Stig of the Dump Page 3

  By the time Barney had got his load to the edge of the pit he was quite tired, but there was still the problem of getting them to the bottom. He sat on the camel’s-neck tree-trunk. The string was still there. It was the thick brown sort, and he thought it would be strong enough for a few jam-jars.

  He called to Stig, and after a time Stig came out backwards, like a badger with its bedding, dragging a load of chalk.

  ‘I’ve got some things for you, Stig!’ Barney called. He pulled up the string and took the end to the pile of jam-jars. About eight of them were packed in a cardboard box. It would take too long to pass them down one by one, so he tied the string round the box, took it carefully along the tree-trunk, and started to lower it. This wasn’t nearly as easy as the carrots. The box swung wildly, the string round it started slipping, the part he was holding tried to run through his fingers and burned his hands. He took a turn round the stump of a branch and let it run out round that, hardly daring to look down and see what was happening. He hoped Stig wouldn’t get a jam-jar on his head.

  The box was hanging by one corner when it reached the ground, but instead of untying it Stig disappeared into his den.

  ‘Hey! Stig! Undo it!’ Barney called. ‘There’s some more to come.’

  Stig came out again holding what was left of a large broad-brimmed lady’s straw hat, with ribbons to tie it under the chin. He untied the string from the box and tied it to the ribbons. It made quite a useful-looking cargo-sling.

  ‘Jolly good idea, Stig!’ Barney shouted. Stig’s got brains, he thought.

  After that it was quite easy. He hauled up the hat, filled it with jam-jars, lowered it down with the string running round the stump of branch, waited for Stig to unload, hauled it up again, and so on. When he had finished the jam-jars he started on the tins, which were much lighter. And when he had lowered all the tins he looked at the truck.

  How strong is string? he wondered. Could he send the truck down the same way? If he didn’t he would have to trundle it all the way round the top and along the bottom of the pit.

  He wound the string a few times round the branch-stump, leaving enough loose to reach the truck on the cliff-top, humped himself along the tree-trunk, tied the string to a wheel of the truck, moved back along the trunk, and pulled the truck towards him by the string. The truck lurched over the edge of the cliff, swung wildly outwards on the string, which ran out so fast that he couldn’t stop it – until a tangle in the string made it stop with a jerk, the string broke, and the truck was falling through the air.

  Barney held on for dear life to the tree, with his face against the mossy bark, and shut his eyes. He felt weak and dizzy.

  At last he allowed himself to look down. He couldn’t see the truck at first. Then he saw that it had swung out to land in the branches of an elder tree, and was hanging there quite happily.

  ‘I’ve sent the truck down,’ he called to Stig. ‘It may come in useful.’

  He was still feeling what his Grandmother used to call hot-and-cold-all-over, but he carefully inched himself off the tree and on to firm ground, and set off round and down to the pit. A pity he couldn’t let himself down on a rope – but no, he thought, he wouldn’t try just yet.

  His idea of sending the things down on the string had been a good one though, he thought to himself as he walked through the copse. Another day he’d have to find some more tins and jam-jars to send down. He hoped Stig liked them. They would come in useful for – for – well, things like that always came in useful. If you kept them long enough.

  By the time he got to the den, Stig had untangled the truck from the tree, and was squatting looking at it, and at the tins and jamjars. And then Barney wondered what they were going to do with them.

  ‘These are jam-jars, Stig,’ he explained. ‘Jam and marmalade come in them, and you can use them for keeping stuff in them – rice and coffee and things like that.’ But did Stig want to keep rice and coffee in his den? ‘And these are tins. They’re empty of course, but you get all sorts of things in tins. Peaches and baked beans. You have to open them with an opener like this.’

  He took out of his pocket a tin-opener which he usually carried about with him. It was the sort with a butterfly handle which you had to turn. Just to show, he fitted it on to the bottom of one of the empty tins and twisted the handle. The opener crept round the edge of the tin, the blade ploughed into the metal at the bottom, and soon the shiny round disc of metal came loose.

  Stig was fascinated. He looked at the flat round piece of tin which had been the bottom, he looked at the empty tube which was all that was left of the rest of it. And he took the tin-opener from Barney and turned the handle, but he couldn’t make it out.

  ‘It’s quite easy, Stig. Look!’ and Barney took another tin, fitted the opener on the bottom, and showed him how to work it. And there was another round plate and another tin tube. Then Stig had to have a go, and they started on a third.

  One of the tins had been rather flattened, but it gave Barney an idea for how it might be used. He took it, left Stig with the others, and towed the truck into the den and along to the place where Stig had been digging at the chalk. There was quite a lot of loose rubble lying about there, and Barney set to work to shovel it into the truck with the flattened tin. It was certainly better than using his hands, though it wasn’t quite the right sort of shovel-shape yet. He hammered at it with an unbroken flint-stone and made it into quite a handy scoop, like the sort the village grocer used for shovelling sugar into little paper bags.

  He toiled away until the truck was heaped full. It held much more chalk than the tin bath, and because of its wheels he could pull it away quite easily.

  ‘Look, Stig!’ he said as he went past where Stig was sitting. ‘Look at all the chalk I’ve loaded.’ But Stig seemed too busy to notice.

  Barney wheeled the truck along to the place where they were now dumping the chalk, and tipped out his load. Then he ran back to the den, with the truck bouncing along empty behind him. When he got back, Stig was sitting there surrounded by round plates of tin and empty tubes, and just in the act of taking the bottom out of the last tin.

  ‘Stig, what are you doing?’ exclaimed Barney. ‘You’ve spoiled all the tins now! You can’t keep things in tins with no bottoms!’ He was really quite annoyed. What was the use of a lot of tin tubes with no ends?

  Stig sat there playing with them. He seemed to have the idea of fitting one inside the other, but that wouldn’t work because they were all exactly the same size. However, one of them that had got a bit pinched did fit into another, which seemed to please him a lot.

  Barney thought it was a bit childish of Stig to sit there playing, like a baby with plastic bricks, when there was all that work to be done. But Stig went on seriously worrying over the problem of fitting them together. He found that by pinching together the end of a tin he could make it fit into the next one, and soon he had four or five fitted together like a length of stove-pipe.

  Stove-pipe! Barney knew there was something Stig needed badly.

  ‘You are clever, Stig!’ he said. ‘You’ve made a chimney!’

  Stig looked blank. He didn’t know he needed a chimney. He didn’t know what a chimney was. Certainly he’d made one, but if it hadn’t been for Barney he wouldn’t have known.

  Working together, they fitted all the tins one into the other until they had a pipe that was taller than either of them. With Barney directing, they carried it into the smoky den, where it was too long to stand upright.

  ‘Now all we’ve got to do is poke it through the roof,’ said Barney. Stig looked doubtfully at him, but together they managed quite easily to push it through a crack between the piece of

  linoleum and a sheet of corrugated iron. But now what? They couldn’t just leave it hanging above the fire.

  ‘I know!’ exclaimed Barney. ‘The bath!’ He left Stig patiently holding the chimney, and went and fetched the tin bath. What luck! It had a rusty hole in the bottom which only needed a
little work with the boot-scraper to make it big enough to fit the chimney through. Stig was dimly beginning to see what Barney was trying to do. Together they built up a fireplace of chalk-blocks and big flints, rested the bath upside down on top – and there was mantelpiece and chimney, with the flue leading from the hole in the upturned bath, through the roof, and into the open air.

  Barney lit the fire – which Stig had laid as they built the fireplace – and threw some additional scraps of paper and twigs on to it. Once the smoke had learnt its way it went roaring up the pipe. They rushed outside and there it was coming out of what looked like a proper chimney-pot sticking through the roof. Stig watched, fascinated.

  ‘There you are, Stig,’ said Barney. ‘Now you’ve got a proper fireplace people can come and visit you without getting their eyes full of smoke.’ Actually Stig didn’t seem to care very much about having the place full of smoke, but he was as pleased with his fireplace as if it had been a new toy, and kept on putting twigs and leaves on the fire so that he could go out and see the smoke coming out the other end. And Barney was so proud of his invention that he looked round for something else to invent.

  He saw the stack of jam-jars. What had he brought those for? It would be too dull just to use them to keep food in. Stig’s den wasn’t that sort of place. He had to think of a new way of using jam-jars.

  What had he thought Stig’s house needed most? A chimney – he’d got that now. A chimney and – yes, a window! A window.

  Well, windows were made of glass, and so were jam-jars. Yes, but the shape! Doors were made of wood and so were clothes-pegs; ships were made of steel and so were tin-openers. But you can’t make a ship out of tin-openers or a door out of clothes-pegs. The shape’s wrong.

  You couldn’t hammer glass flat, could you? He picked up the boot-scraper. No, of course not.

  Stig had stacked the jars on top of each other, lying on their sides. They made a sort of wall of glass like that. But they rolled about, and of course there were gaps between the jars.

  Barney looked at one side of the den, the darkest side, which really needed windows. It was built of wooden boxes from the dump, bottoms outward, open tops inward. He took the digging-tool and knocked the bottom out of one. There was now an open square where the daylight came in. But so did the wind, and Stig didn’t seem at all pleased at sitting in a draught.

  Stigs like to be snug, thought Barney.

  He carried the jars in and stacked them in the frame of the box. They fitted quite well, the light came in, but the draught came in too.

  Stig got up and looked at the gaps between the jars, grunted, and went out of the den. Barney followed him, wondering. Stig led the way along the bottom of the cliff to where there had lately been a landslide and quite a large chunk of cliff-top had come down in one piece. Between the topsoil and the chalk there was a layer of red clay, good damp squidgy stuff you could make model animals with. Stig began to dig out lumps of clay with his fingers, and Barney found another good clay-mine and did the same. They got as much as they could carry and took it back to the den, and from the outside Stig set to work to fill in the gaps between the jam-jars. They had to make two more journeys before all the jars were firmly bedded in clay, and then Barney carefully wiped the smears off the bottoms of the jars with a rag.

  Then they stood and admired their window. They even made faces at each other, one standing inside and the other outside, because you could almost see through it. It certainly let the light in, even though it was late in the afternoon and there was not much light to let in.

  ‘Well, well,’ said Barney. ‘That’s that!’ It was a thing he had often heard his Grandfather say when he’d finished a job.

  He was tired after all the inventing he had done. He went to sit down, and then he saw all the round plates of tin that Stig had cut out, lying around on the floor. He gathered them up. There must be a use for these, too. He went back to the window, and found that the discs fitted exactly over the ends of the jars if he pressed them into the soft clay. There were just enough to go round.

  ‘There you are, Stig,’ he said. ‘Like on a ship, to shut the port-holes. If you don’t want people to look in. Or to shut the dark out.’

  There was a feeling in the evening air that darkness was coming and that it would be snug to sit by the new fireplace and watch the fire going up the chimney. But Barney suddenly remembered something and stood up with his mouth open.

  ‘Stig,’ he said. ‘I’ve got to go home. All the way home I mean. I probably won’t be staying with Granny till Christmas.’

  Stig looked at him.

  ‘Stig,’ said Barney ‘When I come back again, you – you will still be here, won’t you?’

  Stig didn’t answer, but he went to a little niche in the chalk wall, poked about among some things there and brought back something which he gave to Barney. He looked at it. It was a little chipped flint, perfectly shaped like a flat Christmas-tree, and very sharp.

  ‘An arrow-head?’ Barney gasped. ‘For me? Oh, thank you Stig! I – I really must go now. See you at Christmas. You will be here at Christmas, won’t you, Stig? Good-bye!’ And he ran off.

  As he made his way along the bottom of the pit he felt he knew the way there better than anywhere else in the world. And he felt that Stig’s house was as much his home as anywhere else. After all, it was like drawing pictures. Once you’ve put a chimney and a window on a house, you’ve really made a house.

  Chapter Three

  It Warms You Twice

  Christmas was over at Grandmother’s house. The old oak beams were still decorated with trails of ivy and there were still branches of holly stuck in the tops of picture-frames. The last turkey-bone had been picked, the last thimble found in the pudding. They had even got a good way round the Christmas cake. They had been to a circus.

  Barney lay in bed in the grey morning light. For once he was not in a hurry to jump out of bed. The air in the bedroom felt icy to the end of his nose. ‘Let me see,’ thought, ‘is there anything special to look forward to today?’ He couldn’t think of anything.

  He was looking at the thick black beam in the wall that grew out of the floor right up to the ceiling. It had been part of a ship before it was part of the house, Grandfather said. It had deep holes cut out of it where other bits of timber had fitted into it. What was that hidden in one of the holes?

  Barney sat up in bed suddenly. It was the flint! Stig’s flint, left there since last time he had come to stay. And he hadn’t even thought about Stig all over Christmas.

  He got out of bed and looked out of the window. There was white frost on the grass. A few hopeful birds hung about the bird table, fluffed up like woolly balls, waiting for some food to be put out for them. He reached up and took out the flint. It was like a lump of ice.

  I wonder what it’s like living in a cave these days, thought Barney. Poor Stig! He must be cold.

  After breakfast Barney slipped out of the house and went off to the pit. In the copse the frozen leaves crunched like cornflakes under his feet. He climbed down into the pit on the far side, where the cliff was lowest, and it hurt his fingers to hold on to the icy tree roots. The nettles were all dead in the bottom of the pit and the old cans had lumps of solid ice in them.

  There was no sign of life in the shelter, though he noticed the ashes of a small dead fire and a faint smell of wood-smoke still hung around. But at the back of the cave was a kind of nest made of bracken and dead grass and newspaper. He thought he heard breathing sounds coming out of it.

  ‘Stig!’ Barney called. Nothing happened. I wonder if he’s like a dormouse, he thought, and goes to sleep all the winter.

  He called again. ‘Stig! Are you there?’

  There was a rustle in the nest, and a mop of black hair poked up out of it. Underneath it was Stig’s face, but it was screwed up in a very strange expression.

  Is he cross? wondered Barney anxiously.

  His eyes still screwed up and his mouth shut, Stig took a deep
breath.

  Then he sneezed. It was a sneeze like a cannon going off, and it made the cave echo.

  ‘You did give me a fright!’ said Barney. ‘You’ve got a cold, Stig. No wonder, when you live in this damp place. You need a good fire.’

  He looked around the shelter and the cave. There didn’t seem to be any wood to burn. Stig’s heavy flint axe was leaning against the wall and Barney picked it up, but he saw that the edge was crumbled and blunt.

  ‘You’ll have to sharpen this,’ said Barney.

  Stig crawled out of his nest, blinking stupidly. He moved as if his joints were rusty and he did not take the axe as Barney held it out to him.

  ‘All right, I’ll do it then,’ said Barney. ‘I expect it’s quite easy.’ He sat down with the axe between his knees and picked up a heavy iron bolt and tried to remember how he had seen Stig chip the flint. But it was painful holding the cold flint and the cold iron and his fingers were so clumsy that they would not do what he wanted them to.

  ‘Oh, never mind,’ said Barney. ‘Come on, we’ve got to get some wood.’ He stood up with the axe and went out of the shelter. Stig followed, half awake, half frozen, and silent. They climbed up out of the pit and looked around the copse for wood to cut. Barney could see now that someone, probably Stig, had already been chopping and breaking down the dry branches. He chose a fairly thin thorn tree and set to work on it.