Read Free Fall for Free Online Page A

tree would lean down at this point and reverse the crayon; but then one day the crayons appeared on her side of the desk sharpened at both ends, so life was easier. I neither liked nor disliked Minnie. She was an appearance, to be accepted like everything else. Even her voice, with its few, blunted words, was just the way Minnie spoke and nothing more. Life was permanent and inevitable in this shape. The pictures on the wall of animals and people in strange clothes, the clay, the beads, the books, the jar on the window-sill with its branch of sticky chestnut buds—these and Johnny Spragg and Philip Arnold and Minnie and Mavis, these were an unchanging entity.
    There came a time when we sensed that the trees were tossed by a high wind. There was to be an inspection and the trees whispered the news down to us. A taller tree was coming to find out if we were happy and good and learning things. There was much turning out of cupboards and pinning up of especially good drawings. Mine were prominent which is perhaps one reason why I remember the occasion so vividly.
    One morning there was a strange lady at prayers and by then we had been wrought to a state of some tension. Wehad our prayers and a rather tremulous hymn and waited for the marching music which would take us back to our room. But things were altered. While we stood in our rows the strange lady came along and bent down and asked each of us our names in turn. She was a nice lady and she made jokes so that the trees laughed. She was coming to Minnie. I could see that Minnie was very red.
    She bent down to Minnie and asked her name.
    No answer.
    One of the trees bent down to help.
    “My name is Μ——?”
    The nice lady guessed. She was helping, too.
    “Meggie? Marjorie? Millicent?”
    We began to giggle at the idea of Minnie being called anything but Minnie.
    “May? Mary?”
    “Margaret? Mabel?”
    Minnie pissed on the floor and the nice lady’s shoes. She howled and pissed so that the nice lady jumped out of the way and the pool spread. The jangly box struck up, we turned right, marked time, then filed away to our room. But Minnie did not come with us. Neither did the trees for a time. We were impressed and delighted. We had our first scandal. Minnie had revealed herself. All the differences we had accepted as the natural order, drew together and we knew that she was not one of us. We were exalted to an eminence. She was an animal down there, and we were all up here. Later that morning Minnie was taken home by one of the trees for we watched them pass through the gate, hand in hand. We never saw her again.

2
    The general has left his house along the road. The gate house is still there, projecting across the wide pavement from the high wall that surrounded his acres of shrub and garden. The house has been taken over by the health service and I cannot claim much social prestige from living almost next door. The slums are not what they were; or perhaps there are no slums. Rotten Row is a dusty plan outlined among rubble. The people who lived there and in similar huddles live now in an ordered housing estate that crawls up the hill on the other side of the valley. They have money, cars, telly. They still sometimes sleep four in a room but there are clean sheets on the bed. Here and there where the old, filthy cottages are left, either in the town or in the country, beams are blue or red. The sweetshop with its two windows of bottle-glass, is yellow, picked out in duck’s egg blue. There are the usual offices indoors now, and the dreamy couple who live there throw pottery in the shed. The town does not stand on its head for the head is gone. We are an amoeba, perhaps waiting to evolve—and then, perhaps not. Even the airfield that lay on the other hill is silent now. The three inches of soil are ploughed up and planted with wheat that sometimes grows as much as a foot high, reaching for the government grant. In winter you can see the soil smeared away from the chalk