whistled twice and waited a few seconds before whistling again and then after a minute the same signal was echoed back to them.
‘Who is it?’ Adam asked.
‘Luke,’ said a familiar voice, close by but invisible. ‘An’ ’Arry and Davy MacKenzie, an’ I hope you can keep a secret, Adam Raine?’
‘He will,’ said Ernest, answering for Adam. ‘I got him to promise before we left.’
‘Fair enough,’ said Luke, coming forward out of the mist and clapping Adam on the shoulder. He and the two boys with him were smoking cigarettes and the burning ends illuminated their faces. Adam knew them all from playing football.
‘What’s the secret?’ he demanded. He’d been amused and irritated in equal measure by Ernest’s refusal to tell him what was going on, but his frustration was getting the better of him now that he seemed to be the only one of the five of them who didn’t know why they were there.
‘Come on,’ said Luke. ‘You’ll see.’
The boys followed Luke as he led them over to the big shed-like building that housed the stores for the mine and produced two keys from his pocket.
‘Where did you get them?’ asked Adam, starting to feel worried.
‘One of the deputies left ’em lying around an’ Davy ’ere was sharp enough to nab ’em without anyone noticin’, said Luke, pointing to his friend, a boy of his age but of much smaller stature with curly sandy hair and a round cherub-like face that reminded Adam of the carvings in the church in Islington that he used to go to with his mother. Davy was constantly getting into trouble, letting off fireworks or pilfering from the village store, and relied on his false air of innocence to escape punishment. His twin brother, Harry, looked nothing like him. He was tall, dark-skinned and serious, and had a precocious talent for playing the violin that he had never been able to properly develop as he had been required, like his brother, to join their father and uncle down the mine on the day following their fourteenth birthday. The strike had given the boys their longest holiday since then even if it had also made them cold and hungry.
Luke fitted one of the keys into the lock on the door of the stores and they went inside, leaving Harry outside to stand lookout.
Luke and Davy lit candles and began to pick their way up and down the narrow lanes between the tall stacks of equipment piled up on all sides – ropes and rails and wheels and steel and timber roof props – before Luke gave a triumphant whistle as he halted in front of a tall cupboard at the far end of the shed which had the word ‘DANGER’ painted in big red letters on the door under an image of a skull and crossbones.
The second key opened the padlock and the door swung open to reveal shelves of the various explosives used for shot firing in the mine. Luke carefully selected two sticks of dynamite.
‘One should be enough; t’other one’s just in case,’ he said as he relocked the door.
‘What the hell are they for?’ asked Adam, now feeling seriously alarmed. He was angry too. ‘You should have damned well told me, Ernest, that you were planning to blow up the mine before you hauled me out here,’ he told his friend, taking hold of his arm. ‘If I’d known, I wouldn’t have come.’
But Ernest shook him off and laughed. ‘Who said anything about blowing up the mine?’ he said. ‘We’re going fishing. That’s what we’re doing.’
The roads were still deserted as they rode their bicycles out of the town, heading past the football pitch into the open countryside. Away from the valley bottom the early spring sunshine was burning off the mist and the clean cold air filling Adam’s lungs gave him a sudden feeling of exhilaration as the boys increased their speed, weaving in and out of each other’s paths but somehow never colliding. They halted at a crossroads a few miles from Scarsdale, arguing about which direction to take.
‘It’s up there,’ said Davy, pointing to the left where the road narrowed as it climbed up into a beech wood and disappeared. ‘I know cos this ’ere is the cross lanes where they ’ad the iron gibbet back in the olden days. They used to ’ang the ’ighwaymen up ’ere in chains after their executions as a warnin’. Pitch on their faces; tar on their bones. Imagine the wind blowing through the bars of the cage rattlin’ their skeletons; imagine the sound o’ it in the moonlight,’ he said, dropping his voice to an enthusiastic whisper.
‘You’re makin’ it up,’ said Luke, pushing Davy playfully back with his hand. ‘I think you’re maybe right about the lake, but the rest is nonsense, ain’t it, ’Arry?’
‘Nay, it’s true,’ said Davy’s brother. ‘Our granddad told us about the gibbet the year afore ’e died; ’e said ’e’d seen it ’ere when ’e was a kid.’
‘An’ I s’pose you’re sayin’ that’s what’s we’ve got comin’ to us for stealin’ the dynamite?’ said Luke, grinning.
‘Nay, ’angin’s too good for the likes o’ us,’ said Davy, shaking his head in mock despair.
Laughing, they got back on their bicycles and pedalled hard to put the cross lanes behind them and reach their destination.
They slowed down once they reached the wood. They had to as the road quickly became no more than a dirt track and they bounced along in single file over the exposed tree roots until they reached a rise and stopped, looking out in wonder at the still waters of a semi-circular lake ringed by weeping willow trees whose leafy branches were trailing down into the water.
The boys waited while Luke lit the fuse on the first stick of dynamite and threw it into the lake. Almost immediately a column of foaming water exploded upwards from the surface and with it came scores of fat fish glinting silver in the sunlight. They flew up through the air before cascading back to float stunned or dead on the surface, ready and waiting for the boys who were already wading out into the water with the nets that they had brought from home extended in front of them.
They sorted through their catch on the shore, looking for the green-scaled perch with black stripes down their flanks and a spiked dorsal fin on their backs. The rest they threw back. Adam was told off to gather twigs and branches for the fire while the other boys descaled and filleted the fish ready for cooking.
‘Perch are the best to eat. And this lake’s known for them. The carp taste of mud and the chub are full of forked bones and taste of mud too,’ said Ernest, grinning happily as he took the wood from Adam and built the fire.
Adam watched the quick way the boys worked together preparing the meal with a twinge of envy mixed with regret: there had been no opportunity for him to learn how to live outdoors back in London. Over the course of the last year he had come to love the countryside around Scarsdale, gazing out at it with pleasure every day from the window of the bus, but he still felt like an outsider looking in, utterly ignorant of how nature or agriculture actually worked.
But Adam’s despondency was fleeting, chased away like a stray cloud by the delicious scent of the cooking mixed with the smell of smoke from the fire. Ernest had come equipped, producing a frying pan and flour and a bag of lemons from his knapsack, and the breakfast was the best and most satisfying meal Adam had eaten in as long as he could remember. The food prepared by Ernest’s mother had always been bland, and quantity as well as quality had sharply deteriorated since the privations inflicted by the strike had begun to bite into the family’s income.
Afterwards Adam lay back on the mossy bank with his eyes closed, using his rolled-up jacket as a makeshift pillow, and let the sunlight warm his face as it dappled down through the branches of the willow trees. He idly listened to the laughing voices of his friends, not taking in the words but letting them intermingle with the sound of birdsong and the tap-tap-tapping of a woodpecker further back inside the wood. The mine and the strike and the unresolved issues in his life seemed faraway and inconsequential, subsumed for now in a deep contentment. And later, in the midst of war and misfortune, he thought back on that moment lying beside the lake as the one where he had been most completely happy, wanting for nothing, at peace and in perfect harmony with the