A short sample from one of the short stories of the collection, ‘Definition’
It was a late winter day, because of course it was. I had parked the car away down the lane, that back lane, you might know it. I was walking into the village, along another of those lanes, and the time I was taking was my own. You had asked for definition, a way to understand.
As I walked, houses came to me, and I passed their fronts, their backs, their small gardens and damp, bare trees, and I remembered them as one remembers – well, I saw them, of course. I didn’t need to remember, so to speak. They were present before me, and I think now of what they were, and are: houses of other people, yes, but also blocks of colour and form in the tapestry that was that boy’s (I, me, himself) childhood, utterly incidental but somehow important enough to relate here, because they are there. Because of me. How bloatedly significant.
This a sorry start, I think. I apologise: you wanted more definition. I will try my best.
But anyway: I was walking, and have always walked in some ways, past these houses. On the right is the field where my mother kept a pony, and I liked that pony. He was a good-natured thing, and had an endearing, familiar habit of speeding-up on his way home. I’d ride him out – or rather, he let one sit on him, and you sat there because your mother had put you there – and my mother would hold the reins, and on we’d walk, past these same houses, and others like them, and others not, down the lanes – they may have gone, now, lost to the overgrowth, a subsidence to abundance – and then we’d all turn around, and the pony, the dear thing, would know, and up would go his ears and forwards would go his snout, and my mother would have to walk that little bit faster.
And my father is waiting at home, to read me a story. That is where I am going.
The field is steep and broad, and I see a horse in it now, who ignores everyone (though it is only me here, I think – nobody else is on their own walk) and I rather like it for that. Down I plunge into the heart of the village, and there is a public house, where I worked in a May summer, long before, where I tried to call out the names of punters, for I had their food, on large plates, too large for my hands (and I could never carry more than two at a time, despite what the glare of the chef seemed to demand – but his mouth never made the words – of me), wobbling slightly. I had a desperate fear of chips lining the cobbles, of salad strewn in flowerbeds, of steak slapping onto someone’s boot, this fear never meaning I thus spoke louder, that I demanded these patrons make themselves known, to take their bloody food (‘medium rare’, cough) cos that is why they were there, wasn’t it? And back in I’d go, and say in a voice I do not know as my own any longer, fortunately, ‘I don’t know where they are,’ and the landlady would look at me as if I were one of the boys at school who never did normal classes, and her mouth would say ‘go and try again,’ in a way that also included the words ‘you bloody idiot’, but never did the wooden fireplace and the brass pans on the wall ring with those particular words, no, not ever, but I heard them – or I hear them now, and I smile, in the way one smiles when one thinks of all the things one has surpassed, and the next moment a little thought sends it all tumbling down, just as her words did then.
The Church, then – of who? I can never remember, and when I read it I somehow still cannot. It has never meant anything to me. The Church is 15th century, with a 13th century chancel, I do know that. Quite why, well. You wanted definition, a way to understand something. You have come to me to find it, it seems, and so.
On that note. This Church represents a curious thing I’d like to dwell on, for a moment. The Church stands in its own ground, as churches are wont to do, surrounded by the dead of long before, and contains so much history, so much time and weight, of which you can read in a local guide or two; that the history society could agree, that one can enter into through the church gate, overhung with those holly trees that have grown with me, and inside the nave of St Jude’s, that’s who it was, of course – and, anyway, the point is a curious thing, clear and vague, of how all this means nothing to me. It may to you, perhaps? The age of the Church means something, doesn’t it?
Nicholas S Hall - Writer 