Bred of Heaven Read Online Free PDF Page A

by then. I spent my entire childhood in the front.
    The bridge gave rise to a competition. Who would be the first to spot it? Children are not good with distances. We’d set out from West Sussex, usually quite early, and soon after we hit the M4 we’d start scouring the horizon for the telltale turrets. On and on the road mowed west, but our quarry resisted all efforts to will it into sight. I had the advantage of course, being in the front seat and therefore closer, with a full windscreen to see through. It must be round this hill. It must be over that brow. It must be. It never was, not for aeons. We’d start to lose interest, get bored, perhaps be distracted by the prospect of a squabble.
    â€˜You’re a dimmy.’
    â€˜No, you are, so there.’
    â€˜Am not.’
    â€˜Boys, look!’
    â€˜Are so.’
    â€˜Not.’
    â€˜Can you see what I can see?’
    You rounded a hill and there, surprisingly close, would be the Severn Bridge, suspended as if from the clouds. Strangely foreshortened by a trick of perspective, visible long before the stretch of water it spanned, it was a thing of mystery and fascination.
    We had a ritual of driving up for a closer look. There was a service station called Aust built on the banks above the Severn. I know now that Aust Services was the direst shitpit and the thought of it caused my parents to sink into morbid depression, but to us it was a wonderland. We’d eat eggs, beans and chips – chips were forbidden at home because my mother objected to the lingering pong – and look up at the bridge magnificently filling the window.Below it the Severn swam muddily by. And on the other side of the bridge you could see Wales. Or so we thought. Actually you couldn’t. It took me decades to work out that Wales begins beyond the Wye, not the Severn, and that the opposite bank was Gloucestershire.
    â€˜How many miles to go?’ We knew exactly how far it was from the bridge to our grandparents. Children with no concept of distance ask such things frequently.
    â€˜Eighty-four … seventy and a half …’ My father would turn arithmetical. ‘Sixty-eight and three-quarters …’ The revolving milometer kept us from fighting. ‘Fifty-nine point nine …’ Progress was slow. In those days, somewhere after Cardiff, the motorway petered out into a single carriageway and the numbers would click along with agonising reluctance. ‘Forty-seven and a third.’ Sometimes there was nothing else for it but to peer out at Wales crawling by beside us.
    It looked nothing like England. Children don’t notice countryside. They aren’t interested in the character conferred by the lumps and bumps of landscape. But they know a plug-ugly bungalow when they see one. They also regard deviations from their known environment as somehow deficient, and that was certainly how I saw the towns and villages the Singer hared through in the days before speed cameras. It sure as heck didn’t look like home. The road was lined with squat, drab housing, low-slung shops and hatchet-faced pubs. I remember wondering by what right petrol stations, planted in the middle of nowhere, were permitted to exist with such unfamiliar names. And overhead it was forever grey. From those journeys along that snaking, snailing road, whether I was four or five or eight or nine, I have not kept a single memory of the sun.
    â€˜Twenty-seven miles to go.’
    The colour, such as existed, was all in the names of places. Andwhat colours they were. As we drove on we’d ask my father to read them out.
    â€˜How do you say that one?’
    â€˜Cwmrhydyceirw.’ My father had a musician’s ear for sound and a trace memory of correct pronunciation: the rising terminals, the firmly placed stresses that made Welsh sound like both a statement and a question.
    â€˜And that one?’
    â€˜Pontarddulais.’ I might not have liked the look of