Jago Read Online Free PDF

petition because he’d been laid up by the heat, but he had hopes it would be longer than ever. He mightn’t stop them this year, but he was making a dent. Next year, or the year after, maybe. He didn’t care if he was grappling with the Lord God. Danny Keough had dealt with a campaign of terror before, and this time he would brave it out. His country had let him down in Palestine, running away from the Jew-boy killers. Things were different now. It was all up to him. There were no politicians to chicken out when things got hairy.
    Four years ago, he’d been sweet-talked along with the rest of the village. But when he saw the first carload of teenage tearaways come up the road, he knew what it would be like. They didn’t call themselves hippies any more, but that was what they were all right. And hippies were no different from gypsies, savages, vermin. Nomadic trash with no hopes, messing up one place and going on to the next.
    It was an invasion. An occupation. A week of unrelieved din, litter, harassment and degradation. Naked and painted kids using the street as a toilet. Drugged freaks running riot. And the noise. It wasn’t music, any more than a plane crash was music. Afterwards, Alder looked as if a Panzer division had rolled through, followed by an Apache war party.
    The next year, and every year since, Danny had been making a din of his own, trying to put a stop to the festival. He began with letter writing. He remembered with pride the headline the Western Gazette printed over his first published letter, ‘“Hippies Should Be Stopped” Writes Decorated Veteran’. He sent copies to the district council, the county council, the Sedgemoor and District Preservation Society, his Member of Parliament and the bishop of Bath and Wells. He’d been in the Gazette again regularly, also the Bridgwater Mercury , the Western Daily Press and the Bristol Evening Post. HTV West came and interviewed him in his front garden, but they had cut up what he said and also had on some posh-voiced drop-out from the Agapemone to make him look an intolerant old fool. Even then, the television station had letters in support of him.
    But the festival happened again. And it had been even worse. Every year, it got worse. Five weeks before the second festival, the last of his cats had been run over in the road. Danny was sure the car was from the Agapemone. It was part of some obscene rite which demanded sacrifice. Over the years, indignities had mounted up. His front garden had been trampled over, his stretch of white fence pissed on and spray-painted. The side of his house had been flyposted with so many advertisements for groups with disgusting names that it looked like a modern art collage when he tried to rip it down. He wasn’t the only victim. Mrs Graham, who lived alone, had been terrorized by young thugs who pitched a tent in her garden with not so much as a by-your-leave, and had passed away the next winter. Mr Starkey’s youngest, Tina, had been lured into the festival; she had come back half-naked, doped up to the eyeballs. The family had to send her away to an approved school, and Danny heard she had to get rid of a baby. There was also damage to crops, animals, roads and private property.
    It had to be stopped.
    This used to be beautiful countryside, but since Jago came to the Manor House it had turned, like milk left in the sun.
    He started walking again, trying to keep the weight off his knee. There was pain in each step. Lately he was more aware of his old wounds, and thinking of how he had got them.
    It must be the heat, taking him back. During the Gulf War, he had grudgingly raised a brandy in salute every time one of Saddam’s Scuds got through to the Jew-boys. Every time he read in the Telegraph about the PLO blowing up people in Israel, there was a little holiday in his heart. That was what an American writer had said about Palestine, ‘Every time a British soldier is killed, there’s a little holiday in my