Black Dogs Read Online Free PDF Page B

staying with a family in France, just outside Dijon. Believe it or not, they were actually in the mustard business. They taught mehow to cook, and that there is no better place on the planet than France, one youthful conviction I’ve never been able to revise. When I got back it was my eighteenth birthday and I was given a bicycle, a new one, a beauty. Cycling clubs were still the fashion then so I joined one, the Socialist Cycling Club of Amersham. Perhaps the idea was to give my stuffy parents a shock, though I don’t remember any objections. At weekends about twenty of us would take picnics and pedal along the lanes in the Chilterns, or down the escarpment towards Thame and Oxford. Our club had links with other clubs, and some of these had affiliations with the Communist Party. I don’t know if there was a plan, a conspiracy, someone should do some research on it. It was probably quite informal, the way it worked out, that these clubs became a recruiting ground for new members. No one ever lectured me. No one was bending my ear. I simply found myself among people I liked, cheerful and bright, and the talk was as you’d imagine – what was wrong with England, the injustices and suffering, how it could be put right, and how these things were being set to rights in the Soviet Union. What Stalin was doing, what Lenin had said, what Marx and Engels wrote. And then there was the gossip. Who was in the Party, who had actually been to Moscow, what joining was like, who was thinking of doing it, and so on.
    ‘Now all this talk, all the chatter and giggling took place as we rode our bikes through the countryside, or sat on those lovely hills with our sandwiches, or stopped by village pub gardens to drink our halves of shandy. Right from the start, the Party and all it stood for, all that mumbo-jumbo about the common ownership of the means of production, the historically and scientifically ordained inheritance of the proletariat, the withering away of the whatever, all that fandangle, was associatedin my mind with beech woods, cornfields, sunlight, and barrelling down those hills, down those lanes that were tunnels in summer. Communism, and my passion for the countryside, as well as my interest in one or two nice looking boys in shorts – they were all mixed in, and yes, I was very excited.’
    As I wrote I wondered, ungenerously, if I was being used – as a conduit, a medium for the final fix June wanted to put on her life. This thought made me less uncomfortable about not writing the biography she wanted.
    June continued. She had this worked out rather well.
    ‘That was the beginning. Eight years later I finally joined. And as soon as I did, it was the end, the beginning of the end.’
    ‘The dolmen.’
    ‘Quite so.’
    We were about to leapfrog eight years, across the war, from ’38 to ’46. This was how these conversations went.
    On their way back through France in 1946, towards the end of their honeymoon, Bernard and June took a long walk in the Languedoc across a dry limestone plateau called the Causse de Larzac. They came across an ancient burial site known as the Dolmen de la Prunarède a couple of miles outside the village where they intended to stay the night. The dolmen stands on a hill, near the edge of the gorge of the river Vis, and the couple sat there for an hour or two in the early evening, facing north towards the Cévennes mountains, talking about the future. Since then we have all been at various times. In 1971 Jenny courted a local boy there, a deserter from the French Army. We picnicked there with Bernard and our babies in the mid eighties. Jenny and I went there once to thrash out a marital problem. It is also a good place to be alone. Ithas become a family site. Most typically, a dolmen consists of a horizontal slab of weather-worn rock propped on two others to make a low table of stone. There are scores of them up on the causses, but only one of them is ‘the dolmen’.
    ‘What did you talk