Frank Baker Read online

  It is thus to this schoolmaster that we owe our present abode. Here I was born, and all my brothers and sisters, except Ivan. Twenty-five years ago from this house I was wedded to Thomas the woodcutter, who loved me well as I loved him. We left this house and began to farm our own land from the cottage in the Valley of Mallynth. Nine years later I returned here with my three boys, sad at heart, glad to find the peace of my father and mother. Thomas had been killed by a falling tree; my little girl, my first-born, had died of a fever. In this house I found comfort in the growing beauty of my boys and the wisdom of my parents.

  Here, then, for sixteen years I have lived a full and happy life with no time to consider what sort of a world it is beyond these few miles that are visible to us. When my father travelled to the City, twenty years ago, we were curious enough to know what he had seen. But he would say nothing, even to Olga very little. Now he has told me, I have written it all down, and you—my brothers, sisters, and children—must one day read it as certainly he intended you to.

  *

  I think over all that I have written down these last few weeks, the strange and terrible story of my father’s early life, and I am sad to think that so many questions I wished to ask him can now never be answered. Even many of the words which he used have no meaning for me, though he tried often to explain them. I never cared to break the flow of his memories with questions, and at the end of a day’s work he liked to put aside the past and talk of the happier present. What was the true meaning of the Birds? I have tormented myself with this question. I cannot try to add anything to what my father related. You—my brothers, sisters and children—must think what you will. We know that millions of people were killed, and that the world as my father knew it, passed away. We know that cities were destroyed and that men and women became the prey of savage birds such as nobody had ever seen before. My father reveals to us his own belief as to the true nature of these creatures; perhaps we must accept this and ask no more.

  Yet there are still questions which cry out to be answered, and none more so than in his description of the man he met in the café and his later meeting with him on that last dreadful day. Why would not my father make himself clearer to me here? I know that there was much in his mind which he would never speak of. Who was this man? Is he somewhere still alive? Is he the living embodiment of that dark spirit our ancestors called Satan?

  I am writing late at night, alone, with the ancient hills of Wales around me. And I wish I had never written “is he somewhere still alive. . . . .”

  I look out of the window. The embers of the fire have nearly died away. Nothing but ashes is left of my beloved father’s body. What do I believe—that he has gone somewhere to join my mother whose love for him and us bound all our lives together?

  I do not know. But I am glad he lived so long, to enjoy all those blessings of life which we hold here, unclouded by the miseries which engulfed the old world, in the days before the Birds came.

  END.