Read Online Quatermass by Nigel Kneale - Free Book Online Page B

years? Forty? He was with his wife and little . . . who, Hettie? Not Hettie, of course not. Hettie was still an undeveloped egg in the little child’s womb of her mother, who held her father’s hand, his hand, and licked at the ice-cream cornet he had bought her near the ticket office. The admission tickets were sixpence each and she had wanted them, to hold them, to possess something. He suddenly saw the small face looking up at him, the sticky fair hair. It was very hot that summer. The grass was brown, trodden flat by the tourists crowding the Round. The child had felt uneasy among so many bodies. She had run for a little among the great stones, but then wanted to go. A quick look at the megaliths . . . the two trilithons . . . the great hanging sarsen stone in the middle of the group . . . and they left. The little girl ran ahead of her parent waving thin arms, pretending to be some imaginary creature. A long way in time from the autobahn that was going to kill her. Not long enough.
    “I know a rhyme about Ringstone Round,” said Sarah. She had been listening.
    Clare nodded. “The nursery rhyme.”
    “Do you know it?” Sarah asked Quatermass.
    “Of course,” he said. “I remember teaching it to”—he hesitated—“to other little girls. How does it go? ‘Huffity, puffity, Ringstone Round—’ ”
“Huffity, puffity, Ringstone Round,
    If you lose your hat it will never be found . . .”
    She clapped her hand on her head to hold the imaginary hat in place. She said: “You have to do the things.”
    “That’s right.” It came back to him with almost physical clarity. Another small figure was capering there in front of him and biting its tongue in concentration. Who was it, Hettie? Hettie’s infant mother? Hettie, he decided, when she was aged about five.
    Sarah was tugging at her waist band.
“So pull up your britches right up to your chin,
    And fasten your—your—”
    “Cloak,” he said. He knew.
“. . . your cloak with a bright new pin—”
    They finished the words together:
“And when you are ready, then we can begin,
    Huffity, puffity, puff!”
    Sarah sat back, pleased. She evidently felt she had made a point. In some obscure way, Quatermass felt he had, too, but was not sure what it was. He sat frowning.
    “It must be windy there,” said Sarah.
    “Yes,” he agreed, and looked across at Clare. He met an expression that puzzled him for a moment, until he remembered he had seen it before. It was when she had talked about her discoveries. A kind of hunger.
    “It’s curious about nursery rhymes,” he said. “What else they may be telling us.”
    Clare nodded. “Politics, I suppose. Wars, invasions. When, oh when, does little Boney come? P’raps he’ll come in August, p’raps he’ll stay at home . . . Sometimes he was just the Bone Man. That made him more sinister.”
    Sarah was out of her depth. “What bone man, mummy?”
    “Napoleon. I told you about him, didn’t I? Well, I will. And there was the brave old Duke of York, who had ten thousand men and marched them up to the top of the hill and didn’t know what to do next. And little Jack Horner, who hid valuable documents in a pie, he really did. And pulled out quite a plum. And King Georgy Porgy. And most of all there were the . . . sickness ones.”
    She meant plague, of course, but she wouldn’t say it in front of the quick child. Memories of the Black Death and later visitations, transformed into pretty harmlessness. The chain of rising pustules . . . Ring o’ Roses. A pocket full of posies . . . attempted prophylaxis. A-tishoo! A-tishoo! We all fall down . . . onset of pneumonic plague by droplet infection, followed by rapid collapse. It was all compressed there, symptoms and action taken, softened and rendered fit to be preserved as a memory, transmitted through the centuries of infants’ singing. Like nuclear waste set harmlessly in blocks of glass.
    “Sometimes they were far older,” said Clare. “Eena, meena, mina,