‘Na’ then, lass.’ His weathered hands knew just where to tickle the best places between chin and chest as he unclipped them.
Darting this way and that and running with noses of piled snow they circled him, skittish as young colts. The bond between a farmer and his dog, essentially a working animal who clearly loved the daily round and common task, was something no urban dweller who kept a house pet could ever understand.
He checked the mistel first, the heady syrup scent of hay filling his nostrils and the familiar aroma of contented cattle chewing sporadically, turning their great heads to regard him for a moment. Wandering along the standings, his expert fingers kneaded a cow here and there on the muscles at the root of the tail, which they loved. He was a man totally at one with his animals, using a natural skill, as old as time itself, that understands the mutual language of instinct.
All was well.
He closed the mistel door and, with the windblown snow deeper here, he pushed on past the pigsties. Apart from sporadic grunts, it was quiet. He went on across the garth to the hen houses where his Rhode Island Reds clucked aimlessly on the perches above the deep litter, the nesting boxes lining the walls below them on either side of the hut. By day they scratched and pecked across the field, occasionally “laying away” so that he and Walter had to check the hidden places for eggs. With the advance of dusk he was careful to drop the popholes once the last hen was inside, otherwise the stragglers fell easy prey to the hill foxes. As he crossed to the huts, Tip and Bess were suddenly galvanised, spinning away across the snow, barking madly. Jos noticed the double sets of tracks going from one pophole to another. Two foxes had been testing his defences.
* * *
He recalled the dogs and together they walked over the lower pastures where the sheep, with much wool and lanolin to bar the cold, pulled at stray wisps of hay from the rack in the centre of the field. All was well here, though you could never be too sure. At lambing time the foxes sometimes circled the flocks looking for the chance to dash in and seize the weaklings. If it wasn’t the fox, Jos mused, then it was the buzzards or carrion crows. And they went for the eyes first.
He turned and looked back down the rise towards the house, the glowing windows emphasising the snowy landscape, and feeling as he always did that sense of belonging and heritage. He paused, brushing off the snow and resting his arms on the top bar of the gate. A moment of reflection.
He was a man of shrewdness and wisdom when it came to things of the earth, the things that had been in the blood for generations. In his world you never asked for pity when things went wrong or disaster struck. People helped you anyway without being asked. You just did your best to solve the problem yourself, for there were so many things that could go wrong from foot rot in sheep, red mite in hens, swine fever in pigs, and it was always the unexpected that caught you when your back was turned. Invariably, it was linked in some way to the weather, be it gales, floods, blizzards or drought. You had to be vigilant at all times and more often than not it was a combination of sixth sense mixed with knowledge and instinct that saved the day.
Jos loved this land, for it was the land that carried the dust of his ancestors and a fitting monument to their lives. The house had seen the mating, the birthing, the living and the departing of souls against the remote backdrop of world events, news of which in bygone days took forever to reach them, and sometimes never did at all. When the Young Pretender marched out of Scotland and got as far south as Derby in the rebellion of 1745, little realising that, if he had pushed on, he could have easily captured a London emptying in panic, Keld House was already more than a century old. Over a hundred years later, life went on as usual as Bonaparte’s armies brought Europe under the yoke of France. A century later the old order changed forever as the villages poured their young men into the bloodbaths of the Somme, Ypres and Passchendaele, in the War to End All Wars. A fine ideal that lasted twenty-one years before it all fell apart again and the distant crump of Nazi bombs could be heard even here, dropping onto the railway marshalling yards of York.
Keld House lived through it all, the only visible signs of change being the slow wearing of the stone by the elements. Attitudes changed and fashions came and went with the shifting tides of opinion but so far the old house had outlasted them all.
From the promise of the spring and the upthrusting of the life force in the earth, to the cry of newborn lambs, so very like the first squalls of a newborn baby, and the scything and cutting of the meadows; this was a world he knew and understood.
Now his breath hung like smoke before being whipped away by the bitter wind, but in his memory he warmed still to that sweet ache of comfort mixed with relief that always followed on the heels of getting in a lap ahead of Mother Nature. When the last bales of hay were safely forked into the loft; when the final load arrived on the laden, squeaking cart just as the thunderheads came in over Dead Man’s Hill to lash the earth with liquid stair rods, the hay crop so essential to getting through the winter was secure by just a few moments.
Memories of the long, hot days of summer when sometimes the beck shrank to a trickle and the leaves on the sycamores hung limp and sticky. Sweat in the small of your back and on your brow and the cool relief of a stoneflagged dairy. Those were days when the grass shrivelled and burned, the fellsides shimmered in the heat and milk churns of water were trailered up to the stone troughs for the thirsty animals.
Autumn, he reflected, was his favourite time of all. The fruitful mellowness tinged with sadness for the ageing year and the glories displayed in the reds, golds and browns on the palette of the countryside. Then came the winding down of the land, the last leaves spinning lazily to earth, and the first chilly blasts of the north wind, the winter herald, sighing through the bare bones of the trees.
He had proposed to Emily in autumn. Standing by the gate that evening he looked anywhere but at her, awkward in his suit and polished boots. His hair was newly cut in ragged steps above his ears and plastered down either side of a parting that gleamed like a furrow in a freshly ploughed field. He had been miserable at the apparent hopelessness of it all, the carefully rehearsed lines practised in the mistel day after day had somehow evaporated like puddles in the sun. He stood there forlorn, his great hands still mashing the helpless cap, eyes darting anywhere but in her direction. At last he had forced himself to look at her, the breath seized up in his frame and a hot choking feeling rising in his chest. It was now or never. ‘Emily, I bin thinkin…’ Then it all got stuck again. ‘Well, it’s no good!’ he had said and thrown the tortured cap over the gate. But she had rescued him. ‘Yes, Jos? What about?’ His last words had come out in a well nigh unintelligible torrent, but the meaning was true enough. ‘I was just wonderin’ if we could, well, be together. Would you marry me?’ She had never looked so beautiful, poised, holding the bouquet of meadow flowers he had brought her with one hand whilst pushing a strand of chestnut hair from the fullness of her mouth with the other. The grey-blue eyes danced, her breasts taut beneath the cotton dress and all the lissom wonder of a young girl in her prime. ‘Well, Jos Robertshaw, I thought you were never going to ask. Of course I’ll marry you.’
Sweet memory. And the time later, scrubbed, ruddy-cheeked and with his collar pinching painfully, standing beside Emily in the little chapel at Nethergill singing lustily, ‘All is safely gathered in…’ The day they were married.
Emily. He broke from his reverie, whistled up the dogs and hurried down the track to the house. Kicking the snow from his boots, he hung the Barbour on the broom handle. Lifting the latch he peered into the living room. She was asleep, a stray wisp of hair across the waxen face. The fire in the range had burned down to a dull glow. The lamplight winked back and forth among the horse brasses on the lintel, and the only sound was the keening wind hunting across the frozen windowpanes.
Gently he whispered in her ear, and folding his arms about her, he easily lifted the quiet form and carried her up the worn stone steps to bed.
Chapter 2
MONDAY 23 DECEMBER
IT WAS Monday morning at the farm, and the day that Ambrose Barnfather was supposed to arrive in North Appleton. The snow had ceased, giving way to a day of blinding white with sunshine from a steely blue sky. The wind still came from the north with a keen razor edge and throughout the day the temperature barely lifted above freezing. Icicles hung like organ pipes from the guttering of the mistel. The boulders in the beck were sugar-coated with frozen spray and fingers of snow still clung to the telephone wires.
Jos and Walter had begun their day as ever, milking, with breath rising in smoky clouds from man and beast. The cows were fothered and turned out while they mucked out and washed down. The tractor, known affectionately as Old Beelzebub, sat ticking over in the yard while the heavy milk churns were loaded onto the trailer.
The big back wheels of the tractor with their heavy tread tyres bit easily into the snow on the upward winding lane. But Jos frequently had to wipe the tears from his eyes as he peered into the scything wind.
Tip and Bess ranged across the snow as free spirits, here one minute and gone the next, but ready to return to Jos at a word or whistle. The same old routine, seven days a week, over the cattle grid at the top and roll the churns on to the platform to await collection. How many times had he done this? Countless. He noted the road had been ploughed. It had to be; it was vital to get the milk wagons through. He was about to turn back down the lane when he spotted the familiar red Post Office Land Rover grinding up the hill.
Lonnie Bean had seen a lifetime at the job, through every kind of weather and situation. He was a law unto himself and a hot-wire into all the gossip which, largely thanks to him, circulated swiftly.
‘Na then, Jos, bit slape this morning,’ he bellowed over the combined racket of two wheezing diesels.
‘I’ll give you t’post an’ it’ll save me a run. I’m late enough as it is.’
He slipped the rubber bands off the bundle of letters, thumbing through the Christmas mail, assorted bills and accounts, and Jos’s Yorkshire Post. In the middle of the bundle was a postcard liberally spattered with palm trees and bikini clad girls. Jos turned it over several times viewing it this way and that.
‘Oh, that,’ said Lonnie, ‘That’s from someone called Claire who’s a friend of Arnold’s, on holiday with someone called Anton in Florida. Sent care of you.’
‘Really?’ Jos eyed the postman with a baleful look. ‘Tha’s got to be t’nosiest bugger around.’
Lonnie grinned,
‘Well, you ’ave to keep abreast of the times you know.’
The back of his Land Rover was jammed to the roof with Christmas trees and boxes of groceries that gave out the cheerful clink of bottles. The Post Office would not have approved but the old folk of the high country certainly did, unable to get out as so many of them were, and it ensured Lonnie a rich supply of whiskies, beers, sherries, obligatory mince pies and, in most places, coins pressed into his welcoming palm with a muttered,
‘Compliments of the season.’
‘‘Ave you heard owt of t’lad from South Africa then?’
Jos shook his head. ‘He’s supposed to be arrivin’ at ’Appleton today.’
‘You be thrang this Christmas then?’
Lonnie had an unquenchable thirst for the details of people’s lives that bordered on the obsessive.
‘Aye. Counting Walter and Laura, there’ll be seven of us on Christmas Day.’
‘How’s Emily keepin?’
A fleeting cloud passed across Jos’s face.
‘Oh, tha knows, fair to middlin’. It can only be expected.’
The postman bade him farewell with a grinding of gears and clouds of blue diesel smoke.
* * *
Jos drove on back down towards the farm, parking in the lee of the mistel. He climbed down from the tractor, unhitched the trailer and then walked off into the house with the post.
Emily was sitting in her chair by the fire while Laura was by the dresser ironing, the pleasant smell of hot, crisp linen filling the room. Jos went over to kiss his wife gently on the cheek.
‘No word from t’nephew then?’ he queried, pouring boiling water from the ever ready kettle on the hob over a strainer full of tea leaves, adding four teaspoons of sugar and a splash of milk from the can on the table. The tea, soundly stirred, had a dark soup-like consistency and, blowing on it between gulps, he soon drained to the bottom.
‘No, and not likely neither’, Laura said bluntly.
‘We’ve just tried to call Harkers for some bits and pieces and t’line’s dead again. Walter reckons it’s ice on t’wires bringin’ them down.’
‘That’s all we need,’ Jos grumbled. He took his empty mug into the kitchen and headed for the door. ‘There’s nowt we can do so I’d best be gettin’ on.’
‘I suppose,’ said Emily, ‘If he does get to Appleton and he can let us know, you’ll be going for him in the Land Rover?’
He paused in mid stride, ‘Well… aye.’
‘Then it might be a good idea to tidy it up a bit because knowing you it’ll be full of junk. There’ll be no room for t’lad.’
He walked out into the yard muttering under his breath. ‘Women. Sometimes fit to craze a saint.’
With his nephew uppermost in his thoughts and knowing better than to argue with Emily, ill or not, Walter and he attempted to give the inside of the Land Rover a face lift. They removed bags and bales, assorted bundles of twine and paper bags, tools, a roll of barbed wire, a sledge hammer, boxes of nails, several storm lanterns, a jerry can of paraffin and, puzzlingly, a single cricket pad with the straps chewed off.
‘You wonder where all this stuff comes from,’ said Walter to no one in particular.
The vehicle had also been parked under a standing by the mistel and unbeknown to Jos had just been taken over as home by one of the farm cats. From a bag of wood shavings in the back he and Walter had gingerly carried four squalling kittens to a bed on an old army greatcoat in the hay loft.
* * *
The day stayed fine and clear. Apart from a break for the mid-day meal they spent most of the time cutting logs. The iron saw bench had a great circular blade greased with goose fat when not in use and driven by a belt that ran from a pulley on the tractor.
Autumn did a lot of the initial work. As October gave way to November, the onslaught of the winter gales finished off the process of life, death and decay and the wind brought the dead and dying timber to the ground. Sometimes it was the whole tree. An oak could have up to six miles of roots and its timber prodigiously strong, but if the ground was frozen hard then beeches and elms in particular were weakened and could go down under the immense pressure of the wind. Myriad plants and organisms that flourished in the long days of summer faded and died to form the nourishment for the same process the following year. The tree produced its splendid canopy of leaves only to shed them in the “back end” to add to the leaf mould beneath that gave strength and sustenance to feed the tree. With the aid of the earth, it fed itself. The key to the mystery of life lay in there somewhere.
Among Keld House Farm’s several hundred acres were two small woods, all that remained of the forest that would have covered much of the land hundreds of years before. Up on the fellside were several breaks of pine trees and a copse around the ruined lime kiln.
Jos and Walter would chainsaw the deadfall timber brought down by the gales and trailer it back to the farm. Walter mistrusted the chainsaw but it was easier than the old days when they cut the wood by hand with a great two-handed saw six feet in length.
In the shed, as they worked on, floured by the flying clouds of sawdust and half deafened by the shrill whine of the circular blade, the woodpile outside, seasoned by the weather, diminished and the pyramid of logs grew higher, spilling out across the floor.
It was a great way of keeping warm and when the pile of wood was of sufficient height the tractor was shut down and the leather belt looped over the rafters. Then each got
to work on the chopping blocks, two waisthigh sections of tree trunk, their tops worn and grooved with the impact of countless steel edges. As old Ambrose had told Jos long ago,
‘Listen, lad, and think on, tha’ can’t split logs with a sharp blade. It does nowt but stick in t’wood.’ So Walter used a blunt tree axe, Jos a wedge-shaped splitter. There was a rhythm in the work that used no more energy than was necessary; the drum of timber lifted up onto the block, the axe head descending more by its own weight than powered by flailing muscles and the deeply satisfying thunk and rending split as the steel parted the wood.
The logs were neatly stacked until all the available space in the building was full. Ash logs were by far the best for they burned green or old. Birch logs had tar in their bark which made them an excellent firelighter, whilst Cherry scented a room. Elm, the crossgrained wood that blunted many a saw, smouldered with hardly a flame while Pine was just the opposite and banged and cracked loudly, firing red hot missiles into the room. Sycamore lasted briefly while the noble Beech burned for hours.
* * *
It was now mid-afternoon and already the blue shadows behind the walls were starting to lengthen. Walter stretched his aching back and glanced up at the sky. ‘It’s still clear enough.’
Jos watched him carefully putting away the tools. For so many years with hardly the feeling of “boss” and “employee” they had worked side by side. They knew to depend on one another and if there was a difference of opinion then it was never allowed to linger, for in such lay the destruction of a working relationship and the erosion of respect. They both understood that. They also understood with the gift of hindsight that in their particular world there could be few secrets. Between them, their knowledge of farming, and hill farming in particular, was encyclopaedic. What one did not know then, like as not, the other would.
And then there was the business with Emily. From the day they realised that things could not get any better, only worse, Walter had been a rock to him. Little unassuming kindnesses, shrugged self-effacingly away. So often taking the major workload on his shoulders so that the boss could devote more time to his wife and adding unpaid hours to his six-day working week to help keep things going. Then there was Laura, who had taken it upon herself to run Keld House. Jos had tried once to say, stumblingly, just how much he appreciated all Walter had done. The other had blushed under his wind-tanned face and edged away, muttering something about how Jos had always seen him right and such things didn’t have to be said. It was never alluded to again.
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