The Secret Hen House Theatre

by Helen Peters

  To my parents and in memory of my grandparents

  H. P.

  BANG, BANG, BANG!

  Somebody was trying to smash the scullery door down.

  Hannah sat cross-legged on her bedroom floor, hunched over a piece of paper, her pen racing across the page. Even inside the farmhouse her breath came out in white trails, and the cold sneaked its way right through her woolly hat and three jumpers.

  BANG, BANG, BANG!

  Her right hand didn’t leave the page as she glanced at her watch. Five to two. But it couldn’t be Lottie. She never knocked. She just walked right in and yelled up the stairs.

  One of the others could get it for once. She had to finish this by two o’clock.

  BANG, BANG, BANG!

  “Will someone answer that blasted door!” shouted her dad from the farm office.

  There! Finished at last. Hannah wrote “THE END” in large capital letters. This play would win the competition, she just knew it.

  BANG, BANG, BANG!

  “Hannah!” called Dad.

  “Oh, OK.” Hannah slid her mother’s copy of Putting On a Play under her bed and scrambled to her feet. She must remember to put that back in Mum’s bookcase later.

  “If it’s for me, tell them I’m not in,” Dad called as she passed his office door. “And get the others ready. There’s a pig wants bringing up from the Anthill Field.”

  Hannah ran down the splintered back stairs, script in hand, ducking the cobwebs that hung from the crumbling ceiling. Her little brother, Sam, was already at the door, fumbling with the latch.

  “It’s stuck again,” he said.

  “I’ll get it, Sammy,” said Hannah. Sam moved aside. His laces were undone and his shoes were on the wrong feet.

  BANG, BANG, BANG!

  As Hannah wrestled with the battered latch, her sister Jo came through from the kitchen, a flat cap pulled down over her curls. A ginger guinea pig nestled into her left arm, nibbling a cabbage leaf.

  “Who’s come?” she asked.

  The latch shot up. Sam glued himself to Hannah’s side as she opened the door. Jo hovered by the stairs.

  Looming in the doorway, stamping his feet against the cold, was a stocky man with a red face and a puffed-out chest. He looked like an irate turkey. His shiny dark hair was greased down on his head and he grasped a clipboard with his thick red fingers.

  He stared at the children. “Flippin’ heck,” he muttered. His breath hung in the air.

  What’s wrong with him? thought Hannah. She looked round but there was nothing, only the three of them in their holey jumpers and torn jeans. Had he never seen farm clothes before?

  Click, clack, click, clack.

  They all turned. At the top of the steep staircase, in a white minidress and red stilettos several sizes too big for her, stood ten-year-old Martha, one hand on her hip and her chin in the air.

  “Martha,” said Hannah, “you’ll die of pneumonia. Go and get changed. And take Mum’s shoes off. Dad’ll go ballistic.”

  “Oh, shut up,” said Martha. “You’re just jealous cos I look like a model.”

  The man raised his eyebrows. Martha tottered down the stairs and pushed past Jo to get a good look at him.

  “I’m looking for –” The man glanced at the clipboard. “Clayhill Farm.”

  They said nothing.

  “Is this Clayhill Farm?” he asked, louder now. “There’s no sign.”

  “The sign blew down,” said Sam.

  Hannah noticed a very new, very big, very shiny black BMW parked in the farmyard. At least, the top half was shiny. The bottom half was plastered in mud, like every vehicle that came up the farm track.

  “In the records, it says it’s a working farm,” he said.

  “It is,” said Hannah. Was he really thick or something? And who was he anyway, coming up here on a Sunday afternoon asking nosy questions?

  “Really? Then what’s all this junk lying around for?” He flicked his hand around the yard. At the horse ploughs half buried in grass, the collapsed combine harvester rusting in the mud by the pigsties, the old doors, oil stoves and tangled barbed wire heaped up outside the house. “I mean, what’s with that old rust bucket?” He pointed towards the tractor shed where Dad’s vintage tractor stood. “What is it – an engine from the Age of Steam?”

  “It’s Daddy’s Field Marshall,” said Sam proudly. “It’s really old.”

  “Huh. You don’t say.”

  Sam turned puzzled eyes to Hannah, and Hannah felt her cheeks flushing. How dare he be rude to Sam? And how ignorant was he? Didn’t he know Field Marshalls were collectors’ items?

  “Can we help you?” she asked.

  “I hope so.” He consulted his clipboard again. “I’m looking for Arthur Roberts.”

  “Who shall I say is calling?”

  “Just get him for me, will you?”

  They all spoke at the same time.

  “He’s out,” said Hannah.

  “He’s milking,” said Jo.

  “He’s in the office,” said Sam.

  “I see,” said the stranger. “Busy man.”

  They nodded.

  “Well, is your mum in then?”

  They were silent. Hannah had already seen quite enough of this stranger and she didn’t want him to know any more about their lives than he did already. What else was written on that clipboard?

  Along the lane a bell sounded. Hannah looked up. Lottie Perfect was bumping up the track on her brand-new bicycle, weaving around the puddles and potholes.

  “Can I take a message?” Hannah asked. She had to get rid of him. She needed every second of her time with Lottie.

  “Give your dad this,” he said. “Make sure he gets it.”

  Hannah took the envelope. Printed across the top were the words “Strickland and Wormwood, Land Agents”. And then, in red capital letters, “URGENT”.

  Thank goodness she hadn’t called Dad. This man must be the agent for the new landlord. Hannah pulled on her coat and stuffed the letter and her script into one of the pockets.

  The agent strutted off. Lottie, waving at Hannah from her bike, almost ran into him. She swerved wildly through a puddle. The children stared open-mouthed as a great brown wave of muddy water splattered all over the man’s trousers. Sam giggled, and that made his sisters laugh too. The agent glared at them as he opened his car door, and they laughed even more.

  Lottie braked at the garden gate. She jumped off her bike and yanked the gate open. “Look at the state of me,” she said. “Have you got something to wipe this mud off, Han?”

  “Right, you lazy lot!” shouted Dad down the stairs. “Look sharp!”

  Oh, no, thought Hannah. If she got caught up in Dad’s pig chase, she’d be gone all afternoon and they’d never get the play done.

  She threw Lottie a threadbare towel from the draining board, then grabbed Jo’s arm and pulled her outside, around the corner of the house. The guinea pig scrabbled across Jo’s jumper.

  “Hey, careful with Carrots!”

  “Jo, you have to cover for me. Please. I’ve got to read through the play with Lottie. We need to make sure it’s right so she can type it up. The competition closes on Tuesday – we have to send it off tomorrow.”

  “Oooh, I’ve got to read my play with Perfect Lottie,” said Martha in a high-pitched singsong voice. “As if you’d win a prize with your stupid play.”

  Hannah swung round. “Martha, get lost. It’s none of your business.”

  “Like I care anyway,” said Martha. She stuck out her tongue at Hannah and teetered back inside.

  Hannah turned to Jo. “Just tell him you don’t know where I am. Please, Jo. I’ve got to do this play – if we win, i
t actually goes on the radio and it might be my chance to be an actress!”

  Dad’s heavy tread sounded from the stairs.

  “I won’t tell,” said Jo. She placed Carrots in his hutch, sat on the scullery step and tugged on her muddy wellingtons. “Come on, Sam. Let’s get your boots on.”

  Hannah skulked around the corner. Dad strode out into the yard with Sam trotting beside him. Jo followed them. And, finally, Martha emerged.

  “Martha, please don’t tell him! I’ll give you anything!”

  Martha shot her a contemptuous glance. “Like you’ve got anything I’d want.”

  She kicked off the red stilettos and rammed her feet into an old pair of Jo’s boots. They were so much too small for her that she had to walk on tiptoe in them.

  She staggered into the farmyard. “Dad, wait up!”

  Dad was a good ten metres ahead of her and walking twice as fast. Hannah was spared. But not for long.

  Once the others were a safe distance away, Hannah pulled Lottie into the yard. She could see her dad’s back as he strode across North Meadow with the others behind him, Martha swaying precariously in her squashed-down wellies.

  “OK,” said Hannah. “Tractor-shed loft.”

  Halfway across the yard, she looked back. Lottie was still at the garden gate. She looked as panic-stricken as a person stranded on a sandbank with the tide coming in all around them.

  “Come on, they’ve gone now,” said Hannah.

  “Can’t we just go in the house?”

  “Don’t be stupid. That’s the first place he’ll look for me. Come on.”

  “I can’t. I’ve got my new trainers on. I promised I’d keep them clean. If they get ruined my mum will kill me.”

  Hannah let out an exasperated sigh. They were wasting precious minutes. She could go and get her trainers for Lottie but they had holes in the bottom and they’d be miles too small. Lottie was tall for eleven, and Hannah was little.

  Little but strong.

  She squelched back through the mud. “All right, hop up.”

  “What?”

  “I’ll give you a piggyback.”

  Lottie giggled. “You’re mad. You’ll break your back.”

  “I’ve carried heavier things than you. Get up, quick. They’ll be here with the pig in a minute.”

  Hannah staggered across the yard, her thick straw-coloured hair falling into her eyes. Lottie clung on to her neck, half laughing, half screaming.

  “Lottie, you’re strangling me!”

  “Aargh, you’re going to drop me!”

  “Stop squealing; you sound like a stuck piglet. Right, get off.”

  She dumped Lottie on the floor of the tractor shed and sank down into the dirt, rubbing her shoulders and pushing the hair out of her face. Lottie’s smooth dark bob was as sleek as ever. She always looked as though she’d just stepped out of the hairdresser’s.

  Lottie brushed the dust off her new coat. “Oh, guess what? You know the Linford Arts Festival’s coming up? They’ve got a youth drama competition – I saw a poster round the shops. We could do our play there.”

  Hannah dragged the rickety ladder out from behind the Field Marshall. “We can’t,” she said as she propped it up against the trapdoor.

  “Why not? You’re a brilliant actress. And then we could win, and that would serve Miranda Hathaway right for going on and on about how her drama group has won it for the last fifty million years.”

  “But we can’t enter,” said Hannah as she stepped on the ladder. “It’s for proper youth drama groups. You have to have an actual theatre. Don’t you remember Miranda saying how the judges come out to your theatre and watch your play?”

  “Oh. I forgot. Shame. It looked really good.” Lottie climbed up into the loft. “So have you finished the radio play?”

  “I’ll show you.”

  The loft was dark except for the far corner, where a narrow slit let in a shaft of grey February light. They groped their way across, ducking the beams and the cobwebs. Nobody ever came up here.

  They clambered over mounds of rusty tractor parts and empty calf-medicine bottles to a pile of old feed sacks next to the window slit. Hannah’s muscles tensed at the thought of what might be lurking under those sacks. She bit her bottom lip, screwed her eyes shut and stamped her foot down on them. She held her breath, listening for the horrible sound of scuttling rodents.

  Nothing.

  Phew.

  She plonked herself down on the sacks.

  Lottie settled herself beside Hannah. “So?”

  “OK.” Hannah reached into her pocket, pulled out the folded sheets of paper and flattened them on her lap. “Ta da!”

  On the first page was written, in large flourishing letters: “By Her Majesty’s Appointment. A play for radio by Hannah Roberts and Lottie Perfect.”

  “You didn’t have to put my name on it,” said Lottie. “I didn’t do anything.”

  Hannah had struggled with this herself, but eventually her more generous side had won. “Well, you had some really good ideas. And you are going to do all the typing up. And then we can send it off tomorrow.”

  Lottie clapped her hands in excitement. “Come on, let’s read it now.”

  “We’re going to win, I know we are,” said Hannah. “Mum loved Radio 4. It’s a sign.”

  Lottie reached for the script but her arm froze in mid-stretch as a cacophony of squeals and grunts blasted their ears.

  “What’s that?”

  The squealing got louder and more piercing as it was joined by the sound of running boots and thunderous swearing.

  They looked down through the narrow slit.

  Hannah’s father, holding a muddy board in front of him, was herding an enormous pink pig into the farmyard. As they watched, it shifted its huge weight on its tiny trotters, flicked around so quickly that no one could stop it and bolted back up the track.

  Martha shrieked and jumped out of the way.

  “Martha, you useless tool!” shouted Dad. “Joanne, get round behind her. Move!”

  Jo ducked under the electric fence and raced through the field, trying to outrun the speeding sow.

  “Sam, stand on the path there. Don’t let her past you, whatever you do. Martha, get down there and open the pigsty door. Move it!”

  “Hadn’t you better go?” asked Lottie. “He’ll go mad at you later.”

  “He’d go mad anyway. I’d only knock something over or get trampled by the pig. He’s moodier than ever at the moment.”

  “Here she comes!” yelled Dad. “Sam, hold that board out! Martha, get her in the sty. Where the blazes is Hannah?”

  “She’s in the tractor-shed loft with Lottie,” called Martha. “They’ve been there all the time.”

  Hannah’s heart stopped. She stuffed the script back into her pocket. “Hide!” she hissed to Lottie. “Quick!”

  But there was no time. She heard him shout, “Hold that!” and in three bounds he was up the ladder and in the loft. He glared through the gloom at the girls trying to disappear into the pile of empty sacks.

  “What the hell do you think you’re playing at?” he shouted at Hannah. “Get down in that yard this instant!”

  “Should I—” Lottie started to say.

  “No, no, you stay here,” Hannah muttered. Clumsy with embarrassment, she heaved herself off the sacks and followed her father down the splintered ladder. The sow was racing up the track again, and Jo was trying to turn her round, leaping from side to side like a goalkeeper defending a penalty.

  “Get over there!” Dad barked at Hannah, pointing at the entrance to the horse paddock. “Keep your wits about you and don’t let her past.”

  Head down, Hannah trudged across the yard. A thin layer of mud, patterned all over with the spiky footprints of chickens, coated the concrete. Tractor tyres had churned the gateway into a mass of brown puddles. It was impossible to tell how deep they were until you stepped in them and the water slopped over the tops of your wellies.

&n
bsp; Half a gate hung jaggedly off the one remaining hinge. If Dad ever got anything mended, Hannah thought, he wouldn’t have to use his children as fences.

  Standing up to her shins in a pool of water, Hannah let her imagination take over.

  “It is a great pleasure,” the radio interviewer would say, “to have with us the youngest ever winner of our playwriting competition, who also, of course, starred in the wonderful performance of her play which you have just heard. Hannah Roberts, you clearly have a great future ahead of you. What inspired you to write a play?”

  “Well,” Hannah would say, “my mum loved acting, so maybe I get it from her. And in Year Six I was in the school play…”

  How could she describe the joy of it? The fun of rehearsals. The excitement as the play starts to come together. The magic of creating a world from wood and words and fabric and sound effects. The buzz backstage, the butterflies in your stomach, the dazzle of the lights—

  “Hannah, look sharp!”

  Hannah looked up.

  The sow was charging straight towards her. Its muddy snout and huge yellow teeth loomed closer. And closer.

  She knew exactly what to do, and if she had been Dad, or Jo, or even Sam, she would have done it: leapt right into its path and stood her ground, confident that it would sense her dominance and change direction at the last moment.

  If she had been Martha, she would have jumped out of the way.

  Hannah did neither. She turned and ran. Lurched across the sodden ground, the pig sploshing and squealing behind her. Thick wet clay, heavy as concrete, clung to her boots.

  Dad crashed through the hedge just ahead and ran full tilt towards the enormous sow at her heels.

  And Hannah tripped over his boot and fell flat on her face into a gigantic puddle.

  She staggered to her feet, soaked to the skin. Freezing water cascaded down her back and legs. The world had gone dark. Her eyes were stuck together with mud. She tried to wipe them but her hands and sleeves were coated with mud too. She could feel her hair plastered to her face. Through the muddy water in her ears she heard Martha’s laughter.

  “Hannah, are you OK?” It was Jo’s voice.

  “Yeah, great, thanks, how are you?” Hannah tried to say, but the mud got into her mouth and she had to stop to spit it out.