Ten Mile Bank

By Paul Marshall

‘We’ve hit an animal. Stop the car.’ My father slammed his foot on the brake pedal and we squealed to a skidding halt, the smell of burning rubber wafting in through my open window. I nipped out to inspect the front of the car. My father took his time. I pointed to the left-hand side of the Ford’s bumper.

He ran a finger along the chrome.

‘That’s a dent,’ I said.

‘An old wound. I saw nothing. How big was this beast of yours?’

‘It ran fast, into the field. It’s sure to be injured. We have to find it.’

‘Little chance of that. We need to get back. Your mother will be waiting for us.’

‘Two minutes.’

‘No more. It’ll soon be dark and, Tom, don’t in any way damage the crop.’

‘Aren’t you going to help me?’

‘I could do with a moment to scribble down a few notes. I have to decide what to do with Cyril. He doesn’t want to listen, not to a single word I say.’

Dad was driving his Ford GT along Ten Mile Bank in the Cambridgeshire Fenlands, a narrow road running alongside the Great Ouse. On one stretch he touched ninety-five, a speed he’d never risk with my mother in the car. As the corner careered towards us I foresaw in my mind a Massey Ferguson Red Giant at the turn. That would be that.

We’d been to see Cyril Chapman. He rented fifteen acres of land behind his one-bedroom cottage at Black Horse Drove, near Brandon Creek. My father, a Lloyds bank manager, often made evening visits to the smallholders to offer advice and support. A caring and respected man, he stood six feet four. I’ve never known anyone walk more upright. I’d watch him, from our flat above the bank, crossing the High Street of our small, market town to buy his twenty Senior Service cigarettes. Before his evening appointments, if he caught me lounging on the sofa, he sometimes persuaded me to keep him company. This time the alternative was Double Your Money. I knew my mother rather liked us being out of the house. She had this person she rang. ‘He’s a friend,’ she let slip to me. ‘A special friend,’ she added as if released by her confession. ‘Not a word to anyone.’

I stepped down the verge of dry, wild grass to wade into the expanse of wheat panning out to the horizon. A breeze shimmered across the field, the grain dust irritating my nostrils and throat. I feared I was breathing in DDT. I strained to detect any sound of distress, an ebbing whimper, a low howl. Some animals sound like humans screaming.

I trudged on through the rows, the spiky ears brushing against my arms and shoulders. The golden hour was fading. To my left, Jack Colburn’s farm appeared, shadowy, with its cluster of ugly barns of corrugated iron roofs and walls of concrete blocks. Such a business was an unattainable dream for Cyril, twenty-nine years old with a shock of wiry hair and creases on his face as if engrained with the world’s darkest earth.

Half an hour earlier the three of us sat in his front room. It reeked of nicotine, the low ceiling stained with patches of sticky yellow. My father would have yearned for a cigarette but he never smoked amongst his borrowers and savers. As he and Cyril discussed debt I sank into an old, sagging armchair, a mangled spring stabbing the back of my leg. Shifting my position I stared at the thread-worn mat at my feet while drinking tea with milk on the turn. In the corner stood a Futurama, the B and top E strings broken. I mentally rehearsed an offer to take the guitar home, replace the strings, tune it, clean the neck and bring it back. I reckoned Cyril liked The Yardbirds, The Rolling Stones, Jimi Hendrix. Chatting to him would be great. Maybe I’d talk to him about my idea if I came to visit again some time.

Cyril took us outside through the lean-to kitchen’s back door. ‘Mind your heads,’ he warned, ‘and the chicken shit.’ Next to the outside toilet a pile of old tyres lay slumped amidst a clump of nettles. A cockerel tootled off towards a decrepit barn. ‘That’s Henry,’ Cyril pointed out. ‘He does what he wants, when he’s ready.’

‘Under the car, back wheel,’ I shouted as we walked past Cyril’s Reliant. ‘A badger.’

‘Poor soul,’ said my father.

As I stepped nearer the stench of death reared up as if clawing at my arms and clothes. ‘I’ll bury him later,’ murmured Cyril, tapping a Capstan on its packet, his veins pronounced along his weathered arms.

On the edge of Cyril’s strip of land my father broke off a seed-head and rubbed it between his hands. As the breeze snatched the husks from his palm he dug into a kernel with his thumbnail. ‘No green visible and wonderfully hard. Harvest time!’

Cyril pointed a finger: ‘What I have, Mr. Martin, is my independence.’ He nudged me to one side as my father stepped away as if to do more testing. ‘Keep it to yourself, Tom, but I’ve a fair few pounds tucked away. There’s no necessity to fret about me, not for a moment. More than a survivor, that’s who I am. As I see it, and no disrespect, I don’t need your dad, not at all.’ In fact he did need my father. I was sure of that. I was proud of my father’s dedication. As for Cyril’s ‘fair few pounds’, that, I knew, was wishful thinking.

My search was futile, my will for the beast’s existence waning. My feet were sore from the thin soles of my plimsolls on the hard, uneven ground. I was too far out, alone, resentment rising to be living amidst this desolate landscape in my dreary town’s Main Street with nothing much around but Vermuydeen’s ditches and dykes, sluices and drains. Most locals had some knowledge of how the fen tigers ferociously defended their self-determined way of life of eel catching, fishing, wild fowling and reed cutting. Back then, I had no heart in their history.

I had to turn back, find the car. In search of a landmark I couldn’t see the farm and began to doubt that the buildings I saw earlier were Colburn’s. I was losing sense of time. I had not worn my watch for a while, waiting for one with a bigger face, a wider strap, more adult, displaying the day, the month and year.

By my feet, close. Something was rustling. A fox? Too wounded to scramble away. It had to be. Or any creature would do. Standing like a pylon there he was: my father. He strode forward, calling out: ‘Any sign at all? Had a good hunt round?’ He ruffled my hair. ‘If there was any suffering, let’s hope not for long.’ I looked up at him. He often seemed sad. It was the way he was. Side by side in that field, I resigned myself never to know what mattered to him most.

I followed him back to the car. ‘We should have tried for a few more minutes,’ I muttered but I was thirsty now, hungry too.

‘And what about your mother?’ he snapped. ‘Has it not crossed your mind she must be wondering what’s happened to us?’

Headlights on full beam, my father drove with a silent purpose but not as fast, his left hand on the wheel. His right held a cigarette. We passed Black Horse Drove and slowed down for the level crossing. In the absence of words, only the shifts of gear to listen to, I went through how I’d tell my mother about this evening, what to leave out. I repeated in my mind over and over in my mother’s voice, ‘A special friend’. I began to wonder what my parents were like when I wasn’t around. Who were Audrey and Phillip when they weren’t together?

We coasted down Station Road and turned left for Granby Avenue. Another left took us onto Main Street. My father parked outside the bank and switched off the engine and the lights. Through the stillness he said, ‘Let’s just keep this, all of it, between you and me.’ He then did something he’d never done before. He shook me by the hand and that was how it was left.