Waterland by Graham Swift Read Free Book Online

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    Children, evil isn’t something that happens far off – it suddenly touches your arm. I was scared when I saw the dark blood appear but not flow in the gash on Freddie’s head. But not half so scared as when Mary Metcalf said to me later that day: ‘I told him it was Freddie. Dick killed Freddie Parr because he thought it was him. Which means we’re to blame too.’
    And that same evening, after I’d cycled back from my tryst with Mary (because she and I had one of those youthful things going, which, though youthful, are not always innocent and which, though they happen in youryouth, can affect the rest of your life), something else floated down the Leem, was seen and fished out only by me.
    The swallows are skimming the water above the sluice. The late July evening is only just beginning to darken. Gnats are jitter-bugging above the rushes. And I am lying in a little cavity in the river-bank, under a willow, upstream from the cottage on the far side; a place where I have often sat or lain and fed my hunger for books. Where I have polished off Hereward the Wake, The Black Arrow and With Clive in India. And, more recently, chewed thoughtfully, if distantly, over school textbooks (does it surprise you that your tiresome teacher was once a tiresome swot?) or concocted my high-flown essays (wince again) on the Jacobite Rebellions or The Effects of the Seven Years War. But I have not brought history with me this evening (history is a thin garment, easily punctured by a knife blade called Now). I have brought my fear.
    Through willow branches, I watch Dad. He is walking to and fro, sentry-like, along the far tow-path. Sometimes he looks at the gently gliding river and sometimes he looks at the sky. He is talking, soundlessly, to himself. And now and then he rubs his right knee, the right knee wounded all those years ago in 1917. He rubs it because he has made the mistake earlier in the day of kneeling (the worst possible thing for that still susceptible knee) on a hard surface (concrete) for several minutes. Yet he was scarcely to have considered … And now he walks, up and down, the twilight darkening his profile, nursing and flexing the suffering joint, but still not really thinking of it. He won’t go to set eel-traps tonight; but he won’t go to bed either. When it’s dark and nearer dawn than dusk he’ll still be rubbing his knee at the lock-side. Because, last night, for want of vigilance …
    And Dick is by the lean-to against the left-hand wall of the cottage, doing what he will always be found doing when there is nothing else to do – ‘mending’ his motor-cycle. That is to say, removing parts of it (for, though it’s old, there’s nothing wrong with that motor-cycle), oiling them, holding them up to the light, blowing on them, rubbing them, and putting them back again. Dick has a way with machines. Every day he coaxes into continued action the antiquated gear of a bucket-dredger which, were it not for the war, would have been declared obsolete long ago. And it is conceivable that, but for the lack of something up top, this way with things mechanical, which in Dick’s case is less a skill than a sort of kinship, might have taken Dick far in some relevant field – hydro-engineering, say, for which there is constant demand in the Fens.
    Dick lacks, indeed, certain accomplishments which even the mechanically minded find useful. Dick cannot read or write. He is not even good at putting a spoken sentence together. He has received a rudimentary schooling at the village school. But the strange thing is that whereas it would seem that Dick’s shortcomings required extra and extensive attention, his education was in fact curtailed, even, one might say, deliberately abandoned by the parents. To the younger son was given the privileged role of the bright schoolboy of whom much was expected and who was therefore to be protected from all things menial; while to the elder (who did not seem to mind) was