The Carhullan Army by Sarah Hall Read Free Book Online

empty handed.
    *

    The rifle had belonged to my father. I’d known its whereabouts for twenty years, since he had buried it in the garden of his house on the north side of Rith. He’d never had a proper licence; all he wanted it for was to take pot shots at crows when they went after his seeds. I could remember him lining up the sights and squeezing the trigger, the crack of the shots being fired knocked his shoulder back an inch, as if he’d been punched there. He had let me hold it, supporting it under the stock to lighten the weight. Once or twice I had fired it, and each time it felt as if my heart had been jolted loose. ‘You’d make a good soldier, little tinker,’ he’d said to me. ‘Hup two three. Atten-shun.’
    I was nine years old when the weapons amnesty was issued. I remember there had been a bizarre shooting in a school in Manchester. A mother had come into a classroom where her boy was in the middle of a maths lesson. She waved to him and then aimed the gun. Eight other children and a teacher lay dead before she placed the barrel under her own chin. Nobody knew why she had done it. I watched on television as they carried the bodies out of the schoolroom in black bags. Within a year all guns were banned again.
    The evening news had said there were an estimated twenty thousand weapons that would have to be handed in from British citizens. ‘That’s twenty thousand minus one,’ my father retorted, winking at me from his armchair. It was against tradition, he said, and he wasn’t taking part in any soft-policy hand-in. ‘Will they arrest you and put you in prison?’ I’d asked him. He’d laughed and said not a chance.
    He wrapped the rifle in oily rags, put it and ten boxes of cartridges into a steel container and shovelled them into the earth next to his leeks. ‘Never know when it might come in handy, tink,’ he said to me as I watched him dig. He rested for a moment on the handle of his shovel and gazed at me. ‘It does n’t do to rely on those in charge completely. That’s one thing the Yanks always got right. You’ve done a bit of history in school, haven’t you? Well, now. Imagine if the National Guard had surrendered their arms, and the Germans had invaded after all. We’d have been fighting with broom handles and axes like hairy medievals while they ran over us with tanks. Your great-granddad knew that. This was his gun. He was at Osterley.’ Then he had smiled and scruffed my hair. ‘Come on, help me get this clod tipped in.’
    I remember my father fondly. He was a good man, and his eccentric defiance stuck in my mind. My mother had not lived long enough to see me aiming at the black corbies on the garden wall. I was glad my father’s bad lungs had let him escape before the next war, a decade later, that he had not witnessed the decline of his proud country. I knew it would have taken a piece out of his spine. It hit the oldest most severely. Their parents might have lived through downturns and wars, but they had only known stability, appliances, and readily available goods. For them it was simply madness to have to give up their homes, to be supplied with canned food instead of fresh global produce, and to be told that Britain was now little more than a dependent colony.

    My father’s generation seemed to die out quickly, though their lives had been lived in prosperity. The health system cracked apart. Epidemics swept through the quarters in every town and city. There were new viruses too aggressive to treat. Those who did not fall ill seemed just to fade away. It was as if, one by one, they made the decision that the present and the future were intolerable propositions. And maybe they were right.
    I never forgot my father’s gun. Remembering it reminded me of him, wearing his slippers and dressing gown out in the garden, bending to pull snails off his tomato plants, watching film after film on his satellite television with a cigarette drooping between his fingers. It