A Field Full of Folk by Iain Crichton Smith Read Free Book Online

villages like midges in July.
    He stood in front of the mirror, with his helmet on. Those had been the days when one knew one’s enemy and could fight him face to face, not like nowadays when you didn’t know your friend or your foe, like for instance the bureaucrats who had tried to adjust his pension after his wife died. As he stood there in front of the mirror it seemed to him that the helmet made him appear young again, that it gave a sterner cast to his face, till it became like those faces that one saw on coins. As the austere helmeted face gazed back at him from the depths of the glass he thought about those children who ran about outside the house at night and tapped on the windows. It wasn’t just mischief, there was evil loose in the world.
    The sun was rising and they were all making straight at it. He could hear the big hollow blows of the guns, he could see the earth, continually ploughed beneath him. The sun sparkled from his bayonet and from the bayonets of those to the left and right of him, but he had no time to look who was there, who was still advancing and who was down on the earth. At that very moment his dog would be running across a field, its tongue lolling. On mornings like these he would send him after the sheep, he would be walking about his little empire with his shepherd’s crook. But now he was rushing headlong into the blinding sun with a gun and a bayonet in his hand. And they were among the German trenches and there were faces in front of him, some with moustaches, some without. They were all rising like grey rats out of the trenches, the ground was spawning them.
    They were … He put the helmet back on the sideboard as he heard a knock at the door and there was Elizabeth with his meal. Meals on wheels, they called that. In the old days he wouldn’t have accepted charity but now with inflation biting into his pension like a rat there was no reason to be ashamed.
    Elizabeth was casting a strange look at the helmet while she poured out some soup for him.
    â€œI’ve just been feeding Mary Macarthur,” she said. “She didn’t like the fish. Only Catholics take fish, she told me. You can take your fish away and bring me meat.” And she laughed so that her slightly yellow teeth showed.
    â€œMary Macarthur?” said David as if returning with difficulty to the reality of the village.
    â€œThat’s right. Up the glen. Of course you know Mary.”
    â€œOf course I know Mary Macarthur,” said David violently. “Of course I know her. Wasn’t I in school with her? She was in the same class as me.” He didn’t want to tell Elizabeth that his memory sometimes failed him, that often he had to cast about for a name as if he were fishing in a swirling river.
    â€œOf course I know Mary Macarthur. How is she keeping?”
    â€œOh, she’s not too bad. It’s mostly arthritis she’s got, though she calls it neuritis. I’ve got the neuritis, she keeps saying.”
    â€œIs that right now?” said David complacently, thinking that this young girl did not know about the old. Also she was pale and thin and spectacled and he liked someone with a big hefty body.
    â€œI told her the fish would help her arthritis but she wouldn’t take it. It’s for the Catholics, my dear, she kept saying. But she gets up and looks after the house. She has a lot of hens, too.”
    Mary Macarthur: he tried to visualise her. But of course it was Kate’s mother, who had been married to Andrew Lang. What was he thinking about? He must have been thinking of the other Macarthur.
    Elizabeth was still looking at the helmet and he said, “I took it out to give it an airing.”
    He finished his soup and began on the fish. How good and rich it was, though his teeth weren’t as good as they had once been. He should take a lot of fish to keep him healthy, he would show them yet, he would outlast them all.
    â€œAnnie is of