The Green Wind [antikvár]

ONESussex countryside is green, decorated in summer with cow-parsley and ragged robin. In winter there is a lot of insipid rain. We grew up peacefully there, surrounded by hills and flowers and windmills. It was not so much a world in miniature as a world in half strength. Even the sheet lightning storms which lit up the dark garden like a bewitched daylight had been sweetened by the time the shoulders of the downs had broken their spirit. The rivers were infected with polio but we paddled unharmed in their forbidden water. We smeared poison-berry pulp over our faces but it had no more effect than if it had been blackcurrant juice or cold cream. Sometimes a lorry would miss us by inches as it went rocketing along the country road but we laughed and stepped off the verge just the same the next day. We did not believe in an antagonistic reality.Our family moved from place to place within a small green radius. As we children grew up we lost several pets and a little of our contentment, but my father made more money. He expanded his business and my mother expanded her wardrobe. From beginning life in a cottage where clematis grew among the lattice work, we found ourselves, as our parents approached middle age, in a large house in a small village. The only buses were to a nearby rural town and to the seaside town which lay beyond the downs. It took a long time to get anywhere so one rarely bothered. The village was beginning to be threatened by development, but a patchwork of fields still spread protectively round its borders. There was a shop for every necessity, and not more than one, that is to say one grocer, one greengrocer, one chemist there was an exception in the case of the butcher, for there were two, and a terrible rivalry existed between them. Cats slept in the sun and the publican's dog slobbered all day round the doorway to the pub. When you walked down the street you had to keep a smile on your face all the time because you were supposed to know everyone.Beyond the downs was the sea. If you stood on the crest of a hill you saw the cloth of water hung up on the horizon. Sometimes it was silver and almost indistinguishable from the sky, sometimes dark turquoise. There were rare days when it was purple, with a pale strip of light along the top, and then the storm air drew it closer to us as we stood there with goose-pimples springing up over our bodies. The water was the colour of a bruise, and frightening. Glimpses of the sea filled me with5