In 1850 a mill owner by the name of Ferris did the usual thing and built himself a mansion outside town high above the dirt and the noise by a stream that had not been spoiled and with the open moor accessible from his garden through a small back gate. The house, which to please his wife Mr Ferris christened Astolat, was of the local stone whose appearance for a while was light and sparkling. But the smoke Mr Ferris had hoped to escape came up there on the wind, some days the very air had a bitter taste, and Astolat blackened in the look it gave to the world. Between the wars, when the mill was done for and the family went bankrupt, the Local Authority acquired it cheap, changed its name to Hollinside, and used it first as a convalescent home for men whose lungs had been ruined in the mines and the mills, and then, after the Clean Air Act, as a children’s home. Quite soon the rhododendron leaves no longer dripped soot whenever it rained, the women no longer wiped the lines before they hung the washing out to dry, and the children, taken for hikes across the moor, no longer blackened their hands when they scrambled on the crags. The stone of the house stayed black, but upstairs and downstairs the many rooms let in the light through generous windows, the tiles and cladding of the conical towers reflected every weather, all indoors was brightly decorated, and the spacious sloping and terraced gardens received the southern and the western sun. The brook, steep-sided, was fenced in safely for its passage through the grounds; but the tones of voice of it, soft or ferocious as the weather dictated, lingered in the dreaming memory of the children long after they had grown up and gone elsewhere.
When Ashton came to Hollinside in the latter part of January 1963 the stream was utterly hushed in ice under feet of snow. That winter had begun in earnest on Christmas Eve, deep snow, a hardened ungiving earth, week after week, the birds dying in thousands. Hollinside, warm and cheerful indoors, stood in a scoop of frozen stillness, from where, tracking the stream, very soon you might have climbed on to England’s backbone, three hundred miles of it, the long uplands, snow on snow on snow, under bright cold sunlight, bright chilling starlight, and the visitations of blizzards out of blackening skies on a wind that cut to the marrow of every living thing. Ashton, never speaking, looked enchanted by the snow. Warm and safe, the bustle and chatter of the room behind him, he was seen standing at the window, viewing a silence that perhaps, after its fashion, seemed to him kindred to his own. The wariness went out of his eyes when he contemplated the snow. He watched the frozen powder of it falling in sunny showers from the trees when the birds, small handfuls of imperilled warmth, swooped on the crumbs thrown out for them on the cleared flagstones.
Fuel and food, the doctor, the nurse, the workmen, the visiting teachers, came up to Hollinside after the snowploughs out of town. And twice a week, Mrs Edith Patterson was brought down early from Lee Farm on the moor, by her husband, Fred, in his truck, to help with the meals. She met Ashton on a Friday – he had been at Hollinside three days by then – and on the way home that evening she spoke about him in tones which caused Fred, driving very cautiously through the banks – almost a tunnel – of snow, to glance at her often. There was an excitement in her voice, and she seemed, as she talked, to be trying to understand why meeting Ashton was so important. He doesn’t speak, she said. And it’s not that he can’t, it’s that he won’t. And when Fred asked how he made himself understood, she had to think about it. I don’t rightly know, she answered. I don’t recall that he smiled or nodded or shook his head. But he takes everything in. His teachers are sure he’s learning. When he’s upset, he starts shaking. But when he feels all right, he looks at you like you were a blessing on him.
Night cannot fully descend over fields of snow. It seems to hover, quivering, lit from below. The farm lights showed. The dwelling made a brave appearance, its barns and byres and useful sheds clustering round. Elaine stood watching at the big kitchen window, her gran, Edith’s mother, holding her shoulders and also, above her, looking out. As the truck drew in and halted on the crunching snow, Elaine waved her right hand.
5
After the blizzard of 24 January the roads were impassable. Edith could not get to Hollinside, nor Elaine to school. The stillness around Hollinside deepened. Ashton stood at the window looking out. How immensely blurred all the outlines were! The ground fell away in soft undulations over terracing and steps. Mrs Owen, the Matron of the home, came and stood by him. He looked up at her. She saw that he was tranquil. She smiled at him, he looked away again at the vast soft forms of snow. Seeing him there, two or three other children came to the window, so that Ashton stood at the centre of a small group. And nobody spoke. Tranquilly the children and the Matron regarded the stillness which overnight, by a silent fury, had been enlarged and intensified. Thinking about Ashton later, when he and the snow had gone, the Matron felt a sort of gratitude, she felt gladdened and encouraged by him, because she was certain that in him then, in the hush after the snowstorm looking out, some hope had started in the life that he kept hidden.
Four days after the blizzard, Ashton’s teacher, Miss McCrae, rode in shotgun, as it were, on the first snowplough to get through to Hollinside. She noticed a change in him – nothing very concrete or easily describable, more like a shift of light over a surface of ice, snow or water. He did not speak; but a keener alertness and a more trusting openness had come into his face; and his movements, of his hands especially, were quicker and more expressive. She told him about her adventurous journey up to Hollinside, and seeing him so attentive, she chose her words very precisely. Soon after midday she was to ride down again, the snowplough in the meantime having pushed on to some of the outlying farms, Lee Farm among them, clearing a way. Leaving, Miss McCrae did as she had often done before. She took a sheet of white paper and wrote in a clear hand: Goodbye, Ashton. I will see you again the day after tomorrow. Two things happened. First he nodded and smiled. And on that unprecedented sign Miss McCrae would have ridden down between the ten-foot walls of snow on a high of happiness. But more happened. Ashton did more. He took the pen out of her hand and below her message, quickly and neatly, he wrote: Goodbye, Miss. I will see you on Friday. Then he gave her back the pen, bowed his head, clasped his thin shoulders and shook as though all the cold of the moors had suddenly entered him.
The big yellow snowplough came lurching up the drive. The children crowded to the windows to watch Miss McCrae climb in and be carried off. Passing through the hall, she told the Matron what had happened. He can write, she said. And very fluently. It was his secret. And now he is terrified because he has given himself away. The Matron hurried to the schoolroom. Ashton was not there. Arlene, who hadn’t wanted to see the snowplough, it frightened her, said that he had run off and Miss Roberts had gone after him. He was upset, Arlene said. He was making a funny noise. The Matron found him in his bed, Miss Roberts standing over him. He had drawn the blanket up over his face, gripping it very tightly. Nothing could be seen of him except his black knuckles. But the blanket itself, tugged and convulsing, gave the two women some idea of the thing possessing him.
Edith came in next morning, having missed her usual day because of the snow. They told her about Ashton’s sudden writing and what it had done to him. Though he sat at the breakfast table with the other children, Edith saw that he had withdrawn into himself. He would not let anyone see into his eyes. Of course, he was by no means the only child ill at ease. Across from him sat Albert, continually making faces, but as though for himself, as though in some private place he were trying them out, all he could muster, until he might hit on one that would have the power to placate the world. And three places along from Ashton there was Barbara, who never stopped muttering, never stopped cocking her blonde head this way and that, listening, as it seemed, to arguments about herself, harsh judgements and harsher, and her in the middle, listening, defenceless. But all that day Edith watched Ashton. And when Fred came to fetch her and with infinite care very slowly drove home through ravines of snow, she said she had been thinking about it again, s
he felt so much better lately, and would he come in and see Mrs Owen with her tomorrow, and talk about Ashton.
Next morning early, Edith in her canteen apron and Fred in the dark suit he wore for all solemn occasions, talked to Mrs Owen about Ashton. It would be company for Elaine, Edith said; and remembered she had said this last time when they went through the whole procedure, all the forms, and pulled out when a boy might have come to them, her nerve failing. I’m better now, she said. And added, into the pause in which Mrs Owen considered them, Aren’t I, Fred? Fred nodded, took her hand, and nodded again. When he’s better, said Mrs Owen to Edith and Fred, why don’t you take him up to the farm for a day? See how he likes it, see how you all get on.
They left it at that. But when Fred came back again in his work clothes to fetch Edith at 5, Ashton was standing in the big bay window, looking out. Their eyes met. Fred nodded, smiled, and raised his left hand in a greeting like that of an Indian chief who comes in peace. I’ll swear he nearly smiled, he said to Edith, driving home.
6
Towards the end of February then, the freeze still looking set to last for ever, early on a Saturday Fred and Edith fetched Ashton out to Lee Farm, for a visit. Edith sat in the back with him and about half way home, as he stared in his silence into the climbing and winding narrows of packed snow, she told him in a few words, to prepare him, about Elaine. He faced her at once, very close, so that she felt abashed and almost fearful that by her tone of voice and her words, only a few quiet sentences, a child could be so instantly and wholly rapt into such attention. It was as though he could see her daughter in her eyes. She patted his arm, and pointed through the window at a sudden gap and a perspective over a vast tilt of snow on which showed traces of drystone walls and, far off, there stood a house, the limitless bare blue sky curving over it and behind it. That’s where Elaine’s dad was born, she said. He only moved to Lee Farm when he married me.
Elaine was watching for them at the window, with her gran. She waved in great excitement as the truck halted. Getting out, Ashton was hidden from her, and he kept between Edith and Fred coming into the house. Edith felt the silence deepening in him. She ushered him ahead into the big warm stone-flagged kitchen. And then it was as though the adults vanished, that is how they remembered it later, they stood back and aside and were not there, only the children were, Elaine in her best dress, a soft dark blue, short-sleeved, her left arm ending at the elbow in a bulbous flipper, her face, under black abundant curls, of startling beauty, hesitant, fearful what this newcomer would make of her, this stranger, the black boy from nowhere who would not speak – he stared, he widened his eyes looking into hers, for a long while, so it seemed, but not that he was considering her, weighing a verdict, rather that she was flooding into him, through his eyes, into his silence, and when, as it seemed, the look of her had filled him, then, very foreignly, as though this were the custom in a faraway long-lost other country, he closed his hands, crossed his arms against his breast, and bowed his face out of her sight.
You’ve been baking, Mother, said Fred. Edith undid Ashton’s duffel-coat and hung it up. Elaine snatched hold of his left hand in her right. Come and see, she said. I know you don’t talk, but Mam says I talk enough for two so we’ll be all right. Come and look. And she dragged him out of the room.
7
A few days later, sitting in the schoolroom at a desk with Miss McCrae, Ashton reached across her for a sheet of paper and a pen, and wrote: Elaine showed me through the window where she went sledging. Then her dad said he would come out with us if we liked. So the three of us went out. I wore my new wellingtons in the snow. Elaine’s gran made a cake. Elaine’s mam said I could come again if I liked. Elaine’s dad said would I help him with the sheep? They are having a bad time in the snow. Here we feed the birds. – He wrote quickly and neatly but with a pause between each sentence during which, deep in his throat, he made a sound which at first was like the low insistent working of a small engine, and then more like a purring, a humming. The letters he made were not at all pinched, flattened or cramped. They were rounded, well-shaped, and making a word he joined them fluently. When I watched them forming, Miss McCrae said to the Matron afterwards, it felt like watching him breathing. His letters are airy.
Anxious that, as on the first occasion, Ashton might fall into a horror at what (and now so much more) he had disclosed, Miss McCrae hid her feelings under a brisk teacherly manner. Good, she said. Ashton, that is very good. And now I’ll tell you what we’ll do. She fetched a light blue folder from the cupboard and on it, in black capitals, she wrote: ASHTON’S WRITING. So all your work goes in here. He looked at her. His lips were pressed tight shut; but, beginning to be able to read his eyes, she believed she saw triumph in them, a fierce and precarious triumph. She held open the folder, he laid that first sheet in it. I will see you again on Tuesday, she said. Perhaps you will have more to write about by then.
Driving back into town for her next pupil, Miss McCrae recited the sounds that Ashton had made. Pace, pitch, rhythm and tone were all variable, which made for a great expressiveness. She improvised on a few of the possibilities. It pleased her best to begin quite high, in anxiety, move lower into exertion and concentration, settling then into contentment, a purring contentment, the lips tight shut, the tongue quite still, the humming and purring of contentment, in her throat.
8
Miss McCrae could not reach Hollinside on the following Tuesday and nor, the next Saturday, could Ashton be fetched for his weekly visit to Lee Farm. Quite suddenly, in the first days of March, the thaw came and the sound of it, almost at once, was the roaring of flood. Under its carapace of ice and its muffling of snow the stream through Hollinside enlarged its bulk and soon became visible through fissures and abrupt collapses as a dark thing mottled grey and white, battering every impediment loose, ferrying all away, breaker and bearer in one, deeper, faster, more destructive and cluttered by the minute. From above, behind glass, adults and children, equally spellbound, watched.
The moor let go its dead. The trees that, tough as they were, could not withstand three months of ice, they died inside, they stood only as skeletons, gone in the roots, not holding, and the ice that had killed them, becoming water, broke them effortlessly and as mere flotsam, draggled with other life, delivered them downstream. Beasts came too, the bloated ewes, and the small stiff lambs evicted out of the womb into the snow, with bloody sockets, eyeless, they came down swirling any way round and any way up, and a long-legged colt, or somebody’s dog or cat, and once, swelling monstrously, a cow, hastily the moor got rid of them. Half a shed came down, a ladder, fencing, a chicken coop, any one of which might clog a bridge so that things nobody wished to see lodged there publicly for days. The lanes themselves, as their packed snow dissolved, became fast tributaries into the bigger rivers, the Irwell, the Tame, the Etherow, the Goyt, that now, afforced, finally could heave their effluent and torpid sludge thirty, forty miles into the sea.
Ashton watched. Among others or alone if he was let, he stood at Hollinside’s big windows, watching. And at nights, closing his eyes, still seeing what he had seen, he listened to its roaring, for nearly a week the melt roared near below him, by his side, with sudden particular cracks and poundings, a clatter at times, a grating and once a sustained long undulating shriek. When he slept it was the motor of his dreams, he surfaced out of sleep and still it roared, he sank again, dumbly comprehending it.
Then the fury was done with. The stream through Hollinside became its former self, a modest thing with a low and amiable voice, and over it, that first early morning of quietness, louder than it, the birdsong started up that had been held back for weeks, the first singing of birds after a winter that had killed their kind in thousands, they sang and sang on the threshold of spring in the echoing pearl-grey, silver-grey, rosy grey light. The stream made a pretty tinkling, running quickly and almost out of sight between its accustomed banks, and over it, early morning
, early evening, the surviving birds made a triumphant din of song. Along the slope, under the big windows, ran tidemarks of the stream’s few days and nights of violent aggrandizement, lines of leavings, some of them hideous, some ugly bits of junk, torn remnants of birds, little sodden cadavers, which the caretaker and his two sons cleared away in sacks into a skip so that the children shouldn’t see them. But Ashton, the watcher, had.
9
Towards the end of April Ashton moved to Lee Farm. He had a room of his own next to Elaine’s at the front of the house looking out miles over the moorland and down towards the valley and the vast conurbation. The room was light and neat and would have been their second child’s, had he lived. Ashton still went down to Hollinside for lessons with Miss McCrae on the days when Edith helped with the meals. But he slept all his nights at Lee Farm. On three further days Miss McCrae or another teacher came to him there. That was where he lived.
After tea, Ashton and Elaine shut up the chickens for the night, and brought in the eggs. He helped Fred usher the cattle in through the muddy yard for the evening milking. He learned quickly, they were soon used to him, he flitted among them, watchful, settling them. Then he stood to one side, the cows snuffled and clattered, the machine hummed, Ashton attended. He takes it all in, Fred told Edith. I never saw a lad look like that. You’d think I’d let him into wonderland. And on Saturdays, warmly kitted out, he rode on the tractor with Fred into the top fields, to see to the sheep. Fred halted, Ashton jumped down and tugged a bale of fodder off the lifted pallet behind, leaving it where it fell. The sheep came running, they raised a great noise. Ashton climbed up again, to the next drop. When all that was done, Fred left the tractor and he and Ashton went together over a stile out of the green fields into the open moor. On the north slopes the snow still lay, very bright in the sun against the drab grass and heather. The wind felt chillier in the open. They found three dead lambs and left them lying. All their wool and flesh, the small body of them, would be gone soon. They’d be clean bones, disconnected, scattered. Fred strode off, Ashton keeping up the best he could, and halted, looking down into a snow-filled hollow. The snow had shrunk since his last visit, but still nothing showed that was any concern of his. Across the snow, from perches on the gritstone, two carrion crows regarded him and the boy. They’re the ones, said Fred.
The Best British Short Stories 2014 Page 9