Red Sky at Sunrise: Cider with Rosie, As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning, A Moment of War by Laurie Lee

stars, linked but divided, they survived by a mutual balance. Both of them reached back similarly in time, shared the same modes and habits, the same sense of feudal order, the same rampaging terrible God. They were far more alike than unalike, and could not abide each other.
    They arranged things therefore so that they never met. They used separate paths when they climbed the bank, they shopped on different days, they relieved themselves in different areas, and staggered their church-going hours. But each one knew always what the other was up to, and passionately disapproved. Granny Wallon worked at her flowering vats, boiling and blending her wines; or crawled through her cabbages; or tapped on our windows, gossiped, complained, or sang. Granny Trill continued to rise in the dark, comb her waxen hair, sit out in the wood, chew, sniff, and suck up porridge, and study her almanac. Yet between them they sustained a mutual awareness based solely on ear and nostril. When Granny Wallon’s wines boiled, Granny Trill had convulsions; when Granny Trill took snuff, Granny Wallon had strictures – and neither let the other forget it. So all day they listened, sniffed, and pried, rapping on floors and ceilings, and prowled their rooms with hawking coughs, chivvying each other long-range. It was a tranquil, bitter-pleasant life, perfected by years of custom; and to me they both seemed everlasting, deathless crones of an eternal mythology; they had always been somewhere there in the wainscot and I could imagine no world without them.
    Then one day, as Granny Trill was clambering out of her wood, she stumbled and broke her hip. She went to bed then for ever. She lay patient and yellow in a calico coat, her combed hair fine as a girl’s. She accepted her doom without complaint, as though some giant authority – Squire, father, or God – had ordered her there to receive it.
    ‘I knowed it was coming,’ she told our Mother, ‘after that visitation. I saw it last week sitting at the foot of me bed. Some person in white; I dunno…’
    There was a sharp early rap on our window next morning. Granny Wallon was bobbing outside.
    ‘Did you hear him, missus?’ she asked knowingly. ‘He been a-screeching around since midnight.’ The death-bird was Granny Wallon’s private pet and messenger, and she gave a skip as she told us about him. ‘He called threc-a-four times. Up in them yews. Her’s going, you mark my words.’
    And that day indeed Granny Trill died, whose bones were too old to mend. Like a delicate pale bubble, blown a little higher and further than the other girls of her generation, she had floated just long enough for us to catch sight of her, had hovered for an instant before our eyes; and then had popped suddenly, and disappeared for ever, leaving nothing on the air but a faint-drying image and the tiniest cloud of snuff.
    The little church was packed for her funeral, for the old lady had been a landmark. They carried her coffin along the edge of the wood and then drew it on a cart through the village. Granny Wallon, dressed in a shower of jets, followed some distance behind; and during the service she kept to the back of the church and everybody admired her.
    All went well till the lowering of the coffin, when there was a sudden and distressing commotion. Granny Wallon, ribbons flying, her bonnet awry, fought her way to the side of the grave.
    ‘It’s a lie!’ she screeched, pointing down at the coffin.
    ‘That baggage were younger’n me! Ninety-five she says! – ain’t more’n ninety, an’ I gone on ninety-two! It’s a crime you letting ‘er go to ‘er Maker got up in such brazen lies! Dig up the old devil! Get ‘er brass plate off! It’s insulting the living church!…’
    They carried her away, struggling and crying, kicking out with her steel-sprung boots. Her cries grew fainter and were soon obliterated by the sounds of the grave-diggers’ spades. The clump of clay falling on Granny Trill’s coffin