Free A Change of Climate: A Novel by Hilary Mantel Page A

there was all the bread to be cut and margarined. The inmates always wanted bread, three slices per man, whatever the rest of their meal was. They grumbled if they did not get it, as if their rights had been violated.
    When the meal was over and the men on the washing-up rota had been identified and corralled and set to their task, James with a twitch of his head beckoned Ralph into his office. They closed the door and with a single purpose, without a word, heaved a filing cabinet at the back of it; they knew from experience that it was the only way they could get a minute without interruption.
    “Is it about the posting?” Ralph asked. “Is there a problem?”
    “No, no problem.” James sat down at his desk, and found space for his elbows among the unpaid bills and begging letters and rubber bands. “Why do I have these rubber bands?” he wondered. “What are they for? No, Ralphie, there is no problem with Dar es Salaam, it is just that something more urgent has come up, and I thought that you should have the chance to consider it.”
    Here it comes, Ralph thought: my future on the Mile End Road.
    James said, “Would you like to go to South Africa?”
    On the outskirts of Swaffham today there is a goodly selection of dinky bungalows. They have wrought-iron gates and birdbaths, trellises, hanging baskets, shutters, and dwarf walls. They have raw brickwork and shining windows, and scarlet floribundas in well-weeded beds. Their carriage lamps are the light of the twentieth century. In the marketplace Ralph hears the broad drawling accent in which his grandfather spoke moderated to the foul contemporary tones of middle England.
    These bungalow dwellers repopulated the villages of Breckland, which were empty when Ralph went to Africa. Between settlements, there are still tracts of heather and furze, and black pine plantations: barren, monotonous, funereal, like the contents of an East European nightmare. But the bowed, arthritic pines that line the roads creep to the edges of the small towns, intruding themselves among the DIY merchants and filling stations and furniture warehouses; they gather round the new housing estates, like witches at a christening.
    It is only in the land marked off by the military’s fences that the old country can be seen. “Danger areas,” they are called on the map. It is said the army builds models there, of life-sized Belfast streets, and that snipers and marksmen creep behind empty windows and false walls. From the roads you can see Nissen huts, like slugs in formation. Signs read NO ENTRY WITHOUT PERMIT—MINISTRY OF DEFENCE PROPERTY. Vegetation creeps like serpents around their metal poles. The wind topples them.
    To the east, where Ralph and his children now live at the county’s heart, the great wheat fields roll onto the horizon, denatured, overfertile, factory fields. A farm that employed eighty-five men now employs six; the descendants of the other seventy-nine have delivered themselves from rural squalor, from midden and rotting thatch, and live in the bungalows, or in red-brick council houses with long gardens. In spring, primroses struggle in the verges. In June, there are dog roses in such hedgerows as remain.
    Ralph dreams; again, he is three years old. Somewhere behind him, unseen, his father walks, and Uncle James. He curls down inside his grandfather’s coat.
    They are going to the church. His grandfather will show him the angels in the roof, and the Pedlar of Swaffham carved on a stall end, and the pedlar’s dog with its round ears and big chain.
    The Pedlar of Swaffham: John Chapman was his name. He dreamed one night that if he went to London, and stood on London Bridge, he would meet a man who would tell him how to make his fortune.
    The day after this dream, Chapman put his pack on his back and with his dog set off to London. On London Bridge he stood about, until a shopkeeper asked him what he thought he was doing. “I’m here because of a dream,” the pedlar