Bob Hinshelwood's Other writing
   Life lived within is also lived without. 

Those memories of his wife, Christine, resurfaced into his mind with the rhythm of his grinding, the circling of the wheel between his hands, the rocking back and forth as he loaded the kiln.  Christine was buried in him; they had been together in a marriage he had won and valued. But he had never released another memory from years ago. That girl, Jenny, imprisoned as a memory many years ago, and so far away. She remained a wave, a goodbye as it were. Her insistent kissing at the quarry as it dynamited in an explosion that would forever interrupt. Forever interrupt.

            In the afternoon, the Frenchman, Jean-Paul, brought round to the pottery a small machine, trundling it on a porter's trolley. The air was thick with warm pollen and insects and the heat of the summer day drove moisture into the surface of everything. The world was waiting for the thunder to come in the evening. They had worked out the design of this electric grinding-mill together, and Jean-Paul had made the parts in his metal-workshop behind the village garage, once the forge.  He had put the parts together, and they had tried it out over the past couple of weeks, adjusting the play and clearances of the various movements.  The potter had arranged finally for Jean-Paul to bring it this afternoon.  He knew he’d be charged for all the materials and the labour, but this had not been mentioned yet. The potter had cleared a space in the pottery, and he had extended the bench by three feet with some planks of rough wood.  He and Jean-Paul heaved it up into position. 

            They plugged it in with the extension lead, coiled like a long snake, reaching the socket.  The ingredients were put into the mill from the top, wet or dry, and Jean-Paul proudly switched it on for the demonstration. They both watched satisfied for a moment. An older man, originally from Lille, Jean-Paul had settled with a small thin English woman whose cooking he once declared as good as anyone's in France.  His bald head, expansive cheeks to match, his grin and a body muscled as if with steak, contrasted with the potter's lean ascetic seediness.  The thinness of the potter's body was accentuated by the way he pulled his hair forward with his fingers after the rare baths he took. The frame of dark hair, black eyebrows and eyes that pierced steel armour, as it were, contributed over-all a tense ferret-like intrusiveness next to Jean-Paul's wide bonhomie.

            The trolley had stirred up the gravel of the path and there was a thin film of dust, like dry dew, on Jean-Paul's shoes. In that equally hot summer, long ago, Jenny, his girl before Christine, just as dusty after the explosion. It had captured his eyes and had softened them briefly with  lost love. His boy tears had been ready to tumble that day it had all gone wrong.

            The potter was duly grateful for the machine.  It would save a great deal of pulverising effort. Reducing his glazes by hand took many hours.  But it had been the secret of the high demand for the  subtleties of his work. Jean-Paul presented his bill, forceful and jovial at the same time.  The potter felt only the appreciation deep inside, a remote gratitude that they had worked so well together.  In the face of Jean-Paul's swelling affability, he could only stare out of the window, his distant gaze intense enough to shatter the glass, a few tendrils of clematis gently stared back waving slightly in the humid breath outside. He stated absently that they could meet in the bar the next evening to settle the money.  Jean-Paul briefly patted the immobile shoulder, warmly it seemed, but secretly uncertain at this impassive stranger, still a strange intruder that no-one had welcomed into the village those years ago, silent and still. Jean-Paul departed. The potter’s embarrassing uprush of passion, to catch hold of Jean-Paul around the waist in a hug, as he might his father, fell to the floor as lost love. And he stared immobile at the blue horizon in the window. That immobility, like a mill, ground his passions into dry dust.

            Long-ago his leg had been amputated.  They burned it to ashes they had told him, in the hospital's incinerator.  They gave the ashes to him in a small plastic pot.  Because he had asked for them. So, long-ago he had tested how he might grind his own ashes into the glaze that emerged as ash grey on the simple pots and mugs he had begun to make. He had discovered in that long-ago explosion that falling in love with Jenny had been like grinding down a powder, the memory gets drier as you go on, so when you are older it is a finer texture and it clings to you in a coating that has changed the colour of your life.

            When he was in the pub, he was different, the after-sense of the local-brew cider.  He sat on the corner bench. and alone as usual to be sure, but a simple grin growing across the dusty leather of his cheek.  He stared away, above the hem of the glass beer mug to watch the sun, as red as peonies, dropping westward into the flat land.

            Jean-Paul plumped his strong, bouncing limbs beside the potter, and they looked each other in the face for a conspiratorial moment. Then fishing in his trouser pockets as if he had forgotten where he had put it, he drew out a role of cash.  “Fine”' he said flatly, as if Jean-Paul had asked.  “The little divil'll do enything.”

            “Sure.  I made it just like that.”  Jean-Paul raised his hand, finger and thumb touching each other, “Comme ça.” He took the wad of notes, unceremoniously transferring them to his pocket.  “Want another one. I will do it the same.  Just for you,” he offered.  But nothing more from the potter.  The Frenchman removed himself politely to wander down the dark empty public bar.

            On his own he reminisced. At first his job as a labourer in the antique coke furnaces of the plant, had earned him little. After the rent he had little more than pocket money to live on.  His job had been a form of slavery, in the potteries, making heavy-duty sewer pipes, lavatory equipment and what-have-you, and his holidays entailed a merciful staying in bed. If he went out, he spent what he hadn’t got. So, when he married Christine there was nothing to go round. Even the payments to up-grade her wheelchair were beyond his means. 

            Christine had been pretty, and the multiple fractures of her lithe body had not completely damaged the pert fragrance of charm. The facial surgery had not been completely successful but the distortions to her smile in no way made it less engaging than when she had twisted her loving parents round her little finger as a doted-upon child of the elderly couple who had wanted and adopted her. Life, it seemed to her, was for putting her foot down when she wanted something, and for lashing out – in private and in hidden ways – when she felt their doting ceased. 

            Her homework at school required her Mum to hold her book whilst Christine arranged her limbs to write the essay. And every time Mum moved, she could admonish with a sigh or a pout, “Keep’t still Mum, won’tya” 

            She knew that an audience would side with her in her disabled condition, and she had the power of helplessness to control them.

            His flashbacks resumed unabated.

            But his new grinding-mill offered some respite.  It would swallow anything, from toe-nails and bottle-tops, to auburn locks and artichokes.  All reduced to proverbial dust, and in such quantities!  A litre at a time.

            They had met in the gym where their physiotherapists had brought them.  Christine loved his damaged body and cared for it.  And he loved hers.  They did love each other tenderly, and although it had not always been easy between them, their silent tenderness for each other always prevailed in the end. It had been later that their tenderness matched the punching words, her punching words. He would sometimes stroke her hair as he passed behind her wheelchair in their sparce room, a gesture of high admiration, incongruous in their abode of near animal primitiveness. A gesture that was without anticipation, without reason, without guile.  Sometimes when she could reach, without warning, she would place a small kiss at the corner of his mouth, just where the lips joined and turned inwards within a slight fold in the cheek.

            Her RTA when she was a wild adolescent had cured her of that wildness and laid her up in hospital with the paraplegia – still and numb below her waist. The motorbike had literally run over her body cracking her spine and with it her spinal cord and all those nerves to the legs. The doctors had explained it all to her answering her persistent questioning. And despite all her questions and their information, she had never walked again since she was thirteen.

            When she did, surprisingly, become pregnant, there was such mutual joy in the success of her body. They matched each other in their joint thrill, and they would lie clinging motionless together on whatever part of the floor or furniture they could tumble upon.  Their triumph in each other’s triumph.  Being that much older, he took it on himself to manage her care. And so, when she died, carrying off both herself and the little being inside her, he had made a decision not to call for help, for interference, for the intrusion of that official world that would claim lives and deaths as public property.  Instead, it would forever remain his locked in his tight self-sufficiency. 

            Their rural idyll pleasantly came to embrace them and they planned the structure and details of their new home, taking account of her wheelchair.  She too had done striking work on drawing up the developments, and the planning that went into the pottery.  There life had become steadily clearer; tidy, organised and discretely aloofness within a complex of workshops and habitation at the end of this village, like a foreigner at a wedding.  They were there, but not of it. The strange couple were self-contained, and surprisingly entrepreneurial with the passing tourist trade.  There was a high line of elderly cypresses marking off the front of the yard, which served to form a darkened sinister boundary and also provided its unmistakable title: The Cypress Stand Pottery.  Built on the flat surface of an old gravel pit that in ancient times had eaten away the slope of the hill sheltering the village, it held a gloomy forbidding mystery. 

            The private intimacy of the couple within their lair led to a phobic isolation as they drew into their impenetrable domestic realm and the concentration on their separate crafts; she with her intricate weaving, and he with his subtle multi-colouring of his everyday crockery. 

            Christine’s parents had been astonished but relieved that the potter would take over the arduous responsibilities they had striven to carry, and he had willingly taken over. And she, devotedly, massaged many times a day the multiple sores on the stump of his missing leg. 

            He began his special interest in the glazes. His intimate and productive care of nature itself took some half of his working time. Precisely because he could derive from the natural countryside, he extracted and processed them systematically and exhaustively. He was uncharacteristically joyfully exuberant at the colours that could be born in the kiln to surprise him when he opened it and drew the quiet pots out – one a chilled milk blue, another a globuled green colour of ferns and so on. But also, it was just as much a set of new and varied textures he sought from the unsuspecting Suffolk soils – an abrasive, rough crag, fragile shark-tooth flint fragments, or warts of polluted sand.  From their arrival, he had foraged and plotted the fields and miniature heathland in the immediate vicinity of the village. Then, as weeks went on, the perimeter of his world was mapped out as a steady sedate ripple of potter's knowledge, encompassing the old quarry pits, the riverside bog, the ripe forest humus and that tiny hillside graveyard reaching back, it is known, to Saxon times. 

            Times, in their ancient marriage home before they had refurbished it, had been harsh for some years.  They had lived there, in the tight cluttered room, slowly renovating and renewing and re-arranging. Their home, would for years to come grow its gradual sedate and settled rootedness. Until that fateful night.

            It was the previous day, they had had one of their spectacular rows, one of the worst, sustained well, into the day.  So, the next morning, he woke and she had already left the bed, her blankets rumpled and pushed back. He saw the spilt blood, red, fresh-looking, and seeping through the sheets. Heaving her body from the bed to the chair had squeezed put her leaking womb. He knew what had happened, and had even been warned by the gruff and puffy doctor in the town 15 miles away.  The potter moved with speed but contrived a deliberation.

            There she lay.  The bathroom was spattered with blood, spread in wide sweeps across the floor as she had obviously struggled to get herself cleaned.  White paint was smeared by hand-grips, fingers scratching the grain, her raw fluid seeping into its open pores.  Her eyes were now fixed, staring bleakly, widely, straight past his horrified, resigned face.

            There was no need to take time to think, it was obvious what had happened. But, took time, he did, with an expression that remained motionless and as still as a quiet pond in summer; she was at peace at last. He waited as if for the scene to change, and to rewind to a moment for an alternative future.  It might be that she would slide upwards into a reversion to normality, to a revised life, to hope. However, the only movement was the imperceptible ooze of the last of her blood from her pale unashamed nakedness.

            His still recorded  like a blank white page of paper the sturdy up and down stamina of their injured relationship. Not just paralysis and amputation. There was that steady persistent protest. Even with that new husband some years ago, she had flexed the muscles of her complaints and blames, “Yu’ve only lost the one o’ them, But I lost’m both. And”, she bitterly added, “I got to carry them all and forever. So get yer one leg moving an’ ‘elp me.” One could have said, unkindly, that nobody could have become better adapted for life in a wheelchair!

            His solemn faith in his own survival demanded his devotion, a ritual sacrament, a recompense to her. And to the one before. And, moreover, to his own speedily aging parents, hampered by their dedication to alcohol and tobacco. He could have claimed that no-one outclassed him as an advocate of the benefits of physiotherapy or of the virtuous rights of the disabled. He looked after them, himself and Christine, the two of them without stint, as a substitute that stood in for the slavery he had given up in the Staffordshire potteries. It was a kind of golden jackpot in their moment of need when she received so belatedly such a lavish and long fought-for compensation for the road accident. 

            She had refused to use her compensation money frivolously, though he had never really suggested it. Instead, she planned this investment they had just accomplished, their home, their crafts their live renewed, and he had thought, the little one on it way to join than in nine months. She had the general idea, and he the more dogged intelligence.  So, bored with his job sweeping out the coal dust, he had readily agreed. And eventually they acquired their run-down, barn-like accommodation in remotest tourist Suffolk. Her sad and befuddled parents lived out briefly the rest of their brief lives there too, and then the new potter and his wife held themselves to each other as completely self-sufficient. The tenderness that flowed between them after her demanding compliance that energised his generous servitude was only one other dimension of their now newly-nourished lives lived between handicap and creativity. 

            A robust solitary determination had set in as a couple, not only in doing battle against their conditions which they righted stubbornly, but equally in the battles their frugal bleakness engendered over who of them took charge.  Even on his last day at the furnace, he had creaked home on his false leg, coaldust-smeered, sent off optimistically by his colleagues, walking to save the bus-fare. The deputy director of energy services at the plant had popped in to shake his hand carefully and to wish him well.  So, he'd arrived home with an unaccustomed and willing sense of his own place in the world.  But she, alone all day, had planned the packing and the transport to their ancient  barn and for their remote life.  And her planning had not included his relaxed moment of bonhomie which he wished to cherish. She had no time for that.

            “Come along, fine fellow,' she called cheerlessly, 'We'm got work to do.  We'm off tomorrow.  Remember?”

            “Do you want to know what happened at the ...”

            “Not now, my luv.”

            “The fellows really did me proud.  Righty proud.”

            “We've got to move some of this stuff.  Here's a list.  You know I bin working it out all day.”

            “You've been working it out all month!”

            “Eh?  Well, who else would do it? Not you.”

            “Oh, give over.”

            “Give over what?  What?  Some's got to get us going.  If it's no’ me, it's no’ going to be you.  You'd sit on yay flat-pan arse all day.  I mean’t.  Someone's go’ sort out our life.  It's me what got t’ barn organised, bought, paid for.  What?”

            He shrugged his shoulders.  It was true she had worried away at all the arranging and transporting work to their pottery barn.  “Okay, okay. I know what you've been doing. But lord-luv-us, let me rest for a moment.”

            “Rest!  I've been resting all day.  What else can I do?  Give me that, o’ there.  You know I can't get a’moving without’t.  See these cases, a’ packed up.  I've go’ t’move ‘em, and if you're going t’ rest, I need me crutch – in order to do it meself.”  She began to heave herself from the chair onto the crutch he had passed across. Muttering all the time through her efforts, “Him downstairs, he go’m for me.  From the market.  Well, you wouldn't have thought a’bring them in, would you?”

            No, he had not brought in the boxes for packing. Rising to a defiant tone, his voice spoke, “Quite right.  No, I wouldn't, would I?”

            “Have a good look.  Watch me pack up.”

            “OK.  I'll drink me cuppa tea.  Go ahead.”

            “Whatya trying a’do, make me cry?  Okay, I'll cry.  Fall over?  Okay, tha’s whatya want?”  And she lifted the crutch and swung it at his head.  His cup crashed onto the table.  The aluminium tube clubbed the side of his face.  His chair, as he flinched away, went over.  The impetus of her violence sent her crashing the other way on the wooden floor but rebounding from the table she collapsed heavily and deafeningly, the wooden furniture collapsing and arousing him downstairs.

            When they had arrived in the village, some two years before this, it had been as if from Mars.  The misery of their problems had left them feeling initially bereft, as if they had lost their way in emptiness.  Their increased inwardness had raised the temperature between them higher and drawn the shutters even closer against the people out there.  They believed their passions – of love, of shouting – sailed sublimely above the village.

            In recent years, she had developed her textile crafts. He noticed that white shift, tired and old which she slept in, and had woven and printed and then sown into its usefulness. And now, he found her, this early morning, sprawled in that whiteness besmirched by the blood from the failed pregnancy, positioned awry on the floor. The shift had retired into a roll under her armpits, and one breast had nodded out into the air as if to breathe its last there.  The home-spun linen had become rucked as she had slid, mistily, clawing at the woodwork. He looked again and again as it had folded untidily up around her armpits as if she were desperately hot. She had not called out to him for help.  The blood, he saw, had poured, had strayed in a glistening elongated bubble, dribbling  into the dust and the shavings of the wood he had worked.  It rose above the powdery debris as if in disdain, containing her life it had stolen away from her and infused into the refuse and grime. When he did move, it was to give her one last kiss on her dry lips.  It was a kiss of forgiveness, he thought. Again. 

            Then the long years folded back. The vista in his mind changed, the time was the past. But the heart-throbbing pain remained as a return to that time before. As a boy, with Jenny, aged 15, a poppy-red sky breaking outside the village, he had taken the small hand.  Not knowing quite what else to do.  The dry mud path up to the far away edge of the quarry scrunched with pebbles beneath their feet.  So many times, he had spied on couples from behind a hedge. They had taken their love-prize for a moment of privacy. Now he nervously wondered if daring comrades spied on him. 

            Such was his memory of Jenny at this new tragic moment. In those now-gone days, he was never very school-minded but he had a knowingness.  Now, he was aged twice as old, or more, grinding with a pestle on the bench a slurry of glass and red-brown rust.  He was two hundred miles from that tragedy with the girl, her small hand in his. Eighteen years away from it.  Now, his home with Christine, an ancient barn with crumbling beams, a nightmare the insurance company would not risk.  He crossed the floor on his limping leg. The scuffed bottoms of his dungarees, scraped through the dust, leaving trails.  His lurch threatened the safety of the racks of biscuit-fired pots packed in such close aisles.

            Back then, Jenny, in his vivid recall, “Come on. Screw you it into me,” she meowed. And she had tugged her small hand from his grip and run away off into the sunset ahead of him, mischievously.  She dived through the gap in the barbed wire with him hard on her heels catching her. When he had her again, they fell to the ground, both laughing, two kids exploring bodies.  They rolled in each other’s arms, their mouths together.

            “Where is that ball-point?” she said with an emphasis. “The one between your legs. Will I see it?'  And she guffawed hugely. She pushed him back again on the thin grass and clamped her open laughing mouth on his lips again.  It was partly out of young clumsy desire, and partly to silence their moment of fear.  She began a moment of fumbling with his trousers getting him out, as a farmer ousts a pig from a sty. A silent quietness swept inside him in those first innocent and adolescent fervours. When the rumbles in the ground had faded away, she laughingly lay back. Their lips found the new sensations. It was no longer mischievousness, but was moving into …   what. Into a moment of feverish newness.

Then… An instant of mighty noise had split the air, their ears. Their bodies fell still in astonishment.  Both instantly struck motionless were in terror.  Living all their childhood in the village, by the quarry, they were familiar with these explosions.  But having run out of bounds, new lovers seeking a stolen privacy, for a moment they felt caught out.  They had penetrated the private land and were right up by the quarry works.  The explosion wrecked the air. It had momentarily stopped them.  Only momentarily. When the rumbles in the ground had faded away, she laughingly lay back. Then, they fell happily to kissing again, her soft body a breathless electric force pressing down upon him. 

But only for a moment, out of the air, out of the cloud of red dust that reached them from the explosion, on the soft breeze, some rocks that had been scattered high into the air began to fall back again. Big dangerous ones. On them.

            The crashing rain of rock chips, stones and sizeable boulders, stuttered violently upon them in a crescendo of wounds.  The small couple were literally pulverised; it showed the red danger-warning at the bottom of the path had proved correct. As a target for the catapults of the village boys that notice had become too familiar to take notice of its warning. 

            The rocks had concussed him. Unconscious, he lay a day and a half there.  When he came round the falling debris had so lacerated his exposed leg that had stuck out from under her imprisoning body, it had festered into a raging cellulitis, later needing amputation in hospital.  But worse.  Even before his returning consciousness had become aware of the agony in his leg, he felt the crush of her flaccid body, still sprawled on top of him, in that posture of excited pressure as their mouths had met – that day or so before.  Her mass now spilled from its orifices, and it weighed heavy and spongily across his own body. It had protected him from the 'vengeance' of the quarry explosion, protected all of him except for his one exposed leg – and that received his share of the descending disaster from the sky.  It had stunned, ultimately battered her mischievous body into a corpse, the stones and boulders building up around them into the beginnings of a joint grave that failed to be completed.  And all over everywhere, a thick plaster of powder covering him, inside and out.  His regained a consciousness that dawned dizzily upon this macabre blanket, but that first impression was immediate and it was followed by an enduring clogged sense in his throat as the first fit of coughing erupted, promising himself an encroaching death of his own.  Piled up rubble around him and a closing mound of the poor destroyed girl above, he seemed trapped and convulsed, motionlessly coughing.  He fought to move her bulk, and that introduced him to the excruciating ache in his leg.  And the rest of him felt distantly like a collection of crumpled litter. She pressed down on him as if pleading for his rescuing protection against the lethal downpour, but of course pathetically too late.

            Her helpless body lay surprisingly intimate on top of him.  Where her face lolled against his engrimed arm, there appeared a dark smudge of black dust.  The wound on the side of his head had clotted a brown-red between them.  As he moved, it formed an enlarging drop, a round and glistening bubble.  It began to trickle, thick and slow, across the coal dust smudge on her cheek. There was nothing else he could do but heave her off him, amidst all the painful assaults on his senses.  He could only edge himself slowly from under her and slide himself along the ground. He had dragged his useless leg rigidly behind.  The grey/red dust and stones became a vivid world of agony for the enduring journey back down the path they had joyfully chased up. The story of a first romance. 

            After their row, forgiveness was never mutual. Now, in this moment, he alone survived to forgive their row. She in that wrinkled linen shift with irregular smears of blood was inert and indifferent to him and to the responsibility for her nagging. The row, their rows, were village gossip.  The line of secretive cypresses around their barn was not privacy enough. 

            His gruff response to enquiries from neighbours did not calm their suspicions.  By contrast it aroused them. There were not many in that village, but that was all the more reason why they noticed each other’s business – including the outsiders. Especially the outsiders' perhaps. Indeed, he had hardly troubled to know them as friends, one from another. 

            The 'closed' sign on the pottery showroom announced to the village some irregular occurrence, the shut-up look of the whole premises, the gathering leaves and dust in the autumnal breezes across the parking area, on the front steps even, meant a radical departure from proper expectations.

            And he failed altogether to think the neighbours would interpret all these signs at all. No need at that precise moment to consider the gossip-machine, the scandal-harvesting.  Indeed, he could only consider his own predicament, could only consider how he might proceed.  Grief, he assumed, if he had thought it out, ought to confer rights. And if he had thought, he would have considered he had rights to proceed in his grief in any way that could confer relief on him.

            There had been no means by which he could effectively conceal the blood stains on the rough wood walls of their lavatory.  And he had never made any attempt in fact to conceal them.  He had scraped them from the walls, from the floor, the largest of the dried crusted blots for his own purposes – not for concealment of a crime.  And those clots had left enduring stains which were not altogether against his liking.  They confirmed in one way – a sadly unpremeditated way – that her very being did survive. 

            He never knew who first told the police that she was missing. They never gave any significance to those relics of brown grit in a glass tube, labelled 'iron-laden specimen glaze' as well as other jars on the shelf above his glazing bench.

            To be sure the police had been thorough.  They had the testimony of neighbours, and others, testimony to the angry rows, the noise, the violence. But without a body, no prosecution in a murder trial is very certain, no conviction is safe. So, they had no explanatory post-mortem evidence of her miscarriage (or of a risky abortion). No murder occurs without a body; and yet precisely because the body was missing, they were suspicious of what he had done with her. He, reluctantly, lied saying she had left him to go away somewhere, and would never let him know. But they, the police, could hardly believe a wheelchair bound cripple could abscond successfully from her home in the remote countryside – could they?

            He walked more and more in the fields and the soft hills of Suffolk, He flicked the leaves in the hedgerows with his outstretched fingers, his arms wide like a scarecrows or a fumbling aircraft careering in trouble, clipping the vegetation it should be soaring above.  Fallen autumn leaves were building in wind-strewn piles. He scuffed his feet amongst them, the bestirred matter squabbled and subsided in his wake and fluttered away like sad birds dying.    He watched the yellow, the brown, the red and the gold as they blended, and as he would blend them. The friable surface of stillness settled back after his passing, resenting his passing.  A trance that was left behind which meant nothing.

            It was not a journey, not a leisure; it was progress through the lanes merely to return.  He coughed as he entered the gap beneath the line of darkened old trees. A nervous gesture some would say, harking back to that adolescent disaster – nervous facsimiles of the coughs that racked him as he slid himself down the path from that old quarry site.  Once more inside the tired days of the house, the windows were filmed with dust, and when he drew his finger down, a black crescent came off on the tip.  It tasted of dryness and faintly of salt.  He peered into the dark inside of the house as if suspicious that an intruder remained in there awaiting him. 

            So, with all his time exploring those empty Suffolk spaces, he had known exactly where to start his task of concealing his most precious of all relics.  A double incline slid together, rare in this terrain, and hiding behind a copse where pheasants were stealthily bred for the hunting season.  A half-hearted working of flints had been abandoned presumably because it had been so inaccessible in those old days, and then forgotten.  It was here, he knew, one day he would find a place to park his own mortal remains when he lay down to die, on some cold winter's night, covering himself with misshapen and discarded flint waste. There, his life's warmth would ebb determinedly away and leave him his private future for eternity.

            So, when, unexpectedly, he was faced with Christine’s newly dead body, he knew exactly where to bring her, the sloping hollow that faced out across the reed-beds just above the tidal reach.  And over against the southern sky the wide rise of the hill with three ancient barrows on top.  Those dead would be her companions as she lay beneath a cache of disturbed stones.

            But such a distance from the village, and the weight of her precious and now rigid frame, had made it a problem as it was too far, and she too heavy.  Ever practical, he had been forced to take it there in parts.  The larger-than-usual bag he humped across his shoulders on those journeys meant nothing particular to his prying neighbours, their unbright eyes having become so familiar with his daily country meanderings.  It was done in a couple of afternoons.

            And months and months later, after his trial, it took a couple of afternoons to retrieve the now desiccated remains.

            At peace, and found not guilty, and with his precious treasure, stowed away again at home, he had decided after the trial to stay on at the old barns, sheltering behind the line of cypresses acting as a timber screen to defy the winter winds from the North Sea, and the summer humidity seeping up from the river.  His new grind-mill would continue testing the texture, and forging the hues, for new glazes. Every speck and spot of his retrieved treasure would become emblazoned and glazed onto his unsuspecting pots in such spectacular ways as the element-rich colouring from iron and calcium and sodium, all those earths and rare earths she had unknowingly bequeathed with her loving death.