Free Donkey Boy by Henry Williamson

naturally,” agreed Hetty, half-listening, while thinking that at times he was rather like one of the speakers round the Socialist Oak himself.
    One June evening of that year the Hill was transformed. For weeks a great bonfire near the bandstand had been building. Faggots and branches of trees, tar-barrels in the middle, a mass as high and compact as a house, for the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee. In the twilight Richard carried his son up the wide gravel way beyond Hillside Road, planted on either side with may-thorns, to see the sights. He left pocket-book, all money, and watch and chain behind; and carried his oak walking stick on his arm. Minnie was to have come with them; but at the last moment was left behind. Burglars might take advantage of the celebrations to break into the house. Hetty must not be leftalone with the baby. So Richard went with Phillip in his arms, the boy wrapped up and wondering what was to happen: something exciting, he could feel. And it was all strange and frightening, all red like his sleep-pictures, called nightmare by Mummy, when the ninganing man and the ninganing and all had been red.
    The flames ran up the forty-foot bonfire and soon all the people were moving back from the big red. The wood was crackling and the tar-barrels roaring, and all the faces red in the fire light. Shouts, cries, all the sky on fire—he hid his face by Daddy’s tickling beard and cried for Minnie. Before he took the child home, Richard went apart from the crowd of many thousands of people with gilded faces around the perimeter of heat, turning his back upon the great roaring fire, the sparks coiling and whisking hundreds of feet into the air. He walked to the southern crest of the Hill and looking across the lights of houses and streets below, saw many beacons burning far away. There were nearer fiery tongues leaping upon Honor Oak Hill and Sydenham and Shooter’s Hill, with smaller speckles all the way to the North Downs. Chains of beacons ringed the base of the London night to Hampstead and Highgate and distant Hainault and Epping. His imagination took fire; he thought of the tongues of flame from Poldhu in Cornwall to Dunkery Beacon on Exmoor, a living girdle of flame from the hills of Cranborne Chase and the Great Plain above the grey spire of Salisbury Cathedral to Portsdown Hill and eastwards to Ditchling, in Sussex; onwards to Wrotham Hilland Caesar’s Camp above Folkestone in Kent: the midsummer night filled with fire along the coasts of England, far north to the pikes of Northumberland and the remote grey capes of Scotland. Great Britain was aflame! Sixty years a Queen! Nearly into the Twentieth Century! He was the father of a son and daughter in the greatest nation on earth! Could it all be possible?
    “Look, Phillip, bonfires everywhere, for the Old Queen!”
    “Mummy p’e Daddy, mummy p’e Daddy”.
    Richard sighed. Fancy forsook him. With memories of his boyhood gone for ever and ever, he walked in the ruddy twilight down the broad gravel to his home again, the child quiet against his shoulder.
    He was taken up to bed at once, and Richard said he thoughthe would return upon the Hill, for it was an historic occasion; but feeling suddenly weary, he settled in his armchair, and read the Golden Extra of The Daily Trident, printed in gilt letter-press for the Diamond Jubilee. He had an evening paper, too, which he intended to put away, for his son to read when he was a man. That day the old Queen had driven to St. Paul’s Cathedral for the service, which had taken place on the steps, because she was too weak to get out of the State Carriage.
    Well, it was the end of an age all right; and another near-terrifying thought came to him, that almost before life had begun, he was approaching middle-age. Next birthday he would be thirty-two. How far away seemed the holiday in North Devon with brother John and Jenny, Theodora and Hetty, and the baby in its specially made wicker basket. Could it have been only