The Hollow Land

by Jane Gardam

  “Total eclipse,” said Grandpa, “total eclipse of the sun. They held a total eclipse up here in 1927 on this very spot. Better than it’ll be this time where we’re a fraction off the track. In ’27 we all got let out of school for it. We had to lie on our backs in t’school yard with little bits of black glass in front of our eyes. We laid out in rows, all laughing on and chit-chattering. There was ale! Granny Crack’s lass lying out next to me in her black woollen stockings and button shoes. Alice Crack she was then, from over Kisdon. Bright red hair. My—she was a talker. She changed. ‘Alice Crack,’ she said—the schoolteacher—‘Alice Crack, if you don’t stop talking, we’ll all go inside and you won’t any of you see it and if you don’t see it now you’ll never see it, for there won’t be another till 1999 and that one won’t be total.’ ‘Don’t see why I shouldn’t see that’un,’ says Alice Crack, ‘I’ll be scarcely ninety. You won’t see it though, will you, Miss?’ So she had to go inside and she didn’t see it. She had to sit at her desk. She cried an’ all.”

  “Well, she’ll see it this time,” said Mrs. Teesdale. “We promised we’d take her. Lord knows how. Maybe in a pram. She’s a fair weight yet, too.”

  “I don’t ever see,” said Poppet, who was over for hay-time from down the road, her husband being up the fell all day with the rest, “why it’s got to be up at the Nine Standards we have to do things.”

  “Always was,” said her mother-in-law, “it’s a tradition.”

  “Time some traditions was looked over and sorted out,” said Old Hewitson. “Traipsing here and there. The Jubilee—all the jubilees. Why some of them still goes up for Guy Fawkes to this day.”

  “Old Mr. Kendal says that people have gone up there since before the Romans,” said Poppet. “He says the Nine Standards are probably Roman soldiers turned to stone. Says it’s part of the Lost Legion of the Ninth they used to write about in the old children’s books. They never got to Scotland, Mr. Kendal said. They only got as far as the Rigg and got turned to stone.”

  “Kendal,” said Old Hewitson, “always read over-many fond books.”

  “He says before the Romans the Rigg was where the Celts used to drive their cattle through the smoke.”

  “That,” said Grandad Hewitson, “is pure ridiculous Kendal talk. No folks, not even Romans, was daft enough to take cattle up yonder.”

  “For sacrifice and that,” said Poppet’s girl, Anne.

  “It’d be sacrifice all right, sacrificing good money int’ market. They’d be good for nowt, hiked all the way up to them Nine Standards and put through smoke.”

  “Nor us neither going gawking at eclipses of the sun eleven o’clock in the morning of a good day’s hay-making,” said Bell, coming in to see after the baskets setting off. “I’m warning you, I’m not going looking at eclipses on August whatever ’tis. I’m cracking on.”

  “You’ll not get much done int’ dark.”

  “It’s not going to last five minutes.”

  “There’s the coming and going of it. And it’s bad luck not to take notice.”

  “It’ll be darkness all right,” said Old Hewitson.

  “All darkness is darkness.”

  “No. Darkness is all sorts. And let me tell you, Bell, darkness from eclipses of the sun is not like owt else. It’s neither darkness of night nor gloom of twilight nor darkness from the Helm Wind over Dufton, like there can be on a bright day.”

  “Darkness is darkness. I don’t care about missing out on seeing some darkness.”

  “There’s more’n darkness about it. Stars come out. You can spot the planets—Venus, Mercury. Birds stop singing. All animals up at Light Trees from Hartley Birket to Nateby Birket will be falling silent and standing mazed.”

  “Aye well. I dare say we’ll not ignore it, Grandpa.”

  “And another thing I remember. Lying there int’ school yard. Under them currant bushes she kept. You remember them currant bushes, Bell?”

  “Not there in my time, Grandpa. Nor yet in Dad’s.”

  “Well under them currant bushes and the two-three trees they had there was little wee bits o’ light scattered. For an hour before, maybe. Little pieces like of light, and as the sky changed to like sunset, every little speckle under them trees turned crescent-shaped like the new moon.”

  “There’ll not be yon up the Nine Standards. There’s not a tree to speak of. And Standards themselves is too solid to show any crescent moons scattered about.”

  “Which is why I’ll be staying down here,” said Old Hewitson. “I’ll seat myself int’ garden by Mary’s lupins. Alice Crack, the Egg-witch, can go gallivanting in prams.”

  “Anyways, it’ll likely rain,” said Bell, who had grown over the years more like his father than his father had ever been. “Like it’s about to do today. Come on. Let’s get moving. It’s nine o’clock already.”

  “In my day,” said Old Hewitson, “hardest part of hay-time was over by nine o’clock of a morning. That’s when we rested, nine o’clock, horses being tired out. Good fast go at it we had from five int’ morning till eight. Then breakfast. In the hedge back. Tatie pies. You could only cut properly with dew upon the ground. People got out of their beds them days. I were called out at five from under my bedroom window. I were earning by time I were eleven.”

  “You’s talking of scything days.”

  “I’se talking of horses. Same as it’s horses again now. There was scything and leading with horses, then cutting and leading with horses. Then away went the horses and in came the machinery. And now, since the oil went, we’re back to the horses. I never thought I’d live to see the old tractors go. Grand they were, though dangerous. Rolled on you many times more often than any horse if you didn’t handle them right. I liked the old tractors mind. Historic.”

  “I don’t know,” said Eileen to her mother as they started to walk the Quarry Hill, empty these days of lorries and with creepers showering down the deserted limestone cliffs, “we get more history lessons the older he gets. His memory gets sharper every day.”

  “It’s better than with some,” said her mother. She shifted the heavy harness which held the buckets for the field dinners. “He doesn’t go in for holy traditions, saying things never should change and the only good things are the things that are over. He’s all for the present and the future still. Grandpa’s himself.”

  “Oh but he likes traditions.”

  “Aye, but he casts about among them. Thinks them out. He’s not like poor old Jimmie Meccer, still wambling on about being homesick after all these years. There was a letter from him this morning.”

  “Is he right?”

  “I don’t know. Hadn’t the time to read it. It’ll likely be usual sort of an affair. His letters don’t change. He might be still in his shed.”

  But “Oh my word!” said she later, in the warm, wet, impossible morning, with no haymaking done and back down at the farm again. “Oh my word—but this isn’t from Jimmie Meccer. Lord knows who it’s from, except he calls hisself a Hewitson and he’s from South America somewhere-other and he’s coming here.”

  “Here?”

  “Aye. To us. Any day. He’s on his way.”

  “Who is he? How’s he getting to travel?”

  “Well I don’t know. He’ll be great auntie’s lad’s lad. Or lad’s lad’s lad. I’d think. Or someone. Wonderful letter-paper he uses. Beautiful script. He says he’s booked at a hotel.”

  “Coming to see the old home likely. Is he bringing Jimmie back?”

  “No. He says he’s not seen Jimmie in donkey’s years. Not since Jimmie’s arrival party. Says he meant to come here, but with the oil crisis and his work—now he’s retired. And he’s coming about—he’s coming about his inheritance!”

  “Inheritance?” said Mr. Teesdale coming in thinking of more vital matters, like getting in some investigations for fluke-worm in mules sin
ce the rain had dished everything else. He carried the tools for flukeworm searches and a black frown. “Inheritance! He can inherit this weather. We’ve not much else to give him. He’ll soon be away back again. Right out of his depths he’ll be here.”

  “Inheritance,” said Mrs. Teesdale reading, “of the farmhouse Light Trees.”

  “Oh,” said Bell.

  “Ah,” said Old Hewitson. “Ah. Aha. That.”

  And everyone was silent, like the birds at an eclipse of the sun.

  On August the first, Henry Roberto Hewitson III arrived in a gleaming car and unannounced. He knocked on Teesdales’ door and it was opened at once because Mrs. Teesdale still did her own floors and was on her knees behind it washing the lino. She was in her sacking apron because she had been feeding hens earlier and doing the other dirty jobs while the fire got hot for the oven and she changed into her cooking pinny. She looked first at the car and said, “A car!” Then she looked at her cousin many times removed, his silvery suit, moustache and head of hair and no-coloured eyes, and he looked at her broad brown face and broad brown hands and eyes as blue as the headless woman’s dress. She said, “Are you coming in?”

  “I am Henry Roberto Hewitson III.”

  “You’re Auntie Win’s brother-in-law’s father’s son’s boy and you’re the image of William!”

  “William?”

  “William my only other cousin, who died. Of Whin Gill over Brough Sowerby way.”

  “I am from Brazil.”

  “My but I can see it in the hands! No hands for a farmer or a miner, we always said. Didn’t know where they’d hailed from, them narrow hands. And them shoulders! Well! He died young, poor William. He never prospered.”

  Henry Roberto Hewitson III, who had done nothing but prosper since the day he was born, walked behind her to the kitchen with a blank expression.

  He was introduced. Mr. Teesdale and Bell were out, but Eileen was over with Poppet. Eileen was often over with Poppet and Poppet’s Anne. They were talking about cake entries for Appleby Horse Fair and how to get them there. Old Hewitson was there—close up against the fire, though it was a hot day. He sat at the edge of a big stretch of newly washed stone floor because all the rag rugs were out airing in the yard with the cats and most of the furniture.

  “You are moving house?” said Henry Hewitson III. “I apologize. I should have made an appointment.”

  “Moving house? No—it’s just it’s kitchen day. Eileen, bring in yon rocking-chair for Henry. Poppet, shake him up a cushion. Anne—mind your head now, Henry, on the clothes airer. It’s been good blanket weather this week, in and out of showers. When we daren’t risk hay I wash blankets, but they tend to hang about and the ceiling’s low. This is Grandpa.”

  Grandad Hewitson turned his old head.

  “It’s an honour, sir,” said Henry.

  “It’s William!” said Old Hewitson. “William over again. He had the TB had William and something muscular the matter with him, too. Started with him hitting his finger with the chopper when he was hewing hawthorn sticks. He had his arm off int’ end. But then, Jimmie Meccer’ll have told you.”

  Henry said he had not seen Jimmie Metcalf for—

  “Legs lasting out with Jimmie Meccer, I hear,” said Old Hewitson. “Mind you, he rested them long enough. Sat in yon shed for fifteen years till he struck lucky with his kitchen table and got hisself sorted out.”

  “Unfortunately I have only met him—”

  “We had his dog. It used to lie in the road day after day. Nice dog, but not much go about it. It died seven or eight years back or you could of seen it and told him about it. You can see his cottage anyway. You’ll like to see that. It’s close by. Our Bell and his wife, Poppet, and their Anne live there.”

  “That,” said Henry, “will be the old farmhouse, Light Trees?”

  “No,” said Grandad and turned back to the fire. It might have been that Henry had never existed. The room, for Grandad Hewitson, had emptied of him.

  “Light Trees is a hill farm away up above the quarries,” said Mrs. Teesdale. “It belongs to Grandpa. It’s tight away up the fell.”

  “It is Light Trees I came to England about,” said Henry, and he put every one of his fingers together and then his two thumbs and his elbows very precisely on the ends of the arms of the rocking-chair. “My father once told me of Light Trees. Your daughter lives at Light Trees?”

  Eileen said after a little pause that, no, she lived beyond, in the only farm beyond. It was her husband’s own farm and grand low-lying land. Dark Trees. No, they didn’t own Light Trees.

  “And you live here with your daughter, Mr. Hewitson?”

  “Yes, he lives here with us,” said Mrs. Teesdale, since Grandad Hewitson was closely examining the coals. “He’s lived here long since. Ever since Mother died. He does own Light Trees, though.”

  “So Light Trees stands empty?”

  “Light Trees,” said Mrs. Teesdale—while Eileen and Poppet and Poppet’s Anne stood still—“is let. It’s been let over twenty years. To the same family.”

  “To a local family I take that to be?”

  “No. No. Friends. Old friends.”

  “Not members of our family then? My family said that the house—there is a tradition that the house was never to pass out of the family and often passed to cousins?”

  “It hasn’t passed out of the family,” said Poppet. “It’s Grandpa’s. He lets it. To London folk. They’ve taken good care of it. It was a bonny mess when they took it on, by all accounts. They’ve been coming up here a thousand years.”

  “They will be sorry to leave it,” said Henry. “It would be bad luck I understand for it to pass out of the family. I remember my father saying this. It’s an old tradition.”

  Poppet suddenly thumped down a pot of rum-butter she was holding and crashed out of the room. Her temper was still uncertain.

  “I remember distinctly my father saying that the one who should rightly inherit Light Trees would be me. Over the years I seem to have remembered it more clearly. Before I came away from South America I looked it up in his papers and it is all written down. The deeds of Light Trees. Here they are,” and he took from his expensive slithery briefcase an old piece of paper and laid it on the stool on top of Old Hewitson’s feet.

  Then he left—to walk the Quarry Hill to survey the property to be left to him when Grandad Hewitson died.

  I am Anne Teesdale. I am the daughter of Bell and Poppet Teesdale. I am eleven and shall marry Harry Bateman, who is a friend of my father, though younger; he is a friend of all our family. He does not know that I shall marry him, nor does anybody else except perhaps my Grandfather Hewitson, and nobody knows exactly what my grandpa knows or doesn’t know because he’s about ninety years old.

  Harry Bateman is the most beautiful, glorious, peaceful man and he lives in London but really belongs up here, where he’s been visiting since he was a baby. Here is the ancient kingdom of Cumbria and our part is the Hollow Land, which is where I was born and have never left, except when they sent me to a boarding-school. I came back before the Crisis and I shan’t leave again.

  This place was the home of Eric Bloodaxe the Viking, the Lord of the Marches of Harcla, the Headless Horsewoman of Stainmore, the Hand of Glory, Granny Crack the Loony and my grandfather, who is almost in folklore already. It was not the home of my mother Poppet, but you’d never guess. She came here about my age; my mother, on holiday with my important grandmother, who is a household word. We never see her. My mother Poppet decided to marry my father the day she met him. Harry will settle here for good too when he can afford to—say six years from now when I marry him, and he’ll not fret for other places neither. It’s that sort of a place, the Hollow Land, and he’s that sort of a man.

  But it isn’t easy to get a footing here.

  Just wait.

  This is
the account of the two most eventful days of my life to date. They ended this evening and must be recorded at once before I go to sleep, in case the slenderest detail should be lost to the world.

  Harry was to come on the steam train from London yesterday morning. He’d booked the ticket months ago, as you have to with only one train a day, and my father and I were up at dawn with the dew soaking white on the fields outside the kitchen window, white ash in the fire grate and nobody stirring, not even the five yellow cats asleep on chairs. My father opened the back door and slung the cats out in the yard one by one. He can’t bide cats, he says, though they come trying to sit all over him. We drink each a cup of tea and I’m hoppity skippety mad round the place because of Harry coming.

  “Give over,” he says, Dad, while I’m dancing and flapping toast about. “You’ll wake your mother,” and I notice he’s right gruff.

  Just standing, he is, staring out at the fields with the sun ready to come up over them, turning the four big oaks black and throwing spars and bars of dazzle across the lane and up towards Quarry Hill. You can’t see any fells from down here. It’s alongside my Granny Teesdale’s farmhouse, this one, a little old house once lived in by some fat American with no legs called Jimmie Meccer. I never worked out who he was, but he found some magic bit of furniture or pot of gold or some such and away he went and married a millionaire.

  Anyway, we got his little house with its shed and it’s grand. Behind it there’s a stable, old as Henry VIII, with a little trap in it as old as Henry VIII’s grandfather but a godsend since the Crisis. When the oil dried up and we all had to think again, my father, Bell, burrowed about in the stables and came out with this old trap, called a digby. It needed new springs, which Harry made last year—“He can do owt” my dad says—and it needed new seats, which my Gran Teesdale made out of old patch quilts, and new wheelspokes, which Harry went passionate over and painted reds and blues and yellows like the gypsies, said he, though gypsies seem to me always just to be sat by the road in old tin cans. Since the Crisis the gypsies have no colour in them. They mend old petrol tins and sit by the roadside watching you, and then move on. They’re still good at finding horses. They’ve not left one wild now, though Harry says that there were many a dozen ponies all over Wateryat Bottom when he was my age, dropping big fat foals that never knew saddle nor bridle and lived and died free.