The Rain Before it Falls by Jonathan Coe Read Free Book Online Page A

fields, about a mile from the farm. That happened while I was there. I can remember hearing the explosion, being woken up in the middle of the night and running to the bedroom window along with Beatrix. We could see the fire burning through the trees, and the next morning we were allowed to go with the boys to look at the crater. I am wandering from the point again…
    The only person left to describe, now, is myself. My eight-year-old self. No need to look too closely at what I’m wearing: I can remember exactly. I think I only had about three changes of clothes with me for the whole time I stayed at Warden Farm. Here I am wearing my faithful old thick brown woollen jumper, knitted for me by my mother. She was an enthusiastic – one might almost say obsessive – knitter. Sometimes she did it the usual way, by hand, but she also had a knitting machine – a simply gigantic, baffling contraption made up of cogs and levers and pistons which took up most of our dining table at home. (I’m surprised it never collapsed under the weight.) This was the machine she would use, for two or three hours every night, knitting woollens for the troops. ‘Comforts’, she called them. The brown jumper I wore was just a by-product of all this activity, but I was devoted to it. It was the same brown, almost exactly, as the rough corduroy trousers I am also wearing in this picture. The ensemble is completed by a polo-necked shirt, which was a lovely autumnal golden colour. The colour of leaves on the turn.
    Shropshire itself was golden. That was the thing I noticed about it at once, when I woke up on the first morning of my evacuation and drew back the curtains. I looked out across the beautiful manicured green of the front lawn, like the green baize of the table in the billiard room, and after that all I could see were fields of blazing gold, beneath a rich blue sky. Shropshire blue, Shropshire gold. It may seem like an odd thing to say but the whole colour of the county had changed in the last few months. There was a reason for this. (There is a reason for everything, in case you haven’t learned it yet, in your short life. In fact, the story I am trying to tell you will demonstrate as much – if I tell it properly.) The reason being, in this case, that the government had recently been telling farmers to grow as much corn as possible. ‘Food is a munition of war,’ they were told, ‘and the farm should be treated as a munitions factory.’ And so, where once there had been green, now there was gold. I looked out of the window that morning, and for a moment, a brief moment, my heart soared and the terrible knowledge that had been crushing me for the last few hours – the knowledge that I had been banished from my parents’ house, sent into an undeserved and inexplicable exile – was lifted from me. I turned to share this moment with my cousin Beatrix, who slept in the attic bedroom with me, but her bed was empty and the bedclothes were dishevelled. She was always an early riser, always downstairs before me. Such was her appetite for breakfast and, more than that, for life itself.
    Actually, I am allowing my imagination to run away with me again. Whether I looked across, on that first morning, and saw Bea’s empty bed, I really cannot say. It happened that way many mornings. Whether that was one of them is another matter. I can see that this photograph has done its work and further memories, more general memories of those few months, are starting to come back to me. Time to move on.
    Number three: the caravan.
    I have not yet described Warden Farm – the house itself – in any detail, but I think I will talk about the caravan first. It was one of the first things that Beatrix showed me in the garden, and it quickly became the place where we would retreat and hide together. You could say that everything started from there.
    Aunt Ivy gave me this photograph herself, I remember, at the end of my time living at her house. It was one