The Tale of Oat Cake Crag

by Susan Wittig Albert

  “Who-who-whoooo?” the Professor muttered in astonishment and fright, opening both his eyes very wide. “What-what?”

  Then he took a deep breath, summoned his imperial authority, lifted his wings, raised his voice, and demanded loudly, “Just whoo-oo the devil are yooou, sir, and what dooo yooou think yooou are doooing?” When the creature paid him no notice, he repeated the question, even more loudly and imperially.

  Now, the Professor—a substantial tawny owl with a look of significance about him—is widely acknowledged to be one of the most important birds of the Land Between the Lakes. All of the other creatures are accustomed to answer respectfully when he speaks, and for good reason. It is certainly true that he has earned an international reputation for his scholarship in celestial mechanics (which, if you are not familiar with it, is a study of the motions of astronomical objects such as stars and planets), achieved by years spent in diligent search of the night skies with a telescope from his beech-tree observatory and residence on Claife Heights. Amongst his peers, he is widely respected for his detailed work on celestial navigation.

  Locally, however, the Professor is better known for his studies in applied natural history. He takes a special and very personal interest in the mannerisms and tastes of certain feathered, furred, and scaly creatures who live in his territory, which extends across the Land Between the Lakes. Having selected and captured his research subjects, he carries them back to his beech tree, where they are invited to join him for a midnight snack. I think you can see why he is respected and even feared.

  But the exotic fixed-wing flying creature the Professor could see on the lake was not as respectful as the natives. In fact, the thing simply ignored his repeated questions—rudely ignored them, I am sorry to say. Buzzing and clacking and clattering, it flew very close to Oat Cake Crag, taunting the Professor. Then it cocked its wings, turned sharply (How did it do that without a single flap?), and buzzed and clanked and clattered and coughed itself out of sight around a wooded point of land.

  The Professor stared incredulously after it. Something ominous had obviously happened whilst he was away on holiday. There had been a breakdown in the natural order of things. An alien flying thing had invaded his territory. If it were permitted to stay, it was very likely to multiply (since it is in the nature of all creatures to reproduce themselves), which would mean that the skies would soon be filled with heaven-knows-how-many impertinent flying things who made a great deal of noise and rudely refused to identify themselves when challenged. To make matters worse, he knew nothing about the origin of this incredible thing, its capacities, and (most of all) its intentions. It might be entirely good-natured and benign, or it might attack. It might bite. And since it was obviously very large, its bite was quite likely to be deadly.

  The Professor shuddered. He himself was a strong flyer and could likely evade any tactics that even a much larger enemy—such as this thing, which was as large as a thrashing machine—might employ. But what about the smaller birds, especially the water birds? The great crested grebe, the mallards and teals and tufted ducks? The shelduck and the red-breasted merganser and the graylag geese and oh so many others—what of them? A creature of this immense size must have an enormous appetite and require constant feeding. Why, it could decimate Windermere’s bird population in no time. And then it might go on to savage the scaled, furred, and feathered creatures who lived on the land. If nothing were done to stop it, many of the owl’s research subjects might simply vanish.

  Well! This situation obviously required some very careful attention. The Professor thought for a few moments. Then, with a sweep of his powerful wings, he lifted himself and flew away. He was on his way to The Brockery, a short distance away on Holly How, to discuss this dreadful business with his friend Bosworth Badger. Bosworth was always fully informed about everything that went on in the Land Between the Lakes. The owl was confident that, between the two of them, they would be able to come up with a plan.

  Normally, the Professor would invite the badger to his beech tree, where they could discuss the matter in greater comfort than the cramped confines of Badger’s underground home. But he was feeling urgent, and as it happened (what a lucky coincidence), it was just about teatime, and tea at The Brockery was always quite substantial. The Professor felt that a comforting cuppa would go down a treat, with perhaps a cheering bit of ham and cheese between two slices of buttered bread, and one (or two) scones. Yes, indeed. There was nothing like a bite of something to make a bird fit to tackle whatever challenges might come his way.

  I’m sure you would like to follow the Professor and find out what the badger knows about this alien airborne creature. But if you don’t mind, we will catch up to the owl later. Instead, we will go over to Hill Top Farm, where Miss Beatrix Potter has just come indoors from an afternoon in the garden and is about to put the kettle on to boil for her own cup of tea.

  2

  Miss Potter Takes the Case

  Beatrix Potter took off her gardening gloves and her woolen jacket and hat and hung them on the peg behind the door, then slipped her feet out of the wooden-soled pattens she wore outdoors and into the softer shoes she commonly wore in the house. The pattens, handmade for her by a cobbler in Hawkshead, were the traditional footwear of farmwives in the Lakes. Beatrix loved to wear them, not just because they were practical, but because they symbolized her commitment to the garden, the farm, and the farmer’s way of life.

  She had spent the afternoon in the garden, planting lilacs and rhododendrons and a red fuchsia, which she had bought from a nursery in Windermere. The plants should probably have gone into the ground in late fall, but she hadn’t been able to get down from London. Her parents—her father was nearly eighty and her mother in her seventies—had a large house there, and required her attention. The more she wanted to get away, the more they found they needed her.

  But finally Beatrix had put her foot down. She told her parents that she wanted to spend a few quiet days to herself, in order to work out ideas for her next book, The Tale of Mr. Tod, the latest book in a series that had begun some ten years before, with The Tale of Peter Rabbit. This was partly true, although she had another reason (a more intensely personal and secret reason) for coming to the farm just now. A reason that—

  But never mind: we’ll get to that later. Suffice it for now to say that Beatrix always loved coming to Hill Top, which she had come to think of as her home in the six years she had owned the farm. It was all very beautiful and dear to her—the green meadows and woodlands and gardens and orchard and house and barn and all the animals—and she longed for it when she had to go back to dirty, sooty, smoky London, where she invariably came down with a stuffy cold the minute she stepped off the train.

  Mr. and Mrs. Potter, I am sorry to say, did not happily let their only daughter go, and this departure, like every other one, seemed to precipitate a great crisis. Her mother simply couldn’t understand what she saw in the sleepy little village of Near Sawrey. “But there is no society there, Beatrix!” Mrs. Potter complained (although “no society” was exactly what Beatrix wanted). And her father thought the farm a silly burden for a woman and the house itself “exceedingly plain and severe,” without electric lights or a telephone.

  Mr. Potter was very right. Hill Top was plain and severe—and still is, as you can see for yourself when you visit there, for the National Trust (to whom Beatrix donated Hill Top Farm) keeps the old farmhouse just as it was during Beatrix’s time. The outside is still plastered with a pebbly mortar and painted with the gray limewash that is traditional in the area. The eight-over-eight windows still march symmetrically across the front of the house, which also features a peaked porch constructed of blue slate from a local quarry. The steep roof is covered with the same blue slate, and the chimneys still wear those peaked slate caps that always reminded Beatrix of schoolboys lined up in a row.

  Beatrix herself had made many changes, although none that altered the traditional style of the house and farm.
When she bought the place in 1905, it had required quite a lot of fixing. To satisfy the needs of the barnyard animals—cows, pigs, sheep, chickens, and ducks—she repaired the barn, the dairy, and the fences. To accommodate the Jennings family (Mr. and Mrs. Jennings cared for the farm and the garden in her absence), she added on several rooms and a new water system. She also built a detached kitchen at the edge of the garden, where Mrs. Jennings baked and cooked meals for everyone.

  In her own part of the house, Beatrix had pulled down a partition in the main room and papered the walls in an airy green print, then laid a sea-grass rug that covered most of the floor and a smaller, shaggy blue one in front of the cast-iron range. Red curtains and a red geranium at the window, the fire on the hearth, and an antique oak cupboard for her collection of dishes delighted her with their hominess. The other rooms suited her, too: the downstairs parlor with its formal marble fireplace and richly paneled walls; her bedroom upstairs, with its window overlooking the farmyard and garden; and the treasure room, where she kept her collection of favorite things. Room by room and altogether, Beatrix felt that the house was perfect in every way. Her heart told her that this was home, and she cherished the quiet days and nights she spent here.

  But today had not been nearly as quiet as she had come to expect. In fact, it had been disconcertingly noisy. The first disturbance had come early that morning, when the silence was shattered by the dull, hollow boom of a massive explosion. Mr. Jennings said that it must be the gunpowder works at Blackbeck, some ten miles away, near Haverthwaite. When Beatrix took the post to the village post office, Lucy Skead, the postmistress, told her that, yes, indeed, the works had blown up. Tragically, two men were dead and a half-dozen more were seriously hurt. Making gunpowder was a dangerous business, but all the works in England seemed to be gearing up to produce more powder and shells, for fear of war with the Germans. For Beatrix, a longtime pacifist who hated the thought of war, it was altogether unsettling.

  Beatrix picked up the kettle and put it on the range, which was built into the fireplace alcove next to the open fire. (If you want to see how this looks, you can find pictures of it in The Roly-Poly Pudding, where a kitten named Tom Twitchit narrowly escapes being baked.) She took down a teapot and spooned in loose tea, then spread the red-checked gingham cloth on the table and set out a loaf of Sarah Barwick’s fresh-baked bread, butter from the morning’s churning, and the pot of blackberry jam Dimity Kittredge had given her. When the kettle boiled, she made her tea, then ate her bread and butter and jam with an intense pleasure, very grateful for the quiet. The aeroplane—the second loud disturbance that had marred her day—had thankfully stopped flying and gone away to its barn or its hangar or wherever aeroplanes go when they come down out of the air.

  Now, I am sure you have already guessed that the alien airborne creature that so perplexed Professor Owl was an aeroplane. You are, after all, a modern person. You have seen many aeroplanes in your life and have most likely flown in quite a few. We live in an airborne age, and it is as easy for us to take to the skies as it is to ride in a high-speed train or drive in our automobiles across the country.

  But I’m also sure that you can forgive the Professor for mistakenly thinking that the aeroplane was some sort of bird. He had never seen a flying machine and did not even know it existed. And indeed it had not, until just eight years before. In March 1903, American bicycle shop owners Orville and Wilbur Wright assembled one and flew it. The idea took off immediately, so to speak, but it was five years—in 1908—before the first aeroplane was successfully flown in England. By 1912, at the time of our story, the Admiralty was considering its use as a possible military weapon. City folk were acquainted with aeroplanes, but most people in rural England (let alone most owls!) had never seen one.

  Beatrix was not an antiprogressive, and she had no complaint about aeroplanes so long as they kept to the skies above London. With the racket of motor lorries, the hooting of automobile horns, and the clatter of horses’ hooves, the city was already so noisy that the aeroplane’s buzz could scarcely be heard amidst the din. But here, in the peace of the countryside, the aeroplane’s noise was a different matter altogether, and deeply, deeply annoying. Not only did it intrude on her private thoughts, but it reminded her (as did the gunpowder works explosion) that the world—or at least the part of the world that the Admiralty was in charge of—was preparing for war.

  She was still thinking of these unsettling matters when she finished her tea, put away the tea things, and got out a pen, ink bottle, and paper. Then she lit the paraffin lamp and settled down to write a letter to her closest friend, Millie Warne.

  Millie was Norman’s sister—Norman Warne, her own first, sweet love, who had died just a month after their engagement, some six years before. The loss had been devastating, but Beatrix was a practical woman, and although she felt she could never recover, she had gathered up the pieces of her shattered life and gone on. Thanks to Hill Top Farm, which had given her a new challenge to dream about and work for, she had begun to put the loss behind. And thanks to Will Heelis, who had helped to heal her heart and—

  But that was another story, not an entirely happy one, and certainly not a story that she was anxious to share with Millie. Not just yet, anyway. She might have to, someday, when she could think of an easy way to tell it. But not today.

  So she wrote about the weather (always a safe subject) and the noise. “Today was mild & pleasant—except for two noises.” She described the explosion at the gunpowder works, and added: “The other disturbance moved me to bad language. There is a beastly fly-swimming spluttering aeroplane careering up & down over Windermere; it makes a noise like ten million bluebottles.”

  She dipped her pen in the ink bottle and continued, frowning as she wrote. “It is an irritating noise here, a mile off; it must be horrible in Bowness.” (Bowness, if you don’t know it, is a picturesque town on the east side of Windermere, quite near to the place where the aeroplane was based.) “It seems to be flying very well; but I am extremely sorry it has succeeded. It will very much spoil the Lake. It has been buzzing up and down for hours today, and it has already caused a horse to bolt & smashed a tradesman’s cart.”

  This was something else she had heard at the post office that morning. The plane—which apparently took off and landed on the water (the reason for the Admiralty’s interest, she supposed)—had buzzed low over the ferry landing on the eastern side of the lake. A drowsy old horse pulling a cart piled with empty beer kegs had taken fright and galloped off, smashing the cart to bits against a stone wall and sending cartman and beer kegs bouncing top over teakettle across the grass. (The horse is not to be blamed, certainly. He could not have expected to be attacked by a flying thrashing machine, like a dragon swooping out of the sky. No wonder the poor old fellow bolted.)

  Beatrix added a sentence about the shrubs she had planted in the garden and was signing her initials (“Yours aff HBP”), when someone knocked at the door. When she opened it, she was delighted to see Mrs. Grace Lythecoe, who lived in Rose Cottage, across Kendal Road, on the other side of the village shop. With Mrs. Lythecoe were two of the village cats, Tabitha Twitchit and Crumpet.

  “Is this a bad time to call?” Grace asked tentatively. “I haven’t interrupted anything, I hope.”

  “No, of course not,” Beatrix said, and stepped aside to welcome her guest. “How very nice to see you, Grace! You’ve had your tea?”

  “I’ve had a bite to eat, but I wouldn’t say no to a cup.” Grace stepped into the room and unbuttoned her navy blue coat. Taking it off, she looked down at the two cats who had come inside with her. “Oh, dear. Tabitha is staying with me now—she must have followed me here, and I seem to have let her in. Crumpet, too. Do you mind? Shall I put them out?”

  “Oh, please, no, Miss Potter!” cried Tabitha Twitchit, an older calico cat with an orange-and-white bib and fluffy fur and tail. “My paws are cold, and I’d love to curl up by the hearth.”

  “If Miss Potter doe
sn’t mind,” said Crumpet sharply, ready as always to correct Tabitha’s manners. Crumpet was a handsome gray tabby, sleeker and younger than Tabitha. She wore a gold bell on her red leather collar and lived with Bertha and Henry Stubbs in one of the Lakefield cottages. Bertha, a rather rotund person who enjoyed causing trouble, was one of the village’s most colorful characters.

  Beatrix laughed. “I don’t mind at all. In fact, I’d be glad if the cats would have a look around. They might find a little something in the cupboards to amuse them. I’m sad to say that the Jenningses’ cat is an indolent creature who has no interest in patrolling for mice.”

  “You’re certainly right about that,” Tabitha remarked in a judgmental tone. “Felicia Frummety is the laziest cat in the village.” She went to the hearth, where she stretched out full length and basked in the heat.

  “Pot calling the kettle black,” Crumpet muttered, and went round the table to the open cupboard.

  “Seniority, my dear,” purred Tabitha smugly, and licked a paw. “I have killed more mice in my lifetime than you younger cats have seen or smelled. I am entitled to a spot *of warm hearth now and then. But feel free to sniff out all the mice you like.”

  Which, from Tabitha’s point of view, was a perfectly appropriate response. Having spent many years engaged as Chief Mouser in various homes in the village, she was currently living at Rose Cottage, where Mrs. Lythecoe kept her generously supplied with bread and milk in return for ridding the place of mice. But Tabitha was a clever cat and knew by long experience that a good bargain tasted better than a mouthful of musty mouse. So she had negotiated a quid-pro-quo contract with the Rose Cottage mice. They would pack their furniture and their belongings and take the children and move out to the shed at the foot of the garden, and she would pretend not to notice that they were there. You might call this blackmail, or even extortion, but it does not seem so to Tabitha, or to the mice, for that matter. It is just another gambit in the age-old game of cat and mouse.