The Reading Party by Fenella Gentleman

Author:Fenella Gentleman [Fenella Gentleman]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781999811730
Publisher: Muswell Press
Published: 2018-08-17T16:00:00+00:00

Barnaby got his way about the bonfire. We built it after lunch once we’d inspected the remnants of an old construction betrayed by an ugly splot of darkness beyond the greenhouses. Blackened soil and grey ash, an acrid mix where it was still damp, defaced the turf; at the extremities the grass crept inwards, curling over the offence and a few charcoal-edged logs suggested what might have been. A row of tree stumps, lined up against the cold frames, waited to be arranged in a curve at a sensible distance. People must have sat around that spot before, staring into the flames – it was a tradition calling out to be revived.

Before we’d even begun gathering wood, Barnaby and Martin had reassembled the circle and were discussing how much heat was needed to bake a potato, forgetting we didn’t have any. Thoughts of eating by the fire would have stayed entirely hypothetical had it not been for the marshmallows I’d bought. The prospect of those little bags of rubberiness got me lots of brownie points. All we needed was a fire that would keep going into the evening; then, if the embers were still alight, we could toast them on sticks.

The problem was the dearth of raw material. There was some dead wood on the ground by the pines, not so much branches as gnarled excrescences that might have fallen under the own misshapen weight even without the wind. But mostly that area provided pickings we could only use as kindling: curling spindles of still-pliable twig, topped with a green pipe cleaner; curved sheddings of bark, like rusting cheese graters; and endless tight little cones, too small to collect one by one but big enough to be caught together in the wooden rake.

The real mass of the bonfire had to come from elsewhere. Tyler, Priyam and I explored the outhouses, the two of them deferring noisily to my supposed foraging instincts and swapping stories about where they’d gone as children to escape the city. In the stables we found rotten timber from what might have been an old shed, which Loxton agreed we could use; and there were neat piles of garden waste in the corridor between the greenhouses – trimmings from the shrubs and the area of hedge and so on. Still, we all had to work hard to assemble a good structure. Some of the students went down to the little beach in search of driftwood, returning with a few sizeable pieces washed naked and smooth by the sea. They’d looked for what would have been lying around for a while, they said, finding it mostly at the extremities, under the cliff edges. Anything recently thrown up was too waterlogged and heavy with sand to carry, let alone to burn.

By the time everyone had returned and added their contribution, the pile was nearly too high to see over the top. Eddie didn’t believe we would get it to catch, given that some of the wood was damp, and there was a brief debate about using firelighters to give it a kick-start, but the purists won.

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