The Innocent Moon by Henry Williamson Read Free Book Online Page B

yellowlichen. Learning that a thatched cottage was to let lower down the path, he went there and spoke to another labourer who was picking peas in the garden in front of the cottages, which had a common wall. Asked if he would like a cup of tea by the labourer’s wife, he entered their rather stuffy kitchen and sat down on the settle by an open fire of wood. At once he felt at home with the old fellow, and learning that badgers, foxes, and all sorts of wild birds lived along the coast, and in the woods, decided to spend his holiday at Malandine. Miss Potts, the post-mistress, put him up that night; and next day, hearing that the cottage adjoining that of his friend the labourer was to let, he sought the landlord, and looked over it with him.
    There were two small rooms upstairs, divided by a stud-and-plaster wall. They looked clean, having been recently brushed over with lime-wash. The roof of thatch seemed to be waterproof —there were no patches of damp on the ceiling—and although the coal-burning range in the north wall of the single room downstairs was rusty, and half-hidden under a heap of soot and mortar from the chimney, he was already determined to take it. What would the rent be, he wondered. He would go up to £ 30 a year.
    Not liking to discuss money, he asked about the water.
    “Us pumps it from th’ pump up th’ lane. Tes good water.”
    “I suppose you don’t know where a bed can be bought?”
    “Into town, I reckon. But furniture be turrible dear. Tes the shortage of wood, you see. So prices be hup, my gor’, bant’m, tho’!”
    “By ‘Town’, you mean Queensbridge?”
    “Aye.”
    Rents too, thought Phillip: no doubt the grasping peasant had spoken of the rise in prices as a preliminary to charging a whopping great rent.
    “Where be you from, zur, if you don’t mind my asking?”
    “London.”
    “Lunnon? Vancy that now! You come all that long way. Well, well.”
    At last Phillip asked about the rent.
    “Would vive pun’ be too much, zur?”
    “What a week?”
    “Noomye! Tes by the year us lets’n.”
    “Five pounds a year?”
    “Aiy.”
    “How good to meet an honest man!”
    They shook hands on it, and Phillip paid a year’s rent then and there in pound notes. He had a home of his own!
    He went into Queensbridge, and bought the first furniture he saw in a second-hand shop. Meanwhile he had remembered a talk with Jack O’Donovan in the gods of the Opera House, of spending a holiday together; and as soon as he had bought two beds he sent a telegram, c/o The Age, Fleet Street, inviting Jack to come down. The next day O’Donovan arrived by train; Phillip met him at the station, and took him on the back of the Norton to Malandine. “Welcome to Valerian Cottage!”
    While he had been waiting for the London train, a wooden-frame bed, costing £ 4—12/6 before the war—had arrived by carrier. It had rusty springs and was accompanied by a dumpy mattress and a camp-bed, some war-surplus Australian sheepskins, two feather pillows, and a length of old brocaded curtain which, ripped in two pieces, would do for coverlets, he told Jack.
    That morning he had collected a sackful of driftwood from the beach, and bought from the post-mistress an old Beatrice oil stove, a tin kettle, and a china tea-pot. With a couple of cracked cups lent by his neighbour, Mrs. Crang, and a couple of soap-boxes for table, he set about preparing tea.
    “I say, old lad, ought you to boil the eggs in the kettle? Won’t it give us warts?” asked O’Donovan. “There are limestone beds somewhere here. I’m a civil servant with the Metropolitan Water Board, and looked up the charts before I left. It’s red sandstone around Exeter, by the look of the fields, and Dartmoor water is acid, from the peat layers.” He looked in the kettle. “I thought so, look at that lime deposit.”
    “It’s a kind of shale round here, Jack, I think. The guide book says the cliffs are gneiss and schist.”
    O’Donovan made a joke