Mackie stretched out a hand and squeezed her husband's in grat.i.tude, the underlying joy resurfacing, as persistent as pregnancy itself. Perhaps Angela Brickell too, I speculated, had been delighted to be needing her test. Who could tell?'

Gareth gusted in full of plans for an expedition I'd forgotten about, a fact he unerringly read on my face.

'But you said you would teach us things, and we could light a fire.' His voice rose high with disappointment. 'Um,' I said. 'Ask your father.'

Tremayne listened to Gareth's request for a patch of land for a camp fire and raised his eyebrows my way. 'Do you really want to bother with all this?' 'Actually, I suggested it, in a rash moment.'

Gareth nodded vigorously. 'Coconut's coming at ten.' Mackie said, 'Fiona asked us to go down in the morning to toast Chickweed and cheer Harry up.' 'But John promised,' Gareth said anxiously. Mackie smiled at him indulgently. 'I'll make John's excuses.

Sunday morning crept in greyly on a near-freezing drizzle, enough to test the spirits of all would-be survivors. Tremayne, drinking coffee in the kitchen with the lights on at nine-thirty, suggested scrubbing the whole idea. His son would vehemently have none of it. They compromised on a promise from me to bring everyone home at the first sneeze, and Coconut arrived on his bicycle in brilliant yellow oilskins with a grin to match.

It was easy to see how he'd got his name. He stood in the kitchen dripping and pulled off a sou'wester to reveal a wiry tuft of light brown hair sticking straight up from the top of his head. (It would never lie down properly, Gareth later explained.)

Coconut was nearly fifteen. Below the top-knot he had bright intelligent eyes, a big nose and a sloppy loose-lipped mouth, as if his face hadn't yet synthesised with his emerging character. Give him a year, I thought, maybe two, then the sh.e.l.l would firm to define the man.

'There's a bit of wasteland at the top of the apple orchard,' Tremayne said. 'You can have that.'

'But, Dad-' Gareth began, raising objections.

'It sounds fine,' I said firmly. 'Survivors can't choose.'

Tremayne looked at me and then at Gareth thoughtfully and nodded as if to confirm a private thought.

'But February's a bad month for food,' I said, 'and I suppose we'd better not steal a pheasant, so we'll cheat a bit and take some bacon with us. Bring gloves and a penknife each. We'll go in ten minutes.'

The boys scurried to collect waterproofs for Gareth, and Tremayne asked what exactly I planned to do with them.

'Build a shelter,' I said. 'Light a fire, gather some lunch and cook it. That'll be enough, I should think. Everything takes forever when you start with nothing.' 'Teach them they're lucky.' 'Mm.'

He came to the door to see off the intrepid expedition, all of us unequipped except for the survival kit (with added bacon) that I wore round my waist and the penknives in their pockets. The cold drizzle fell relentlessly but no one seemed to mind. I waved briefly to Tremayne and went where Gareth led; which was through a gate in a wall, through a patch of long-deserted garden, through another gate and up a slow gradient through about fifty bare-branched apple trees, fetching up on a small bedraggled plateau roughly fenced with ruined dry-stone walling on one side and a few trees in the remains of a hawthorn hedge full of gaps round the rest. Beyond that untidy boundary lay neat prosperous open acres of winter ploughing, the domain of the farmer next door.

Gareth looked at our terrain disgustedly and even Coconut was dismayed, but I thought Tremayne had chosen pretty well, on the whole. Whatever we did, we couldn't make things worse.

'First of all,' I said, 'we build a shelter for the fire.' 'Nothing will burn in this rain,' Gareth said critically. 'Perhaps we'd better go back indoors, then.' They stared in faint shock. 'No,' Gareth said.

'Right.' I brought the basic survival tin out of my pocket and gave him the coil of flexible saw. 'We pa.s.sed at least four dead apple trees on the way up here. Slide a couple of sticks through the loops at the ends of this saw, and you and Coconut go and cut down one of those dead trees and bring it up here. Cut it as near the ground as you can manage.'

It took them roughly three seconds to bounce off with renewed enthusiasm, and I wandered round the decrepit piece of what Tremayne had truly described as wasteland, seeing everywhere possibilities of a satisfactory camp. The whole place, for instance, was pale brown with the dead stalks of last year's unmown gra.s.s; an absolute gift.

By the time the boys returned, puffing, red-faced and dragging the results of their exertions, I'd wrenched out a few rusty old metal fence posts, cut a lot of living hawthorn switches from the hedge and harvested a pile of the dead gra.s.s stalks from a patch near the last row of apple trees. We made a short trip down to the deserted garden to reap a patch of old stinging nettles for bindings, and about an hour after setting off were admiring a free-standing four-foot-square shelter made of a metal frame with a slightly sloping roof of closely latticed hawthorn switches thickly thatched on top with endless piled-on bundles of dried gra.s.s. While we watched, the drizzle trickled down the top layer of brownish stalks and dripped off to one side, leaving a small rain-free area underneath.

After that, by themselves, the boys made a simple square frame lashed with thickly criss-crossed hawthorn which we could lean against any one side of the fire shelter to prevent the rain from blowing straight in. Gareth understood without being told and explained it to Coconut matter-of-factly.

'OK,' I said. 'Next, we find some flat dry stones from that broken-down wall to make a floor for the fire. Don't bring very wet stones, they can explode when they get hot. Then we go around looking for anything very small and dry that will burn. Dead leaves. Bits of fluff caught on fences. Anything inside that wrecked old greenhouse in the garden. When you find something, keep it dry in your pockets. When we've got enough tinder, we'll feather some kindling sticks. We also need enough dry wood, if you can find any. And bring any old cowpats you come across: they burn like peat.'

After another hour's labour we had stacked under the fire shelter the remains of an old cuc.u.mber frame from the greenhouse and enough dry tinder to take kindly to a flame. Then, working with my hands under the shelter, I showed them how to strip the bark off a wet stick and make shallow lengthwise cuts in the dry dead wood underneath so that fine shavings curled outwards and the stick looked feathered all over. They each made one with their knives: Gareth quick and neat, Coconut all thumbs.

Finally with a match, a piece of candle, the tinder of dead leaves and flower heads, the feather kindling sticks, the cuc.u.mber frame and a good deal of luck (but no cowpats) a bright little fire burned healthily against the drizzly odds and Gareth and Coconut looked as if the sun had risen where they didn't expect it.

The smoke curled up and out over the edges of the thatched roofing. I remarked that if we'd had to live there for months we could hang spare meat and fish under the roof to smoke it. Apple wood made sweet smoke. Oak would smoke some meats better.

'We couldn't live out here for months.' Coconut couldn't imagine it.

'It wasn't always sunny in Sherwood Forest,' I said. We snapped all the smaller twigs off the felled apple tree and added them gradually to the blaze, then made the beginnings of a human-sized shelter by wedging the dead tree as a roof and rear wall between two live trees, bringing more hawthorn to weave through the branches, heaping onto the top and rear surface any boughs, dead plants and turves we could cut and thickly laying a floor below of gra.s.s stalks, the nearest thing to straw. Apart from a few drips, we were out of the rain.

Lunch, when we finally ate it after a long forage, consisted mainly of finds from the old garden: some tubers of wild parsley, comfrey and Jerusalem artichoke, a handful of very small Brussels sprouts (ugh, Gareth said) and a rather bitter green leaf salad of plantain, dock and dandelion (double ugh). Never eat poisonous b.u.t.tercups, I said, be grateful for dandelions. Coconut flatly refused to contemplate worms, the only things plentiful. Both boys fell on the bacon, threaded and grilled on sharpened peeled sticks, and such was their hunger that they afterwards chewed for ages on strips of the inner sweet bark of a young birch tree that was struggling away in the hedge. Birch bark was good nourishing food, I said. Gareth said they would take my word for it.

We drank rather sc.u.mmy rainwater found in an old watering can and boiled in a c.o.ke can that Gareth collected from the Sh.e.l.lerton House dustbin. They declined my offer to make coffee from roast dandelion root. Next time they went camping they would take tea bags, they said.

We were sitting in the shelter, the fire burning red with embers on its stone base a few feet away, the drizzle almost a permanence, the odd foods eaten, the end of the experiment not far ahead.

'How about staying out here all night?' I asked.

They both looked horrified.

'You'd survive,' I said, 'with shelter and a fire.'

'It would be miserable,' Gareth said. 'It's freezing cold.'

'Yes.'

There was a pause, then Gareth added, 'Survival isn't really much fun, is it?'

'Often not,' I agreed. 'Just a matter of life or death.'

'If we were outlaws in Sherwood Forest,' he said, 'the Sheriffs men would be hunting us.'

'Nasty.'

Coconut involuntarily looked around for enemies, shivering at the thought.

'We can't stay out all night. We have to go to school tomorrow,' he said.

The relief on both their faces was comical, and I thought that perhaps for a second or two they'd had a vision of a much older, more brutal world where every tomorrow was a struggle, where hunger and cold were normal and danger ever present and cruel. A primitive world, far back from Robin Hood, back from the Druids who'd walked the ancient Berksire Downs, back where laws hadn't been invented or rights thought of, back before organisation, before tribes, before ritual, before duty. Back where the strong ate and the weak died, the bedrock and everlasting design of nature.

When a dark shade of iron seeped into the slate-grey light, we pulled the fire to pieces and dowsed the hot ends in wet gra.s.s. Then we stacked the remaining pile of apple wood neatly under the fire's roofing and started for home, carrying as little away as we'd brought.

Gareth looked back at the intertwined tree shelter and the dead fireplace and seemed for a moment wistful, but it was with leaps and whoops that he and Coconut ran down from there to re-embrace the familiar constraints of civilisation.

'G.o.d,' Gareth said, barging in through the back door, 'lead me to a pizza. To two pizzas, maybe three.'

Laughing, I peeled off my long-suffering ski-suit and left them to it in the kitchen, heading myself for warmth in the family room; and there I found a whole bunch of depressed souls sprawling in armchairs contemplating a different sort of disastrous tomorrow where food was no problem but danger abounded.

Harry, Fiona, Nolan, Lewis, Perkin, Mackie and Tremayne, all silent, as if everything useful had been said already. Tight-knit, interlocked, they looked at me vaguely, at the stranger within their gates, the unexpected character in their play.

'Ah- John,' Tremayne said, stirring, remembering, 'are both boys still living?'

'More or less.'