Beltane 1

On Sunday, M left home and travelled into the surrounding country. He walked up the shallow country lanes. It was a drippy, dew-wet Sunday morning when birds trilled lazily in trees, but occasionally, passing through certain streets and lanes, a blinding blaze of sunshine would sweep in, through the moisture in the air, transfused into a sublime golden Sunday morning light.

Up M marched, ever onward up grey tarmaced roads, till he reached a small, sleepy village, full of stone houses and thatched roofs, smoking chimneys, benches where old men smoke. He traverses the main grey road through the village and past the old Tudor pub, advancing past the main group of houses till he comes in sight of a long-abandoned, grey-green field, leading past the westward-bound road, and dominated by a huge, sad, drippy oak.

M has had to climb a huge, grey wet hump of hill to reach this far, and he trudges determinedly on, till he comes to the brokendown stone wall bordering the field. In the west spring sunshine dappled by oak leaves, he clambers over this, with its crumbled masonry exposed like blocks of white flesh, and comes into contact with the other students who are assembled in this long, lank field, with its dying grass and hopeless tree.

First to meet M is a tall kid standing nervously near the wall. He turns around suddenly, towering above M, the stub of a cigarette in his long fingers. His tall frame is dressed in a neat indie-kid sports jacket and he wears old trainers, scuffed and weary, on his feet. He is rather acne-scarred and shifty, perpetually disgruntled with an odd kind of fidgetiness and nervousness, and his words come out cracked and mumbled, peppered with curses. He has a curious concave face and the large nose of a peasant farmer. But turning there in the field, M sees his green eyes glint lightly, and with surprise, in the sunshine.