Kindlings

Chapter One: Gorse Hall

I have painted the cove at Gorse Hall in every light there is, and I still cannot get the water right.

That is the sort of thing I say now, when people ask me what it was like. They expect an atrocity and I give them the sea. But it is honest, in its way. For the first nineteen years of my life the world was a spit of land two miles long and half a mile wide, with the Atlantic on three sides of it and a single road running out the fourth, and I loved it the way you love the only thing you have ever been given.

The Hall itself was Victorian, red brick gone brown with salt, built in 1878 by a shipping man who wanted a view and got wind instead. It had thirty-one bedrooms, four staircases, a chapel with a cracked bell, and a long glass corridor called the Orangery where nothing citrus had grown for a hundred years. Gorse grew everywhere else. In April the whole headland went yellow and smelled of coconut, which is a strange thing to say about a place like that, but it did. In February the gorse turned black and the wind came off the water hard enough to lean on.

Forty-seven of us lived there. The youngest, when I was nineteen, was a boy of eight called Peter Colenso, who could not pronounce his r's and kept a jar of limpet shells under his bed. The oldest was Davina Carthew, twenty-two, who had once run the length of the perimeter path in eleven minutes and forty seconds and had the time written in chalk on the boot-room wall, where it stayed for years after she was gone.

We called each other family. Nobody taught us that word in the sense other people mean it. We had no mothers, no fathers, no aunts turning up at Christmas. We had been made — decanted, we said, the way you'd say born — in the institute laboratories at Plymouth and brought to Gorse Hall in temperature-controlled vans when we were eleven days old. But we slept four to a room and ate at long tables and knew the particular sound of each other's footsteps on the back stairs, and if that is not family then I do not know what to call it.

The Sisters ran the Hall. There were nine of them, in grey serge with white collars, and they were not nuns, though the uniform borrowed the idea. They were half nurse, half teacher, and they had been trained somewhere in the north to look after us. Sister Bryce was the senior. She was in her fifties, broad-shouldered, with reading glasses on a chain and hands that were always slightly red from washing. She taught literature on Tuesdays and Thursdays and could recite long stretches of poetry from memory, standing at the window with her back to us and her eyes on the water.

There was a small medical staff too: two nurses who came up from the village, a phlebotomist called Mr. Trethewey who visited on Mondays with his tray of tubes, and Dr. Terence Cottle, who lived in the gatehouse and had been at Gorse Hall longer than any of us. Dr. Cottle was thin and tall and stooped, with a soft voice and a habit of apologising before he touched you. He was not unkind. I want to be careful about that. Almost nobody at Gorse Hall was unkind. That is the part people find hardest to believe.

We were told what we were as soon as we could understand the words, and then told again, in a little more detail, every few years, so that the knowledge grew with us like a second skeleton.

We were Kindlings.

The name came from the old word for the small dry wood you use to start a fire. Sister Bryce explained it to each intake in the same lesson, in the same room, with the same steadiness. A kindling, she said, is a small thing that burns quickly. It does not last. But without it the great log never catches, and the room where the family sits never gets warm, and the children in that room grow up cold. The fire that a kindling starts, she said, goes on burning long after the kindling is ash. That is not a small life. That is the most generous life there is.

We had been designed, over four decades of government-sponsored genomic work, to grow tissue that healed and regenerated far beyond the ordinary human range. Our kidneys did not scar. Our marrow rebuilt itself at speeds that made haematologists blink. Our livers regrew lobes in weeks rather than months. Our hearts — and this was said more quietly, always — were the finest hearts ever grown in Britain, tolerant of nearly any recipient, resistant to rejection, good for forty years in a body that would otherwise have had two.

So we donated. First a kidney, usually at nineteen or twenty. Then bone marrow, sometimes more than once. Then a lobe of liver, at twenty-one or so. And then, at some point between twenty-two and twenty-five, depending on how a Kindling's body had held up, there was the fourth donation, which was the heart, and which was called completion.

Nobody at Gorse Hall ever explained the word completion. They didn't need to. We understood it the way a child understands that the sea is deep — not through any explanation, but because it is obviously and enormously true, and because everyone speaks about it in a particular tone.

I don't remember learning it. I remember, at about six, asking Sister Vellacott whether completing hurt, and being told that the Kindling is asleep, and that the sleep is very deep, and that afterwards there is nothing to feel. I remember being satisfied by this. I remember going back out to the lawn and continuing a game involving hoops.

My name is Hannah Webb. The names were assigned; they came out of a book the institute kept, and every intake got a set of first names and a set of surnames and they were paired up by a clerk in an office in Plymouth who probably never thought about it again. Hugh Kellaway used to say his had been chosen by someone who hated him. He said Hugh was the sound a man makes falling off a roof.

Hugh was my age, nineteen, tall in the loose, unfinished way of boys who have grown fast, with knuckly wrists that came out of his sleeves. He played the cello. He was not brilliant at it but he was serious, which is better, and on winter evenings the whole east corridor would go quiet without deciding to when he practised. He had a dry, sideways humour that made him popular with people who did not know him and made him lonely with people who did, because underneath it he had decided, very early, that nothing could be changed, and he had built his whole personality on top of that decision like a house on a rock.

Becca Terrill was eighteen, a year below us, and she was the opposite. Becca argued with weather. She was small and quick and had a way of turning her head sharply that made you think of a bird deciding whether to trust you. She read adventure novels — shipwrecks, mutinies, boys stowing away in barrels — long past the age when the others had moved on to Sister Bryce's poets, and she read them without embarrassment. She fought with everyone and forgave instantly and never once, in all the years I knew her, said a thing she did not mean.

The three of us shared a dormer room on the east corridor, up under the roof, with a window that looked north along the coast. There had been a fourth bed once, but the girl who slept in it had transferred to the Ilfracombe house when we were twelve, and after that we left it empty and piled it with books and paint boxes and Becca's collection of found rope.

I painted. That was my thing, the way the cello was Hugh's. Watercolour, mostly, because Sister Odell taught it and because oils were expensive and had to be requisitioned. I painted the cove and the stacks and the shag birds on the black rocks and the long grey shoulder of the headland. I painted them in fog and in gale and in the four flat blue days a year when the Channel looked like something from a brochure. Sister Bryce hung my work in the Orangery and told visitors — there were occasionally visitors, from the institute or the ministry — that we had a real talent among us. They would nod and look at the paintings for the correct number of seconds.

I was nineteen that spring and my first donation was scheduled for December.

I knew this the way you know your own birthday. The date sat in my file in Dr. Cottle's office and also in a small blue book each of us kept, in which the Sisters recorded our height, our weight, our vaccinations, and our forward schedule. Mine said: KIDNEY (L) — 14 DEC. Under it, in the space for the second donation, someone had pencilled a provisional line: MARROW — SUMMER, YR 20.

I want to be clear about something, because this is where people stop understanding.

I was not afraid. Not then. Fear requires an alternative, and I had never been shown one. I had been shown a life: nineteen years of drawing and music and biology and salt wind and friends, and then a few years of surgeries in Plymouth with recovery weeks in between, and then a deep sleep. Against what? Against nothing. There was no other version of Hannah Webb available for comparison. You cannot mourn a road you have never been told exists.

So when I say that everything changed that spring, I do not mean that I discovered we were being killed. I knew that. Every one of us knew that, in the plain, unhysterical way you know the tide table.

What changed was smaller and worse. It was six words, spoken by a dying girl in the East Infirmary, and they did not tell me anything about my death.

They told me something about the world.

I am fifty-one now. I live above a chip shop in a town I will not name, and I paint the sea, and I have told this story exactly twice: once, badly, under oath, to a committee that shelved its findings; and once, now, properly, to you.

It begins in April, with the gorse in flower and the whole headland smelling of coconut, and a van coming up the access road bringing Davina Carthew home.