Travellers by Richard Lowe & William Shaw

Author:Richard Lowe & William Shaw
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9789085241522
Publisher: For the Benefit of Mr. Kite
Published: 1992-12-31T16:00:00+00:00

SPUD

Spud doesn’t build the usual dome-shaped bender; just a long thin shape that looks like a big armadillo. To get in you peel back the tarps. Inside you can see the intricate turns of the hazel poles, and the hessian insulation between the wood and the plastic tarps, which seem to be the only items Spud uses which have come from the twentieth century. Inside there’s a bed beside which lie three books. The top one is about spiritual healing.

The bed takes up half the space of the bender; the rest is the living area. Under the rugs there are floorboards, and under them, stone. At the far end there’s a box of cooking pans, a box of vegetables and a tiny stove for cooking on. When he puts the stove on he has to leave the door open. Normally, he says, even in the middle of winter, all he needs to heat up this tiny space is the warmth of two candles. He doesn’t have a radio.

The bender’s been up over a year, but he left it in the summer and travelled to Scotland where friends live on a site on the Kyle of Lochalsh.

He gave up drinking a while ago, and not so long back smoking too.

The bender’s on its own, a distance away from the travellers’ buses parked on the Cornish cliffs, but though Spud likes his privacy, everyone seems to get on with him. He lopes around the site, helping to push cars when needed, or putting an escaped horse back into afield.

It’s been misty here for three days now. Every minute or so, you can hear the foghorn a mile away at Pendeen booming mournfully, warning ships off the rocks, day and night. Spud says he doesn ‘t even notice it any longer. In the brown light in his bender, he talks a lot about why he does things, and then stops himself and grins sheepishly. ‘God, I sound like a bloody saint, don’t I?’

♦

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