I promised this, by way of a thank you to all of you who have supported the book, taking us to 50%. There are 155 of you, wonderful supporters. Thank you for your faith in me and the project, and for your patience.
Here's an extract from somewhere near the middle of the book. Obviously, this may change a bit when it comes to redrafting later, but I hope you like it. This is the excerpt that I read at an Open Mic a little while ago.
West of Taunton, south of Minehead, ascending from the wet flatlands of the Somerset Levels, was Skilgate, where the land rose up to Exmoor and the Quantock Hills. This place, near to Wiveliscombe, and far from war, was where Blindwell Farm dipped and drove with the seasons.
During his tenth year, Robert was out with his father hunting for hare. This was in the years before their horses were requisitioned by the authorities for the war effort. They rode out to a fallow field, where they knew the grass would be long. At least one brown hare had been plaguing the farm for a few days, feeding on crops.
The Old Man dismounted, patted the horse gently. It knew to stay and graze and did so happily. “Bob,” he said, “Come here”.
Young Robert, called Bob by his parents then, followed his father’s eyeline as he pointed to a rustle in the long grass some twenty yards away.
“There’s the Lively Puss,” he whispered. “See him?”
“I think so”. He was uncertain, squinting. The ears were flat perhaps, not as long as he expected at this distance.
“Here,” said his father, handing him the shotgun. It was clamped shut, loaded, ready to go. It was not the first time that he had shot, but the first time he was to aim at a hare.
The gun was steady, at the end of his father’s long arm, insistent. “You’ve hit a pheasant before. You can claim a hare, son”.
The stock was warm in his hands, the barrel cool. His fingers barely reached the trigger, but he took the weight, balanced himself, held it pointed toward the ground. His father nodded approval. The hare shifted, the ears twitched. They seemed short, but perhaps the distance made it difficult to judge. The boy raised the gun, the weight as much as he could lift. He aimed, his gaze tight as he had been taught.
“See him?”
“Aye”.
“Relax”.
Taking a breath, the boy pressed the trigger. A shot clapped the air. The horses snorted, then settled, used to it. A splash of something indicated that the shell had found its target. The hare sank into the grass.
The boy tied the animal’s back legs together and lifted it up. Its eyes were glassy, its ears too short, its body too round. Instinctively, he stroked its head, his fingers lingering behind the ear. The reddish markings behind the ear common amongst rabbits of the area were there. “It’s a rabbit,” he said.
“It is. One for the pot then. We’re not going home until we find a bloody hare though”. His father was uncritical. The wrong animal had been shot but the kill was still useful, and the job was still in hand. As the day came to a close, the fields tinged with the low glow of a ruddy sunset, Robert’s footsteps paused at a clutch of long grass.
Something brown and red lay in the grass. A hare, matted and wet, lay on its back, front paws in the air. Its midsection was torn, stretched tendon, with grass reaching up through the hole where its stomach used to be. Disturbed by Robert’s presence, a rustle in the grass betrayed the brush of a fox as it turned and scuttled away from its kill.
“Hungry fox. They usually have the rabbits, rather than a hare,” said the father.
“Shall we find him? Shoot him?”
“There’s plenty that will hunt him anyway. Out here, he’s keeping the rabbits down. Besides, we won’t find him. He’ll either have dug his own earth or widened a rabbit burrow after emptying it out. He might even be sharing a badger set somewhere. We shoot the fox if he comes after our chickens, but out in the field, what harm is he doing?”
“The hare…”
“The hare we were going to shoot anyway”.
That day, they returned with the rabbit and a pheasant that burst seemingly out of nowhere into the path of the shotgun, but no hares.
Now, hares and rabbits, foxes and rats all roamed the hedgerows and French forests even as their world was torn apart by shells and shrapnel. Bullets did not always find them, but when they did, it made Robert yearn for home. As the men moved through denser forest to avoid the road, the sleet fell intermittently, nothing having time to dry between each shower. There were dozens of men ahead of Robert’s group, leading the line towards the village.
The sight of a skylark turned Robert’s eyes upwards to a gap in the canopy of trees. Against the grey and the white of the torn sky, the bird was climbing, carried on an uplift. Against the flying fire, it was flying free. As if compensating to be heard, its trilling could be heard above the sounds of battle.
The larks had woken Robert every morning, and it was in those waking moments that he would be most reminded of home, of peaceful summer mornings turning out the animals or tending to crops. Along with the lark, the swallow was the happy bird of summer. Here, in freezing France, when the swallow found bright days to emerge, it would be seen in No Man’s Land feeding on the corpse-flies that infested abandoned dead men.
The skylark above dipped suddenly as a shape, like a smudge against the sky, darted towards it. Too late. A black kite, wings outspread, had the skylark in its claws. It fluttered, resisting like a bucking horse, then was still. The kite flew out of sight with its prey. At home, Robert had seen a red kite snatch up a vole once. The vole had squirmed and struggled out of the bird’s grasp. For a fleeting moment, it was free, falling through the air. The kite was quicker, though, and caught the vole again before it reached the ground.
Something unseen, probably a vole or rat, skittered through the undergrowth. Robert wiped the rain out of his eyes. They stung from peering into the cold. If there were any birds like the screaming swifts or the full-throated nightingales, blackbirds and chaffinches that he had heard singing near water-filled shell holes, then they were above the metallic spray.
“What you looking at?” said Ernest.
“Just… birds,” he said.
“Not that bloody nightingale that kept us awake last week I hope”.
“What was wrong with it?”
“Sounded like a hoarse drunken sapper”.
“You’re a heathen. Sweet as anything, the nightingale”.
“Bloody miserable, I say”.
“Sweet as a nut”.
“You’re a bloody nut”.
The men paused under a crying willow tree. A vale of poplars, coursed by a stream, hid where the land undulated away. The sleet turned again to rain. The sound of shells pouring down in the distance gave way to a growing sound of horses, trampling, the drumming of hooves, the panicked whinnying.
Robert had only heard a horse bellow in pain once before, when a fall had broken its leg and left it lame. His father had put a bullet in its head without hesitation. When he saw the taut haunches of the animal dash past the hollow in which they waited, he stepped out.
“Henson! Back here!” called someone. He didn’t listen.
He knew there was no safe way to slow down a bolting horse unless in the saddle, but he had to see. Another horse, its rider, dead and useless, hung collapsed over its side. A wound in its stomach was open to the air, its entrails hanging down. Its raw protest was louder than anything else until it clattered past, the pain fading into the trees. There was more humanity in that moment than in the entire day.
The roads had been destroyed by the incessant freezing, thawing, snow, sleet and rain. The horses and mules were desperately needed to move ammunition across the land. Robert had seen them on countless occasions, laden down with shells and panniers full and sagging, sink thigh-deep into the mud. Some would eventually escape. Others would fall, surrender and die. Others would struggle, as brave as the men, unable to extricate themselves, and suffer broken legs or worse.
Robert looked up at the path that the horses had made through the undergrowth. Some thirty or forty yards away, mounted soldiers were being picked off by snipers. Blocking the path was a mule, curiously positioned. It seemed to be lying down. With its front legs, it was trying to heave itself upright. It tossed its head back and forth. As it writhed to one side, Robert could see that its hind legs had been shot away.
He raised his rifle, took aim. The hare, the rabbit, the pheasant, the horse, the mule, were all one in that second as he squeezed the trigger. The bullet entered its brain and it was still.