Cryers Hill by Kitty Aldridge

said.
    Hilda Brown was always having to point things out to people. She thought if she didn't point things out, the whole world would go entirely around the bend. The man next door, for example, kept cages of yellow and blue birds, referred to by him as buggery guards, and occupied himself strangely, at night, in the back garden. He shouted out habitually in his sleep and his wife had grown nervous as a hare. Hilda knew he had fought in the Boer War, but she did not consider this an excuse. He preferred birds to people, that much was obvious. She kept Walter away from him.
    Walter's father, Frank Brown, had worked at the Town Hall. It was generally supposed that he had helped arrange Walter's appointment at the Water Company. Unless you were very idle indeed, he used to say, you would have a job for life, unlike those who were laid off during difficult times and could not know what on earth was coming next, or how they would feed their families.
    Walter understood it was important to know what on earth was coming next, but he couldn't bring himself to fear for his future the way everybody else did. The day he had discovered his father kneeling before the gooseberries with his face in the dirt, he had known he was going to go about things differently. To expire suddenly on your knees, while not ideal, was preferable to dying lingeringly in a bed, anyone could see that. But Walter remained troubled by the memory of his father's body – the weight, the dampness, the yawning oval of his sour-smelling mouth.
    Walter's father had managed to escape the first war by dint of his age. He was forty-three when Walter was born and forty-five by the time conscription came. Invalided soldiers and hearsay brought the facts home to him, and Frank Brown became fretful about the good fortune that had spared him. Bad luck seemed more likely, and this particular fortuity haunted him for the rest of his life.
    Walter's grandfather too had worked at Wycombe Town Hall, worked his way up, was how Hilda put it; a dynasty of hard-working clerks, the Browns. Walter was born in their little house on Penn Road in Hazlemere where they all lived, three generations of clerks together, until Walter's father got a mortgage and they moved to one of the smart, newly built houses that was to remain his home until the day of his great departing.
    As a boy Walter had known the woods as well as his own two hands. Still, Mary Hatt had a talent for hiding. He found her at last in Millfield Wood, up an elm, straddling a low branch. He had to shout, then she screamed and spat at him for frightening her. Now she would not come down. All right then, she would come down if he chased her, that was fair.
    Walter had chased Mary many times. He had stopped enjoying it, truth be told, now he was nineteen, but Mary was a creature of persistent habit and one of anything was never enough. Mary liked any sort of game or lark. Hide-and-seek was all right, but best of all she liked games involving stealth and surprise. 'Boo' was her first word. One time she chased the man come to do the steam cultivator all the way up to Provost Spinney, laughing like a bear all the way. She had a great burst of a laugh – she could let it off like a missile and it would catch up with you no matter how fast you ran.
    He had agreed to her request and chased her again. Now she had disappeared. Walter stopped and caught his breath and waited for her to jump out or scream or pelt him from behind, but she didn't come. He sat down on a bulging tree root and wondered what would happen to him if it turned out he had lost her. He rested his long chin in his hand. He considered the thrashing he would get from her father, the hiding from his mother, p'raps others, p'raps all the mothers and fathers, p'raps they would line up with belts, canes and horsewhips. There would be nothing left of him by the time they were finished. They would have him arrested. Mr Looker, the policeman, would ask him where he lived,