Free A Tree on Fire by Alan Sillitoe Page A

who had lived for generations in one place, they realised how possible this was.
    Because there was no saying when his suddenly acquired fortune would vanish, Mandy wanted to get out before it did. She couldn’t believe that from now on he’d be able to earn good money doing something or other in the world of art. He could turn his hand to many things, but being pigheaded, would never do anything his integrity told him was wrong. Otherwise why had they lived a desperate existence for so many years? To deviate from such principles would turn it into an awful waste, and though she realised how much of a pity this would be, at the same time she didn’t want to go on living in the greater uncertainty that unexpected affluence had created. She was the daughter of a true aritst in that she wanted the sort of settled life her upbringing had denied her the means of acquring. And having the same determination as her father she would go to great lengths to get it, in the course of it justifying the inversion of the common maxim to say that the sins of the children are visited on the parents.
    Sun flooded the coastal meadows with light, dust jumping from her train seat when she fell on to it for a better view of the fields embossed in green and yellow. Comfort was beauty, and she was always passing both. When you liked the landscape but had no feeling for the people set there, it was a place where you could live with pleasure but not grow up in, which at eighteen was a good reason to get out even though it broke your heart. The fact that her parents lived here would make it easier.
    She met Ralph by the Stump. ‘I’d have waited all day and all night,’ he said, as if she’d been hurrying for his benefit. ‘Time never drags when I’m expecting you.’
    â€˜I wish I knew when you were being sarcastic and when you weren’t.’
    â€˜That’s easy,’ he laughed, as they walked arm in arm towards the bridge. ‘I never am. Bitter, disappointed, perhaps, but only a fool is sarcastic.’
    Ralph had long ago made up his mind never to do any farming, and so was locked in an internecine conflict with his father who was determined that he should – who wished he’d never encouraged him to go to Cambridge, though in fact there’d been no choice. After getting his degree in English Ralph set out with fifty pounds on a trip round the world. His father drove him as far as Grantham, and shook hands with a grin that expected to see him back in a few days. Ralph felt this, but strode off south along the Great North Road in anticipation of his first real lift. Tall, ruddy-cheeked, a gleam in his eye that had not yet received its baptism of worldly irony as had his father’s, he travelled fast and reached Yugoslavia in a week. He there discovered a profitable frontier trade in foreign currency and so made enough money to live on the Dalmatian coast for a few weeks before resuming his advance through Greece and Turkey. In Ankara he translated letters for a business firm, then bought an old Italian motor-bike to ride across Iraq and Persia. He wore jeans and checked shirt, with a sheepskin coat for the mountains, and a pipe of cheap local choking tobacco was gripped in his teeth as he bumped at fifteen miles an hour over boulder roads. In place of his ruddiness came a sallow tan, permanently stamped when he became ill in Baluchistan with a violent form of liver-fluke. He lay for weeks on a rope bed in a remote khan, gaunt and bearded, raving at the cannonball lodged in his stomach. A junior consular official of the same age walked in one day as the worst of his fevers and cramps were leaving. He was taken to a salubrious Dak bungalow, and lived there on bacon and tinned carrots until fit to ride east again – which he did against the advice of the consul with so little grace that they afterwards marked him in their common memories as one of those northerners whose taciturnity