The Rain Before it Falls Read Online Free PDF Page B

tram.
    Let me concentrate. A thin layer of snow covers almost everything. There is a little wrought-iron gate at the side of the house, but you cannot see down the passageway into the yard which I remember lay beyond it. My father used to keep his bicycle in that passageway, it may be that you can see the handlebars peeking out in this picture, but I may be imagining it. That part is very shadowy.
    To the far left of the picture, slightly overhanging the wrought-iron gate, you can see a few withered branches. These belong to my father’s apple tree. It almost never bore any fruit: I don’t suppose this year was any exception. But it was good for climbing, I remember. Later on, when we moved, we had four or five apple trees in the back garden. But there was no back garden at this house. Just this one patch of earth where my poor old father tried his hardest to grow some fruit for us.
    These houses were semi-detached, and I suppose built at the end of the last century. The nineteenth century, I mean. Small, unyielding, redbricked houses. You couldn’t enjoy much of a life in them. Looking at this picture, I can make out the number, forty-seven, just above the letterbox in the front door, which my father painted yellow, I remember. There are no colours here, of course; it is a black-and-white photograph. Next to the door is a small frosted window, with a design on it, in stained glass. I can remember this design very clearly. A circle of red – deep, ruby red – with spokes of green and lemon-yellow radiating from it. Little green triangles at each of the four corners. I can remember sitting at the foot of the stairs in the hallway and looking at this window, watching the way the sunlight would brighten and darken behind it, with the passing of the clouds. The play of colours, like a kaleidoscope. This is one of my earliest memories, I think. Perhaps I did it many times, perhaps just the once. As I try to remember it, I can hear the sweep of my mother’s broom near by, behind me, on the lino in the kitchen. The two things – the image and the sound – go together in my memory. These things have resonance for me – an enormous, almost supernatural resonance – but it’s terribly hard to convey that, in words. To you they will probably seem banal.
    Well, back to the photograph. I have just noticed something which allows me to date it a little more exactly. To the right of the drive – the drive that is just large enough to hold a car – is an area of grass, of about the same size, with a little sumac tree in the middle. This was what we used to call – rather laughably – the ‘front garden’, and it did not shelve as steeply as the drive, so that near the bottom, just by the pavement, there was quite a sharp drop from the one to the other. After my friend Gracie fell over this drop and hurt herself, my father put up a little wooden fence; and you can see it in this picture, see the snow which forms an even carapace along the topmost beam. The snow looks clean and white and fluffy enough to eat: which is just what I would do sometimes, creaming it off with a sweep of my gloved hand and then taking an icy, tingling bite out of it, feeling it crumble and melt on my tongue. There’s nothing like the taste of freshly fallen snow. Anyway, my father took down that fence not long after the war broke out and used it for firewood; but I am sure it was still there when Gracie was evacuated, because I can remember leaning on it that morning, and watching her go by. That was in the autumn of 1939. So the picture was taken before that. The winter of 1938, in all probability.
    Do you know, Imogen, about the evacuation of children during the Second World War? (I’ve no idea what they taught you, in those schools of yours. I know that ignorance is rife among children today. But then, you’re not a child! I keep forgetting that, have to go on reminding myself. In my mind, you are frozen, still the age at which I last saw you,