Read Online The Fourth Pig by Naomi Mitchison Marina Warner - Free Book Online Page B

must have been terrible living then, in that hopelessness of any real difference, with that sense of being stuck which must have oppressed them all. When it was all going to be—not easy, but at any rate, simple. As we, now, have come, through our well-wishing of those before us, to understand.
    THE FANCY PIG
    There used to be a pig on Princes Risborough hill:
    A fat white sow on the road, lying quite still.
    Every time I went there, and most of all at night,
    I thought I should see that pig in my yellow headlight.
    But every time, at the top, there had been no pig there,
    Only beech hedges in the cool, waiting air,
    Only leaves stirring in the dark air’s flow,
    And this time again my Thing had let me go.
    What was the pig of mine, this fancy pig,
    With light hairs on her hams, and her udders big?
    Was she once a real sow in a Bucks farm-yard,
    Then pork, ham, trotters, pig’s fry and lard?
    Or was she something in me which I so needed to kill
    That I had to grow her a body on Princes Risborough hill?
    Or was she something else that was neither me nor her
    But a stray twist of fancy on a chalk road’s blur?
    For all I know, she may be lying there still,
    Waiting these seven years on Princes Risborough hill.
    For I never go there now, by day nor yet by night,
    With clutch and brakes and steering, and yellow headlight;
    I never go there now, where often I have been,
    The long beech-twigs lightly brushing my wind-screen.
    But some other woman, with pigs in her to kill,
    May have run down my fancy sow on Princes Risborough hill.
    THE SNOW MAIDEN
    Once again the Snow Maiden was born, the daughter of January and April. Once again she was hated by the sun-god, the man-god, the god of life and potency. Once again, for her safety, her parents sent her to live amongst the mortals.
    She was boarded out at five shillings a week by the Poor-law authorities, and her name was Mary Snow. She was pretty enough to eat, blue eyes and curly hair, as yellow and shiny as a Caution Stop, whenever her foster-mother—Mrs. Smith her name was—a good old sort, and so was her man, Mr. Smith, a tram-driver for the Corporation—whenever she’d time to help Mary give it a wash. At school everyone liked Mary Snow, and some of the big girls were always wanting to baby her up, but she wasn’t having any. There’d been a bit of a fuss about her scholarship, her being a Poor-law kid and all, but her school teachers kicked up no end of a bother till she got it all right. Clever she was, too, and most of all with what’s not common in a girl, and that’s mathematics. The teachers used to talk her over with one another over their lunches, and they all said they’d never seen anything like it.
    And she was prettily spoken, though where she picked it up, no one knew, for the Smiths were just plain folks in a back street in Aston, and that’s no beauty-spot, as everyone in Birmingham knows, or would if they took a No 8 from the centre, the line Mr. Smith used to drive on. But where she did get her pretty way of speaking from was her mother, her real one, that used to comeinto her room of a night in Spring-time—down through the skylight, for Mary’s room was just a bit of a corner that had been a box-room in old days when the place had been a one-family house and servants kept. She’d sit on the end of Mary’s bed, would that April, looking for all the world like a young girl, not an old married woman—or what you might call married, for I never heard that her and old January ever went to church, the way decent folks do in Birmingham and elsewhere.
    She’d sit there, chattering half the night to Mary, and all round them the room’d be full of the scents and flowers and bird-songs and sunrises that had slipped in after her through the skylight, fidgety little things they were, all legs and eyes and wings, perching on the edge of the Co-op calendar, and scuttering up and down