Green
Chapter 1
From above, it seemed as if Cribon was a sun in itself: just as the one above
it – it was clear and buzzing with joy and harvest time had come.
The lakes were a vibrant blue-green and flooded with little children:
abandoning their work for summer fun; not caring for the consequences waiting
at home, not a need to care about the future: thinking – how could anything go
wrong in such a world? such a simple world?
When the harvest was almost finished, the annual celebration of pumpkin carving
and dressing up as devils had seeped in from the influence of rural areas and
had caught on like an epidemic. And as it was on the 31st of
October, from that year onward, not a soul required rest.
Feeling that he could rest until the arrival of spring, Mr Berisford was a
changed man. For a short three or four months, he was tolerable and pleasant to
be around, and the children needn’t fear him if they were to walk by his
fields. He now would willingly tell stories about his time in the war and,
unlike many others at the time, he had a moral code to not burden others with
his suffering and never informed them of the dangers and disease he had endured,
yet still explaining that he would have rather stayed at the farm.
Mrs Berisford, his wife, was altogether a different person from her
husband; she was, if you pardon me for, saying not very bright – not to say it
made her at all an unkind person: quite the opposite: her husband always said
she is the nicest person he had ever met and this, I assure you, was not in the
least an exaggeration.
Little Elly sometimes came to help out the Berisfords, as they had no children
of their own, she often milked the cows and in return, she would get some
cookies to take home and perhaps share with her brother Al. Al didn’t live with
the rest of the family as their father had driven him out with a hot iron for
defending his mother one day; when he was unnaturally drunk (even for him) – not
that there was anything natural about drinking anyway: expect in substance of
course.
All the children thus mentioned, and some yet to be, go to the same education
centre in the far end of the village: the nearest building to the town, this
place was quite newly built and was not in the least like the farmhouses near
it and, therefore, it was disliked at first but, as it appeared that it would
not soon move away, it had to be accepted.
On every Monday, some, but not all of the children would unwillingly make their
way to the grey building: an ugly rock in grains of gold. They were all taught
in one classroom: twenty or thirty at most, yet all hot and ill-tempered at
such claustrophobic conditions that were not common to them outside.
Being as it is evil to criticise such a donation of money and the hard work of
a teacher to teach the most
ill-informed that the world was
not flat but round and there were numbers that could not be counted. So, I
shall tell what good had come of it and that is a greater appreciation of the
time that they have and that it would be short-lived.
Such a day as when the last leaves of autumn were falling in the chilling
morning of a school day, together, to the school went Elly and her sibling.
They passed the estate of the new town doctor: the old one having prematurely
passed away after a bombardment of coughing through the ingestion of a cigar:
it was thought, or at least the rumour goes, that after a long tiresome day he had thought it wise to
have a cigar and snooze. However, his deep trance had been disrupted by
knocking causing him to gasp in the weapon – this, if you would believe it
actually started an anti-smoking campaign that was surprisingly successful –
with the younger years (who did not smoke) – especially in Elly who had
attempted to hide her father’s pack but was consequently caught and received a
thorough beating for her kindness.
“Once there was
a man with great power,
Granting every
wish,
He was asked to
make a good father,
And he left his
place with a swish.”
Elly
worried for the sanity of the new residents and informed her
brother so, but he assured her, there was no reason to worry that:
“A doctor can heal anything – even a broken house”