Thimblewinter Read Online Free Page A

Land Rover, was the figure of the old man slumped by the up-turned pram and the two girls, the older one struggling, taken up on the horses and borne away.
    The road-train guards set off in pursuit, but without much zeal. They soon faltered in the failing light and returned without the captives. So it was that I spent a sleepless night and decided to heed Mrs. Sharma from then on. The next day, truth to tell, the incident on the road was almost forgotten, because we came to the place they called The Services, where the road-train stopped and broke into its many parts. We were on the outskirts of the city and, though not safe, were safe enough to complete the last few miles alone, though sleep caught up with me for the last leg of the journey.
    As we drove on down to the harbour, the sea came on me suddenly and, though I had read about it and seen pictures, I was little prepared for the otherness of it. It filled up the bay and beyond the horizon I could see faint smudges of dark colour, a band between sky and sea. I thought they were clouds at first, but the Constable told me it was Devon, which I admit that, at the time, I took to be the name of some strange, exotic place.
    Like the gull birds I had seen earlier, the sails that filled the harbour put me in mind of white ghosts hovering on the surface of that water. As we drove on down the hill, the town was laid out in front of us like an illustration in a child’s picture book, but it was a strange sort of skeletal presence. Much of it was ruined, with the occasional finger of an old church spire or the shell of a tall office or apartment block pointing to the sky.
    The place had contracted, shrunk in on itself, between new walls, new defences, it seemed. A hectic mixture of shelters and shanties had crowded the spaces between the older buildings in the centre of town and here it was all hustle and bustle, while outside the ramparts and barricades the quiet ruins were mostly silent and haunted by scavenging creatures.
    The market place was by the dock-side, through another gate and a set of ramparts and out onto the pitted tarmac of some sort of former car park. Because to all intents and purposes we had come to trade, that was what we intended to do, so as not to cast suspicion on ourselves. There were always militia and watchmen around the place, and people saw spies and thieves everywhere, so we had to act as we were supposed to.
    It had not always been like this, Cal had told me, but in the days of the first big cold, when the hunger and the fighting came, there had been so many people on the roads - refugees from the big cities which were emptying out - that those who could had dug their ditches and built their walls to keep what was theirs and keep the others out. There was so little to go around, Cal said, that there wasn’t enough for everyone; so those that had it, guarded it jealously.
    The Constable had found us a pitch and paid the market tax, which was more of our goods gone. It seemed to me that we had little to spread out on the old tarpaulin we had brought, but as I looked around I could see that may of the pitches had much less. One old man sat not far from us with precious little in front of him; an old watch, a pair of shoes and some broken children’s toys. He looked as if he would sit there all day, silent and unmoved, but later the market watch-men chased him off for not paying the tax.
    We had not had room for much, so we had brought dried meat and cheeses, dried fruit and some honey; though the latter was a luxury as bees were rare creatures nowadays even in our mountain. There was some barter, but much of the trade was done in the city tokens that were currency here; these were flattish discs of recycled metal, from old cans mostly dredged up from rubbish heaps, and stamped with a value and the town crest. Cal was loath to take these, but the Constable though it best and besides we could use them while we were in the place. We were to find out