Reginald Hill - The Woodcutter

I didn’t want to go, but Dad dug his heels in and said that it was time I learnt some manners and Sir Leon had always been good to me and if for once I didn’t do what he wanted, he’d make bloody sure I didn’t do what I wanted for the rest of the summer holidays and lots of stuff like that, so one bright sunny afternoon I clambered over the boundary wall behind Birkstane and walked through the forest to the castle.

As castles go, it’s not much to write home about, no battlements or towers, not even a moat. It had been a proper castle once, way back in the Middle Ages, I think, but somewhere along the line it got bashed about a bit, whether by cannon balls or just general neglect and decay I don’t know, and when the family started rebuilding, they downsized and what they ended up with was a big house.

But that’s adult me talking. As I emerged from the trees that day, the building loomed ahead as formidable and as huge as Windsor!

Everyone was scattered around the lawn in front of the house. With each step I took, it became more apparent that the Sundaybest outfit that Dad had forced me to wear was entirely the wrong choice. Shorts, jeans, T-shirts abounded, not a hot tweed suit in sight. I almost turned and ran away, but Sir Leon had spotted me and advanced to meet me.

‘Uggh grrr,’ he said in his pretended wolf-speak. ‘Wolf, my boy, so glad you could make it. You look like you could do with a nice cold lemonade. And why don’t you take your jacket and tie off – bit too hot for them on a day like this.’

Thus he managed to get me looking slightly less ridiculous by the time he introduced me to the ‘kids’.

The girls, ranging from eleven to fifteen, more or less ignored me. The boy, stretched out on the grass apparently asleep, rolled over as Sir Leon prodded him with his foot, raised himself on one elbow, and smiled at me.

‘Johnny,’ said Leon, ‘this is Wolf Hadda. Wolf, this is Johnny Nutbrown. Johnny, why don’t you get Wolf a glass of lemonade?’

Then he left us.

Johnny said, ‘Is your name really Wolf?’

‘No. Wilf,’ I said. ‘Sir Leon calls me Wolf.’

‘Then that’s what I’ll call you, if that’s all right,’ he said with a smile.

Then he went and got me a lemonade.

I got no real impression of Johnny from that first encounter. The way he looked, and moved, and talked, he might have been a creature from another planet. As for him, I think even then he was as unperturbed by everything, present, past or future, as I was to find him in later life. He took the arrival of this inarticulate peasant in his stride. I think he was totally unaware that I’d been brought along to keep him company. I can’t believe that being the sole boy among all those girls had troubled him for a moment. That was Sir Leon imagining how he might have felt in the same circumstances.

A tall woman, slim and athletic with a lovely figure and a face whose features were almost too perfect to be beautiful came and looked at me for a second or two with ice-cold eyes, then moved away. That was Lady Kira. The ice-cold look and the accompanying silence set the pattern for most of our future encounters.

I’ve little recollection of any of the other adults. As for the girls, they were just a blur of bright colours and shrill noises. Except for Imogen. Not that I knew it was Sir Leon’s daughter to start with. She was just part of the blur until they started dancing.

Most of the adults had moved off somewhere. Johnny, after two or three attempts at conversation, had given up on me and gone back to sleep. The girls had got hold of a radio or it might have been a portable cassette player, I don’t know. Anyway it was beating out the pop songs of the time and they started dancing. Disco dancing, I suppose it was – it could have been classical ballet for all it meant to me – the music scene, as they term it, was an area of teenage life that entirely passed me by.

But presently as they went through their weird gyrations, one figure began to stand out from the half-dozen, not because she was particularly shapely or anything – in fact she was the skinniest of the lot – but because while the others were very aware of this as a competitive group activity, she was totally absorbed in the music. You got the feeling she would have been doing this if she’d been completely alone in the middle of a desert.

The difference eventually made itself felt even among her fellow dancers, and one by one they slowed down and stopped, till only this single figure still moved, rhythmically, sinuously, as though in perfect harmony not only with the music but with the grass beneath her feet and the blue sky above, and the gently shimmering trees of the distant woodland that formed the backdrop from my viewpoint. Unlike the others, she was wearing a white summer dress of some flimsy material that floated around her as she danced, and her long golden hair wreathed about her head like a halo of sunbeams.

I was entranced, in the strictest sense of the word; drawn into her trance; totally absorbed. I didn’t know what it meant, only that it meant something hugely significant to me. I didn’t want it to stop. I wanted to sit here and watch this small and still totally anonymous figure dancing forever.

Then Johnny who, unseen by me, had woken and sat up, said, ‘Oh God, there goes Imo again. Turn on the music and it sets her off like a monkey on a stick!’

His tone was totally non-malicious, but that didn’t save him.

I punched him on the nose. I didn’t even think about it. I just punched him.

Blood fountained out; one of the remaining adults – maybe it was Johnny’s mother – had been looking our way, and she screamed. Johnny sat there, stock-still, staring down at his cupped hand as it filled with blood.

I just wanted to be as far away from all this as I could get.

Again without thought, I found myself on my feet and heading as fast as I could run towards the welcome shelter of the distant woodland.

My shortest line took me past Imogen. She had stopped dancing and her eyes tracked me towards her and past her and I imagined I could feel them on me still as I covered the couple of hundred yards or so to the sanctuary of the trees.

That is my first memory of Imogen. I think even then, uncouth and untutored though I was, I knew I was hers and she was mine forever.

Just shows how wrong you can be, eh, Elf?

I’ve just read over what I’ve written.

It strikes me this is just the kind of stuff you want, Elf. Childhood trauma, all that crap.

Except maybe I haven’t made it clear: I enjoyed my childhood. It was a magical time. Do you read poetry? I don’t. Rhyme or reason, isn’t that what they say? Well, I’m a reason man. At school I learnt some stuff by rote to keep the teachers happy but I also learnt the trick of instant deletion the minute I’d spouted it. The only bit that’s stuck doesn’t come from my schooldays but from my daughter, Ginny’s.

It was some time in that last summer, ‘08 I mean, it was raining most of the time I recall, perhaps that’s why Ginny got stuck into her holiday assignments early.

At her posh school, they reckoned poetry was important, and one of the things she had to do was write a paraphrase of some lines of Wordsworth. She assumed because I was a Cumbrian lad, I’d know all about him. A father doesn’t like to disappoint his daughter, so I glanced at the passage. A lot of the language was daft and he went all round the houses to say something, but to my amazement I found myself thinking, this bugger’s writing about me!

He was talking about himself as a kid, the things he got up to, climbing steep cliffs, moonlight poaching, going out on the lake, but the lines that stuck were the ones that summed it all up for him.