The Dig by John Preston Read Free Book Online Page B

for a copy of my latest work.”
    “How very kind.”
    “It’s about flints.”
    “Flints?” I repeated, sounding rather more surprised than I might have wished.
    “With particular reference to the Cromer field bed in Norfolk.”
    “I shall greatly look forward to reading it,” I told him.
    He uncrossed his legs and stood up. Maynard followed suit. At the front door I wished them goodbye. Reid Moir lowered his eyelashes, while Maynard gave a mournful-looking smile.
    It continued to rain throughout the day. Robert stayed indoors and played with his train set in the nursery. He insisted that he was perfectly happy on his own, even claiming that he preferred it. From downstairs, I could hear the noise of the engine going round and round the track. I found I could not wait for the day to end. Both of us went to bed even earlier than usual.
    The following morning the weather had barely improved. Despite the rain, Mr. Brown had insisted on returning to work. Together with Jacobs and Spooner, he removed the earth that had buried him, placed planks along the side of the trench to ensure that there were no further landslides and continued with his excavation.
    At eight thirty Mr. Lyons drove me into Woodbridge to catch the London train. On the journey I started to read Mr. Reid Moir’s book about flints. However, I am afraid I found it rather heavy going and put it aside after only a few pages.
    When we reached Liverpool Street, I queued for a taxi and asked to be taken to Earls Court. As we drove down the Strand,I was aware of a strange atmosphere of gaiety, of excitement. A tightening in the air that I had not noticed before. People sauntered along the pavements and peered into shop windows as they had always done, the men in shirtsleeves and the women in blouses. Yet there seemed to be something exaggerated, something not wholly plausible, about their nonchalance. They moved like loosely knotted figures who at any moment might snap into rigidity.
    The cabbie told me that on the previous evening there had been an air-raid drill near to his home in Battersea. A warden had driven round the streets, throwing out different-colored tennis balls from his car. Yellow and green balls denoted gas; red denoted high explosives, while those with red stripes represented incendiary bombs. The exercise, said the cabbie, laughing delightedly, had been a fiasco. Despite the warden’s entreaties, people had immediately picked up the balls and begun throwing them at one another.
    In Hyde Park, trenches had been dug. A mass of zigzagging lines now fanned out from Speaker’s Corner. In order to dig the trenches, a great many trees had also been felled. Several of the stumps were still sticking out of the ground. The wood looked very soft and white, like chicken flesh.
    Further down the Bayswater Road, on the western side of the Serpentine, I was astonished to see that an enormous crater had appeared. This crater must have been forty feet deep and easily twice that across. Around the top the earth was dark brown, shading down to yellow at the bottom. On the road beside it was a queue of cars. Several of them were towing trailers.
    Without my asking, the cabbie leaned back and told me that twenty sites had been identified around London where large deposits of sand could be found. People were being encouraged to fill sandbags and place them around the doors and windows of their properties. As yet, however, scarcely anyone had bothered to do so.
    He dropped me in Nevern Square. Certainly there were no sandbags here, or any other signs of preparation. Everything appeared just the same as always: the same orange-brick terraces with their long, sceptical-looking windows, the same flowerpots with stiff and crinkled blossoms, the same clusters of unpolished bells beside the front doors.
    I rang the bell of Mr. Swithin’s flat. He was waiting by his front door when I came out of the lift and led the way down the corridor into his living room. As usual