The Light Ages Read Online Free PDF Page B

me and are now shadowed in soot and clawed by graffiti, I can see most of Brownheath spread below, rising and falling in greys and greens with bits of town and forest sprouting like bodyhair all the way to the bigger peaks of the Pennines. It can be warm here on the good days of summer, and I can see, far closer below me, the figure of my mother in her black coat and bonnet stooped amid the brambles.
    Finally, she finds something and calls up to me. And I clamber down and we inspect together whatever tiny plant she’s discovered clinging to this grey collier’s earth, and reassure ourselves as we bend to uproot it to nestle in a scrunch of newspaper that it will better off taken home than left out here. We gave them local names which no guilded expert with his Latin books would have countenanced. But they were good enough. Heartsease and mugwort. Eyebright and tansy. On my mother’s lips, they sounded like music.
    So we’d take our plant home and lay it in a pot and place it on the sunniest spot on the window ledge each morning, and shift it away from the frosts at night. My mother kneaded the earth with her fingers, and watered it, and breathed encouraging words to its leaves. Then one morning, faint yet inescapable over the reek of smoke and damp and humanity, an odd scent would be in my nostrils when I awoke. And I’d stumble down through the house to find my mother preening before some tiny new bloom that the plant had stooped its stem to bear, the colours paintbox-pure in a way that nothing else ever seemed to be in Bracebridge. Not that the flowers ever lasted, but those mornings, glancing time and again at the whorls and petals, and breathing the scent which left an ache behind my eyes like first snow, had a unique character.
    Once or twice, she was mistaken in what she found, and we came home with a cuckoo-plant. There were many such infestations in Bracebridge, just as there were dragonlice in its factories and kingrats in the burrows by the old barges down beside the river. It was part of the ways of our town. Of course, we children knew to inspect carefully any bramble bush we might choose to pick the berries from in case they brought nightmares, and not to brush our legs against the black-tinged nettles which erupted along the paths at the back of the aether beds, for they gave a rash which could bleed and ache for terms. Our fathers knew also to pluck out any bloodivy coming up from the drains, and the women never picked the mushrooms which grew on the rivermeads. But mistakes were easily made: a spray of simple yellow flowers, looking like big buttercups and smelling sweet and creamy, or a fine stem of foxgloves rising from the bracken, even if it was far too late in the summer. Bring them back, and the smell of their rot pervaded your house like bad cabbage and their ooze could ruin a best vase or burn your mantelpiece like acid. Still, all the fussing with newspapers and the open windows and the complaints of my father were worth it for the good days, that sense of surprise and discovery when my mother called to me from across the hill, parting the windy grass to nestle in her fingers the perfect face of a flower.
    So much of everything was a mystery to me then. Board School taught me nothing beyond how to read and write, which my mother had already shown me, and the guildsmen, men like my father, kept the drudgeries and secrets of their daily work to themselves and the insides of their beer glasses. Mawdingly & Clawtson was a name, a sound, a feeling, an edifice. Industry was our purpose. Aether was our god. It was as if we were all trying to turn our eyes from something vital and lay our heads on the pounding earth, lulling ourselves into a sleep which would last a lifetime of endless duty and disappointment.
    Occasionally, I would risk the attentions of the cuckoo-nettles and peer through the fences at the settling pans wherein aether was catalysed and bound with ordinary matter, which thickened to