The Hollow Land

by Jane Gardam

  The Household Word had had to stop talking about how awful England was because everyone else was making a racket about such things as what was to become of Hannah’s chickens and where Tatton would be selling the dogs and who would look after the six new cherry trees planted last autumn for a windbreak. “Seems hard on them,” said Hannah, “to come through ’78 like us and we take off and they has to stay and die.”

  “Surely the next farmer will see to them?” said the Household Word in the voice she used on people who weren’t being perfectly sensible.

  “There’s likely to be no next farmer,” said Tatton. “The farm’s rented. The rent’s high. The sheep are heafed. That means you can’t move them. They’ve been here since the Vikings this flock, and they’d get nervous breakdowns if you tried to move them. The sheep and the land will maybe be rented separate, maybe by Teesdales, and the barns and byres, like Light Trees. But nobody but crackpots’d want this house. It’s the farthest on the fell. They’d have to be even more crackpots than Batemans. There’s limits. No, Light Trees is a solitary house enough, but if you don’t live in Dark Trees through the winter it’ll fall to pieces. Dark Trees’ll be a ruin five years from now.”

  “But such a beautiful house!” And the Household Word, a light of a very disturbing sort appearing in her eye, swept past Hannah—though she had not yet been invited in—over the doorstep of Dark Trees and started briskly opening and shutting doors. When she saw the great grandfather clock and the meal chest and the settles and the man’s knitting chair the size of a throne, she said, “Did you say you were going to live in a signal box?”

  “Oh, these we’re leaving—or selling for a pound or two. They’d not be wanted most places. They were born here in the house and lived here all their lives.”

  “I expect you’ve had the dealers after them?”

  “Oh, we couldn’t do with dealers. We’ll maybe put an advert in the Herald for someone to take them away.”

  The Household Word asked if she could see the bedrooms and look at the plumbing. When she came down—an uneasy, glum sort of feeling had settled over everybody—she asked how much money the owner wanted for the house. When she was told, her eyes became brighter and clearer than ever.

  Going out again to find Poppet, who was sitting on the gate with her back to everybody, the Household Word looked carefully at the thick strong walls, the tiny, deep-set windows, the huge old door that had been made and opened and shut for the first time by somebody who wore sheepskins and rags on his feet and spoke a language nobody in the yard today would understand and who only ever went to the village on special occasions—to sell sheep or see the great Lord of the Marches set off to the coronation in his rubies and pearls. The Household Word said, “You say the water supply is good? That’s what is usually the matter with these places I suppose, lack of water?”

  Tatton, who thought very slowly, could not tell why his heart was heavy when he said again—as of course he had to—that no, the beck had never dried up in five hundred years.

  “Simply wonderful,” said the Household Word on the way home. “So cheap! I’m most definitely tempted. Poppet darling—we’re definitely tempted, aren’t we?”

  The London father said, “But my dear girl, what about your work? You would never get up here. The place would stand empty for months of the year.”

  “Not at all. I’d let it to friends. There are dozens of people in the media just longing for a place like this to relax in. And a wonderful place for parties!”

  “They’d not like the weather. It’s not always like today. Is it, Teesdale?”

  Mr. Teesdale was coming past them down the fell with long strides behind a little cluster of sheep. Two dogs swept round, holding the sheep together.

  “What a wonderful country scene,” said the Household Word. “How marvellous to see a real shepherd.”

  Mr. Teesdale gave her a quick sharp look. “Weather’s not as I’d like it even today,” said he. “Too bright. We’ll not get dipped tomorrow.”

  “But it’s glorious weather.”

  “Let’s wait on,” said Mr. Teesdale.

  At the beck that was seldom at home above ground they let him pass them with the sheep and paused on the tiny culvert bridge. The beck bottom was thick with green grass, fat thistles and purple and yellow wild pansies. Lady’s smock was like clouds of white midges. There were harebells. It was a garden.

  But—“Hey! Look!” said Harry.

  Coming towards them over the green grass moved something blue. You could see the edge to it, getting nearer. It was water, soaking steadily along down the green channel, reflecting the sky. When it reached them it curled quietly about some stones under the culvert and passed beneath them and out the other side, so that where a moment before had been a green garden was now a blue waterway.

  “Did you ever see such a thing!” said the London people.

  “Only but once or twice,” said Bell. “It means there’s something up below.”

  “Up below?” said the Household Word.

  “Oh I say!”

  “Deep under the ground,” said Bell.

  The sky darkened during supper and during Monopoly the rain began. When Mr. Teesdale came up to fetch Bell and Harry—for Harry had given up his bed to Poppet and was sleeping at Bell’s during the visit—the rain was streaming, rattling down, and the wind was rising fast. It was very warm. During the evening there had been several solitary great claps of thunder.

  “Look sharp you two,” said Teesdale, “let’s get down yon Quarry Hill. Get your coats on. This puts finish to any dipping in the morning.”

  “Is it certain that the weather will be like this tomorrow?” said the Household Word in the tone she used.

  Mr. Teesdale gave her the look he used and said, “Certain.”

  From his bed at Bell’s—a Z-bed with a feather mattress bulging all over it like clouds—Harry said, “Bell, whatever shall we do?”

  Grunt, said Bell.

  “To stop her? We’ve got to stop her. We can’t let her come. It would be terrible. All the awful people she’d bring. London people shrieking about.”

  “You’re London people. You don’t shriek about.”

  “Her lot would. And that Poppet!”

  “Aye—that Poppet.”

  “That Poppet’d bring her awful friends, too.”

  “She’ll not have many friends, I’d think. Not by the way she plays Monopoly. Win, win, win. Grab, grab, grab.”

  “Just think of her always here! Every single holiday. Just think of her at Tatton and Hannah’s. Flaunting about.”

  “She doesn’t flaunt exactly. Her ma flaunts. That Poppet grumps.”

  “One flaunting, one grumping, all the friends shrieking. I’d not come. I’d not come here any more. I’d stay home. It’s not fair.”

  “Oh, give over,” said Bell. “Get to sleep. Summat’ll fetch up.”

  “Hey, we could do summat. To Tatton’s beck. Dry it up. It’s right small where it springs up in Dukerdale.”

  Snore, said Bell.

  “We’ve seen it. We could dam it. We could divert it. Hey, Bell, tomorrow when you’ve no work since we’re not dipping we could go on up and divert it.”

  Bell stopped snoring and said against the roaring torrents attacking the window, and the wailing wind, “Grand time for damming becks—day like tomorrow’s going to be.”

  “But what shall we do then, Bell? Oh what shall we do?”

  “See what tomorrow brings. It of times brings summat.”

  “Not a dry beck though.”

  And most certainly it did not. That day was the wettest day in Westmorland since they began to keep records. Four inches of rain fell in the night and at dawn it was still coming down as hard. The Light Trees beck that had come up pretty and blue for an airing went quite out of its mind. It pounced and f
oamed and crashed about in a positive brainstorm. It covered its own green channel and turned into a brown-white spate. It slopped and foamed over half the valley and swept into the Home Field. The culvert completely disappeared. It cut off Dark Trees, of course, starting with their telephone, so that no one could find out how Tatton and Hannah were managing.

  Everyone at Light Trees just sat. Or looked out of steamy windows. The Household Word smoked cigarettes. Poppet went up to her room and locked the door. After lunch, which was difficult because the kitchen got so hot that the heat and stife came rolling across into the living-room, everyone began a tremendous yawning. Mr. Bateman longed to go off and do some work but felt he couldn’t with a visitor. Mrs. Bateman found she hadn’t a single thing to talk to the Household Word about. The Household Word sat frowning at her beautiful rose-red fingernails.

  Then there was an unholy noise in the yard.

  It was Hannah.

  Somehow she had crossed the culvert and she stood weeping—sopped to the skin on Light Trees’ porch step she wept, with moss in her hair.

  “We’re flooded,” she cried, “flooded out! Worse’n ever in our lives. We’ve the dogs and the chickens in the bedrooms and Tatton’s trying to get the cow up too but it’s stuck on the stairs. The knitting chair’s afloat and the grandfather clock’s going to have a ring round its knees till the end of its days. If it goes on we’ll all be ont’ roof and Tatton says he can’t get a cow on a roof. Bedrooms yes, he says, roof no. And the yard is like Amazonian torrents.

  “The television’s safe,” she said with a polite nod to the Household Word. “It’s up on a wardrobe and Tatton put his back out lifting it, which is probably why he’s in fixtures with the cow.

  “The telephone,” she added, “got drowned.”

  The Household Word said she thought she might be more use staying behind to look after Light Trees, but otherwise everyone—even Poppet, who had been up in her bedroom staring, Mrs. Bateman said, in a real sulk at the lustre teapot—set off to Dark Trees to help. The rain was lighter. You could wade now just to your thighs where the culvert must be, and up the hill and down the lane was not too bad—but no view of distant mountains today. When they reached Dark Trees quite a lot of people were there already from the other side of Dukerdale over the high limestone pavements on the Rigg. Tatton was hanging out of his bedroom window looking very doleful and saying he was really a railway man, and everything was just as Hannah had said.

  A ladder was found in a barn and waved in Tatton’s direction and encouraging sounds were made, like “Jump man, and swim”—but Tatton wouldn’t on account of the dogs and the cow. There was a great deal of splashing and shouting and advice-giving for perhaps an hour until someone—it was Poppet, who was standing with Eileen—noticed that the water level was dropping. Or perhaps.

  Half an hour later it was certain. It was decidedly dropping. And half an hour after that Mr. Teesdale got in through the front door and said hello to the lid of the meal chest and gathered up the new rag rug as it floated by. Another half hour and you could actually see the feet of the knitting chair looking very rheumaticky and the rounded edges of the fine stone flags on the floor. Tatton and the cow came down the stairs and the cow rushed wildly out into the yard. After being in a bedroom it never felt quite the same again—and neither did the bedroom.

  By nightfall you could stand on Light Trees’ culvert bridge again and watch the water just filling the arch below, boiling and gurgling still, and brown and not blue, but nicely behaved now, not frightening. Wrapped round in rugs, Hannah and Tatton came to Light Trees for the night—in fact, for quite a lot of nights, for their house was not habitable for a long time. They were very happy with the Batemans’ living-room floor and hot soup, then dinner and warm blankets. But they were extremely talkative and didn’t seem to want to sleep at all. The Household Word—who had examined her fingernails very thoroughly by now—said that she, on the other hand, felt like an early night.

  She and Poppet left next morning—which was fine and sparkling like the first day of God—and did not mention coming back. “A thrilling visit,” said the Household Word. “Wonderful place, darlings—so exciting!” Great kissings all round went on and then she got in the car where Poppet had already seated herself, glaring fiercely at her knees.

  “Goodbye Poppet,” said Mrs. Bateman, but she did not reply.

  “So that’s the end of that,” said everyone. Mrs. Bateman got the red and white quilts out of hiding and put them on the beds again.

  “Thanks be,” said Harry. “The finish of them.”

  But it was not. A week or so later came a postcard from Poppet with glamorous palm trees and a white beach on it and it said:

  Thank you for a lovely, lovely, lovely time. Oh I do wish I could come back! Mother says not now. Oh, it was all wonderful.

  Lots and lots and lots of love from Poppet

  “I don’t think I understand girls,” said Mrs. Bateman, “only having had boys.”

  “Well, neither do I,” said Mrs. Teesdale, “and I’ve got one.”

  “Neither do I,” said Harry.

  “I do,” said Bell. “They’re cracked.”

  Eileen understood Poppet though, and so did old Mr. Hewitson, for next year he went to the station to meet her when she came to stay with Eileen.

  Eileen had married a farmer and gone to live at Dark Trees and Poppet stayed with them for many holidays for many years. She fed the chickens and gathered the eggs and mixed the gingerbreads and grew a very chattery, cheerful girl.

  And the beck beside the farmhouse door ran smoothly along.

  TABLE TALK

  It was Appleby Horse Fair and all the roads near and far were threaded with gypsies. They came from all over England, and had done every year since the gypsies started. There had been other people ahead of them—starting, they say, with the Greeks on their way to Scotland to leave stories and bagpipe dances behind them. Then the brooding Celts with their copper pans and choppers. Then the Romans, who travelled light but left rearrangements behind them. Then King Arthur and his knights, who fell asleep in a room under Richmond Castle and are still there if we could only find the way down. Then the dreadful Eric Bloodaxe arrived, who bit the Stainmore dust, and the unspeakable Scotsman, Malcolm the Red, who burned Appleby to the ground twice, before the Danes came and looked about more sanely and thought that this would be a nice place to settle down.

  But even after all this, it was still a long time ago that the blue-eyed gypsies arrived for the Horse Fair, appearing by stages and to be seen in all the lay-bys of the road from the south which the Romans called Watling Street, like the swallows back from Africa. And like the swallows they never stopped to tell you why.

  Their visits made—and still make—difficulties. Gypsies make people who are born of go-ahead Danish or Celtic stock uneasy. Vikings like neatness and hard work and no mess. Celts are less fussy, but they believe in talking, not sliding off and out of sight. And gypsy fortune-tellings drive people of the Hollow Land mad because Viking or Celt or whatever they are, they know their fortune is in the weather and they know the weather better than any gypsy, for they have to be out in it working night and day. The arrival of the gypsies occasions a lot of drawing in of lips as their battered cars and shiny caravans come sliding back down the lanes.

  One year, at the same time as the Appleby Horse Fair, there was an important sheep sale at Hawes—a bad arrangement. Everyone needed to go to one or the other or both—the Teesdales in particular because they specialized in little black-faced Swaledale sheep, which needed to be seen, as Swaledales were beginning to be less popular. “We have to go—it’s our shop window,” said Bell. “Our sheep-window,” said Grandad Hewitson.

  The Batemans had been to the first day of the horse fair and were missing the sale, as it was nearly time for London again and Mrs. Bateman was wanting to go with Mrs. Teesdale to a wo
nderful new antique shop that had set up over Stainmore. She had left it late as usual—this was her last day.

  “The whole village’ll be empty this afternoon,” said Mrs. Teesdale. “It’s a pity with gypsies about. But I’ve got to go. I’ve got to keep Mrs. Bateman right about prices.”

  “Well then go,” said Mr. Teesdale. “There’s old Jimmie Meccer in his shed. He’ll watch all’s well in the village.”

  “Crack lot of good he’ll be. He’s hardly the use of his feet. No more has that fond dog. I’ve never heard it yap. Nor old Jimmie yap. Not more’n three words. Sitting there in that shed-back with his face like a bladder of lard morning till moonrise.”

  “Well, make him sit in front of it then. It’s fine weather. He can have a stick over his knees along of his walking aid.”

  “I’d sooner he sat at the telephone box down the street. We could sit him there with a fivepenny bit if owt came up urgent.”

  So Jimmie Meccer, armed with a fivepenny piece and his dog, was set up in the telephone box with the door propped open. He filled the doorway so thoroughly that it was uncertain whether he would be able to reach round to the receiver if any trouble did come.

  “We could sit him in backwards,” said someone.

  “Well then he’d not be able to keep watch.”

  “There’s a mirror.”

  “It’s above his head. Anyway, he’d not look much threat sat with his back to everything.”

  They lumped him about for a while, this way and that way, and finally had him looking fairly obvious and considerable. They made him practise stretching backwards to the receiver, which wasn’t a complete success.