We trod narrow paths into the dilapidated cemetery that led the way to the sweetest elderflower bush, a patch of ground elder which had found sunlight, and the best tree for climbing. I could stand on its lowest branch, and my father would give me a leg up into the tree’s crotch, where its branches, each the size of his waist, curved up, then outward. With our legs dangling either side, we shuffled along one of these, me first with my father close behind, until we could look down through the waxy leaves to the graves below. My father said it was called a Magnificent Tree.
The cemetery was closed to the public—lack of council funds had locked its gates the year before. We were alone with the foxes and the owls; no visitors or mourners came, so we invented them. We pointed out a tourist in a Hawaiian shirt with his loud wife.
“Oh gee,” said my father in an American falsetto, “look at that angel, isn’t she just the cutest thing!”
Once, we swung our legs above an imaginary burial.
“Shh, the widow’s coming,” whispered my father. “She’s blowing her nose on a lace handkerchief. How tragic, to have lost her husband so young.”
“But just behind her are the evil twins,” I joined in, “wearing identical black dresses.”
“And there’s the despicable nephew—the one with egg in his moustache. All he wants is his uncle’s money.” My father rubbed his hands together.
“The widow’s throwing a flower onto the coffin.”
“A forget-me-not,” my father added. “The uncle is creeping up behind her—watch out! She’s going to fall into the grave!” He grabbed me around the waist and pretended to tip me off the branch. I squealed, my voice ringing amongst the stone mausoleums and tombs surrounding us.
When I should have been in school, the garden became our home, and the cemetery our garden. Occasionally I thought about my best friend Becky and what she might be doing in class, but not often. We sometimes went into the house to “gather provisions,” and on a Wednesday evening to watch Survivors on the telly. We didn’t bother to wash or change our clothes. The only rule we followed was to brush our teeth every morning and evening using water we brought to the camp in a bucket.
“Four billion people on the planet and under three billion own a toothbrush,” my father would say, shaking his head. The sunshine didn’t stop, so we spent our days foraging and hunting. My back and shoulders burned, blistered, peeled, and went brown while I learned what was safe to eat from the trees and plants of north London.
My father taught me how to trap and cook squirrels and rabbits, which mushrooms were poisonous and where to collect the edible ones like chicken-of-the-woods, chanterelles, and penny buns, and how to make ramson soup. We pulled up the stalks of nettles and dried them in the sun; then, sitting on the edge of a grave, I watched him strip away the plant’s exterior and twist what had been foliage a few minutes before into a fine braid. I copied him because he said the best way to learn was to do things myself, but even with my small fingers, the cord I produced was clumsy and malformed. Still, we made hangman’s nooses of them and tied them to a branch that we propped up against a tree.
“The squirrel is a lazy creature,” said my father. “What is the squirrel?”
“A lazy creature,” I said.
“He always takes the path of least resistance,” he said. “What does the squirrel do?”
“He takes the path of least resistance.”
“And what does that mean?” He waited for my answer, which didn’t come. “It means he’ll happily run up this branch and get his stupid head stuck in a noose,” my father said. “In fact he’ll happily run up this branch over his dead friends and still get his head stuck in a noose.”
When we returned to our traps the next day, two slight corpses dangled from the tree by their necks, swaying to and fro from the weight of their own bodies. I dared myself not to look away. My father untied them and put the nooses in his pocket “for next time.” That evening he tried to show me how to skin them, but when his knife came down on the first neck, I said that I didn’t think we had enough kindling and perhaps I should go and collect more. When he had finished, he skewered the skinned animals on a stick he had whittled to a point, and we cooked them over the fire and ate them with ramsons and boiled burdock roots. I picked at mine—the squirrel looked too similar to the animal it had once been, and tasted like chicken that had been out of the fridge for a day too long.
We didn’t give a thought to what we were doing to the garden. We only considered our next meal—how to find it, how to kill it, and how to cook it. And although I would have preferred Sugar Puffs with milk in front of the telly, I joined in the adventure without question.
My father dug stones out of the rockery with a trowel and built a fire pit in the middle of the scuffed earth, a little way from our tent. We tied ropes across our shoulders and dragged half a fallen tree trunk around the gravestones and back to the garden so we had something to sit on. Chairs from the house would have been cheating. We dug a pit in a dusty flower bed and made a shallow grave for the bones and skins of the animals we ate. My father showed me how to make char-cloth using a shirt that he had me fetch from his wardrobe in the house. According to my father’s rules, this wasn’t cheating. I brought it down still on its metal hanger and he sliced the cotton into pieces with his knife. He said if we’d been near a river the hanger would have made perfect fishing hooks and we could be having smoked trout for our dinner. Every evening I lit a fire with his flint and steel, which he always kept with him—flashing the sparks onto the char-cloth, then transferring it to the dry tinder we had gathered.
“Never waste a match when you can light a fire with flint and steel,” he said.
After we had eaten and I had brushed my teeth, we sat on the log and my father told me stories about catching animals and living wild.
“Long ago, in a land called Hampshire,” he said, “there was a family who lived together in die Hütte. They survived off the land and no one ever told them what to do.”
“What’s a Hütte?” I asked.
“A magical, secret place in the forest,” my father said with a catch in his voice. “Our very own little cabin, with wooden walls, and wooden floors, and wooden shutters at the windows.” His voice was deep and smooth; it lulled me. “Outside, we can pick sweet berries all year round; chanterelles spread like yellow rugs under the trees; and in the bottom of a valley there’s a river, a beautiful swirling Fluss overflowing with silvery fish, so when we’re hungry and need supper, we can just dip our hands in and pull three out.
“One for each of us,” he said as I leaned against him. “You, me, and Mutti.”
“Does she like fish?”
“I think so. You can ask her soon.”
“When she gets home from Germany.” I was almost asleep.
“In two weeks and three days exactly.” He sounded happy.
“That’s not long, is it?”
“No, not long until we have Mutti back.”
“What else about the Hütte, Papa?” I didn’t want the conversation to end.
“Inside there’s a stove to keep us warm on long winter nights and a piano for Mutti to play.”