The Warren

While walking across a field, along a short-cut to the high-road, Jan stumbled upon some people living in a warren, and she jumped back startled. The two heads which had surfaced at her feet emitted a short scream of surprise; then after the initial shock of this encounter, they tried to cast surreptitious glances at the stick which the woman was carrying. She, having decided not to move from the spot just yet, watched the two keenly. The heads, which belonged to two men, left off worrying about the stick and began to grin broadly, the younger following the older man's lead. Jan glanced quickly across the marshy fields crossed by dyke banks, where long coarse grass lay flattened and bent in many directions. The bank into which this hole was an obvious entrance, was marked by many other holes: very likely a large nest of these people was living inside there. At least, thought Jan, these people haven't neglected their appearance; look! their faces are quite clean, their hair not matted at all. For a moment she felt a surge of admiration for them.

A disturbance from below elicited groans from the two men and caused them to crane their necks downwards until a further head, that of another man, having forced its way behind that of the first two, popped up and grinned at Jan. The older man, jostled and irritated by this new arrival, and now quite uncomfortable in the narrow hole, addressed Jan - "We are doing no harm" he said, "on the contrary we, almost all of us, harbour no ill-will towards anyone. Look at us!"  he opened his arms expansively. "Look now! Do you think we can hurt you? Oh dear what a joke. Eh? Now be reasonable, I implore you." Jan looked at the man's outstretched arms. "You don't look harmful, I'll admit," she answered. "But anyway, I'm not interested in that. I don't think that harmfulness is the point, is it." She began to circle the hole slowly, staring in amazement, taking slow measured steps unconsciously, for she was not paying the least attention to her feet.

The two younger men, willing to let their companion be the spokesman for the three, poked him repeatedly in the back with their fingers. The man bristled with fury which he diverted on to the girl. "Hey!" he shouted, twisting his torso in the hole so that he could face Jan again, "You! What do you think you're doing? Be off! It'll be the worse for you if you don't - it'll go bad for you with the authorities, don't you realise that? We are not without any influence at all, you know. Don't you think that. I say don't you think that. You!" One of the younger ones hugged the man from behind, encircling his neck (Jan wondered whether he was the man's son) and after he'd rested his chin on the man's arm, gazed up at Jan a little sheepishly. He in his turn was being hugged by the other young man who began to whisper something close in his ear. Jan stepped back a pace, crossed her chest with her arm and gripped her shoulder nervously. "I didn't mean to anger anybody," she explained. "Yes; of course, I'll go. I'll leave right now, if that's what you wish. Yes; I'll do that now." She looked up into the grey skies and viewed the horizon slowly from one side to the other. The older man began to run his hand across his head, letting the thick fingers of hair pass through it, and followed Jan's gaze towards the horizon. He wiped his mouth with his palm, then looked across the bleak fields. "Anyway" he complained, "it's rude of you to stand over us like this; as if you were something and we were not; as if you were not like us. Have we no right to privacy, us? Well? Are you not intruding, just a little my girl? Won't you grant me this one point?"

Jan nodded slowly. "Ah! I see you do" continued the man; "We have some of our dignity left, do we?" The man's indignation spent, the other two who had been watching his face closely, now looked glumly at Jan. The man also raised his eyes to hers, to make of it a tripartite defence. She stared at them, uncomfortable, and took a couple of hesitant steps backwards and forwards once more. The warren-dwellers held her gaze. She started to speak, spluttered, and cleared her throat. However, before she could utter a clear word, the three had lowered their eyes to the ground and looked away from one another. Suddenly one of the three opened his mouth wide and with his thick wide red tongue, gave one of his companions a lick stretching from his chin to his hair, a cow's lick.

Jan's eyes sprang into life. She seized upon the lick. "There! Caught you!" she cried. She jumped into the air, fists clenched. "Disgusting! Diseased people. That's it. Diseased! Oh why didn't I see it straight off? Ha! I have it now. You disgust me, yes, that's it; I wasn't sure what I had against you; but now I see it. You're depraved and you disgust me." For a moment the older man's head rose a little, but when Jan looked at him it sank again. Laughing uproariously Jan began to swing her leg, and to toe clods of earth from the ground. Long spurts of earth soared from her foot to the hole entrance, making the three heads sink suddenly out of sight. With the side of her foot, Jan shovelled stones, twigs, and earth into the hole until it filled. "There!" she cried, "I'll not stay here any longer," and she hurried down the bank humming to herself and snapping her fingers.

That night she laughed a little more, standing at her window, yet felt compelled to put on a coat and run out into the dark to head across the fields again. From behind a stunted bush she spied upon the warren-dwellers, squatting with hands placed on knees. When they surfaced she gritted her teeth and watched. Two women, short-haired women who talked to one another in an unhurried and reflective manner, something which Jan instantly admired in them, walked in her direction hands on hips. They sat down at the foot of their bank, put their arms around one another's shoulders and conversed in the half-dark, one leaning forward slightly to catch the words of the other. The one who talked the most playfully squeezed the neck of the other at one point. An older woman approached, getting their attention. She sighed and shrugged, making the others smile; then she knelt at the feet of her companions, took the toes of one of them in her mouth and gently sawed off the nails with her front teeth, an attention which made both women close their eyes with pleasure for a while. Her disgust confirmed, Jan almost threw her arm up in the air in excitement. She scuttled across the fields, crouching low, keeping at hedge height and swinging her arms until she reached home.

It was several days before the drowning-party could be organized. A pump had to be ordered from a town quite distant, Jan was told; then wheels had to be made in order to pull it across fields. As the group set off on its journey to the warren, the drowning-party walked behind Jan. The party leader stayed on her shoulder the whole way, somewhat hopeful of her love in spite of her obvious preoccupation with these warren-dwellers about whom she had started talking even before she had opened the door of his office. He freely admitted to himself that it was probably his love for the girl that had made him listen to her story and order this drowning-party. In the centre of the party the pump was pulled over hills and tracks by three men, who had to endure the loud criticisms and mock bullying of the others. Every half mile the team had to be changed and the hounding renewed - the free-walkers took it in turns to shoulder the nozzles and carry the hoses which they wore around their bodies.

Jan and the man at her shoulder set a fast pace, for the journey would take several hours. After a while the men began a game of leap-frog, each chasing the others and trying to fold one of them over so that he could win a vault. They wandered off, sometimes raced off, at tangents to the direction they needed to follow, not thinking about the delays they were causing at all. Ahead, Jan and the leader of the party had to stop. The leader turned to watch them and smiled. He turned to Jan and saw that she was frowning intermittently, nervous and darting her eyes from side to side. He skipped over to his charges, clapped his hands and, happy not to conceal his amusement, reprimanded them with good humour. Stepping up to his favourite in the party, he ruffled the man's hair and tried to get Jan to notice he was doing so.  

The warren looked deserted when they got there. Some of the men bent down, ostrich fashion, placed their palms on either side of a hole and poked their heads inside to peer into these novel homes. It was too dark to see anything, they complained. Some seemed unhappy with the job and lay down their pipes for a few moments to talk with the others. A few walked a little distance away and addressed the leader of the party. None worked with enthusiasm. Slowly, hoses were pushed firmly down those holes the men could discover, and screwed to the several nozzles on the pump. A longer fatter hose was run from the pump, over a distant ridge, and into the dyke waters behind. The starting of the pump was left to the leader of the party.  

The pump throbbed dully. The men of the party stood all around the bank, hands in pockets, listening in silence to the water bubbling quietly beneath the bank. Jan rushed up to the nearest man, took him by the ears and forced his face up to hers. "Listen!" she shouted. "You must hurry. You must now pack your machinery away. It is nearly four o'clock. Quickly now. It's important." She ran in front of the circle of men, shook the shoulders of another one. "You are expected back before evening. You know that; so come along. Don't forget that you're paid only until dusk." The men began to stir from their inactivity and to gather their equipment. 

A naked leg appeared, at a high angle, from one of the holes. It began to bob stiffly. The hoses were heavier now. The men passed the hose segments down the hill from one to another. The body, at last pushed out by the pressure of water beneath, began to slide down the bank revolving slowly on its descent. Before it had been washed to the bottom, several more corpses from various holes, some of them previously unnoticed ones, had been floated to the surface and commenced their slide down the bank.

It was getting cold. The party huddled together on the return journey. The work was harder now, the equipment heavier. The men were tired and didn't say a lot. When Jan reached the outskirts of the town, she fell into step behind a pair of girls who had emerged from a noisy house. She vaguely knew them. One had her arm round the shoulders of the other, said something to her then protruded her thick red tongue, and gave her a lick which stretched from her chin all the way up to her hair, a cow's lick. Jan stopped in her tracks. So it had always been there in her people too, only she hadn't noticed it. Or perhaps she had? Despite all this new awareness, she reasoned that the warren people deserved their fate nevertheless. For they had no effective defence - it was clear to her now. That was it. Their only ploy was to try to hide themselves away (and that not very effectively). Thus she had decided that they always were going to suffer this fate of theirs, at some point or other and from some quarter or other.