The Hollow Land

by Jane Gardam

  When I come back he hands the letter over.

  “D’you want to come out?” I say. “You can come up and fasten the fell gate with me if you want. Get some shoes on.”

  He’s over the sill in his shoes and his jersey over his pyjamas in half a minute flat, and we go off doing silent vampires over the Home Field. At the beck we make a change to spacemen and while I’m fixing the fell gate we’re the SAS and have a bit of quiet machine-gunning. I see he gets back in through his window, for there’s rain coming now, great cold plops at first, then armies like running mice, and the moon all suddenly gone. He takes a header in through his window from a standing start. He’s not a bad ’un this Harry.

  Then I’m away. Over the hill and down the road, past the quarry and under the bridge and into the village and dripping wet through our own front door. I left it unlatched (great snores still going on above) and I put the letter from under my shirt down carefully in the middle of the doormat. It’s a pity she hadn’t had time to put it in an envelope. They look a family for envelopes. But we’ll have to see.

  Then I dried myself off a bit and slithered into my bed and I didn’t wake till long past milking.

  When I got down they’d finished breakfast and my mum’s been baking. Yawning but baking. Our Eileen’s still in bed and not a sign of Grandad. “Grandad’s seen plenty hay-times,” says my dad, “but he’s slower now forgetting them.”

  My mum’s putting six or seven grand big tea cakes into a paper bag and my father’s carrying eggs and some new milk in a can.

  “What’s yon?” says I.

  “It’s for them up at Light Trees,” says my mum. “They get little enough in London fit to eat. They may as well get some benefit here.”

  I met up with the lad, Harry, later beyond the fell gate. He joined up with me behind Dad’s tractor, which was laden up with dead sheep getting a bit ripe and on their way to being dropped down a shackhole. It’s right horrible putting dead sheep down shackholes. You wait ages till you hear them splash. Just think of falling in yourself! Harry loved it. Our four dogs was dancing all around him, jumping up and licking his face.

  “All’s right then now?” I ask.

  He says, “Seems like.”

  “You’re stopping then? Not away off back to London?”

  “We’re stopping. There’s been not another word.”

  “Nowt said?”

  “No. Your dad just came walking in with buns.”

  “Tea cakes.”

  “Tea cakes. And milk and eggs.”

  “What did your mum say?”

  “When he’d gone she said, ‘This puts us to shame. I didn’t even send that letter.’”

  “I hope she doesn’t see it’s gone.”

  “She won’t. She’d never think. She’s not sensible.”

  “And that was all?”

  “No. After that my father went across the yard to your father and they shook hands.”

  Harry and I walked on after—away over Green Fell Crag behind the tractor, squidging in the soaking turf. And every now and then there comes the rain like Dad said, and the clouds are fat and purple with the sun flashing in and out of them, and my dad singing on the tractor cock-a-hoop and loud as larks because he’s done with hay-time before the rain and there’s other folks all round not yet dared start.

  I said, “Harry, you’re going to settle here now. I just feel it. There’s not many do. Not incomers to these old farms and different, like you lot are. But I’d say you’d settle for plenty holidays now.”

  And Harry said, “I’ve settled.”

  THE EGG-WITCH

  Harry sat happily on Jamie the old horse rake that stood in the yard with the nettles sticking up high through its round, rusty ribs. He sang as he bounced in the curved iron saddle and clanked the gears and handles. Behind in Light Trees every door and window stood wide open and Harry’s mother lay spread about on a sofa, dabbing her face against heat and looking out every two minutes anxiously across the yard at Harry.

  Around the yard stood the square of fortifications of stone barns and sheep pens and above them, stretching far, far away were the fells, bright pink-yellow turning hazy with heat. Their horizon jigged like the desert. Not a sheep or a cow seemed to move, humped in under the stone walls, looking for shadow. No walkers passed to the Pennine Way. Not even the curlews were conversational.

  The rest of the Batemans had taken themselves off climbing in the car. “Climbing in the car,” sang Harry. They had gone to High Cup Nick, hoping for cool air. Harry’s mother had stopped behind to mind him because Harry climbed—and walked too for that matter rather zigzag, which meant he went double the distance at half the speed. She had also stopped behind to get some peace and quiet, for except for Harry her family were going through a noisy and argumentative time just now, wagging their fingers a lot at each other and shouting above the radios.

  When the car had roared away over the ribbony white road and they had watched the cloud of dust at its heels die away after it had tipped over forwards down Quarry Hill, the silence settled like limestone dust. Harry’s mother gave a thankful sigh, walked back into Light Trees and fell on the sofa with a book, and Harry climbed up on Jamie and sang.

  It was a drone perhaps rather than a song, and it went on and on. He droned at the nettles, at the invisible horse in the thin old dropped-down shafts of the rake, which was still faintly painted blue. He droned at the dusty cherry trees hanging over the orchard wall. He droned at the pink fell and the track up it to the haunted tarn and the old mines and the bumpy lines on Hartley Birket which people said were ancient railways.

  Harry was happy. But his mother was not. Edgy, fidgety, she couldn’t keep to her book. She looked at Harry once, twice. She wondered if there was something odd about him sitting there all by himself not wanting someone to play with.

  So much younger than James, she thought. I oughtn’t to be lying here. I ought to be off finding him a friend. He’ll be getting shy and funny. It’s not natural—droning on a horse rake.

  Also it was Sunday, which always meant scrambled eggs for supper and she had run out of eggs. She would have to go down to get eggs from Teesdales’. Perhaps Bell Teesdale might ask Harry to stay down there and play.

  So the two of them set off walking in the heat of the afternoon, up the ribbony road and tipping over the hill as the car had done, past the great sleeping lime quarry dazzling the sky; on past the row of dusty fir trees all covered in grey powder; under the bridge where the bones of a young woman and the bones of her child had been discovered by quarrymen last year. They had been curled together in a sleeping position, the child inside the mother’s arms for about four thousand years. You could tell their date by the way they lay curled. They were Beaker People. Harry’s mother thought that she perhaps ought to be telling Harry about all this, and especially about the date, because it would help with school.

  But Harry was zigzagging and droning ahead. He droned at the showers of blackberry bushes hanging over the road, pricking with pins, and at the dry beck with the little bridges down the village street. Looking down at the beck and the village was a farm called Castle Farm where a Great Lord of the Marches had lived more than three hundred years ago. He had loved the king and had ridden all the way from the fells to Westminster for a coronation. The jewels in his sword and harness and on his clothes had cost so much that he had no money afterwards and someone wrote it all down in a book. Harry’s mother knew all about it. She wanted to tell Harry. But Harry was too interested in the peeling paint on the rail of the little bridge and the ducks complaining of the lack of water in the beck. She wondered if it had been a dry day or a wet one when the Lord of the Marches had crossed the beck on his way to Westminster Abbey.

  In the middle of the village street Flora the fluffy dog lay curled in a shallow pothole fast asleep. No quarry lorries came by on a Sunday and so Fl
ora felt safe. She knew Sundays like a Christian. Four tired, hot hens jerked russet necks out of a hedge and made long complaining sounds in their throats and bobbed back in again. Not a soul stirred down the village street.

  When Harry’s mother knocked on Teesdales’ front door—the farmhouse was close on the road—there was no reply and—a wonder, the door was locked. All Mrs. Teesdale’s lupins in the narrow front garden, pink and pale yellow and purple and lavender blue and deep rich glowing red like the Lord of the Marches’ rubies, stood there looking at Harry and his mother and saying clearly, “Did you forget then? They’ve all gone off to Morecambe to the sea. Even old Grandad Hewitson.”

  “They’re all at the sea,” said a voice from a dark place. Harry’s mother turned to see Flora’s master, Jimmie Metcalf (called Meccer), shadowy in the back of his tottery dark shed by the roadside. He had been lamed in the quarry long since and could work no more, but he kept in touch by sitting in the shed and watching the limestone go by in great white lumps on the lorries, and on Sundays watching his dog sleep in the limestone lane. He was a huge fat pale man with a large flat face and straight-ahead eyes. He knew every mortal thing you did, Mrs. Teesdale said, even before you had done it. Now he said to Harry’s mother, “Your eggs will be round the dairy at the back. It’ll not be locked.”

  “Oh that I couldn’t do,” said Mrs. Bateman, “not without asking.”

  “No shops open,” said the voice from the dark of the shed.

  “We have some tins,” said Mrs. Bateman, not very proudly.

  “There’ll be eggs further along,” said Flora’s master. “They sells eggs along at Blue Barns. It’s straight down the lanes. It’s barely a step.”

  So Harry’s mother called to where Harry was lying in the middle of the road stroking Flora, whose eyes were tight shut as usual, and they went on down the village and into Jingling Lane, then up and round a cluster of farms and a pub and on to Gypsies’ Hill.

  Gypsies’ Hill was interesting because it had a big post on it with a notice saying GYPSIES PROHIBITED. The council repainted it every year or two. Yet every year the gypsies came and settled in round the post and hung a line of washing from it. Maybe six or seven times a year they would suddenly be there with their huge caravans you’d never think could get down the lane and their filthy tin cans and children and heaps of rubbish and a pony or two tied up and a fire going. Then just as suddenly they’d be gone.

  Today they were here. In force. Very comfortable. The fire burned bright, making the hot day shimmer. The washing was hanging on the line and they were all sitting about doing nothing at all like Jimmie Meccer. But they were more separate. Harry’s mother felt uneasy with gypsies and her heart beat faster as she went by the hot, still place.

  But a man smiled at her and she said, “Good afternoon.”

  “Good day my lovely,” said a dark young woman to Harry and Harry said hello and waved.

  On they went down a lane so narrow that the bushes tangled their fingers together overhead. The ruts under their feet were sharp and crumbly and stars of flowers shone in the high banks—campion and speedwell and yellow and purple vetches and plumy grasses and little brown-pink orchidy things and long arches of flimsy wild roses.

  They came out of this lane to a place where three lanes meet and took the one signposted to Blue Barns.

  “Blue Barns is a pretty name,” said Harry’s mother, still dazzled by the flowers she had picked and the sudden sunlight as they came out into the open. Harry lifted his arms and began to drone and be an aeroplane.

  “Oh stop that silly singing,” said his mother. “Can’t you talk to me?” Harry stopped singing—he was always good—and came back and took his mother’s hand, though he didn’t talk to her.

  So they came to Blue Barns which was painted black.

  Every bit of it that could be painted was painted black—black barns, black byres, black window frames, hulls, chicken houses, sheds, front gate, back gate, dog kennel and even the front door. Black is a bad colour against Cumbrian stone and scarcely ever seen. On the front gate was painted in white BLUE BARNS.

  Every window and door was tight shut. The yard looked scrubbed, without a wisp of straw on it. If there were any chickens you felt they’d be made to tiptoe round the edges. Every window gleamed and shone and the curtains hung down inside stiff as paper. Paper flowers in brass pots stood on the sills. The square flagstones up to the shiny, beetly, black front door looked as if they’d been scaled with hard wire wool.

  Harry hung back from this house but his mother walked very carefully up these bleached stones. She knocked very quietly. After a minute she said, “I expect everyone has gone to the sea here too,” and knocked rather loud, and at the very same second out of the kennel by the garden gate sprang a great black dog with yellow eyes and teeth and a long clanking chain. He pounced on Harry, and the great black door swung back in one sweep and out came a big square woman in a sombre dress. She had steely hair and eyes and mouth, and wiry whiskers.

  Harry’s mother flew to Harry and the dog pounced towards both of them, straining the chain, prancing on mad feet and yelping with a mad mouth. The woman—after a time—told it to give over. She did not move her gaze from Harry and his mother for a moment and she did not move.

  “Oh I’m so sorry—I’m so sorry. Were you—resting?”

  “I was reading,” said the woman.

  “Oh—I’m sorry to disturb—”

  “Reading my Bible.”

  “Oh dear. Oh—it was—well, it was eggs.”

  “Eggs?”

  “I was told. Back in the village. You sell eggs.”

  “I do.”

  “And I’ve run out of eggs. And it’s always scrambled eggs for supper on Sunday. Or tins. We’re—on holiday.”

  “Where from?” said the steel woman. In time. She arranged her hands criss-cross over her stomach.

  “From London.”

  “I shouldn’t care to live in London. Where are you stopping?”

  “We’re above the quarry. At old Mr. Hewitson’s farm, Light Trees. We lease it. They’re all away today at the sea.”

  This seemed to make the woman very disgruntled. She turned away from them and said, breathing deeply, “How many eggs?”

  “Oh—three dozen.”

  “Three dozen!”

  “Yes. Well. There’s a lot of us. We have a lot of friends coming and going.”

  “Have you a basket?”

  Harry’s mother had forgotten all about a basket. Mrs. Teesdale always gave her egg-boxes.

  “I will lend you a basket,” said the stern, broad woman. She turned her eyes on the dog, which at last stopped sobbing and yelping and slunk back into its kennel. Then she removed her crossed hands from her stomach, clenched her fists, turned her back on them and walked away.

  “Why is it Blue Barns when all’s black?” asked Harry.

  “Hush.”

  “And why’s she got metal whiskers?”

  “Hush.”

  “I’m thirsty.”

  “Hush.”

  The woman came back with a big shallow plaited basket more like a tray with thirty-six eggs laid out over it, which were going to have a seasick time up Quarry Hill.

  “Can I have a drink of water?” asked Harry—who was always good—in a bossy voice.

  “Hush,” said his mother again, “we’ll go home for tea. Or—” she said, more daring since they were almost escaped now, “or could you tell us? Is there somewhere round about where we could get some tea?”

  “Get some tea?”

  “Well, where they serve teas. Teas. In the south you can see it advertised. TEAS.”

  The woman stood quite still.

  “On notices,” said Harry’s mother getting feebler. “By roadsides. TEAS. With cakes and things . . . ” and her voice trailed away.
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  “I can give you some tea,” said the woman. “Step this way.”

  Harry—who was always good—retreated very fast down the path and hid behind the garden gate. His mother had to run and grab him.

  “Step this way,” said the woman again and dismally they had to follow through the black door into the very clean house to the very clean parlour and sit at a very polishy table among the brass pots and vases and everlasting flowers, upright chairs and any number of photographs of people in wedding dresses and all with the bristle-woman’s jaw. A clock ticked like tin cans and hanging above it was a great piece of writing made of woollen stitches and decorated all round with dark brown woollen flowers. The writing said Ye Know Not The Hour.

  In the silence that fell in the boiling airless room you could hear bread being cut far off in the kitchen and the slow clatter of a kettle. Harry put his head on the table and fell asleep.

  The tea when it came was very ample.

  But rather dry.

  Plate after plate the steely woman brought—once or twice she brought three plates at once, one on top of the other joined together with wires. Different kinds of pale heavy cake lay on these. All the things looked rather old, though they were definitely home-made. They had been built, like the bristle-woman herself, to last.

  The butter was marg.

  A giant pot of tea arrived.

  Harry asked again for a glass of water. Or orange.

  “Milk,” said the bristle-woman, and brought milk and went away again.

  Harry—who was always good—said in a minute, “I can’t drink it.”

  “Oh Harry!”

  “It tastes of meat.”

  “Don’t be silly. Let me try.”

  It tasted of meat.

  “She’s had it in a fridge near meat. Crowding it up. She’s mean. I want water. And it’s horrible marg on the bread.”

  “Oh Harry.”

  “I can’t eat the bread. The marg tastes of meat, too.”

  “Shall I ask for some jam?”