mackay, Marina, and Lindsey Stonebridge, eds.,
British Fiction after Modernism
(Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).

Montefiore, Janet,
Men and Women Writers of the 1930s: The Dangerous Flood of History
(London: Routledge, 1996).

Murray, Isobel, ed.,
The Naomi Mitchison Library Series
(Kilkerran, Scotland: Kennedy & Boyd, 2009–). Murray is the leading scholar on the works of Mitchison.

Oppizzi, Alessia, “Between Gender and Fictional Experiment: Naomi Mitchison's Historical Novels,” in Bignami, Orestano, and Alessandro Vescovi,
History and Narration
, 56–84.

Plain, Gill,
Women's Fiction of the Second World War: Gender, Power, Resistance
(Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1996).