Being one of the boys
‘Everything degenerates into habit – nausea, vanity, everything. For a year after I began drinking beer, I couldn’t stand the taste of it. All I was getting was the satisfaction of being one of the...
Category: John Christopher
Effect of high-altitude living
‘Extraordinarily rosy-cheeked, that girl.’ ‘Effect of high-altitude living,’ David said. ‘She comes from some tiny village up in the Italian Alps. You get that sort of thing above the fifteen hundred metre level. The small...
Brilliant skies
It was difficult to tell, looking back, how good a summer that had been. The records gave a statistical answer – at Kew, the century’s fourth best for dryness, the third best in hours of...
The winter begins
The light was poor, the bulbs glowing dully on the inadequate voltage. He ruffled the pages back awkwardly, peering at dates and headlines – back through the early days of scientific reports, dubious prognostications, tucked...
A stranger in that fair country
They walked across the park, and Isaak spoke of youthful excursions to the Plänterwald. It was his intention, without being too obvious, to point the contrast. Then, that broad and formal beauty under wide blue...
One foot in front of another
Billy was awake, but delirious again. His skin seemed to be hotter even than it had been earlier. Matthew realized he could not leave him here – it was essential, anyway, to get him to...
A penalty for sacrilege
He found it quite easily: the hermit’s body was a marker. He saw that first, but on coming closer realized there were two bodies. They lay together, the hermit’s fingers clenched round the other’s throat,...
In the ruins of a bed
The things one found, though, were less and less valuable with time and exposure to the elements. Blankets, with a Harrods label, but damp and musty, growing some kind of fungus in the folds. If...
For a few years, and then the recollection of it
He turned from her, from the accusation, from the experience of pain and ugliness, to the sea of the past. There had been rain in the night, he remembered – he had heard it beating...
The first heaven and the first earth were passed away
He also insisted on putting food in their packs, entirely stripping his shelf. When Matthew demurred, he said: ‘The earth is the Lord’s, and the fulness thereof. And I can get plenty more, friend. There...