The Hollow Land

by Jane Gardam

  Europa Editions

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  New York NY 10001

  info@europaeditions.com

  www.europaeditions.com

  This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real locales are used fictitiously.

  Copyright © 1982 by Jane Gardam

  First publication 2014 by Europa Editions

  All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

  Cover Art by Emanuele Ragnisco

  www.mekkanografici.com

  ISBN 9781609452568

  Jane Gardam

  THE HOLLOW LAND

  Christ keep the Hollow Land

  Through the sweet spring-tide

  When the apple blossoms bless

  The lowly bent hill side.

  Christ keep the Hollow Land

  All the summer-tide

  Still we cannot understand

  Where the waters glide.

  Only dimly seeing them

  Coldly slipping through

  Many green-lipp’d cavern mouths,

  Where the hills are blue.

  —WILLIAM MORRIS

  BELL AND HARRY

  I’m Bell Teesdale. I’m a lad. I’m eight.

  All down this dale where I live there’s dozens of little houses with grass growing between the stones and for years there’s been none of them wanted. They’re too old or too far out or that bit too high for farmers now. There was miners once—it’s what’s called the hollow land—but they’re here no more. So the little houses is all forsook.

  They have big garths round them, and pasture for grass-letting—sheep and that—and grand hayfields. Maybe just too many buttercups blowing silver in June, but grand hay for all that, given a fair week or two after dipping time.

  All these little farmhouses for years stood empty, all the old farming families gone and the roofs falling in and the swallows and swifts swooping into bedrooms and muck trailing down inside the stone walls.

  So incomers come. They buy these little houses when they can, or they rent or lease them. Manchester folks or even London folks, with big estate cars full of packet food you don’t see round here, and great soft dogs that’s never seen another animal.

  All down Mallerstang there’s becks running down off the fell. It’s bonny. Down off the sharp scales, dry in summer till one single drop of rain sends them running and rushing and tumbling down the fell-side like threads of silk. Like cobwebs. And when the wind blows across the dale these becks gasp, and they rise up on theirselves like the wild horses in Wateryat Bottom. They rise up on their hind legs. Or like smoke blowing, like ever so many bonfires, not water at all, all smoking in the wind between Castledale and the Moorcock toward Wensleydale. It’s bonny.

  And townsfolk come looking at all this now where once they only went to the Lake District over the west. Renting and leasing they come. Talking south. “Why’d they come?” I ask our grandad, who’s leased the farmhouse he used to live in (my gran died). “There’s not owt for ’em here. What’s use of a farm to them? Just for sitting in. Never a thing going on.”

  “Resting,” says my grandad. “They take ’em for resting in after London.”

  Well, this family that come to my grandad’s old house, Light Trees, wasn’t resting. Not resting at all. There’s a mother and a father and four or five great lads, some of them friends only, and there’s a little lad, Harry, and the racket they make can be heard as far as Garsdale likely.

  They has the house—our gran and grandad’s old house, see—but we still keep all the farm buildings and work them and we’ve right to the hay off the Home Field. There’s good cow byres, dipping pens, bull’s hull and clipping shed. So we’re clipping and dipping and drenching and putting the cows to the bull regardless. Sometimes there’s a hundred sheep solid across our yard so they can’t get their car over to the yard gate. But it was in the arrangement, mind. My dad always says, “We’re about to bring in sheep, Mr. Bateman”—it’s what they’re called, Bateman—“We’re bringing in sheep. Would you like to get your car out first? We’ll hold things back.” There’s maybe four, five and six of our sheepdogs lying watching, and their soft dog lying watching our dogs, but never going near. Then from out the house comes their music playing, and lads yelling and laughing and a radio or two going and the London mother cooking these Italian-style suppers and their telephone ringing (they’ve got in the telephone like they’ve got in a fridge) and they’re all saying, this London lot, “Beautiful evening Mr. Teesdale”—my dad—“and what are you doing with the sheep tonight? You’re giving us quite an education.”

  And there’s this little lad, Harry, just stands there not saying owt.

  Now there’s one night, the first night of hay-time, and we’re all slathered out, even my dad. It’s perfect. A right hot summer and a right hot night and a bright moon. Yesterday my dad said, “Tomorrow we’ll mow hay. We’ll mow all day and if need be through the night. There may be rain by Sunday.”

  He’s never wrong, my dad, so we—my mum and our Eileen and our Eileen’s boyfriend and Grandad and all of us—we set up till we’d mowed and we finish the High Field and Miner’s Acre by teatime. And then we sets to with the Home Field—that’s the great big good field round Light Trees. Light Trees stands right in it.

  It makes a rare clatter our tractor and cutter, louder than their transistors—clatter, clatter, clatter, round and round and round—and after a bit, well maybe two hours, there’s heads beginning to bob from windows. Then round ten-eleven o’clock and the summer light starts fading and it’s still clatter, clatter, there’s electric lights flashing on and off inside Light Trees and this London father comes out.

  First he just stands there. Then he strolls and watches. Clatter, clatter, clatter. Round and round and round. He starts waving a bit. Then he’s calling. Finally, round midnight he’s yelling and shouting at us, but we can’t stop. When you open up a field of hay you have to see it mowed out.

  And then the tractor breaks down and there’s silence. Silence like the beginning of the world or the end of it, and the London father and some of the big lads comes over (the mother’s inside with ear-plugs in likely, the cutter coming up to the house wall, see, every two-three minutes, though not that near—farther off as we get nearer the middle) and he says, “Will this row be going on much longer then, Teesdale?”

  “Not if I can get this feller mended,” says my dad, fratcheting with spanners.

  “Causing something of a row,” says the London father.

  “No row here,” says my dad, “I’m having no row.”

  “No, no,” says the London father, “making a row. You’re making one devil of a row.”

  “None of my making,” says my dad, pushing his jaw forward and getting aloft the tractor again and the racket starts up even louder than ever, blue smoke rising from the tractor chimney in the moonlight.

  They’d got at cross purposes, see. First meaning of row with us seems to be quarrel. First meaning of row with them seems to mean noise, or at any rate it does tonight. I could see this, but my dad was busy, and tired, and working ahead of rain, so he took no heed. My dad might have been talking Chinese for all the London man tried to understand him and the London man might have been talking Eskimo. The big lads looked soft about it too, and started muttering and kicking their feet about in the new short grass left by the cutter. “Country peace and quiet,” says one. “Country peace and quaat. Worse than Piccadilly Circus.”

  I stood back like. I’d been sent to the clipping shed for more John Robert before I went to check the fell gate was shut for the night, and as I crosses t
he field back I sees this little lad, Harry, looking out of his bedroom window and I catches his eye. And somehow I know he’s all right, this one, London boy or not. I know he understands how we have to make all this racket to see hay cut ahead of rain. Maybe all night long we have to go on. With lights fixed up, even. I give him a bit wave, and he disappears his head out of sight. Dips it down shy-like. You’d not think of London folk being shy.

  So, well, by morning we’re finished. And next day we strow and turn. And very next day after—it being such a wonderful hot summer—we begin to bale and elevate into barns, doing the Light Trees Home Field first for their convenience, to get it over for them. A rare noisy job of course it is and the London folks all walked away out of it—the whole band of them! Going off across the yard in boots, and packs on their backs for an all-day hike. But by the Saturday night we’re off the fell. We’re back down in our own farm kitchen, down the village, all fields finished and very satisfied. We’re all over aching. We’re slow speaking. We’ve done with moving for a week. With hay-time for another year. My dad says, “I’m away. Bed for me,” and then as he gets his hand on the knob at the end of our old staircase he says, “You shut yon fell gate now, Bell?”

  I said I had.

  “You’re sure now?”

  “Aye, I’m sure.”

  “Well, I’m away.”

  And I starts to wonder. Every single night since my gran died and grandad moved down here with us and my dad began to farm the Light Trees land he’s checked this fell gate. It’s a long old gate in the last stone wall before the open fell. It’s on a path that walkers use. They walk in clumps—great fat orange folk with long red noses and maps in plastic cases flapping across their stomachs. Transistors going sometimes too, and looking at nowt before them but their own two feet. Sometimes the walkers up front leave the gates open for the straggling ones coming behind. Then the stragglers think that’s how the gate’s meant to be, and leave it. Then the cows come out of the pasture and onto the fell and the sheep come off the fell and into the pasture and on and away till they’re mixed in with other folks’s sheep and cows where maybe there’s a ram and certainly a bull. And then there’s merry hell. “Better to check that gate every night of our lives,” says my dad, “than rue it.”

  Lately—since I grew to be eight—checking the gate’s been my job. Well, up I goes to bed—and I wonder.

  Did I shut it?

  I gets out of my clothes and I rolls into my bed and it’s grand and soft. I wriggle about into the shape of me in the middle of the springs—if you filled it up with candle grease and let it cool and lifted the grease out you’d have a statue of me sleeping. The moon’s shining in at the window and I’m dead beat and I’m all over scratched with hay. My eyes is dropping and every muscle of me is like stones.

  Did I then?

  Shut that fell gate?

  He’d be in a fair taking if—

  So out I gets and into my clothes again and down the stairs. Great roaring snores. My mum and dad sleep that sound after hay-time they often sleep right through the alarm clock stood by the bedside in a bucket. Away I went, off up the road the two miles up to Light Trees and the half mile beyond it to the fell gate.

  He were wrong, Dad, for once. It’s midnight so it’s Sunday. “There’ll be rain by Sunday,” he said—and there’s no rain. The moon’s as huge and bright as the past three nights and the fells laid out all colours beneath it. There’s rabbits here and rabbits there and cows lumbering up onto their knees as they hear you coming, rolling their eyes and crashing off into the shadows of the little black may trees. And there’s my own three Leicester ewes glaring at me out of green lamp eyes, faces like camels, right snooty. And there’s curlews that calls out to each other all night long, just like in the day, and never seems to sleep. And there’s no sound else up here but the becks running.

  There’s no sign of life as I pass Light Trees. Tired out with walking, they’ve been keeping to theirselves, the London folk, nobody speaking. They crossed the yard twice today while we were there, not speaking. It’s tight lips and heads turned sideways.

  “Likely they’re going to tek off,” my grandad said this afternoon.

  “Not without paying their rent they won’t,” says my dad. “I’d say they’d rested theirselves enough anyway.”

  “It is their holidays,” said our Eileen, who likes the looks of the big London lads, though she won’t let on. “It’s a shame for them really. It’s spoiling their summer. They’d wanted to come back and back for five years at least. And all that money they’ve spent on telephones and that.”

  “Well they don’t have to go,” says Dad. “All’s quiet for them now. Hay-time’s over. They can play their radios full tilt in peace.”

  “They’ll go and they’ll never come back,” wails Eileen.

  “Others’ll come,” says my dad. “There’s any amount of incomers without farmhouses to go round for them now. But they’ll have to learn our ways. Standing there rowing in fields!”

  My grandad says that hay-time’s maybe not understood by them as important and maybe there’s things of theirs we don’t catch onto either.

  I say, “And he weren’t rowing, the London father, not rowing,” and my dad says, “You keep quiet.”

  I’m up at the fell gate by now—and what d’you think? It’s open! Stood right back on itself and wide open and even the John Robert gone that binds it. It’s just what he said’d happen one day and never has. I stand there feeling that grand that I bothered to come out and see. No signs of stock straying yet, thanks be. But many more thanks be that I bothered to come.

  I shut the gate, but it’s still not fast without binding and there’s plenty of John Robert down in Light Trees clipping shed, so off I go, taking the short cut down the slope of Hartley Birket and over the wall and through the Home Field with Light Trees standing in the middle of it. The field looks smooth now with the hay got in—light as my head when my grandad’s clipped the hair off it. Hay-time done, grand hot summer ahead, my shadow twelve foot long from the moon. I feel quite drunk and cheerful.

  They’d get some fright if they looked out and saw me now, this London lot, thinks I. Ghosts and vampires, thinks I, and begins to flap my arms about. I’m right up now against the back wall of Light Trees and I’m looking right in at the little back bedroom window (the house being dug down snug in the side of the fell, upstairs at the back having its chin on the grass so to speak) and I feel like gawping in the window and making whoo-whoo noises, scaring the moonlights out of the soppy lot.

  But coming up to the window I sees it’s open and there’s the little lad, Harry, standing there looking out. Standing quite still. And it’s way after midnight.

  I near passed out cold. I just stood there.

  Yet he weren’t afraid a bit.

  He must have seen me vampiring away from miles off. And he’s not afraid a bit.

  After a bit longer I see he’s crying.

  He’s just a little lad see—maybe four or five. Maybe six.

  I think maybe, though he don’t look frightened, he’s crying with fright, so to speak, and I say—when I get a bit of strength back—I sort of whispers it, thinking of that little house behind him all brimful of people, great knowing London people, “It’s only me. Bell Teesdale.”

  Sniff, he goes, sniff.

  “I’m not doing owt,” I say.

  Sniff.

  “I just been checking on the fell gate. It’s been left open.”

  Sniff.

  “I’m just coming on down here for the John Robert.”

  Sniff.

  Sniff. Then, at last—“What’s John Robert?”

  “Well, string. Farmer’s string. For combines and that. It’s always been called that. You don’t know a lot, do you?”

  He starts crying again. “What’s the matter?” says I. “Don’t get
upset now.”

  “We’re going home tomorrow. I don’t want to go home.”

  “Why you going then?”

  “My father says he won’t be bossed by your father and there’s too much noise. He works writing. He has to be quiet. Six weeks it was to be, our holiday here. All the school holidays.”

  “It’s only once a year,” I say. “We only cut once a year. Then it’s quiet as owt. Except clipping time and dipping time and when lambs get taken from their mothers and there’s a bit bleating, there’s never a sound here. Not so much as a motor except once a day the postman.”

  He says, “My father says he can’t do with fumes and smoke and racket. That’s what he came to get away from.”

  “It’s over till next year.”

  “We’re still going, though,” says Harry and starts to cry again. “My mother wrote a letter to your mother to say she was sorry if we’d given offence, but my father wouldn’t let her send it. I don’t want to go home,” he says. “It’s just streets and streets. Why didn’t your father say hay-time was just once?”

  “Likely he thought there was nobody in the world didn’t know. He were clashed. Could you not see how my dad were clashed out? And the tractor broke. And expecting rain. Anyway—noise! What about all your radios and stereos and portable tellies?”

  He can’t think what to say to this so he begins to cry again.

  “Town yobs,” says I.

  He picks up something heavy—maybe a transistor. Not even our Eileen’s got her own and she’s seventeen, and I say, “Now think on. Hold still. Let’s have a think. Where’s your mother’s letter?”

  “Thrown away. In the bin under the sink.”

  “Crumpled up?”

  “No—just thrown.”

  “Can you get it?”

  “Well, I could.”

  “Get it,” says I. “I’m going for the John Robert in the shed. l’ll come back round this way and you can give it me.”