9: Barley Warning
A
shudder
seemed to pass across the land. As each warm day was followed by a night of gentle rain, making green the stalks and full the ears of barley, it was as though a new life, a realisation, an awareness came into the hearts of the crops, so that on every hillside and in every unwooded valley, the barley stirred and whispered, anxious for what was soon to come, the fulfilment.
And the dark folk of all the chalk hills, wherever they were, heard this living whisper, through their ears and their mouths, in the palms of their flint-scarred hands and across the hard soles of their feet. And most of all they heard it and felt its shuddering, this life, in the deep pit of the belly; and they did not know whether to laugh for joy, or to hide away in darkness for what mig
