Country life
A cry in the dark
Leanda de Lisle
Terrible screams interrupted the after- dinner conversation we were enjoying with my parents and my sister. It was difficult to tell where they came from. 'It's not my chil- dren,' I said, 'I know their screams.' My sis- ter hesitated. I expect she knows her child's screams as well, and the noise hadn't obvi- ously come from the intercom she had plugged into a socket in the kitchen. Still, someone was having a bad nightmare and she bolted upstairs to check on her three- year-old son. He was fast asleep. Puzzled, I went up to the nursery. My youngest was also asleep. The other two were playing happily in bed. The more I thought about it, walking back to the kitchen, the odder it seemed. 'Perhaps it was a vixen,' I said to the others. There was a lot of talk about the terrible noises vixens make, but they agreed that the screams had definitely been human. This bothered me. Whose were they then? But the others had lost interest and so I forgot about the screams, until now.
Something happened that night, half a mile down the road. 'Five killed in fatal crash as storms lash country', the headline in my paper read. There were no storms here, but the roads were wet and the teenage boys who died may have been driv- ing too fast on them when they piled into an on-coming car. We have yet to find out. The woman behind the till at the corner shop, whose son they had been heading to see, tells me that they were sensible lads. And the gossips who live in the cottage at the end of the drive had nothing to add to that, save that they'd noticed somebody's foot was still in the wreckage that morning. The priest on Sunday asked us to pray for a member of the congregation who had attended the accident. 'We've heard of post-traumatic stress,' he said. We also prayed for the dead, their families and the two local men, in the second car, who sur- vived the crash. Back home we absorbed the words of a Sunday paper columnist, who felt that teenagers shouldn't be given cars. 'That's easy to say, if you live in the city,' I thought. You are imprisoned in your house come dark if you don't have a car in the country. Still, I couldn't help but won- der if I will help my children to buy a car when they are 18.
I consider myself to be quite good about letting the boys take risks. I like to see them climb trees, although they don't get medals, as my father used to, for climbing to the top of 40ft pines. I like them to climb sensibly, just as they must ride their bicycles sensibly and jump down a sensible number of stairs. I expect if I bought them a car at 18 it would be an armour-plated Volvo. In this, I fear, I am taking a risk. The risk of turning them into precious young men. We women demanded 'new man' and then discovered we despised him. If we don't allow our sons to grow into the kind of macho men we know we fancy, we will despise them too.
When I dressed my eldest for his first day with the Quorn, I kept thinking of the child killed in a hunting accident in Evelyn Waugh's A Handful of Dust, but I told him he must get back on his pony if he fell off — and he did, twice. I was so proud to hear about him re-mounting, shaken and cov- ered in mud, before going on to jump what his father described as 'enormous' logs, that I insisted on hearing every detail over and over again. It brought home to me the benefits of finding the courage to let him find his. At least, up to a point.
The screams we heard the other night must have been a vixen. The noise was high-pitched — too high-pitched for my children I had been sure — and we couldn't have heard those boys dying, or the injured men crying from here. Could we? It seemed so close to home. But then, in truth, it always does.
`Not bad. Can he dumb it down Jri TV?'
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