“Yes. . . . A miner amongst other things. He was a dowser too.”
“A dowser? What is that?”
“Don’t you know? The divining-rod. A thing that all the scientists have been unable to explain. In a dry country like Mendip the dowser is a most important person; for neither man nor beast can live without water, and he is the only person who can tell where a well should be sunk. Your grandfather was a strange looking man with very clear grey eyes under a black head of hair and heavy bristling brows. Even when he grew very old his hair and his beard were black.
“I was the youngest of the family. All the others, except your Uncle Will, have died—and for some reason or other I was not brought up in my father’s cottage but in that of my grandmother, a tiny, tumbledown affair lying in the valley under Silbury. We were very humble people, Eddie. I don’t suppose anywhere in the world I could have passed a quieter childhood. It’s a long way off now. One only remembers curious, unimportant things.
“When I was four years old I was sent to the village school. I don’t think it exists any longer. You see the population of Highberrow disappeared naturally with the abandonment of the mining. Even in my childhood, as I told you, the workings were running pretty thin. The miners were beginning to find that they couldn’t pick up much of a living on their own calamine claims; and so they drifted back gradually—your grandfather along with them—to the oldest workings of all: the mines that the Romans had made two thousand years ago. You may be certain that the Romans, with their thoroughness, hadn’t left much behind. Why, in their days, Mendip must have been a great place, with a harbour of its own on the mouth of the Ax, and great roads radiating everywhere: to Cirencester, Exeter, and Bath. Even in the Middle Ages there was a population of fifty thousand souls on Mendip. Now I don’t suppose there are a thousand in all the mining villages put together.
“So my father went to work in the Roman mines at Cold Harbour; for a new company had been started that was reclaiming the sublimated lead that had been left in the Romans’ flues. And there, as a little boy, I used to carry him his dinner, through the heather, over the side of Axdown. You’ll see Axdown for yourself to-morrow: a great bow of a hill. There used to be a pair of ravens that built there. I’ve seen them rising in great wide circles. They seemed very big to me. I was almost frightened of them; and when I found the skeleton of a sheep one day on the top of Axdown under the barrows, I made sure that the ravens had killed it.
“I suppose I was a pretty intelligent boy. I know that the men at the workings by Cold Harbour, where I took father’s dinner, used to joke with me a good deal. They used to like the way in which I hit back at them with my tongue. Father didn’t take any notice of it. He was always the same dark, silent man, with very few words, and no feelings, as you’d imagine, except the violent passions into which he would burst out when he’d been drinking. He didn’t often drink, though. He was a good man, Eddie. A good man. . . . And so I myself came to work in the mines.”
“I can’t believe it, you know, father. It’s so unlike you . . . and mother.”
“Of course it was long before I knew your mother. And it does seem funny, looking back on it. I’m very glad now, mind you, that I had the experience. It’s a fine thing for any man at some time of his life to have had to face the necessity of earning his living by the use of his hands. You’ll never know what that means, I suppose. It’s a pity. . . .