Picnic In Eden

by Sally Spencer

Genres: Family Life; Sagas; Small Town & Rural; 20th Century Romance

Synopsis

Warm, powerfully engrossing saga from the author of SALT OF THE EARTH It was freezing cold on the day of the funeral,but as two young men looked down at the coffin containing the body of their best friend,it was not the temperature that made them shiver. They were thinking back to a time when the three of them had first met, in the playground years before. It had all seemed so easy then. But as they grew up,they began to discover that life was much more complicated than they'd ever imagined.

Release date: July 26, 2012

Publisher: Orion

Print pages: 416

Sample

Prologue

It was bitterly cold, even for March, and the gravestones were covered with a sheen of glittering hoar-frost. The sun was no more than a pale, watery spot in the sky. The birds perched in black, skeletal trees ruffled their feathers, but were otherwise still. The only noise to disturb the frozen silence came from human onlookers, who shuffled their feet and exchanged semi-reverential whispers as they strained against the police cordon for a better view of the grave.

The church door creaked and necks stretched to watch the cortège, led by a mahogany coffin carried on the shoulders of four men. This was not a common sight anymore. Trolleys were used nowadays to convey the casket to its last resting place, their rubber wheels gliding smoothly, effortlessly, over the worn paving stones. But the two front pall-bearers had insisted on the old way. They wanted to carry, not guide – to take the weight of the relationship in death as they had done in life.

It was almost too much for them that they were forced to share the load with others, men who had liked the deceased and been liked in return, but had never been close to him. He had only ever had two real friends, and as the box pressed down on their shoulders, the rear pall-bearers felt like intruders on a private grief.

The crisp, biting air buzzed with excitement. The crowd began to push and the policemen had to strain to hold them back.

There would have been a large turn-out under any circumstances. The deceased had been a famous son of Norton. A local hero – at least to some. But the suddenness – the unexpectedness – of his death, had turned the event into street theatre. And already the rumours were flying.

‘I’ve got a cousin in the police force and he says something’s not quite right.’

‘Drunk? At that time of day? You’re not telling me …’

The celebrities had caused a stir too, arriving in their big cars all the way from London. It was worth getting cold just to see the rich and famous standing there, almost within touching distance. Was that her? Didn’t she look different on the telly? Wasn’t that tall chap the one who … you know?

The three plainclothes policemen positioned strategically away from the crowd watched the scene with unflinching intensity. The eldest, a Chief Inspector in his early forties, wore a heavy tweed overcoat and a worried expression. He had donned a black armband, but his eyes were focused not on the coffin itself but on one of its bearers. His business was with the quick, not the dead.

The cortège reached the grave. The hard ground had been hacked rather than dug, and wicked, jagged spikes of petrified earth stuck out from the edges.

The chief mourners reluctantly surrendered the casket to the grave-diggers, and stood solemnly while it was lowered into the hole. As it bumped to the bottom, a heavy grey cloud drifted in front of the sun, and it was suddenly darker, colder.

The vicar, prayer book held in hands that were almost numb, began to read the service.

‘In the midst of life we are in death,’ he intoned.

Three days earlier, the man in the coffin had been fit and active, with the prospect of a golden future before him. Now he was just a lifeless slab of meat and bone.

‘For as much as it hath pleased Almighty God of his great mercy to take unto himself the soul of our dear brother here departed, we therefore commit his body to the ground, ashes to ashes, dust to dust …’

It was difficult to see all this as the result of divine providence, one of the chief mourners thought. Not when you knew how and why he had died. And yet … and yet, perhaps there was a celestial logic behind it. If they were not God’s puppets, then they were certainly fate’s. Because none of this would have happened but for that meeting in the playground over twenty years ago. The seeds of the funeral had been planted then and had been growing, invisibly, ever since.

The vicar closed his prayer book and retreated, leaving the stage free for the dead man’s two friends. They stepped forward together and their fingers tugged and clawed at the frozen earth until each had managed to prise free a chunk. They stood at the side of the grave, looking down at the shining box but seeing beyond it, to the man they had known and the destiny they had shared. They did not move for almost a minute. Then, on an unspoken signal, they opened their hands simultaneously and let the earth fall.

The solid clods hit the coffin with the crash of a hammer striking a skull and bounced back into the air. They landed again, with less force this time, rolled a little along the mahogany, and were still.

The two mourners saw none of that. They had turned their backs and were walking away. The ceremony was over – at least for them.

From a distance, the Chief Inspector watched them uneasily. It was possible, with this crowd, for his man to make an escape, and though they would catch him eventually, it would look bad. Even if he didn’t run he might resist arrest, and nobody wanted any trouble at a funeral.

The suspect saw the Chief Inspector’s anxiety and gestured discreetly that there was no need for it. He would not cause problems, neither now nor later. He turned to his companion, and gave him a thin, wan smile.

‘You’ll come with me, won’t you?’ he asked.

It was not really a question. Signalling to the policemen to follow, they walked together towards the lych-gate, their minds no longer in the graveyard but roaming the playground of their childhoods on that first day of school …

Chapter One

During the long, sweet summer holiday, the children had forgotten what it was like to be cooped up in a classroom. When playtime finally came, they erupted, skipping higher than ever before, pursuing furious games of tag under the warm September sun. They shouted, they screamed, they laughed. All except the infants.

The new children stood with their hands in their pockets and watched the others play, or else wandered aimlessly up and down the playground. Just yesterday, they had joined in the big kids’ games, but that had been in the village street – familiar territory. Now the solid, redbrick school loomed over them, its slated gables gazing down like disapproving eyes. And they felt lonely and afraid.

Some of the children had cried when their mothers left; a few had even tried to follow and been restrained by Miss Gladstone. But not the two squatting by the fence, looking at the ground; not the two that Jimmy Bradley, new to the village as well as to the school, was studying.

One of them, David, was a stocky child, and it was possible even then to see that he would be a powerful figure when he grew up. He had just gazed blankly as his mother walked away, as if he had never expected anything but desertion. The other, Paul, the slight pale one, had wanted to cry, but bit his lip and held back the tears.

Jimmy wondered whether or not to approach – but only for a second. There was something about the other two that made him feel he would be welcomed.

As he got closer to them, he could see what they were doing. In the dirt at the edge of the playground, they had scraped a hole into which they had herded several ants. The sides of the hole were not steep, but when one of the creatures reached the top, Paul would lift a twig and flick it back down. Try as they might, the ants could not escape, and their tiny minds coped with this frustration by adopting an even more frantic pace.

Jimmy’s shadow fell across the hole – and across the two small boys. They looked up, sharply, expecting trouble. Then, seeing that he was new too, they relaxed again.

‘What are you doin’?’ Jimmy asked.

‘Playin’ a game,’ Paul said.

‘What’s it called?’

Paul shrugged his thin shoulders.

‘It’s not got no name. It’s just a game. You’ve got to stop the ants gettin’ out of the hole.’

Jimmy watched as another one scrambled up the slope. Just as it reached the top, Paul poked with his stick, and the insect rolled backwards, stopping only when it reached the bottom.

‘It’s scared,’ Jimmy said. ‘Why don’t you let it go?’

‘Because!’ Paul said, somewhat snappily.

This tall blond stranger had no right to ask questions.

And then Paul discovered that he wanted to tell him because, in some peculiar way, explaining the game to the new boy would be explaining it to himself.

‘It doesn’t matter if it’s scared,’ he said, and then added, with sudden, fierce emphasis, ‘It shouldn’t want to get out. It should want to stay with its pals.’

Jimmy took it as a cue.

‘I’m Jimmy. Shall we be pals?’

He saw the serious expression on the faces of the crouching boys as they stared at him, examined him. Their assessment seemed to take for ever.

‘If we’re goin’ to be pals,’ Paul said finally, ‘we’ve got to be real pals.’

David said nothing, just pointed down to the ground. Jimmy’s gaze followed his finger. While the boys’ attention had been distracted, one of the ants had succeeded in climbing over the lip of the hole and was scurrying away.

‘Real pals,’ David said, repeating Paul’s words. ‘Not like them.’

‘I won’t leave you in no hole,’ Jimmy promised. ‘Never. Cross me heart an’ hope to die.’

Paul looked at David, David looked at Paul and slowly their eyes widened and smiles spread across their faces. They clambered to their feet and each put a hand on one of Jimmy’s shoulders.

‘We’ll be a gang,’ Paul said. ‘A proper one.’

And though they could not have articulated it, each felt as if a force had surrounded them, locked them together, welding their destinies – and excluded everyone else in the entire world.

For an infant, the playground is as fraught with hazards as any jungle, and it was only three days later that they met their first, in the form of Barney Jenkins. Barney was a big dull lad, and he was all of nine. Most of the other children called him ‘Barmy’ Jenkins, though never to his face. He had misbehaved just before playtime, and Miss Howard made him stay behind for ten minutes, so that by the time he reached the milk crate there was none left. He looked around and saw David, just pushing his thumb through the foil-top of a fresh bottle.

‘You’ve pinched me milk,’ Barney said. ‘You’ve had yours and now you’re pinchin’ mine.’

‘That’s not true,’ David replied. ‘Honest. This is the only one I’ve had.’

But he knew there was no point; the bully did not want an argument, he wanted the milk.

Barney reached across and grabbed at the bottle. All his experience told him that the smaller child would relinquish it and then run off somewhere to have a private cry. But David was gripping the milk tightly.

‘Give it here,’ Barney said threateningly. ‘It’s mine.’

‘No, it’s not,’ countered two small, squeaky voices behind him.

He turned and found himself confronted by Paul Wright and the new boy. Barney knew the rules. Individual big boys bullied individual small ones; that was the way it had always been, that was the way it would stay. Somebody had to be taught a lesson, probably the kid with yeller hair, because Barney hated people with yeller hair. He made a fist and punched him in the face, as hard as he could. It must have hurt because the yeller-haired kid started to cry. But he didn’t move. Well, if he had to hit him again …

He felt a pressure on his back as two small arms locked about his neck and two small feet started kicking him just below his knees. He lost his balance and fell backwards, landing heavily on David. In an instant, the other two boys were on him, pulling him away from their friend, beating at him with tiny, angry fists. He fought back furiously, sensing that this was more important than an ordinary fight, that a fundamental law of playground life was being challenged.

He grabbed Paul’s hair and yanked as hard as he could. The younger boy was pulled to the ground and Barney did not release his grip until Paul’s head hit the asphalt. He turned on the new kid – he’d show the little bugger. But before he could get to his feet, David was on him again, his arms tightly around his neck, and Jimmy was punching at him, oblivious to his own pain. Then Paul was back, sobbing but fighting.

The four children rolled around the playground, kicking, biting, gouging and punching for all they were worth. By the time Miss Gladstone arrived on the scene and broke it up, all were battered and bleeding.

‘It was just incredible,’ she told Miss Howard later. ‘I’ve never seen such a vicious fight in this school. And little children don’t gang up on bigger ones. I mean, it just doesn’t happen.’

For Miss Howard, the post-fight interview followed the normal course for such occasions. Barney blubbered and said that he was sorry, Miss, and he would be a good boy in future. For Miss Gladstone, it was quite different. As she sat at her teacher’s table, she found herself looking across at three bruised but firmly unrepentant infants.

‘I’m ashamed of you,’ she said. ‘Children from my class, fighting like that! Aren’t you ashamed of yourselves?’

‘We didn’t start it,’ David said stubbornly.

‘We didn’t start it – what?’ Miss Gladstone demanded.

‘We didn’t start it, Miss. He wanted my milk.’

‘Maybe he did, David. But we don’t solve anything by fighting, do we?’

There should have been nods of the heads and murmurs of agreement. There was nothing but a wall of silence.

‘What do we do when this sort of thing happens, David?’ Miss Gladstone asked firmly.

David said nothing, but she was prepared to wait. She had twenty-five years’ experience of dealing with children and was noted for her ability to enforce strict discipline when she chose. She was certainly not going to be faced down by a five-year-old. Soon there would be tears, then apologies for letting their teacher down. Possibly one of the boys might wet himself – that had happened before now.

The old-fashioned clock on the wall ticked away loudly. The boys stood there, uncomfortable but determined. Miss Gladstone felt her eyes wandering from them to the nature table and from that to the Toyland wall display. This would not do at all.

‘Well?’ she asked – breaking both the silence and her own rule.

‘We tell a teacher,’ David said finally.

‘And why didn’t you tell a teacher this time?’

It was Jimmy who answered.

‘If we tell a teacher, the big boy will only get us back later.’

It was true; she knew it was true, but that was the way things were. It was all part of the painful process of growing up.

‘Barney Jenkins won’t get us back,’ Jimmy continued. ‘He won’t dare.’

‘Nobody will,’ Paul added. ‘Cos now they know we’ll stick together.’

Miss Gladstone gasped. Little children lived from minute to minute. They didn’t think long-term, they certainly didn’t plan long-term. For the first time in many years, she had no idea how to handle the situation. Because she knew that they were right, this mutual-aid society would give them better protection than a teacher ever could.

The Bradleys had moved to Buckworth because Mrs Bradley wanted a house of her own, not something rented from the Council. The village was in many ways no better than a council estate – in some respects it was a lot worse.

It was not a pretty place. There was no green surrounded by thatched cottages, no pond on which sleepy ducks bobbed contentedly. Instead, the rows of terraced houses, their slate roofs turned grey by wind and weather, squatted disconsolately along the sides of the Norton-Warrington road. There was only one other street, which bisected the village and was called, prosaically, Cross Street. It was not a community which had grown organically. It was nothing more than a series of dormitory units, thrown up to meet the needs of rock-salt miners a century earlier. And though on the very edge of the countryside, the houses had only small front gardens and poky back yards.

The salt works, with its two tall chimneys, dominated the place. When they were firing up, the chimneys would belch out clouds of soot, which fell like tiny black locusts on the clean sheets that Mrs Bradley had boiled and dollied furiously before hanging them out to dry.

If the Bradleys had had a council house, they would have had an inside lavatory, not a brick structure at the bottom of the yard, a narrow, cramped place without electricity, where in winter they huddled over the hole and froze. Nor, with a proper water closet, would Mrs Bradley have had to undergo the indignity once a week of knowing that the sanitary wagon, ‘the shit cart’ as it was called locally, was pulling up behind the house and the night-soil collectors sliding the large pan from underneath the lavatory, exposing their private ‘business’ of the previous week to the whole world.

Yet the house was theirs, and when she was scrubbing the front step, her front step, or applying a coat of Woolworths’ bright yellow paint over the damp patch in the kitchen, she knew it was worth it.

She was a slim, pretty woman of twenty-five, blonde like her son. When she was a girl just starting at the shoe factory, she had hoped that she would marry some rich handsome man who would whisk her off to a large house in Manchester. The years went by, the rich man never appeared, and in the end she had to settle for Tom.

Tom was a good husband, a hard worker and a steady provider within his limitations, and she supposed that she loved him. But she had never got used to the sex thing, his body lying heavily on top of hers while he grunted and strained. And when she saw him setting off for work in the morning, his trousers tucked in by bicycle clips, his baggin tin hanging from a strap round his waist, she felt vaguely ashamed, and could not help wishing that he had a job that was more fitting.

Jimmy would never follow in his father’s footsteps. He would be important and go to work in a place where you didn’t have to turn up until nine o’clock and could wear a jacket and tie all day. She had a burning ambition to see her only child do well and, young as he was, she thought she detected ambition in Jimmy too. That was enough to make her happy. Her own future, and Tom’s future, were not really important; it was Jimmy who mattered.

There were no skateboards, Walkmans or video games in the far-off days of 1957, the year Jimmy, David and Paul turned eight. Even television was a luxury. David’s father, who worked long hours at the scrap yard, had recently bought a KB seventeen-inch model. It had cost, David told his friends, seventy-five guineas. They were astonished; none of them had realised there was that much money in the whole world.

When it first arrived, they had all sat in David’s kitchen, mesmerized by the flickering screen, while Mrs Harrison rattled pots in the background, or stoked up the fire so that the oven would be hot enough to bake a pie for her husband’s tea. They cheered Sir Lancelot and laughed at Lucille Ball. Even the adverts – Washday White Without Washday Red – seemed thrilling. But television did not hold them in its power for long. Their natural playground was the outdoors, and as long as the weather was fine, they were rarely found inside.

There was the canal that skirted the edge of the village. It was crossed, close to the salt works, by a hump-backed bridge on the outside of which ran a wide pipe. The boys would crawl along the pipe, knees gripping, arms pulling, until they were suspended twenty feet over the green water. From there, unseen by adults, they watched the narrow boats pass below, long thin craft, most of their length given over to their salt cargo which was protected from the weather by a triangular, green-canvas frame. They marvelled at the tiny cabins at the backs of the boats, painted with bright, exotic designs almost like gipsy caravans, and they wished that they could live in one.

There was the railway spur which ran right up to the salt works. The guard would sometimes let them travel in his van and by sticking their heads out of the window as the train rounded a curve, they could catch a glimpse of the puffing, chugging monster that was pulling them.

But best of all, there were the woods, thick and dense – dazzling green in late Spring, azure when the bluebells came out, black and mysterious in the winter. It was there that they created the Secret Camp.

It was Paul’s idea. Paul was always the inventive one, the originator of exciting schemes, the wizard who could take an ordinary scene and invest it with mysterious qualities. He came across a large elderberry bush growing down a slope, and immediately saw its possibilities.

‘If we cut some of it down from the inside,’ he said, ‘we could have a camp, and nobody would know it was there. It’d be a secret camp.’

They worked for two days under David’s direction. That was the thing about David: he never said much. When there was an argument, which was rare, it was usually between Paul and Jimmy. But in practical matters David seemed to know exactly what to do. He told them which branches to break, which roots to dig up with the tools they had smuggled out of their homes. They struggled and sweated, and in the end it was just as Paul had visualised it, a hollow in the green foliage, undetectable from the outside.

‘We can be like real bandits here,’ Paul said. ‘We can hide, and nobody will know where we are.’

But it was not enough for Jimmy.

‘We need to put some things in it,’ Jimmy said. ‘To make it look like a real hideout.’

Paul looked at him, puzzled. He didn’t see the need for anything else. They had their Camp, their secret place. It was enough to squat on the floor and be Davy Crockett and his men hiding from the River Pirates or Long John Silver’s crew on some tropical island. But he didn’t argue – it didn’t seem worth it.

So they brought a few objects from home: a broken chair from Jimmy’s which David managed to fix, some pictures of football teams cut out from magazines, an old kettle and tin mugs, and some bricks.

‘If we can get some tea, we can make a brew here,’ Jimmy explained enthusiastically as he heaped the bricks into a small circle and put the kettle on top.

In some ways, all these additions spoiled the Camp for Paul. The things were tatty; he could have imagined them much better. But it didn’t really bother him. It was not what was in the Camp that was important, not even the Camp itself. It was the idea of the Camp that mattered, a secret place that was theirs, for just the three of them. He was perfectly happy with what they had.

But Jimmy was not. He could see what possibilities the Camp offered, and in an effort to exploit them, he broke one of the gang’s big, unspoken rules.

Jimmy had seemed content at first just to come to the Camp, to sit on the chair and drink cups of strong black tea – or hot water when they had nothing else. But as the days passed, he became more and more restless. Finally, he could bear the pressure no longer, and one lazy, sunny afternoon, when they were just lying there, he looked up and said casually, ‘With a camp like this, we could have a gang.’

Paul felt as he had when he was down with the ’flu – one second sweating, the next terribly cold. His head thundered and pounded.

‘We don’t want a gang,’ he said. ‘We’ve got one.’

Jimmy realised that he was treading on dangerous ground.

‘We’d still have us,’ he said carefully, ‘but we’d have a bigger gang as well. A lot of kids would join a gang that had a camp like this.’

They both looked across at David for support.

‘I don’t care,’ he said, shrugging.

‘It wouldn’t be the same,’ Paul said firmly.

‘Course it would,’ Jimmy urged.

He struggled for the right words, the magical words that would convince Paul.

‘We’d be a little gang,’ he said, ‘the three of us – but we’d have a bigger gang to boss around!’

Paul’s eyes were hot; he could feel the tears forming. He jumped to his feet and rushed out, searching for a place where he could be alone with his sorrow. When he reached the big oak tree, half a mile from the Camp, he stopped, and huddling down at its base, began to sob uncontrollably. His chest heaved, battering his cheek against the thick, gnarled roots, but he did not even notice the pain this caused him. It was all over. They had been together for ever, and now it was all over.

Jimmy told David to stay in the Camp, and went searching for Paul. It was half an hour before he found the other boy, a minute figure sitting against the trunk of a huge tree. Paul got up when he heard his friend approaching. Jimmy stopped, several feet away from him, and the two boys stood in silence for a while, neither knowing quite what to say.

‘Comin’ back to the Camp?’ Jimmy asked finally.

‘No,’ Paul said. ‘I’m a bit fed up with it. I think I’ll go an’ play somewhere else, on me own.’

‘It was only a joke,’ Jimmy said reassuringly. ‘I don’t really want anybody else to join our gang.’

He saw relief flood through Paul. He should have left it at that, thrown his arm around his friend’s shoulder and led him back to the elderberry bush. He couldn’t do it!

‘But if we did want a bigger gang,’ he continued, ‘it wouldn’t make any difference to us. We’d still be best pals.’

It happened one day in August, near the end of the summer holidays. The moment the Camp came into sight they could sense that something was wrong, even though the elderberry bush, its green leaves gleaming in the sunlight, looked as undisturbed as usual. Inside the hollow they had so diligently constructed, there was chaos. The chair had been smashed to pieces, the pictures torn. Bricks had been dropped on the kettle and someone had shat in the corner.

They stood for a while, dazed, surveying the wreckage. David recovered first, and picked up the chair.

‘The chair’s no good,’ he said. ‘I can’t mend it.’

If David couldn’t, nobody could.

They set to work, shifting the excreta with sticks, trying to knock the dents out of the kettle.

And as they laboured, Paul asked himself why anyone would do this. It didn’t make sense to smash up somebody else’s camp. Why didn’t they build a camp of their own instead? But it bothered him more that people had been there at all.

He looked across at David and Jimmy. The stocky boy was methodically tidying up the mess, but though his tall, slim companion was working too, Paul could tell that his mind was not really on the job.

When they had done the best they could, they all sat down, cross-legged in the dirt. Paul was weary and dispirited, but a light blazed brightly in young Jimmy’s eyes.

‘They’ve got to be punished!’ Jimmy said.

Paul had never considered that.

‘We don’t even know who they are,’ he said.

‘That doesn’t matter,’ Jimmy replied confidently. ‘They’ll be back.’

Sometimes Jimmy exasperated Paul. He seemed so sure of things that were far from obvious. Yet he was often right.

‘How do you know?’ Paul asked.

Jimmy looked around the shattered Camp.

‘They liked doin’ this,’ he said. ‘They’d like to do it again. They’ll come back to see if we’ve fixed it.’

They waited for two days, hidden in the bushes. They arrived early in the morning and did not leave until dusk. Jimmy said they were not to talk, so they just lay there, gazing at the Camp. Occasionally, Paul would glance at David, lying with his thick elbows on the ground, perfectly placid and content, waiting patiently for the wreckers to come. Then he would turn his head and look at Jimmy, who was always coiled, tense, his eyes never once leaving the elderberry bush. It would make Paul feel a little guilty and he would turn back to the Camp, soon to retreat into his own thoughts.

He made up stories as he lay there, embroidering on adventures he had seen on the television. Some were about knights in armour, others were westerns, but wherever they were set, the hero was always the same, a grown-up version of himself, bigger, stronger, with shoulders ten times the width of his narrow ones. There would always be a girl, too, a pretty girl in trouble. The hero would dispose of the villains, often against tremendous odds; the girl, once free, would put her arms around him and kiss him – and the story would be over.

But even for someone with Paul’s fertile mind, it was still indescribably boring waiting there, and he would have given up after the first hour but for Jimmy’s insistence. Jimmy made an issue of it, a test of friendship, and Paul had no choice but to go along with him.

On the third day, the boys came. There were two of them and they looked about seven. They were new faces, not from the village. One was wearing a ragged girl’s cardigan, the other had on an old corduroy jacket. The one with the cardigan kept wiping his nose on his sleeve, and Paul could see that his hands were dirty, and not just from today – the muck was deep in his skin.

The boys glanced around furtively, to make sure that they were not being observed, then disappeared into the bush that housed the camp. Jimmy signalled silently that the gang should follow.

‘They’ve not fixed it up properly again,’ they heard one of the boys say.

‘No,’ said the other. He sounded disappointed. ‘Let’s go and watch the narrer boats.’

The gang stepped into the bush and the new boys saw them for the first time.

‘What are you doin’ in our camp?’ Jimmy demanded.

Ther