1. A WINTER’S MORNING

 

All night the vixen had screamed down the burning fields of frost, under a sky chiming with January stars, stalking the hills under a moon and the wild white hair of trees, the barking of a dog fox led on and on across the valley in search of her. Until their clamour died in the hot-throated distance, and the pulse of the morning star dimmed like a weakening signal over the land.

The moon was full and sitting above the tall pines now, above the road which falls down the valley side, its ringing light striking the blue frost-bright slate of the village, echoing down the headlong High Street, fading away into silences where the shadows had drifted, piled like soot.

In the village which lies in the palm of two borders, high on a valley side, arranged as if by a child's hand around post office, church and pub, only the light from the telephone box burned in the lampless High Street, shining with a busy toy redness outside the post office and general store.

From clear across the valley, a farm dog barked at nothing out in the no-man's-land between night and morning, and a tawny owl glided across the village, its flight as silence and as remote as a dream.

Fluttering for a hold on top of a telegraph pole, it folded its wings, its blunt head moving in sweeps as it searched for small scurries of movement from shadow to shadow below. And finding none, sang out, the long-drawn quavering notes sounding under the moon like a ghost story told to a child.

And from one of the terrace of farm cottages in the High Street, a baby howled damply at the world, and a light came on in the bedroom as the owl, lifting for its roost in the wood below, beat its way down through the village. Its swift, sharp call in flight a fingernail drawn across the frosted glass of dawn.

Other lights shone in the village now, in the post office and shop where the newspapers, hot from the London train, were being sorted for the bin outside. In the kitchen of George Perry, coal merchant, waiting for the weather forecast and hoping for the worst. In the bedroom of Miss Holsworth, village spinster, dressing to the frivolous notes of a horn concerto on Radio 3, and in the farmhouse at the top of the High Street, where breakfast steamed the windows and the lights went on in the milking shed.

Udders swinging, the hunched shadows of the cattle were herded from the stalls, the cobbles of the yard brittle with silver under the moon, the dung-heavy smell almost as warm as breath in the frosted air.

Bales of last season's hay in the Dutch barn were tossed down onto a trailer for the stock out on the fields, sweetening the air briefly with the scent of an impossibly remote summer, and the tractor headlights swept across the yards, petrifying a returning barn-hunting cat, and turning into the High Street, rode off the hill into the quenching dark of the valley.

Battered and cooling, the moon had settled now above the Norman tower of the church, the black and gold clock fingered with elegant shadows, a smell like damp burnt paper on the raw air as the first fires of the morning drifted over the village, and light above the hills spread slowly in the east like a stain.

From across the valley a cockcrow flared petulantly, like a sudden protest against the cold and grudging dawn, and rooks in the grounds of what was once, when the village was young, the squire's house, preened and bickered in the tops of the horse chestnuts. And dug in across the farmlands, the creatures of the day felt the tug of light, but in the weather that had sent the owl home hungry still did not stir. While in the wood below the village, pheasants, dropped, coughing, from their perches, and pigeons broke from the tops of the trees, and with a clatter of wings turned blindly towards the fields.

Like the slow unclenching of a fist, the dawn gave up more light. A hard, clay-heavy light, worked into the sky as if with a palette knife, and birds sang, stray, thin winter notes, as the last of the night broke up over the valley, and the light gathered into a new day.