Although he could never resist killing birds when he had the chance, Mick loved every feather on them, and indeed he knew them well: their nestings, their flight, their song, and their quick cries of alarm. He showed Morgan all the birds of that mountain valley: the tree pipits that sprang upward like a stone tossed into the air and then planed downwards with spread tails twittering like mechanical toys: the sandpipers that called plaintively from spits of sand: the black dippers that fled upstream under the arching alders; the water-ouzel that made in echoing, stony combes a noise that he imitated by tapping two pebbles together: the redstarts that fluttered their bright tails near the walls in whose crevices they nested. And they would stand still, this little group of four, listening to the warble of the blackcap safely hidden in impenetrable thickets, or lift their heads, under the high shade of larches to hear the hissing note of the wood-wren, coming home tired in the twilight, the children’s hands hot with the green smell of moth-like cuckoo-flowers that they had gathered in the meadows.
While the light faded the two men would smoke their pipes on the bridge, where the big black trout that inhabited the pool hung gorged with mayfly and held the stream with faintly quivering fins. Mick loved to watch them quietly, telling, in his slow, hypnotic tones, of the great cannibal trout of the Barrow, so strong that they could pull a child into the water after them. When they turned to go home Morgan would beg to shoot at the trout with his catapult. He never hit one, but when the stone reached the water they could see the dark streaks of the fishes vanishing under the shadows of the bridge.
Often Mick would talk of great days in Ireland, the days of country race-meetings and fairs, and round these events also a legend arose. When Morgan was shooting with his catapult the Irishman would encourage him with the patter of the man who kept a shooting gallery, reeling off long strings of words that meant nothing to the child, and standing up with bright eyes and flushed cheeks as though the hum of the fair were still in his ears.
‘Now then, walk up, walk up. . . . Fire, my rattler, fire! Six more shots a penny! Right through the hardware shop—and very near winning the silver cane! Fire, my bold American, fire. Pass along to the next caravan: your halfpenny is no more!’
He told them of the maggie-man, a live Aunt Sally, who stood up in his tub with tangled hair and fierce beard warding off the flights of sticks that were hurled at his head, and of that great mystery, the Live Lion Stuffed with Straw. Morgan drank it all in eagerly.
‘Why bain’t there no fairs in these parts?’ he said.
In a weak moment his mother told him that there were fairs in Shropshire, and above all, the great fair of Brampton Bryan, held every year in June. She told him how her father had taken her there many years ago, when she was a little girl, and how she had eaten the cakes which are made on purpose for this festival. ‘Bron cakes, they call them,’ she said.
The fact that eating was added to these other delights inflamed Morgan’s imagination.
‘Will they have Bron cakes this time?’ he asked.
‘Of course they will. They always have Bron cakes.’