I Shall Wear Midnight

AUTHOR’S NOTE

My job is to make things up, and the best way to make things up is to make them out of real things …

When I was a small boy, just after the last Ice Age, we lived in a cottage that Tiffany Aching would recognize: we had cold water, no electricity, and took a bath once a week, because the tin bath had to be brought in from its nail, which was outside on the back of the kitchen wall; and it took a long time to fill it, when all my mother had to heat water with was one kettle. Then I, as the youngest, had the first bath, followed by Mum and then Dad, and finally the dog if Dad thought it was getting a bit niffy.

There were old men in the village who had been born in the Jurassic period and looked, to me, all the same, with flat caps and serious trousers held up with very thick leather belts. One of them was called Mr Allen, who wouldn’t drink water from a tap because, he said, ‘It’s got neither taste nor smell.’ He drank water from the roof of his house, which fed a rain barrel.

Presumably he drank more than rainwater, because he had a nose that looked like two strawberries that had crashed into one another.[31]

Mr Allen used to sit out in the sun in front of his cottage on an old kitchen chair, watching the world go by, and we kids used to watch his nose, in case it exploded. One day I was chatting to him, and out of the blue he said to me, ‘You seen stubbles burning, boy?’

I certainly had: not near our home, but when we drove down to the coast on holiday, though sometimes the smoke from the burning stubbles was so thick that it looked like a fog. The stubbles were what was left in the ground after most of the corn stems had been cut. The burning was said to be good for getting rid of pests and diseases, but the process meant lots of small birds and animals were burned. The practice has long since been banned, for that very reason.

One day, when the harvest wagon went down our lane, Mr Allen said to me, ‘You ever seen a hare, boy?’

I said, ‘Yes, of course.’ (If you haven’t seen a hare, then imagine a rabbit crossed with a greyhound, one that can leap magnificently.) Mr Allen said, ‘The hare ain’t afraid of fire. She stares it down, and jumps over it, and lands safe on the other side.’

I must have been about six or seven years old, but I remembered it, because Mr Allen died not long afterwards. Then when I was much older, I found in a second-hand bookshop a book called The Leaping Hare written by George Ewart Evans and David Thomson, and I learned things that I would not have dared to make up.

Mr Evans, who died in 1988, spoke — during his long life — to the men who worked on the land: not from the cab of a tractor, but with horses, and they saw the wildlife around them. I suspect that maybe they had put a little bit of a shine on the things they told him, but everything is all the better for a little bit of shine, and I have not hesitated to polish up the legend of the hare for you. If it is not the truth, then it is what the truth ought to be.

I dedicate this book to Mr Evans, a wonderful man who helped many of us of us to learn about the depths of history over which we float. It is important that we know where we come from, because if you do not know where you come from, then you don’t know where you are, and if you don’t know where you are, then you don’t know where you’re going. And if you don’t know where you’re going, you’re probably going wrong.

Terry Pratchett

Wiltshire

27 May 2010