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tell the truth, I was a little nervous.
    ‘Better put
your cap in your pocket,’ I said, taking mine off. ‘You might lose it
otherwise.’
    My real reason
was that our caps advertised the fact that we were King’s School boys. The
school was not universally popular in the town, and there was no point in
courting trouble. Not that I was seriously worried. Mr Witney was a tenant of
the Dean and Chapter, and the school subleased their playing field from him; he
would keep an eye out for us.
    Men and boys
were milling around the yard. The barn doors were open, revealing a space large
enough to take a laden wagon. Dogs were everywhere, small ones mainly, terriers
and the like.
    ‘That’s like
mine at home,’ I said, pointing at a mongrel with a lot of spaniel in him.
‘He’s awfully bright — understands almost everything I say.’
    This was a lie,
as I did not have a dog. But I had pretended I had one for years. My aunt
wouldn’t let me have a real dog. It would bring mud into the house and,
besides, who would look after it in term time? So I had a dog in my mind
instead. The precise breed varied (he was often a mongrel) but his name was
always Stanley, after a dog my father had owned when he was a boy. The dog’s
other permanent attributes included his almost human intelligence and his
unswerving loyalty to me.
    Mr Witney was
concentrating his operations both inside and outside the barn. The building was
very old, perhaps mediaeval in origin, and constructed of soft, crumbling
sandstone. The target areas lay along the base of one of the immensely thick
gable walls, both inside and out. Two or three men on each side were attacking
the ground with spades, iron rods and pickaxes, breaking up the compacted
earth. A score or so men and boys gathered around the diggers, all of them
armed with sticks. Dogs of all shapes and sizes scurried about everyone’s legs,
tails high in excitement.
    Faraday and I
sidled into the outskirts of the larger crowd, the one outside the barn. Nobody
seemed to notice us. They were all staring at the diggers. Some of the dogs,
careless of danger, were diving into the loosened soil and burrowing like
maniacs with their front paws.
    One of the dogs
was already so far into the ground that only his hind legs and tail were
visible. Suddenly he pulled himself out of a hole with a wriggling rat clamped
between his jaws. He shook his prey in the air, and two other dogs instantly
converged on him. One of them leapt up and grabbed the rat by its head. A tug
of war ensued, each animal trying to wrest the rat from the other until the rat
resolved the matter by dividing itself into two unequal parts.
    I heard a sound
beside me and glanced at Faraday. His face had gone white, the fleeing blood
leaving a cluster of freckles scattered across the bridge of his nose and his
cheeks.
    ‘Come on,’ I
cried. ‘It’s—’
    Another rat
broke cover and darted to and fro among the sticks and stamping feet and
snarling dogs. It saw an opening and shot towards the open field beyond. It was
making for the gap between Faraday and me. People were shouting. I swung the
stick down and felt the jar as it hit the ground, the impact running up my
hands and arms.
    ‘Well hit,
young ‘un!’ shouted Mr Witney. ‘That’s the way.’
    I looked down
and saw to my surprise a little mass of bloodied fur, still squirming feebly.
    ‘Oh God,’
Faraday said.
    A sort of
frenzy seized me, a bloodlust. I ran berserk among the men and boys and the
dogs and the rats. I held my stick in both hands and pounded it down, again and
again. One of the dogs attached itself to me. How many rats did I kill or help
to kill that day? Half a dozen, perhaps more?
    Mr Witney put a
stop to the ratting only when the light was beginning to fade.
    It felt as if
we had only been at the farm for five minutes but it must have been at least an
hour and a half. The dog rubbed itself against my leg. It was a mangy little
animal, a mongrel, with a piece of