Each day on the parched moor, men continued to bend and straighten in regular rhythm. Spades reflected sunlight. Green sprigs advanced along the dreels. The bundles of Sitka and pine in red flagged trenches steadily diminished in number. The ganger’s black notebook recorded progress and hatched areas, accurately dated, spread over the Commission map.
Morning, when squads were fresh, was the optimum planting time when more than two thirds of a day’s output was achieved. Around noon, but in their own time, each would take his lunch break alone, unless an intimate happened to be planting nearby in which event both would dine together.
Circumstances found two such basking in the sun while exercising their jaws on thick cut corned beef sandwiches washed down by thermos flask soup. Stretched out on the ground, they made an intriguing contrast: one slim, of fair complexion and medium height; the other iron-pumpingly deep chested, swarthy, tall. Day and night, Noel and Alex were.
The two had resigned themselves to remaining with the squad until late summer. Six weeks of the Torlundy saw course would ensure that come autumn they would be in the wood, paired with an old hand, often one of the gangers, in order to gain quick experience by felling deadfall that had hung up dangerously on adjacent trees. It was likely they would then be teamed with each other as a productive unit.
Each had arrived the previous year during the same week in September and had been assigned the newcomers bothy, as was customary. Billeted together, they had cursed lack of amenities, discomforts, backaches, and the parsimony of the Commission. But they stayed on through the winter, resolving to apply for the saw course and become fellers of trees, creators of lumber, forever abandoning the rat race in which Alex claimed to have featured as an accountant and Noel had been commissioned a gentleman by royal warrant of Her Majesty, licenced to kill by appointees of greater seniority.
A ‘tour’ in Afghanistan had persuaded the latter to immediately cease his contributions to American foreign policy (as a British officer), while the former, an amateur athlete (rugby, cricket and shot putt) asserted he had become revolted by the hypocrisies of a commercial world focused upon tax evasion and profiteering, hypocrisies that were now underscored by sounds of Noel’s night terrors, imported from Afghanistan. These were audible in Alex’ bedroom across the landing.