The Secret Hen House Theatre

by Helen Peters

  “You’re not funny, Jack,” said Lottie.

  “Shame you missed the poetry competition,” said Danny.

  “Yeah, I was really upset about that.”

  “No, really. It was hilarious. She did this poem all about mud and rotting lamb corpses. The judge nearly threw up.”

  Jack nodded respectfully at Hannah. “I like your style, Roberts. There’s not enough poems about dead animals in the world, that’s what I say.”

  Hannah was a mass of confusion. She bent right down over her maths book so that her hair curtained her face.

  “It was really good actually,” said Lottie. “I bet you couldn’t write a poem to save your life. You probably can’t even write.”

  “As it happens,” said Jack, “I wrote a poem this very morning. It was inspired by the tragic death of my only goldfish.”

  The class giggled again.

  “Huh,” said Lottie. “Sure you did.”

  “Want to hear it?”

  “No,” said Lottie.

  “Yes,” said 8M.

  Jack took out his English book, stood up and looked around the class expectantly. They all looked back at him. When Jack performed, everybody watched.

  Hannah gazed at him adoringly. He was so good-looking. And so funny. How could Lottie not see that?

  “‘Ode to my Goldfish’,” declaimed Jack.

  Danny snorted.

  Jack allowed a generous dramatic pause before continuing.

  “Bubble, bubble, swim, swim.”

  Another dramatic pause.

  “Verse Two,” he announced. “Bubble, bubble, swim, swim.

  “Verse Three,” he continued through the laughter. “Bubble, bubble, swim, swim.”

  “How many verses are there?” somebody asked.

  “Thirty-seven.”

  “And they all go, ‘Bubble, bubble, swim, swim’?”

  “Yep. Hey, it’s not my fault,” he protested, dodging a book hurled at his head. “Goldfish only have four-second memories. He really wants to say more but he keeps having to go back to the beginning.”

  “Idiot,” muttered Lottie as Jack sat back down, ducking a blizzard of flying objects. “Honestly, I don’t know how you can like him.”

  “I don’t like him!” said Hannah, suddenly aware that she’d been grinning like a halfwit.

  “Oh, come on, Han, you so obviously do. You go red every time he looks at you. And you’ve been in such a love trance that you haven’t even finished question one and the bell’s going to go any minute.”

  Oh, my goodness. Lottie was right. Hannah pulled Lottie’s maths book closer to her and started scribbling furiously.

  “What are you doing in our classroom anyway?” Jack asked Hannah.

  He leaned his chair sideways and glanced at the two maths books open in front of her. “Ooh, what’s this? Copying homework? In Year Seven? Tut tut.”

  Lottie leapt in like a lioness protecting her young.

  “At least she had a proper reason, Jack. Unlike someone I could mention. So don’t you dare say anything.”

  “Shut up, pudding head,” said Jack. “You’re not her babysitter.”

  The door opened and Hannah looked up.

  Oh, help.

  Mr Nagra was heading straight towards them.

  Hannah slammed shut the two exercise books spread out on the table. She slipped Lottie’s on to the top of the pile on the shelf. But what could she do with her own? All she had written was the date and half of question one.

  “Just in time, you two,” said Mr Nagra. “Right, let’s have those books.”

  He picked up the pile of books and tucked them under his right arm. Hannah hid her book behind her back.

  Honestly, what was she – five years old?

  Mr Nagra stretched out his left hand. “Come on, Hannah. It can’t be that bad.”

  Hannah stood as if turned to stone. If she confessed now and got told off in front of Jack and his friends, how humiliating would that be? But not to confess and then to be found out later…

  Mr Nagra would phone Dad. And that would be worse.

  And then, as she stood there dithering, the book was snatched out of her hand.

  Hannah swung round.

  And there was Jack, holding her maths book, strolling away from her towards the window, rifling through the pages.

  She couldn’t believe it.

  He was looking for the page with her unfinished homework.

  He was going to show it to his form tutor.

  So that she’d get into trouble and he’d get brownie points for grassing her up.

  How could he?

  Hannah ran over to get her book back but he held it out of her reach and carried on flicking through the pages.

  “Stop horsing around, Jack, and bring that over here,” said Mr Nagra. “I haven’t got all day to waste.”

  And then the most amazing thing happened.

  Holding the book with the covers facing the teacher, Jack found the page of unfinished work.

  With a dramatic flourish he ripped it out, tore it into tiny pieces and threw them out of the window.

  Hannah stared, frozen, as the wind blew the shreds of paper out of sight.

  Jack turned to Mr Nagra and shrugged. “Just saving your time, sir. It was all wrong anyway. She’s rubbish at maths, isn’t she, sir?”

  Mr Nagra was speechless for a moment. Then he said, “Jack Adamson, go to the Head’s office. This minute. I’ve just about had it up to here with you.”

  Jack ambled out of the classroom.

  Just before he closed the door, he turned and winked at Hannah.

  Hannah couldn’t stop smiling for the rest of the morning.

  Clayhill Farm was shaped like a shallow bowl, with the farmstead at its centre and the fields rising gently all around it to the woods on the north side and the Downs in the south. As Hannah and Lottie walked down the track after school, the silvery winter sun was setting in streaks of pink and orange cloud.

  Hannah nudged Lottie. “Look! Aren’t they beautiful?”

  A charm of jewel-bright goldfinches, flashing scarlet and gold, pecked the seeds from the winter-blackened teazels by the woodpile.

  But Lottie was absorbed in what looked like a complicated game of hopscotch.

  “I don’t know why you bother,” said Hannah. “You’re going to get covered in mud anyway.”

  “It’s not so much the mud. I just don’t want to get covered in cowpats and sheep droppings and chicken dung.”

  “Well, it’s all mixed up together so you haven’t got much chance of avoiding them. You should keep a pair of wellies here.”

  “Where will he be?” asked Lottie.

  Hannah glanced at the tractor shed. “The Field Marshall’s there, so he’s back from the steam fair. We might catch him in his office before he does the milking.”

  They ran up the back stairs and squeezed past the clutter of filing cabinets in the corridor. Then they froze as they heard Hannah’s dad’s raised voice.

  “So that’s it then? You’re saying he has every right to double the rent and there’s nothing we can do about it?” There was silence for a moment. Then a grunt and, “Goodbye.”

  The phone slammed down on its receiver. Hannah looked at Lottie in alarm. She had heard that tone in his voice more often lately. Angry phone calls, letters from the land agent…

  “Go on,” whispered Lottie.

  Hannah pushed the anxiety from her mind. She braced herself, placed both palms flat on the office door and shoved. The hinges squeaked and the bottom of the door scraped along the floorboards. It opened halfway and ground to a halt against some obstruction on the other side. Hannah squeezed into the room, stepping over a heap of cardboard files, and pulled Lottie in after her.

  The farm office looked like the long-lost treasure hoard of a tribe that worshipped paper. There were files of papers, folders of papers, boxes of papers, and thousands and thousands of loose sheets of paper, all covered in dust and a
ll heaped around the room in gigantic tottering piles. The table under the ivy-covered window was completely obliterated by stacks of paper. The wallpaper hung off in strips, bowing down to the paper on the floor. A cupboard door had burst open several years ago from the pressure of the boxes of papers stacked up inside it. No one had tried to close it since, so it still gaped open, with the papers tumbled crazily across the floor. One heap was suspended in mid-fall: a Leaning Tower of Paper.

  The only thing in the room that wasn’t filled with paper was the waste-paper basket.

  It was empty.

  In the middle of the room, like an island in a foaming paper sea, was an old oak desk. And at this desk, banging out a letter on an ancient black typewriter, sat Hannah’s father. He wore torn blue dungarees with a frayed leather belt. He looked older than usual, his face stern, his forehead deeply furrowed. He looked thinner too, Hannah noticed.

  “Dad?”

  She couldn’t tell if he had heard her. He stopped typing and frowned at a letter lying beside the typewriter. Hannah read the letterhead at the top. Goldman and Co., Solicitors.

  “Dad?” she said again, a little louder this time.

  “What’s that, Joanne, er, Martha, er, Hannah?” He didn’t look up.

  Hannah looked at Lottie. “Go on,” Lottie mouthed.

  Her stomach clenched, Hannah navigated her way between a tower of box files and a pile of brown envelopes to reach his desk.

  “Dad, me and Lottie were wondering if we could maybe use the tractor-shed loft?”

  “Use it? For what?” His voice was tetchy. Hannah took a little step backwards.

  “Well, errmm, as a theatre.” Even the word theatre sounded strange in that room.

  “Theatre?” Her father mouthed the word as if it had an unpleasant taste. “Ha!”

  He went back to his typing. Bash, bash, bash, with his huge rough fingers.

  Hannah turned to Lottie, hovering in the doorway. Lottie stepped back out of the room and beckoned. Hannah tiptoed around the heaps of paper and followed her into the corridor.

  “We’ve got to tell him why we want it,” Lottie whispered. “Describe how good it’s going to be.”

  “Why would that work?”

  “Well, your mum used to act before she was married, didn’t she?”

  “Yes, exactly. Before she got married.”

  “Well, maybe if he knew how much you love theatre? He knows you won the Year Six Drama Cup, doesn’t he? So he knows how good you are. Go on, talk to him.”

  “Hmm,” said Hannah, but she weaved her way back through the obstacles, her heart beating faster. Over the past two days, the wonderful vision of her theatre had taken over her head. Lottie was right. It was worth a try.

  “Dad, you know I wrote a play?”

  “Eh?”

  “It fell in the mud but I’m writing it out again. And we’ve got loads of ideas for more. You see, there’s this drama competition we really want to enter, and we thought if we made a real theatre in the tractor-shed loft we could act the plays out properly, and Lottie can sew and she could make amazing costumes, and we’d make scenery and—”

  Now he raised his head, a deep frown on his face. “You want to take over the tractor-shed loft to use as a theatre?”

  “Yes.”

  “And what about everything that’s in there?”

  Hannah glanced at Lottie, who had stayed in the doorway. “Well, we thought maybe we could help you sort through it.”

  “Oh, did you?” He glared at Hannah. “Do you think I haven’t got enough on my plate at the moment? I’ve just had Martha pestering for a television in the house. A television! So she can sit about night after night goggling at drivel. And now you come up here asking for the tractor-shed loft! Have you all gone mad?”

  “We could clear it out ourselves.”

  He banged his fist on the desk, raising clouds of dust from the disintegrating blotting paper. “Don’t you even think of messing about with all that stuff yourselves! You’ve got no idea what any of it is; you’ll get yourselves injured. And that floor up there isn’t sound. You’d end up falling through it and breaking your legs, and the last thing I need is to be taking one of you to hospital. For goodness’ sake, this is a farm, not a playground. Haven’t you got better things to do than mess about with plays?”

  Something in Hannah made her persist.

  “Please, Dad. I know you don’t like theatre, but I love it. I love it just like Mum did.” She saw his face tighten, but she had to go on. “I can’t be just the same as you. You love your animals. This is what I love. Please, could I just have this?”

  Her father jumped up from his chair and suddenly he was towering above her, silhouetted by the dim light from the window.

  Hannah took a step back.

  Was he angry?

  Or was he upset?

  “Get out!” he yelled. “Just get out! I’ve got work to do, for goodness’ sake. Just leave me in peace!”

  Hannah was already stumbling out of the room. Her vision blurry with tears, she caught her foot on a pile of folders.

  “Aarghh!” she cried as her knee crashed on to the splintered floorboards. “Ow!”

  She shot out her hand and pushed over a heap of plastic wallets. They slithered across the floor, spilling their contents like an oil slick.

  Hannah scrambled to her feet, trying to pile the papers back together.

  “Leave them alone!” shouted her dad. “Don’t touch anything! Just get out!”

  Hannah limped into the corridor, pushed past Lottie, stumbled to the stairs and slumped on the top step, her hands shielding her face.

  Lottie came and sat beside her. “Are you all right?”

  Hannah bit her cheeks to stop herself from crying.

  Why had Dad just lost it with her like that?

  Click, clack, click, clack.

  “Martha!” hissed Hannah. She jumped to her feet and wiped her cheeks with her sleeves. “Quick!”

  But it was too late.

  “Ha ha ha-ha haa!”

  Martha tottered down the corridor. She was wearing the red stilettos again, this time with black tights, denim hotpants and a tiny red vest top.

  “Dad wouldn’t let you have a theatre, ha ha ha-ha haa! Dad’s angry with Hannah, ha ha ha-ha haa!”

  “Have you been spying again?”

  “Spying? It wasn’t exactly hard to hear. Ooh, Daddy, can we have a theatre? Ooh, please, Daddy?”

  “Oh, shut up, Martha. Come on,” said Hannah to Lottie. “Let’s go to my room.”

  They walked past Martha and back through the jungle of filing cabinets. Martha clacked off down the stairs.

  As Hannah passed the office door, she couldn’t help glancing in.

  Her father sat with his head in his hands, staring at a picture on the desk in front of him.

  Hannah knew that picture. It usually hung on the wall behind the desk.

  It was a photograph of her grandfather, taken in the 1940s. He was perched on the seat of a brand-new, bright-green tractor. He was grinning broadly. It was his first ever tractor, Dad had said. His beloved Field Marshall.

  Why had Dad taken the photograph off the wall? And why was he sitting staring at it, looking so miserable?

  Had something happened at the steam fair?

  But what could have happened to upset him like that?

  Hannah pushed the questions aside. She opened her bedroom door and then, without going in, slammed it very loudly.

  “Follow me!” she hissed to Lottie. “Tiptoes!”

  “Where are we going?” mouthed Lottie as they crept down the carpeted front stairs.

  “Sitting room.”

  “But you’re not allowed in there.”

  “Have to get away from Martha. She’ll think we’re in my room. She’ll go and try to listen at the door.”

  “Oh. Clever.”

  The sitting room hadn’t been used since Christmas. A scattering of soot rattled down the chimney as Hanna
h opened the door. The ancestors on the wall did not look amused.

  Hannah’s great-grandparents had been wealthy Londoners. They’d wanted their only child, Hannah’s grandfather, to be a lawyer. But on family holidays in Sussex he fell in love with the land and made up his mind to become a farmer. While in the army during the Second World War he took an agricultural correspondence course. And when he came back from the war he rented Clayhill Farm. It was badly neglected. There was no electricity or mains water, the fields were full of weeds and there wasn’t even a farmyard, just a sea of mud right up to the back door.

  Over the years, all the family money was spent on the farm. All the silver and the good furniture was sold to pay the bills, but Hannah’s mother had tried to keep the sitting room nice and now Dad wouldn’t allow anything in there to be touched. The rich ancestors sat haughtily in their chipped gilt frames, and their stern painted eyes seemed to say: “We’re not supposed to be in a farmhouse, you know. We deserve better than this.”

  The children had been banned from the sitting room after Hannah smashed into the china cabinet during a game of Tag in the Dark. Their mother’s collection of china pigs lived in the cabinet. Three of them had been broken. That was probably the last time Hannah had seen her father as angry as he was today.

  Lottie stared nervously at the portraits. She shivered and pulled her coat more tightly around her.

  “That’s a lovely picture.” She pointed at the only painting that wasn’t a portrait. It was of a beautiful bay horse, all saddled up but riderless, with a spaniel standing beside it.

  Hannah glanced at it. “That was my mum’s favourite.” She slumped on the sagging Victorian sofa and picked at the torn gold brocade. “I can’t believe he won’t let us have the loft. It would have been so amazing to enter the festival. He never even uses it! I bet he hasn’t been up there for years.”

  Lottie wandered over to the mantelpiece and picked up one of the ornate silver candlesticks. “Wow, it’s really heavy. Are they real silver?”

  “Oh, be careful with those,” said Hannah. “They were my great-granny’s.”

  Lottie put the candlestick back. “Why did your dad get so mad just now? I didn’t think he’d go that crazy just because you asked to use the loft.”