Emergency E-Book

Daisy Hildyard

• Herausgeber: Fitzcarraldo Editions
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Seitenzahl: 355

Beschreibung

Emergency is a novel about the dissolving boundaries between all life on earth. Stuck at home alone under lockdown, a woman recounts her 1990s childhood in rural Yorkshire. She watches a kestrel hunting, helps a farmer with a renegade bull, and plays out with her best friend, Clare. Around her in the village her neighbours are arguing, keeping secrets, caring for one another, trying to hold down jobs. In the woods and quarry there are foxcubs fighting, plants competing for space, ageing machines, and a three-legged deer who likes cake. These local phenomena interconnect and spread out from China to Nicaragua as pesticides circulate, money flows around the planet, and bodies feel the force of distant power. A story of remote violence and a work of praise for a persistently lively world, brilliantly written, surprising, evocative and unsettling, Daisy Hildyard's Emergency reinvents the pastoral novel for the climate change era.

Leseprobe

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‘Emergency is a strange and luminously original novel. Daisy Hildyard writes about childhood with a kind of ecstatic detachment, dissolving the boundaries between past and present, and between human and animal life. I find her work exhilarating and subtly provocative. There is, as far as I’m aware, nothing else quite like it in contemporary English-language fiction.’

—Mark O’Connell, author of Notes from an Apocalypse

‘Rich and unflinching, this writing expands our sense of what it means to live, as we do, in a time of crisis. It leads us beyond rational climate debates into the deeply sensual, and sometimes nightmarish, places where our inner and outer worlds make contact.’

—Katharine Kilalea, author of OK, Mr Field

‘In this powerfully attuned novel, the world presses in on all sides, refusing to become background. From the discarded plastics of the narrator’s childhood, now circulating microscopically in the world around her as an adult, to the journey of grass through the bodies of animals and back out to the field as fertilizer, Emergency shows us the cost, as well as the conflicted splendour, of a world that is “fatally interconnected”. Its prose is bewitching and uncompromising, alive to the enmeshing of cruelty with care that articulates our shared – human and nonhuman – existence.’

—Daisy Lafarge, author of Paul

‘Emergency is an incisive kaleidoscope of past and present, nature and industry, stillness and pace, collapsing all into a tapestry of consciousness.’

—Ayşegül Savaş, author of Walking on the Ceiling

‘Hildyard’s writing stretches the mind.’

—Alexandra Kleeman, author of Something New Under the Sun4

‘In a moment of stillness, and from a distance, life is remembered in all its photorealistic, hypnotizing detail: a moth breaks violently out of its cocoon; a vixen protects her cubs; a calf kicks its leg along the inside length of a cow; a pretty girl exerts her power. Emergency is a mysterious and beautiful novel of painstaking attention—attention to other minds, to the time within time.’

—Elisa Gabbert, author of The Unreality of Memory

Praise for The Second Body

‘Part amateur detective, part visionary, Hildyard’s voice is so intelligent, beguiling and important. Like Sir Thomas Browne or even Annie Dillard, her sly variety of scientific inquiry is incandescent.’

—Rivka Galchen, author of Little Labors

‘Daisy Hildyard has turned her curious, sifting, brilliantly original mind onto the pressing ecological questions of our age. The result is a series of essays as captivating as they are delightful, their object no less than to quietly rewire our thinking.’

—Sarah Howe, author of Loop of Jade

‘These are fretful, questioning essays with occasional flashes of beauty, demanding of readers that they think about anthropogenic disruption of climate and ecology.’

—Gavin Francis, Guardian

‘“Another creature’s experience is different, and we do not know how it is different”, writes Daisy Hildyard in The Second Body. This playful and original essay touches on the limits of our ability to imagine that experience. Hildyard, a novelist who was trained as a historian of science, tries to find the ways we intuit boundaries between our bodies and our ecosystems, between ourselves and other animals.’

—Jennie Erin Smith, Times Literary Supplement5

‘In The Second Body, Daisy Hildyard gives a body to an idea in a series of curious encounters that take us from the floor of a butcher shop to the computer room of a biologist to the wreckage of a flooded home. Heady and visceral both, this essay revels in the mess and splendour of the world.’

—Eula Biss, author of On Immunity

‘In its insistence on the illusion of individuality and on the participation of human animals in the whole of earthly life, The Second Body might be an ancient text; in its scientific literacy and its mood of ecological disquiet, Daisy Hildyard’s book is as contemporary as the morning paper. If ecstasy means to go outside oneself, the word usually carries connotations of chaos and inarticulacy. Here, however, is a precise and eloquent ecstasy – and this slender book about who we are beyond our own skins is likewise much larger than itself.’

—Benjamin Kunkel, author of Utopia or Bust

‘In a series of rich, lucid meditations, rooted in conversations with others (butchers, biologists, etc.) and in illuminating readings of literature (Ferrante, Shakespeare, etc.), Hildyard guides the reader through questions about global warming, the illusive boundary between human and animal life, and more. The Second Body is a subtle, original attempt to see humanity more clearly.’

—Nathan Goldman, Lit Hub6

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EMERGENCY

DAISY HILDYARD

Contents

Title PageEmergency About the AuthorCopyright

Emergency

One spring evening, when I was old enough to be outside and alone, I was sitting above the quarry on the edge of the village when I saw a panel of clay drop away from the facing vertical side and fall into a pool of water. Behind it the interior of an animal’s burrow was revealed in relief, like a bombed house with one wall removed. Inside, instead of wallpaper or dangling wires, there was one globe-shaped hollow lined with fluff and leaf mould, and passages leading from it which all ran through the roots of the turf, with one exception: the long tunnel which dropped down into the earth, then turned at an angle, in a stretched V-shape, and began to rise again. Within the passage, heading upwards, there was a small animal – brown and furry, whether it was mouse, a shrew, or a vole, I couldn’t see.

Parallel to this creature, high above the pool of water on the quarry bed, there was a female kestrel, floating. The two creatures were at eye level with one another. The kestrel tilted and allowed herself to rise, just a little faster than the animal. Then the animal disappeared from my view, coming up through the ground; meanwhile the kestrel continued to ascend towards the clouds until, abruptly, she stopped. She stopped absolutely – as though somebody had pressed pause. Only the way her position varied very slightly, tilting one way and then another, showed that she was holding herself against a current.

Holding my gaze on her I rose slowly and as smoothly as I could, and skirted along the track that ran around the quarry at the top, taking care to make no sudden movement and to give the bird a wide berth so that she didn’t flit. She must have been able to see me. She didn’t move.

From the track I could see the animal again – a large vole, male, hiding under a clump of dead turf that overhung the track. He wasn’t in the kestrel’s eyeline. We all waited to find out who would move first. There was a clear bronze early evening light and a cold breeze. The grasses flickered. Then the vole made a sudden break, dashing into the open and stopping in the middle of the wheel-rut, right where he was most exposed. There was an island of grass in the middle of the track, and taller grasses across the field all around – this was the only area that was bald and open, and the only place the vole could look so dark and substantial against the beige dust. I stood at the edge of the track like a tree. He was almost at my feet.

The kestrel allowed her equilibrium to be disturbed. She tipped her body, carved a line in the air, and came to hover directly above the vole. Low sunlight projected her shadow away from her so that it fell beyond his horizon. Still the vole remained in the same place. I could see him intimately now – his features were precise and miniature: acorn-cup ears, thread-fine whiskers radiating in all directions, and tiny hand-shaped feet. His whole body was vibrating violently. He seemed unable to move. The kestrel had paused again and my gaze moved up and down, drawing a direct line between them, like a lift between two floors of a building. I felt a sense of love arise inside me, as huge and widespread as the vole was small and specific, and it occurred to me that I could rescue him.

I knew what this would mean because I’d done it before. When the huge black rabbit who lived in a run in our garden had a nest full of babies, my parents had told me not to touch them. I sat outside the hutch and waited for them to be revealed when their mother rolled aside – tiny pink squirming things which were in the process of becoming, from day to day, delicate versions of their parents. When they were a week or so old, skin still visible through a sheen of black fur, my mother explained why I wasn’t to touch them: the rabbit would eat her babies if they had a strange smell on them. I held my hands in front of my face but they didn’t smell like anything except, faintly, soap. My mother left and I stayed watching the rabbits for a while. Then I put one in my pocket, closed the lid of the hutch at the end of the run, and ran down the drive, along the street, and into Clare’s garden. Clare wasn’t there, but Nic was sitting on the back step with a mug of tea and a biscuit, one cigarette waiting beside her on the warm brick. She was always there, waiting like that when Clare came home from school. I closed the gate and approached, warily, up the path, until I was in front of her, waiting for a sign that she had recognized me, but she wasn’t much interested in my presence – she was still looking over my shoulder. I glanced behind me but there was nothing there, only the sun setting over the fields and the quarry. There was a small yellowish scar below the outer edge of one of her eyes which very slightly affected its shape, so there was always something unusual about her face, but in that moment she was looking towards the sun and her brown iris seemed to have been set on fire, melting diamonds of golds and oranges wheeling around the rim, which gave her a blind, illuminated fierceness, and I felt afraid of her. Then it passed and I said ‘Hi is Clare playing.’

Nic didn’t say hello or speak in the indulgent but dishonest tone that adults usually used when speaking to me at that time in my life. Distractedly, still looking with disturbing directness into the sun, she told me that Clare wasn’t yet home because she had gone to her grandmother’s house after school. Adam was inside, watching a cartoon, if I wanted to wait.

In the front room Adam was cross-legged on the floor very close to the television, having bricked himself into a low wall of wooden blocks. I kneeled behind him and we sat quietly together to watch a squirrel being electrocuted, then guillotined, having its head glued back on, having its eyes plucked out, and being run over by a lorry, until Nic opened the curtains, turned down the sound, and asked me whether I wanted to stay for tea, and I said yes. She asked me whether my parents would mind and I didn’t reply. Then there was a thump.

Clare’s schoolbag was on the mat where the post would land, and Clare silhouetted behind it in the open doorway.

‘Why is there a ladder on the side of the house,’ she announced.

Nic told Clare that her dad was fixing a leak in the guttering.

‘Adam,’ said Clare. ‘Would you like to go up that ladder.’

Adam knocked down his barricade and toddled over to Clare, who took his hand. They went outside and I followed.

Clare and I stood at the bottom of the ladder, holding it steady while Adam slowly climbed. The ladder did not seem to be going anywhere – it didn’t reach the roof, and that side of the house had only one small frosted window high up. Between the red bricks the mortar was covered over by mosses which traced out a regular but complicated shape, a dark green maze. Down here, near the ground, the mosses were plush, with threads like yellow walking-sticks sticking out of their surfaces. Looking at their still, shadowy softness, I felt a deep calm feeling drop through me. On the upper part of the wall above me, where full sun hit the brick, they had dried to a cracked pale colour but on the other side, above Clare’s head, these corpses had come to life. It wasn’t a miracle: the leak in the guttering, which I couldn’t see, was revealed by a widening spill of water down the side of the house. This had woken up the mosses who had advanced out over the brick, thickening and growing emerald and black as they wettened, like waterweed. Even at that age, I knew it wasn’t ideal for the wall. I realized that the sense of stillness that the mosses opened up inside me, which I experienced as a feeling, was in fact a pace – we were out of step. I moved through mornings and weekends, months and dinners, while the mosses, somewhere beyond my timeframe, moved through their alien periods of torpor and spreading.

When I turned away from the wall Clare’s head was almost touching mine. Her eyes were much darker than her mother’s, almost black. I must have stared open-mouthed because she dropped her jaw like an idiot. I felt something moving inside my pocket.

 ‘Oh,’ I said. ‘Look.’

 I stepped away from the ladder and took the tiny rabbit out of my pocket. Holding it in my curled fist, my fingers formed a loose tunnel around it. Suddenly I felt unwilling to reveal it. Its silk fur was damp and pricklier than before, either from the sweat inside my hands or from its own piss. Clare raised her eyebrows at my hesitation, and this made my hand open like a flower, without any conscious will. The rabbit’s ears lay flat. They were thin and fuzzy, like new leaves when they first push out of the bud.

Clare said, ‘Put it back or it will die.’

I told her that I was taking care of it and Clare groaned and rolled her eyes, extravagantly reasonable, and told me that I would learn the hard way.

A sharp voice came from high above us: ‘Clare, get your brother down or you’ll crack his head open.’

I looked up. The bathroom window was tilted open like a letterbox. I couldn’t see Nic.

We ignored her. Clare leaned one arm loosely against the base of the ladder, ready to break Adam’s fall, but he was safe, still climbing with dimpled gripping hands and flat feet. He climbed and climbed until he reached the face of the wall. Then I went home and put the rabbit back. My mother said I couldn’t go to Clare’s for tea, she’d already made something for me.

The following day I went to see the rabbits and the mother was alone in her run. She was truly a big rabbit. I watched her for a while. She seemed calm, nibbling dandelion leaves, and I felt a sense of affinity with her because we had done it together, destroyed the babies with our colossal care. Even today, she seems to me very human in the way her principles forced her to self-destruct, and in the scale of her appetite, which far exceeded what she needed to survive – those dandelion leaves. I don’t mean that the rabbit was much like a person, more that principles and will, among most other qualities (memory, love), are not exclusively human traits by any reasonable definition. All creatures have character.

When I started going to school I had to walk home from the school bus and this meant that I passed Grace and Matthew’s unfenced front garden where their dog Soldier lived. I was afraid of Soldier because she ran out barking excitedly whenever a person passed by on foot and she was, to me, huge – she had a treacle-coloured coat which flowed out behind her as she galloped down the sloping garden. She was old, her jaw wrinkled and slackening to reveal the pointed back teeth. The scary thing was her most vulnerable place, her underbelly, which was bald and mottled brown and purple, with swollen teats. Grace and Matthew, who were kind to me, said that she was only playing, and it was true that she never jumped onto the pavement, or came onto our side of the front garden – there was no fenced division and she could easily have done it. But in spite of her regard for these boundaries, I was troubled by a vision I had of being pinned down under Soldier’s body with the bald patch obscenely in contact with my own stomach, looking up into the mouth which was threaded with lines of drool and hanging open in its slack way above my face. This image was vivid to me in a way that made it unimportant as to whether I had dreamed or remembered it. And so I started turning right just before I reached our road and walking around the block, anti-clockwise, to come at my house from the other side without passing Soldier.

 Instead I passed Alice’s house, at the back of the village, and its tree which had a hollow where Clare and I hid things. It was a thing I’d read about in a library-book and the story flowed into my reality and my real life leaked back into the story. My idea, which I’d taken from a book about children whose parents were separated, was that Clare and I could leave messages or objects for one another in a secret location. Clare decided on the tree. She was older than me and decisions were her strong point. When she told me, decisively, that we would use the witch tree, I knew that she was talking about the ash tree which grew out of the very back corner by Alice Gray’s house, and that Clare’s name for it was the right name. The ash would have been taken down if it had been on any other property – you couldn’t pass it without feeling its threatening glamour, the tree was somehow exuberant even though it was so very dead. It grew out of the loose stone wall which bulged and sagged on either side of the fat trunk, and its topmost twigs went higher than the buildings, the end of its branches twisted into the sky in paused spasms, the wood blackened and rotting. There were tiny white mushrooms and larger apricot-coloured mushrooms on the tree all year round, and the spores and enzymes that were engaged in the long process of digesting the wood gave the whole tree a sodden look, so that its deadness was irradiated with living.

People said that Alice was a witch, though she wasn’t that old. One side of her body was out of sync with the other – her mouth dropped down at one edge and the corresponding leg dragged. Among the children it was understood that she had been pulling a face when the wind changed. She had short hair and round glasses and she looked like a small man, dressed in a long cloth waistcoat and combat trousers. We gravitated towards her door when we played knock-and-run. It was one of those miniature persecutions that children rehearse, with an instinct for victimizing difference, though it was also because we knew we’d get a response: Alice never went out. She was always in her kitchen, right beside the back door, so she was always available.

The hollow was perfect: a small opening near the base of the trunk in which, if I reached my hand, I could feel a dry, football-sized cavity with a mealy floor. I passed it after school every day and sometimes Clare would leave an object inside for me, things that seem like nothing now – a lip-balm or a postcard. Then there was the day when I saw a slice of cake on the low back wall of the farm, right under the branches of our dead tree. I lifted the cake and it was light, the kind of chocolate cake which doesn’t contain any actual chocolate, and still warm, the icing turning to liquid against my fingertips. It smelled good. I placed it back carefully on the wall, in the same place. The next day it was gone. I wondered if I had imagined it but there were crumbs above our hollow. Perhaps Clare had left it for me.

When I asked her, later, playing in her garden, she widened her eyes and denied it.

‘Not me,’ she said, shaking her head. ‘I wonder what on earth it could have been.’ Then she ran away from me. ‘Come here,’ she called from the bottom of the climbing-frame. ‘Do this.’

I went, obedient, and crossed the monkey bars well enough until I reached the final rung, which came away in my hand, dropping me seven feet onto the grass. I stood up, experimentally moving my fingers, and Clare laughed with deep pleasure. She had a manly, guffawing laugh which took over the trunk of her body, which made me laugh with her and at her at the same time, which made us both laugh harder.

It occurred to me then that the ash tree itself had made the cake, or consumed it. The tree, like all the things that rampaged on its dead body, like Soldier, like the rabbits, like the moss on the side of Clare’s house, like the kestrel and the vole – they were all part of my community, as I then thought of it, at least as much as myself or Nic or Alice. Though our village was inside this community, the community went beyond the village. As I saw it, the whole area for miles around was part of the wood: the village, the river, the farms, the wild animals, the quarry, the stately home, the housing estate, the bacon factory, the ruined abbey – they were all surrounded and overrun by woodland which was patchily logged by the Forestry Commission, so that it was hard to identify the place where it ended or began; it ran through all these things, and all these things moved through the wood in their different ways. Birch Wood, it was called, though the name was an old one and there were no birch trees there in my lifetime. We had a silver birch in our garden so I could imagine the birch forest which used to inhabit the site, pale glowing ghost trees stretching to the horizon – but when I was there it was mostly cherry and ash and a few perfect squares of pine plantation, running to the edge of the quarry where the ground dropped.

I used to sit at the top of that cliff for long stretches of time because I liked the view – the quarry was many different colours and they were all gentle, layered pale browns and chalks. The way the earth had been scooped out meant that I could look down on a portion of sky which was made visible in the negative: a bowl of birds soaring down below my feet. Sand martins made their homes in the sides and flew out into the quarry to catch insects; falcons came to hunt the sand martins, and I came to watch them all because there wasn’t anything better to do. That was how I was there to see the kestrel hunting the vole, which was how I came to know about the water in the quarry before the others.

 I was standing and waiting for the vole or the kestrel to move and something clicked. It was physical and visual, like a camera finding focus. The V-shaped tunnel, going down, and then veering back towards the surface, literally spelled out to me the fact that the vole had hit water – that water was rising through the earth, high up the sides of the quarry. I had seen the panel of clay landing in a pool of water on the quarry bed. But the picture bobbed meaninglessly among the debris of what feels like a tidal wave of random information that crashes over me every moment. I like to think that I would go mad if I tuned in to everything, all the time, the squirrel’s heartbeat or the roar of growing grass, but this is most likely a lie –realistically, the business of relentlessly prioritizing and deleting the details of the world is the mad element. There shouldn’t have been a pool of water on the quarry bed.

The quarry had flooded, just a little, years earlier, but since then it had been drained because the flooding had caused problems. The animals who had made their homes in and around the quarry began to move, which put pressure on the territories. Humans were no exception. Most adults in the area were employed by the quarry or the bacon factory, and the gardens on my street were built right out up to the patch of scrubby edgeland I was standing on.

Our quarry produced gravel which was sent all over the world, the requirements of Norwegian motorways and new cities in China determined the shape of the quarry and the size of the space it left, though the relationship went in both directions, in every direction. Stones, single hairs, and skin-flakes from the workers’ bodies and fragments of rubber from the old tyres of the quarry’s two vehicles travelled the globe. The place was dynamited apart and distributed throughout the world in vanishingly small splinters and particles. As a child I watched it go but I couldn’t see where it went. As an adult I have a stronger but still slight understanding of how my resources reach me, or how my life extends into the dams, logging operations, fulfilment centres, makeshift mining towns, oilfields, or containment facilities on which my daily life depends. These resources, like my quarry, are sited not only where they will be cheap, but also where they will be largely unseen by human eyes.

I never went inside the pigsties but they were impossible to ignore because they were on the horizon and the lights never went off – the pigs lived in perpetual strip-lit daytime. Ann’s mum said it made them more eager to die. Ann’s mum, sitting in a plastic chair in her back garden with her head tipped back to catch the remaining UV, once told Ann and her sisters and me the story of her working day, how she stood, wearing waders, for five hours at a time in a windowless, high-walled room with a hole in the floor. Cleaned pig corpses, suspended over her head on a wire track, were pulled into the middle of the room. Their cavities would open down a central line and their insides landed in front of her. She had a broom with a hosepipe running through it that was used to clear blood and heaps of offal into a chute towards the part of the factory that produced the sausage-meat.

I enjoyed this story not so much for the gore as for the way Ann’s mum shrugged, cool, when we children expressed our horror, and told us that the worst thing was the boredom. She was a tiny woman with faded roses tattooed along one arm and shoulder, red hennaed hair, three young daughters, a nineteen-year-old boyfriend, and a talent for peaceful enjoyment which she spread around her house and garden – a part of me wants to say that she was living her best life, but that would be glib. When she told us stories about her job she began to open up some basic understanding of the human landscape in my mind. I could see an unequal difference in the space between the work my parents did (my father was working on short-term contracts at universities and colleges, and as a painter and decorator; my mother was a supply teacher) and the things Ann’s mother went out to do. There was another distinction between the unsteady work my parents did and the real teachers or doctors, who had cars and took holidays. Farming, which my grandmother did nearby, was altogether a different way to be. I would have struggled to explain how these things related to one another with any consistency.

The first time it was known that the quarry was flooding, the local councillor called a meeting in the community centre. It was not well attended. There was no great sense of urgency, perhaps because the quarry was operating as usual, only with a big puddle on one side. At the community meeting the conversation moved instead towards the fox problem. It was breeding season and foxes were fucking and feuding in our gardens over territory. When they cried they sounded tortured, as though they were experiencing some psychological horror that was worse than any physical pain. Sometimes they triggered the security light that Matthew and Grace had set up above their back door, and my bedroom was immersed in a reflected white glare. I kneeled up in bed to look out of my window just in time to spy back legs and long tails flowing out of the pool of light and into the tattered shadow around the edges. The stainless-steel dustbin lid would drop, clang, then roll in a long curve, ringing deeply. It sounded merry, like it found the whole situation a laugh.

I saw the foxes in my own garden just once. It was disturbing. They were dancing. Kneeling on my bed I could see two foxes close to the back wall of my house in the open part of the concrete yard. One fox was very small. She flattened herself down onto the ground, hip-bones making small hills in her flank. The other fox was huge and he was facing her. He had a broad face, a thick, fluffy neck, and a wide tail with a white tag. Slowly, as the small fox united herself with the ground, the large fox reared and rose until he was standing on his hind legs, and then he stepped from foot to foot, his front paws hanging in the air, his long body not quite stable – he heeled from one side to the other, just catching himself at either extreme. This went on for minutes. The small fox watched. I watched. And then I noticed another fox, a little way back, face turned intently towards the pair of them from behind a patch of the ivy which grew thickly on the fence. I could see the third fox’s narrow head angling towards the dancer, then towards the one he was dancing for. I realized that she wasn’t watching them, she was turning to catch their scent.

I got out of bed and went downstairs to tell my parents but it was later than I’d thought. Nobody was awake and the lights were out. When I tiptoed into the middle of the darkened room something stirred on the sofa. My mother sat up and pushed away blankets. I halted in front of her. She told me that there had been an argument. ‘Things will be normal in the morning.’

I noticed nothing unusual in the morning and I didn’t give it much thought. But when I went with my father to the community meeting about the quarry I wasn’t surprised by the fact that those who attended argued over what to do about the foxes. Commuters wanted to accommodate them and farmers wanted to shoot them – one farmer said that he had lost several valuable Christmas geese to a huge dog fox which he had shot the previous weekend, and the bullet had got sucked into the fox’s hide.

At the end of the meeting the headteacher from my school stood up and suggested that the quarry should be decommissioned and returned to nature. This was happening, she said, with the slag heaps from the closed mines, which were being given to local wildlife trusts. She made the quarry sound like an object which our community had purchased, though it didn’t suit us. Sparsely dispersed throughout the community hall, the group responded evasively. There were tiny, noncommittal noises in the backs of throats. Fractional nods, just to register that she was audible. These days I would say that her proposal was a good idea.

There were two classes in my school, with three year-groups in the lower class (mine) and four in the upper. Ms Carr taught top class and so she had a special aura to those of us in lower class. She held assembly, made announcements, and came into our classroom only on exceptional occasions, like the spring day when our usual teacher, Mrs Hepton, vanished at dinnertime. Beside the teacher’s desk, occupying the space where our nature table had been, there was a wheeled dinner-lady’s trolley, and Ms Carr stood in front of it. She told us to practise our spellings in silence. She left the room and closed the door.

Heads lifted and we looked around at one another. The classroom was an environment of its time: the boys all had curtains or shaved heads; the girls wore high ponytails like fountains, two strands of hair released at the front, and the tiny plastic trolls on their desks had received the same treatment, neon hair bunched in tiny scrunchies. These silent, uniformed heads, male, female, troll, all seemed to be listening to Ms Carr’s soles sticking on the linoleum as she walked across the corridor, opened the door to her own classroom, took a reading of the quality of quiet inside, and then closed it again. When she reappeared in front of us our interest in her waned and we looked down at our desks again.

The desks came from a different era: old, wooden, lidded, with inkwells and hollow insides that were regularly inspected to ensure that all books were stored regularly, in ascending order of size, and perhaps also to show each child that there was no private space. I must have spent many weeks in total staring into mine, and before me another child, and before that another, each one of us working with our faces so close to the surface that our breath warmed the wood, which exhaled its own dry scent, so oppressively close that we could see an irregular elongation in the patterns where the tree had swollen rapidly through a wet spring sometime in the nineteenth century, and the place on the surface where the carpenter, a few years later, had shifted his plane to a different angle, and the place beneath the loose hinge where somebody, more recently, had drawn a tiny pair of breasts.

A few minutes after Ms Carr’s return a subtle shift of attention moved within the line of students who were sitting closest to the window. Outside Mrs Hepton was opening the double gates to the road. She walked backwards onto the grass so that a van could reverse into the playground. A man climbed out and opened the doors at the back of the van so that they mirrored the gates to the playground: two pairs of wings spread wide.

Inside the van there was a very large cardboard box. Our teacher and the man lifted it out and placed it on the ground behind the van. There were two smaller boxes behind it. I closed my eyes and listened. A car passed through the village. Sparrows squabbled on the concrete. Clare, who was sitting in the desk in front of me, scribbled her pen back and forth to obliterate something she had written. There was a thud in the corridor and somebody swore, then apologized. I opened my eyes to look at Clare, Clare turned around and widened her eyes at me. Nobody dared to laugh. Then at last the door burst open and the boxes were brought in, one by one, and placed in front of our trolley. Each one was taller than a child. I could see, from the way they were carried, that they were heavy and valuable.

After the man had gone Ms Carr and Mrs Hepton stood together at the front of the room between their pupils and the huge boxes. Ms Carr tall, remote, and serene; Mrs Hepton short. Both wore huge plastic-framed spectacles and had tightly curled set hair, but down on the ground their differences were undeniable: Mrs Hepton’s orthopaedic sandals revealed large toes webbed by flesh-coloured tights. Ms Carr’s low-heeled shoes were white, matching her white artificial silk skirt and t-shirt: she floated above her colleague, high and triumphant – she looked like a calla lily, a white flame, a victor. Her fingers twirled with nervous excitement which made the smeary gold on her rings flash, as she announced that our posters and fundraising fêtes had been successful. She had purchased the school a computer. In the future, she told us with her voice shaking very slightly, we would all work on computers. Every word we wrote would be word-processed.

As she spoke she caught our eyes, one by one – it felt uncomfortable, I could see that it was a deliberate effect. Meanwhile Mrs Hepton raised her eyes and fixed them grimly on the clock at the back of the room. It was Mrs Hepton who had, patiently and against the odds, taught each one of us to read and to write with a sharpened HB pencil, in lower-case. Once we had mastered this, beginning again at ‘a’, we learned to connect the letters, until eventually, in ones and twos, we were presented with a pen when – and only when – the joined-up handwriting merited ink. A few children were never awarded pens and Mrs Hepton did nothing to take the edge off their shame: shame was elemental to her teaching, together with chanting, tidiness, obedience, and silence.

As we unpacked the computer Mrs Hepton remarked on how much space it took up and the fact that it occupied the nature table’s area. She wondered aloud why it was not placed in Miss Carr’s classroom. Ms Carr replied that the nature table could be moved into the back corner and that her own class already had a greater number of students within a smaller room. She no longer corrected the Miss.

When the computer was assembled on the trolley it stood higher than the teacher’s desk. It was browned white, the colour of the stone from the local quarry, and I wonder now why the plastic was chosen in that particular shade, as though the designers wanted their machine to represent something geological – the mine or quarry from which its internal minerals had been unpacked before they were processed, bestowed with new forms of intelligence, and then closed away again within the plastic shell. We opened the box with curiosity and caution, as though it was a live animal, gaining confidence as the computer emerged from its den of cardboard, polythene slips, and polystyrene bows. One child drew a fingernail across the grainy surface of the monitor’s casing and it made a low, rasping noise. Ms Carr flinched.

Then the hard-drive, the monitor, the removable disk-drives, and the keyboard were in place, and we were left with a snake’s nest of wires and cables with plugs of different shapes at the end of them. John Green, one of those who had not yet earned a pen, and who skipped school if his dad was doing something interesting on the farm, plumped down on the floor behind the trolley with a look of happy concentration on his face, connecting machine to wire, wire to machine. Eventually he stood and gave the nod. Ms Carr pushed the largest plug into the wall and flicked the switch beside the socket, and nothing happened.

‘It doesn’t work,’ said Mrs Hepton.

Ms Carr frowned.

‘This is where you switch it on,’ said John, allowing himself the suggestion of a smile. He pressed the button.

There was a feeling of a sudden swelling and filling, as though a hot wind was gusting into the room, when the fans inside the machine first breathed. After a short time, the cursor appeared with a bleep, blinking.

The school computer didn’t have an internet connection and I did not yet know any homes with a desktop monitor, though many of us had Megadrives and Gameboys. I used to play on the computer at Clare’s house on the days when the pesticide sprayers went out. She and I looked forward to these days because our mothers kept us inside and we had snacks and television and computer games in exchange for keeping quiet. When we played Sonic Clare was on a level so high that it seemed theoretical to me, like heaven, and she didn’t even bother playing Tetris any more, but when we played the game that involved shooting down aeroplanes, each one a rudimentary construction whose wings were ziggurats of pixels, my nervous reflexes were quicker than hers and I took down plane after plane after plane. Clare cackled with pleasure at my unnerving ability. ‘It’s not like you.’ It felt good to win.

Spraying days happened mostly in late spring when the weeds came up and rain came down. Moulds and mildews bloomed in the fields. Our street was a row of semi-detached houses that had been built between the wars. The four on the edge of the village, which included Clare’s, faced out above the quarry. They were council-owned. The other four, including mine, were closer to the centre of the village and were owned by their inhabitants. Clare’s home faced the quarry and mine faced large cultivated fields, bare and sloping, whose hedges had been stripped out, where wheat and barley were rotated with broad beans. These fields caught the sun but their soil was heavy and water-retentive and so they needed pesticides in order to produce a yield. They needed them: this was one of the facts that were produced inside the world we lived in; it was necessary and therefore it had to be true.

I played deep inside these fields and so I knew its other pests well. Small shiny-coated insects crowded at the base of the hairs on an ear of barley, each cluster bulging to the size and shape of one blob on a blackberry. Grey beardy stuff that looked like cotton fluff or goose-down grew between the stalks and retained water after a rainfall. This material compounded the problem of a third pest that manifested as pinpoints of black dust that marbled the criss-crossed grains on an ear of wheat.

Even in dry weather the interior of the field was damp. If I played inside it my bare arms or legs would come out soaked and itchy with a white bumpy rash. The smell of wet barley, like washing that has been left too long in the machine, rose out of the fields on hot still days after rain, nauseatingly static. But the spraying was beautiful and I loved it – I loved the opportunity it gave me to stay inside Clare’s house for hours at a time, and I admired its verve, Thomas Gray in his tractor racing up and down, flying too fast over the bumps, with ballerina skirts of vapour pouring behind him, still puffing, in fading asthmatic stutters, as he returned along the road. My mother gave a basic explanation of how this mist crept into lungs and how its tiny dots would morph into floating shapes that would then twirl through the blood. I pictured particles tumbling chaotically like Tetris blocks, which needed to be addressed swiftly and decisively if they were to slot correctly into the body.