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Back Wild Harbour Save as PDF
Chapters (23)
  1. Cover
  2. WILD HARBOUR
  3. Introduction
  4. 15 MAY 1944
  5. 21 MAY
  6. 28 MAY
  7. 10 JUNE
  8. 22 JUNE
  9. 5 JULY
  10. 10 JULY
  11. 24 JULY
  12. 16 AUGUST
  13. 4 SEPTEMBER
  14. 16 SEPTEMBER
  15. 1 OCTOBER
  16. 2 OCTOBER
  17. 5 OCTOBER
  18. 9 OCTOBER
  19. 10 OCTOBER
  20. 11 OCTOBER
  21. NIGHT
  22. About the Author
  23. Copyright

Before night we knew all our store. It seemed a very haphazard collection; we had not reckoned how long we expected to live in the hills, nor suited our purchases to each other so that our necessities would last the same length of time. We were too tired to think. Terry took a sharp stone and scratched on the inner wall of the cave—

April 7, 1944,
and behind the figures she scratched a deep

I

‘What’s that for?’ I wanted to know.

‘To keep track of the days, We’ll make a mark for each day.’

Then we slept again.

21 MAY

WE DO NOT intend this account of our life in hiding to be a strict diary. Days have occurred since we reached here whose passing requires no fuller commemoration than the mark Terry draws every morning on the rock wall of our home. Doubtless many more such days will come to us. Moreover days and hours and the conventional units of time are becoming meaningless. Time is no longer the inflexible system of equal spaces that it was while we lived with our fellows.

For two days after we reached the cave we were spent. We wakened to make food. We slept when we had eaten; like swimmers who have barely escaped with their lives and lie on the shore of the flood that almost swept them away and do not care whether the waters against which they struggled in despair now drag them back, we were overcome with lassitude of mind and body. Freedom, hard-won, tasted stale in our mouths. We savoured nothing, neither our success nor food nor sleep. The dreary waste on which we looked, when we troubled to go to the open air, assumed a hateful aspect.

We revived gradually and painfully. In our hurry to be gone from our house we had had no time to reflect. We were driven by goads whose wounds, scarcely felt when they were inflicted, rankled and festered in these hopeless hours. War and our harsh necessity, the fate of the world, vexed our thoughts and planted venom in our minds.

A very simple emotion finally ousted our discontents. We commenced to be ravenously hungry. No meal satisfied us long. Hunger wakened us when without it we would have slept and dozed out entire days. On the morning of the third day Terry said:

‘We have only enough meat for one other meal, Hugh.’

‘Fry it for breakfast,’ I bade her. ‘Oh, I’m stiff and sore. There’s a rock here we must do something about. It gets me right in the small of the back.’

‘But that leaves us nothing for dinner,’ she protested.

‘I’ll get something,’ I answered.

‘But it’s broad daylight.’

‘I don’t care. I’m too hungry to care.’