Free On The Black Hill (Vintage Classics) by Bruce Chatwin

to the whining blade. But the real attraction was his daughter, Rosie, an impish girl of ten with an insolent way of tossing her head of blonde curls. Her mother dressed her in cherry-red frocks and told her she was ‘pretty as a picture’.
    Rosie took them to secret hideouts in the wood. No one could fool her into mistaking which twin was which. She preferred to be with Lewis, and would sidle up and purr sweet nonsense in his ear.
    Pulling off the petals of a daisy, she would call out, ‘He loves me! He loves me not! He loves me! He loves me not!’ – always reserving the final petal for ‘He loves me not!’
    ‘But I do love you, Rosie!’
    ‘Prove it!’
    ‘How?’
    ‘Walk through those nettles and I’ll let you kiss my hand.’ One afternoon, she cupped her hands around his ear and whispered, ‘I know where there’s an evening primrose. Let’s leave Benjamin behind.’
    ‘Let’s,’ he said.
    She threaded her way through the hazels and they came into a sunlit clearing. Then she unhooked her dress and let it fall round her waist.
    ‘You may touch them,’ she said.
    Gingerly, Lewis pressed two fingers against her left nipple – then she darted off again, a flash of red and gold, seen and half-seen through the flickering leaves.
    ‘Catch me!’ she called. ‘Catch me! You can’t catch me!’ Lewis ran, and stumbled over a root, and picked himself up, and ran on:
    ‘Rosie!’
    ‘Rosie!’
    ‘Rosie!’
    His shouts echoed through the wood. He saw her. He lost her. He stumbled again and fell flat. A stitch burned in his side and , from far below, Benjamin’s plaintive wailing reined him back.
    ‘She’s a pig,’ said Benjamin, later, narrowing his eyes in wounded love.
    ‘She’s not a pig. Pigs are nice.’
    ‘Well, she’s a toad.’
    The twins had their own hideout, in the dingle below Craig-y-Fedw – a hollow hidden among rowans and birches, where water whispered over a rock and there was a bank of grass cropped close by sheep.
    They made a dam of turf and branches and, on the hot days, would pile their clothes on the bank and slide into the icy pool. The brown water washed over their narrow white bodies, and clusters of scarlet rowanberries were reflected on the surface.
    They were lying on the grass to dry, without a word between them, only the currents that ebbed and flowed through their touching ankles. Suddenly the branches behind them parted, and they sat up:
    ‘I can see you.’
    It was Rosie Fifield.
    They grabbed their clothes but she ran off, and the last they saw of her was the head of blonde curls hurtling downhill through the fern fronds.
    ‘She’ll tell,’ said Lewis.
    ‘She won’t dare.’
    ‘She will,’ he said, gloomily. ‘She’s a toad.’

13
    AFTER THE HARVEST festival, the seagulls flew inland and Jim Watkins the Rock came to work as a farm boy at The Vision.
    He was a thin wiry boy with unusually strong hands and ears that stuck out under his cap, like dock-leaves. He was fourteen. He had the moustache of a fourteen-year-old, and a lot of blackheads on his nose. He was glad to get work away from home, and he had just been baptized.
    Amos taught him to handle a plough. It worried Mary that the horses were so big and Jim was so very small, but he soon learned to turn at the hedgerow and draw a straight furrow down the field. Though he was very smart for his age, he was a laggard when it came to cleaning tack, and Amos called him a ‘lazy runt’.
    He slept in the hay-loft, on a bed of straw.
    Amos said, ‘I slept in the loft when I were a lad, and that’s where he sleeps.’
    Jim’s favourite pastime was catching moles – ‘oonts’ as he called them in Radnor dialect (molehills are ‘oontitumps’) – and when the twins left, smartened up for school, he’d lean over the gate and leer, ‘Ya! Ha! Slick as oonts, ain’t they?’
    He took the twins on scavenging expeditions.
    One Saturday, they had gone to gather chestnuts in Lurkenhope Park when a whip