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But surely school dinners are different now? There’s probably a salad bar and a wine list.
‘There are a lot of these abandoned airfields in Norfolk,’ says Clough. ‘They call them the ghost fields.’
It’s fabulously flat.’ It is certainly flat but Nelson finds it hard to see what’s so fabulous about that. There’s a desolate feel about the whole place, the boarded-up tower like a sentry at the gate, the wind blowing through the iron buildings with a high keening sound. The presence of the pigs, grunting and shuffling in their pens, doesn’t help at all.
Ruth once told Nelson that most Europeans have four per cent Neanderthal DNA but clearly this is only an average.
Only the dog looks as if he has any presentiment of disaster. He squints anxiously at the camera, head on one side as if he alone can hear the sound of gunfire.
‘It’s a mystery all right,’ says Nelson as they make their way back over the field. ‘The mystery is how that family keeps going. They’re all living on a different planet.’
A grave is a footprint of disturbance, that’s what she told Nelson, and she thinks that the disturbance stays in the air—and in the land—for a very long time.
Frank once said that he preferred women to look natural but, in Ruth’s experience, that’s what they say before they run off with an exquisitely made-up bottle blonde.
‘The ghost fields,’ says Frank. ‘In 1942, a new airfield was built every three days.’
‘There were decoy sites too,’ says Frank. ‘Fake aerodromes built to confuse the Germans and divert attention from the real thing. They’re called the shadow fields.’
cannot live without my life. I cannot live without my soul. That’s all very well, Ruth tells Cathy, but sometimes you just have to.
In answer, Ruth pulls him towards her. One day the sea will rise and flood the marshes and drown every living soul that lives there. But not yet. Not yet.
‘What about you and football?’ ‘You know what they say,’ says Clough. ‘Football’s not a matter of life and death, it’s more important than that.’
We got on from the first. He was an artist, I’m a writer.’ She waves vaguely at the books on the shelf behind her. Nelson remembers that Alice O’Brien teaches creative writing. So you can get degrees in that now. Jesus wept.
