Two Cows and a Vanful of Smoke by Peter Benson Read Free Book Online

recording tape, picking up, capturing and holding snippets of conversation. Farmers arguing about the price of sheep, barmaids telling stable boys to keep their hands off, potboys laughing at gypsies, the squire remonstrating about idleness. Now the walls are quiet. Someone bought the place and stripped the old paint from the walls before anyone told them he was stripping the old voices away. He put fresh emulsion up, he hung pictures of haystacks and horses pulling ploughs, he cleaned the windows. I sat in a corner with a pint and stared at the regulars, and tried to quieten my mind. It was difficult, but by the time I was halfway through my second, I was getting there.
    I was at the bar ordering a third when a couple of the Ashbrittle hippies appeared. Two women. The barman knew them, called them by name and started to pull two pints of cider. They looked at me, nodded, smiled and turned back to look at the cider. One had short red hair and freckles, the other had brown curls tied in bunches. The redhead was wearing a check shirt and jeans, the one with bunches a striped skirt and a sleeveless blouse. They looked like they’d come from the fields or a garden, their hands were rough and dirty, and their faces were flecked with earth.
    Some of the people in Ashbrittle said cruel things about the hippies, said that they never did any work, that they sponged off the rest of us, that they spent all day smoking smoke, that they never used soap. Some of the people in Ashbrittle are ignorant and only see what they want to see, lost in pouring misery into complaint and back again. I liked the hippies. I liked their colourful clothes, I liked the music they listened to, and I liked the way they didn’t seem to care what anyone thought about them. I suppose difference was different back then and ideals were easier to gather and hold. Or maybe not. I don’t know. Years have passed since the events that stitch this story, and although the dead cannot fight their wars again, at least the hippies can appear in my dreams and smile and laugh at the memories.
    I went back to my seat, and a minute later the hippies came over and the redhead said, “Anyone sitting here?”
    “Help yourself,” I said.
    They did.
    For a couple of minutes I drank and listened while they talked. One of their goats had escaped from its tethers and broken into a neighbour’s garden, where it had eaten six cabbages and some plums from a plum tree. They’d chased it out of the garden, into the churchyard, over the wall at the bottom and into a field. They’d spent the next two hours trying to catch it. Without thinking or excusing myself I said, “My Gran used to charm sheep…”
    The hippies looked at me, and the one with bunches said, “She did what to sheep?”
    “She used to charm them. Cast a spell on them, I suppose. Sheep, goats… what’s the difference? I reckon she’d have got your goat back.”
    “So,” Bunches said, moving closer to me, “How did she do that?” Her eyes were very brown, like conkers peeping from their shells, and her lips were wet. She smelt of hedges and earth.
    “I don’t know. She wouldn’t tell anyone. I think she used to sing them a song.”
    “A song?”
    “Yeah.” I was a bit drunk. “Can you sing?”
    “That depends,” she said.
    “On what?”
    “How much I’ve had to drink.”
    “Or how stoned you are,” said her friend.
    I laughed, they laughed, and we spent the next ten minutes batting stuff between each other about where we lived, what we did, where we’d come from and what our names were. Bunches was called Sam, and the redhead was Ros. Before Ashbrittle they’d worked in a bar in Bristol. Now they were planning to save enough money to buy the old bakery next to their place, renovate the ovens and set up a business.
    “I remember when the bakery was still working,” I said. “They used to sell their stuff all over the place. Their doughnuts were amazing.”
    “We’ll do doughnuts,” said