Running for the Hills

Prologue Clouds bowled along the skyline, a procession of billowing white shapes, like the sails of yachts I could not quite see. Not far beyond my window the mountain rose, rearing like a vast wave, hundreds of feet above the house. From my bed I gazed up its great green wall of new bracken, which flexed and rippled as the wind brushed it, at the knotty thorn trees that clung on here and there, and I watched the beetling white bands of the mountain ewes, and the blown black sparks that were ravens playing in the winds along the ridge. In the middle of the towering horizon, which darkened where it adjoined the sky, was a single still shape, like a man standing, looking over us. I had once asked my father, when he came to see us, what it was. "It's a cairn," he said. "What's a cairn?" "It's a pile of stones, put there by walkers." "Why do they do that?" "Partly for fun, and partly to say they've been there. Cairns are marked on maps, so they help other walkers know where they are. When you pass one, you add a stone to it." But we -- my mother, my brother, and I -- were not really in favor of walkers. When they appeared on summer weekends, stumbling notches on the horizon, we watched them jealously, daring them to descend and invade our land. We lived miles up, higher than anyone else, and we did not like people looking down on us. However, since my father approved of cairns, I approved of cairns, and when I stared up at the solitary shape, the watcher on the skyline, as I did every morning, I thought of him. "Time to get up, children," our mother said, with lightly forced gaiety (she loved her bed), her voice coming clearly through the thin wooden partition that divided our rooms. "Time to get up! Up, Horatio, up, Alexander!" "OK, Jenny. . . " "Yes, Mummy. . . " (We often called our parents by their first names. Other adults thought it was some sort of sixties principle but we were never taught or encouraged to do it: we started because they referred to each other that way and because Jenny had banned "Mum," which she said was some sort of deodorant. "You call me Jenny when you're cross with me," she observed once, "and Mummy when you're being nice! One day I hope you'll call me Ma-ma, but I should think you'll go straight to Mother, which sounds so aged.") My brother appeared in the door of my bedroom, which gave onto his. "Come on then, slugabed," he said. "I'm up." Seven years old, two years younger than me, with an idiosyncratic vocabulary: "idle slugabed" was one of our father's archaisms. We remembered and repeated all his sayings. Now Jenny joined him, on one leg, pulling a long woolen stocking up the other. Her uniform was corduroy britches, a woolly sweater, and long socks. "Good morning, darlings. Up! Up! Or we'll miss the best of the day. It looks lovely out there, but pretty cool, I should think. Warm sweaters." We dressed. Jenny unbolted the bedroom door and led the way, stooping, down the little stone stairs, which were chilly through our socks. The walls were smothered with thick white plaster which flaked if you touched it and there were gently bending postcards of Florentine angels on ledges all the way down. She unbolted the door at the bottom: we slept behind a series of rickety but reassuring defenses. The sitting room smelled of dogs and ashes: we had not had a fire since the end of winter but the hearth was huge and drafts from the wide chimney spread its gray smell around the room. Lark's tail beat a dusty tattoo on the old sofa; as she yawned and whined her greeting, her son shrank into himself, "hiding" ineptly by the front door. "No disgusting little presents this morning, Toss?" Jenny demanded, suspiciously. Toss snaked forward, head ducked low with shame, muzzle down, licking his lips apologetically, heavy with caution and reluctance. "Good dog!" Mum said. "You don't have to be guilty if you haven't done anything!" He alwayClare, Horatio is the author of 'Running for the Hills', published 2008 under ISBN 9780743274289 and ISBN 0743274288.