Where Bones Dance: An English Girlhood, An African War

Magnifying Glass

205 Magnifying glass I take my magnifying glass up the mountain. The train is small and full of women in pale dresses with huge arms and legs, and men with great round bellies and veiny noses, and children with skinny white legs. At the top, which isn’t really the top, we walk until we can’t see many people but we don’t walk very far because of Granny. “How about here?” says my father and he puts down the basket . I put down the rug and keep walking. My feet follow rabbits’ paths through the heather. Their hard round droppings are warm from the sun. They smell sweet. I put my cheek on the ground and look through the stalks of the heather. If I were as small as a mouse, it would be a jungle. A bumblebee grips a stem of heather, pulling it down with his weight until it almost touches the ground. His sting is as long as a harpoon. He inches along the stem to the flower, tries to push his giant head inside the tiny bell and falls off the stem. I find a piece of newspaper and put it in my pocket. A big white rock stands out above the heather. I know which way north 206 is now because that’s the side the moss is growing on. The rock is quartz. When I look at the moss through my magnifying glass, it is another jungle and red spiders live in it. The leaves of this jungle are like giant ferns. I crumple the piece of newspaper and put it on the rock, then I hold the magnifying glass between the sun and the paper so it makes a hard spot of light. I hold it like that until the spot goes brown and then black, then the paper curls up on itself and begins to burn. I can’t see the flames in the sun but I can see the red rim around the hole getting wider. “Anna.” It’s my father’s voice. He has been calling for a while. I poke the ashes with a twig and they are all dead. I run back down the path, my feet landing perfectly, one in front of the other, in the narrow channel. The kettle is whistling on the primus. Everyone is sitting on the rug eating chicken legs. “What were you up to?” asks my father. “I made a fire how you showed me.” He gave me the magnifying glass. It is a good one, heavy glass with a metal band around it and a metal handle. “I made sure it was out,” I say, before my mother can open her mouth. “It works,” I say, “it really works.” My father smiles. I bite into a tomato and the seeds slide down my fingers and fall onto my leg. I lick them off. My leg is brown and salty. “That’s what I said when I made my first radio.” I stop eating. He never tells stories. “How old were you?” I ask because he isn’t saying anything. “I must have been about fourteen. It was the end of the war.” “How did you make a radio?” “You take a needle and run it over the surface of a slice of quartz crystal until you find the place where you can pick up a signal , and then you amplify it. That’s how the first radios were made.” “And you made one and it worked?” C y c l e 3 “I won first prize in a national competition for ham radio operators . I talked to people all over the country and in Europe too. I don’t suppose Ma and Pop saw me for more than breakfast and dinner from when I was fourteen till I went away to do my national service. I think about him in a dark room, bent over a crystal which glows a little, listening to the crackle of foreign voices. It is late at night. His face is very smooth and serious. Sometimes the signals are in code. Downstairs, Ma and Grandpop are sitting opposite each other. I can see the whole house like it is a doll’s house with one wall taken off. Grandpop is looking at Ma with his pale blue eyes. Upstairs in the dark my father isn’t looking at anything. His head is...