Stone Cradle Read Online Free Page A

come. I wanted my son. I wanted to hold him and hold him and whisper to him that no matter how bad things got for us I would never, never give him over to the gorjers.
    *
    Dei said that by the time they got back to the cottage I was raving like a lunatic. I had our things all packed and bundled up. They’d only just got in the door when I was sobbing how the vicar was going to come and steal our babby and make him live with a gorjer family and go to school and be turned into a little gorjer boy. And that’s how come we took to the road again, in the middle of the winter, all unprepared and with no proper plan in mind. We upped and left that very morning and I have never since ceased to blame myself for what happened as a consequence.
    Lijah knew nothing of what was going on, of course. My innocent son was but a few weeks old.
    Yes, well, like I said, he was trouble from the start.

C HAPTER 2
    I f there is one thing I have always been afraid of, it is being shut away. I am so afraid of it that thinking of it makes me go almost mad. And then I fall to reasoning how that’s what madness is. It is like you’re shutting yourself up
,
inside yourself, and the more frightened you get the madder you get and the madder you get the more afeared you are. And there is something round and round about this that makes me want to put my hands over my ears and shut my eyes – to shut myself away from the thought of being shut away. And then I see all too easy how a person could fall to screaming for no reason. It is like all the bad things in your life start spinning round and round you until they are like a wall you can’t see past, and then you are finished,
oh dordy
, you are finished right enough. Not to think on’t, is the only way.
    My Lijah, when he was an old man and me even older and still around to see it, was fond of trapping wasps in jam jars and tapping the jar and shouting
garn wi’d yer
! and laughing and would never understand why it upset me so. We were living togetherthen, in our little house in Peterborough, him an old widower, and me an even older widow. I could never sleep unless the door was propped open. I used a conch shell that I made shiny with shoe polish. And Lijah always said how it was all those years of Travelling made me not like closed doors and I never told him it was more than that.
    I have thought on my fear of being shut away and happened across two reasons for it. (Living for as long as I have gives you the time to come up with the reasons for almost anything.) One is the thing that happened when we took to the road that winter. We would never have done such a foolish thing were it not for my ravings after I heard the vicar’s sermon, and I have cursed for ever since that I had the bad luck to go into the church that day and listen when I was not quite of my right mind anyway, being a nursing girl and therefore sorry in the head. It was losing my wits that Sunday in Werrington that led to the awful thing that happened as we crossed the Fens, the thing that took Dei from us.
    The other reason is, I met a madman once, a real one, and the meeting of him left such an impression on me that it is the thing I remember mostly from my childhood.
    *
    I am not sure how old I was, seven or eight or nine, thereabouts. The years of things are difficult for me to recall as I had no reading or writing and do not know even the year in which I was born.
    Anyroad, when I was nobbut a little chai, Dadus sent me across the fields one day to see if I could find the tents where my cousins were camped. We were stopped at a big camp at Stibbington and were expecting them to join us, when we were all going down to Corby for the Onion Fair. After a day or two and they had not come, a cattle drover passed by that Dadus was friendly with and he told him there were bender tents over at Yarwell.
    ‘Lemmy,’ my Dadus says to me, ‘Go over the fields and see if it’syour cousins, and if it’s not, asks them whereabouts