Coconut was nearly fifteen. Below the top-knot he had bright intelligent eyes, a big nose and a sloppy loose-lipped mouth, as if his face hadn’t yet synthesised with his emerging character. Give him a year, I thought, maybe two, then the shell would firm to define the man.
‘There’s a bit of wasteland at the top of the apple orchard,’ Tremayne said. ‘You can have that.’
‘But, Dad...’ Gareth began, raising objections.
‘It sounds fine,’ I said firmly. ‘Survivors can’t choose.’
Tremayne looked at me and then at Gareth thoughtfully and nodded as if to confirm a private thought.
‘But February’s a bad month for food,’ I said, ‘and I suppose we’d better not steal a pheasant, so we’ll cheat a bit and take some bacon with us. Bring gloves and a penknife each. We’ll go in ten minutes.’
The boys scurried to collect waterproofs for Gareth, and Tremayne asked what exactly I planned to do with them.
‘Build a shelter,’ I said. ‘Light a fire, gather some lunch and cook it. That’ll be enough, I should think. Everything takes forever when you start with nothing.’
‘Teach them they’re lucky.’
‘Mm.’
He came to the door to see off the intrepid expedition, all of us unequipped except for the survival kit (with added bacon) that I wore round my waist and the penknives in their pockets. The cold drizzle fell relentlessly but no one seemed to mind. I waved briefly to Tremayne and went where Gareth led; which was through a gate in a wall, through a patch of long-deserted garden, through another gate and up a slow gradient through about fifty bare-branched apple trees, fetching up on a small bedraggled plateau roughly fenced with ruined dry-stone walling on one side and a few trees in the remains of a hawthorn hedge full of gaps round the rest. Beyond that untidy boundary lay neat prosperous open acres of winter ploughing, the domain of the farmer next door.
Gareth looked at our terrain disgustedly and even Coconut was dismayed, but I thought Tremayne had chosen pretty well, on the whole. Whatever we did, we couldn’t make things worse.
‘First of all,’ I said, ‘we build a shelter for the fire.’
‘Nothing will burn in this rain,’ Gareth said critically.
‘Perhaps we’d better go back indoors, then.’
They stared in faint shock.
‘No,’ Gareth said.
‘Right.’ I brought the basic survival tin out of my pocket and gave him the coil of flexible saw. ‘We passed at least four dead apple trees on the way up here. Slide a couple of sticks through the loops at the ends of this saw, and you and Coconut go and cut down one of those dead trees and bring it up here. Cut it as near the ground as you can manage.’
It took them roughly three seconds to bounce off with renewed enthusiasm, and I wandered round the decrepit piece of what Tremayne had truly described as wasteland, seeing everywhere possibilities of a satisfactory camp. The whole place, for instance, was pale brown with the dead stalks of last year’s unmown grass; an absolute gift.
By the time the boys returned, puffing, red-faced and dragging the results of their exertions, I’d wrenched out a few rusty old metal fence posts, cut a lot of living hawthorn switches from the hedge and harvested a pile of the dead grass stalks from a patch near the last row of apple trees. We made a short trip down to the deserted garden to reap a patch of old stinging nettles for bindings, and about an hour after setting off were admiring a free-standing four-foot-square shelter made of a metal frame with a slightly sloping roof of closely latticed hawthorn switches thickly thatched on top with endless piled-on bundles of dried grass. While we watched, the drizzle trickled down the top layer of brownish stalks and dripped off to one side, leaving a small rain-free area underneath.
After that, by themselves, the boys made a simple square frame lashed with thickly criss-crossed hawthorn which we could lean against any one side of the fire shelter to prevent the rain from blowing straight in. Gareth understood without being told and explained it to Coconut matter-of-factly.
‘OK,’ I said. ‘Next, we find some flat dry stones from that broken-down wall to make a floor for the fire. Don’t bring very wet stones, they can explode when they get hot. Then we go around looking for anything very small and dry that will burn. Dead leaves. Bits of fluff caught on fences. Anything inside that wrecked old greenhouse in the garden. When you find something, keep it dry in your pockets. When we’ve got enough tinder, we’ll feather some kindling sticks. We also need enough dry wood, if you can find any. And bring any old cowpats you come across: they burn like peat.’
