Thimblewinter Read Online Free

just seemed to accept my presence there. It was too late to go back, he said, it would take far too long to get the Land Rover up the track and they couldn’t spare anyone to walk me up the mountain. So we carried on looping around the ridge track and, as we went, I could still hear the call of the strange human animals down below in the woods.
    By evening we were down in the Cwm and we crossed the river on the old railway bridge heading for the nearest way-station. We came up to a big, old building, burnt-out and in ruins, an old supermarket Mrs Sharma told me, in front of which was a vast flat space on which a road-train was being put together. There was another building there also; an old inn, Cal said, which was now the way-station.
    “The inn is called ‘The Rock and Fountain’,” the Constable told me, as we parked amongst the other vehicles, “and it’s been here for at least four hundred years, since the days of stage coaches.”
    But some of the vehicles were not that far removed from those stage coaches. I looked around me and saw various contraptions, some horse-drawn carts and trailers, some cars or vans powered by all sorts of fuel, with chimneys and tanks at odd angles all over the bodies and truck-beds. The centre pieces of this assembly were the two ancient steam tractors that would pull two vast trailers for goods and people afoot, but there were also some there with handcarts and wheel-barrows, who would follow the convoy for safety, being too poor to afford a ride.
    “God help them if they fall behind,” said Mrs. Sharma looking at some of these unfortunate wretches.
    The road-train agent did all his business in the inn, so the Constable set off there, though Cal, Mrs. Sharma and I stayed with the Land Rover. People seemed friendly. Some had fires going and were brewing tea; hedge tea of course, nothing special. But Mrs. Sharma told me to be wary of people, not all were as they seemed and things were harder for young girls; there were always those looking to take advantage of you. But you couldn’t live your life looking over your shoulder, as grandmother used to say, so I took little notice of her.
    The next dawn we set out, after a night spent sleeping where we could in and around the Land Rover. And it was all such a spectacle, the big steam tractors at the front pulling the trailers and any other vehicles which could tag onto them. The ramshackle procession of wagons, cars and trucks was in the middle of the convoy and the people on foot and with all sorts of handcarts were bringing up the rear. All proceeding at a stately pace of about two miles an hour over the ragged strands of tarmac and pitted, muddy fissures of what had once been a mighty highway. And all around us the outriders, the road-train guards, like shepherds with a flock of sheep or more like sheep dogs worrying at stragglers.
    There was one thing, which I will always remember, that occurred on the second day towards evening, in the half-light, at the time when the scouts were usually ahead looking for somewhere to camp. It inevitably happened that, by this time, some of the people who were walking fell behind and often, but not always, the guards would hurry these people up and try and get them back to the main body of the train.
    Because it was getting late, the light was going, and people were getting weary, no-one had noticed that an old man with a hand-cart and two girls - daughters or grand-daughters, who could tell - had fallen behind, by half a mile or so. The old man seemed unwell, but had insisted on pushing his cart, an old pram. The girls, one a teenager the other a child, had helped, but the younger one seemed to tire easily and had a bad chest.
    None of us had realised how far they were in the rear until we heard the shotgun blast, then most of us in the middle part of the convoy stopped. Nobody had seen the small band of riders who had stalked the three stragglers. And all I saw, as I stood on the wagon bed of the