Quite soon he found a tidal ridge of shingle which was dry and firm. Now he could walk quickly despite the limpets and the cockleshells, the broken bones of cuttle, the crab claws and the vacant whelks which formed the ridge. From time to time he felt a movement underfoot — unnerving in that darkness — as foraging sandhoppers, sea slaters, crabs, who knows what else? nipped and quivered at his soles. At first he was not cold. His exertions and the bag across his back preserved the warmth of his uncle’s house at night. But the sweat across his forehead and his shoulders was soon turned gelid by the wind which the sleeping land sucked and summoned from the bleaker sea. Soon he was as cold and damp as frogs. A little frightened, too. The sea, that night, curled and lisped and whispered in a voice which said, Dismay, Dismay, Dismay. No wonder that the wind took flight, took fright, and sought the refuge of the shore. The land was mute — no birds, no human cries, no sheep, no sign of welcome or of safety to my father walking on the beach.
If we’d been him we would have turned around and gone back home. Too cold for expeditions. Too wet. Too dark. Too treacherous and full of wolves; too pitiless with wind and whispers. Too void. We’d seek the bracken path again and creep into the village, replace the nuts, the knife, the grain and candles we had stolen, and lay out with our cousins by the fire. But my father is not us. We do not share his bludgeoned vanity, his moodiness, his resolution. We do not share his ardour. He did not turn or run. He walked along the shore as if his home was close ahead and not behind. He whistled, hummed. He sang. His voice was whisked away and shredded by the wind. If we had seen him there upon the beach that night (he said), if we had watched him striding on the tidal ridge, we’d trust his word that, more than fear, he felt, for once, exultant.
Of course, his triumph could not last. The landscape and the tide conspired to chase him off the beach. He rejoined the cliff path at that point where a valley joined the coast. Its stream spread out (remember?) amongst rocks and tumbled boulders. When he had passed this way before — at the frontier where chick-weed turned to wrack, where skylark became tern, where earth gave way to sand — the river water had been warm and shallow. He’d waded it and hardly got his ankles wet. But now, at the finish of the winter rains, the stream was deep and strong. It was too dark to follow inland on the bank until a crossing place was found. Besides, my father was in no mind for deviations or delays. He stripped and put his clothes into the goatskin wrap. He held it, high and dry, in his good hand and stepped into the water. He didn’t fall. Or drop the wrap. Or lose his footing in the stream and end up — moments later — dumped and bruised like flotsam on the beach. Dimly he could see the dry bank on the other side. He fixed his eye on that, kept his legs well spread, and crossed.
By now his teeth were chattering like a conference of knappers’ stones. His skin was barnacled with cold. His hand was stiff. He dressed — but all the dampness of the stream was soaked up by his clothes. The wind passed through him: it played his ribs. He was wattle without daub. He took the woman’s gifts out from the skin and placed them on the bank. He wrapped the skin around his shoulders and sat amongst his gifts, hunched up, a boulder, with his head upon his knees and his arm around his shins. Now the boulder trembled. He was a logan-stone, shaking on the spot. The noises that he made were icy, animal, dank; they were the rhythmic, shivering inhalations of people making love, or cowering, or cold. His stump — a loather of the cold — was numb. He knew he had to light a fire.
He stood no chance of finding any kindling or dry moss in that light. He took the flint knife that he’d stolen — the sharp and perfect product of his eldest cousin — and tried to cut some kindling from his head. (In his retelling father made it comic, miming with his severed arm and a head that now was old and dry and bald.) But on that night his hair was long enough and coarse and hardly damp. The wind had kept it dry. At first he tried to trap a hank behind his head with his numb stump and to cut the hair free at the roots. He could not hold it firm enough. The hair sprang loose. (He mimed that, too, to laughter that was cautious, thin.) Then he used one hand and tried to slice the thick hair at his forehead. It simply flattened on his skull. Here was a task that required two hands. A one-armed man could only crop his own hair with a knife if he could find the reckless courage to hack the skull, to mutilate his head.
My father put aside the knife. So much for flint and stone! He held a thin hank of hair — forty, fifty strands — between his pointing finger and his thumb. He pulled to test its strength — and then he snapped the hairs out from his head. He was surprised how easily they came, how little pain there was. He tried again. Another skein came free. Quite soon he had a nest of hair — and a head that looked chewed up by rats.
Consider now how hard it was for him to break his cousin’s knife in two, to trap the one half with his toes and strike it with the other. Producing sparks was simple — but they were haywire, shortlived, futile. What he needed was ignition, a spark which had the force and foresight to settle on the nest of hair. To simmer, smoke. To smoulder, flare. To blaze.
Depending on his mood — and on the age and temperament of his audience — my father would invent new ways of making fire. A firefly came and settled on the hair. A lizard that had flames for breath. A fireball. A fire bird. A glow stone. Even with a pair of friction sticks and the dryest moss we know how hard it is to summon fire. With stone and wind and hair? What chance? The truth is this, that father was just lucky. A spark obliged. A few hairs curled and shivered at the thorn of heat.
Fire is determined. Once it has a pinch of life, it flourishes, it thrives. The hairs sent up the sour fume of burning flesh, part crab, part cheese, part gall. They smoked and melted, flared and shrank, became one piece of brittle, sticky tar. Their blaze was strong enough for father — his hand unsteady from the cold — to light the wick of a scallop candle from his store of gifts. He lit them all. Their flames winked and guttered in the wind. My father placed one scallop in the pot to save it from the weather. Its flame reflected on the clay and, from the pot’s mouth, released a single watery pillar of light in which my father thawed his hand.
There were enough dead twigs, damp reeds, dry pith, seed masts, plant waste, bark close by for father to build up a fire with the scallops at its base and the wooden spinning top — his youngest cousin’s treasured toy — at its summit. At first it was all smoke — but the wind took that away and coaxed flames to startle on the twigs. My father was at a loss, he said, to comprehend the depth of pleasure that a fire can give.
He soon was warm, but not all of him at once. That’s the trouble with an exposed fire — it scorches cheeks and noses while necks and backs and buttocks are left freezing in the night. My father had to turn himself, a chicken on the spit, to make quite sure that he was thawed right through. And then he sat before his fire and sucked the emmer grain and ate the nuts. Their shells were fed into the fire. And while he sat there, making shapes and stories out of flames, the sun came up behind his back. If he was at a loss to comprehend the depth of pleasure that a fire can give, then what could he make of dawn? It dulled the cutting edge of wind. It brought my father’s shivering inhalations to an end. It silenced father’s teeth; the knappers’ conference of stones was suspended for the day. His wattle now had daub. The logan-stone was still.
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