The Farm Beneath the Water

by Helen Peters

  Owen pulled a shocked face. “Steady on. I didn’t come here to be sacrificed.”

  “Too late, mate,” said Jonah. “You volunteered.”

  “Right,” said Hannah, “now I’m going to show you the seven basic attack and parry moves in the French system. Attack number one is a thrust to the stomach. Keep your sword hand extended and look for your target.”

  She thrust her sword at the plaster on Owen’s belly button. Owen groaned and staggered backwards theatrically. Several people giggled.

  “OK, now you do that, Owen, and I’ll show you how to parry it.”

  She handed Owen a sword. Owen struck a dramatic pose and thrust his sword out. Hannah parried it away.

  “See? We’ll do it again, in slow motion. Great. Now, you can all take a sword and practise in pairs with the person you’ll be fighting with in the scene. When everyone’s got it, I’ll show you the second move.”

  An hour later, they had all mastered the seven basic moves of the French system and Hannah asked everyone to sit on the carpet again.

  “Now that you know the moves by number, we can choreograph a fight just by using those numbers, you see? And I’ll write the numbers down so we have a record for future rehearsals. So can you all choreograph a one-minute fight in your pairs, using those seven moves? When you’re done, show me and I’ll write down the numbers.”

  Everyone sprang to their feet again. Hannah weaved her way between the duels, ducking the plastic blades and attempting to write down moves as she tried to keep order.

  “Jonah, not near the face!”

  “Elsie, extend your arm. You’ve got to look like you mean it.”

  “Always look at the target, Nathan.”

  The theatre was a whirl of parrying and clashing swords. It wasn’t until Lottie tapped her on the arm and said, “Hannah, it’s after five,” that Hannah even remembered that time existed. She called the rehearsal to a halt and thanked everybody for coming. The cast tumbled out of the theatre, laughing and chatting.

  “I don’t know why you were so worried,” said Lottie. “That was brilliant.”

  “It was such good fun, wasn’t it?” said Hannah, glowing with energy and excitement. “And it felt great, having so many people in the theatre.”

  But as they emerged from the secret path, her happiness evaporated instantly. A swarm of fluorescent-jacketed wasp people stood a few metres from them, holding equipment and clipboards and gesturing across the fields.

  What were they doing now?

  “Look at that!” squealed a curly-haired Year 7 girl called Millie.

  “Oh, that is the cutest thing I’ve ever seen,” cooed her friend Bea.

  Hannah followed their gaze. The Beans were walking up the track from the farmyard, and behind them plodded Jasper, with Lucy swaying on his back.

  “Is that really a duck sitting on that sheep’s back?” asked Katy.

  “What?” said Ben. “No way.”

  The Beans ducked under the electric fence into the field, followed by Jasper and Lucy.

  “He’s my sister’s pet sheep,” said Hannah. “He was an orphan lamb she bottle-fed, and he lived in a stable with a family of ducks. And one of the ducklings kind of adopted Jasper. She started riding around on his back. And she still does it now she’s fully grown. It’s like they’re best friends.”

  There was a chorus of oohs and aahs from the girls. “That is sooo cute,” said Amy. “Can I stroke him?”

  “Sure. He’s very friendly. Although watch out for my brother and sister. They’re a bit loopy.”

  People crowded round Jasper. “Careful,” said Jo. “He bites.”

  Amy withdrew her hand.

  “He doesn’t bite,” said Hannah.

  “He might,” said Jo. “I’m just saying be careful, that’s all.” She approached the wasp woman nearest to her. “Are you the archaeologists?”

  “We are,” she said.

  Hannah stared at Jo. How did she know that?

  “Are you looking for treasure?” asked Sam.

  The woman smiled. “We’re working on behalf of Aqua’s environmental consultants. We’re doing field walks of the area.”

  All the girls were cooing over Jasper now. Lucy, unused to crowds, flapped off his back and waddled away to a safe distance.

  “If you find treasure,” said Sam, “do you get to keep it, or does it belong to us?”

  “It’s not really about finding treasure. We’re looking for any significant surface finds. Then our work will be followed up by geophysic specialists.”

  “What’s that?” asked Jo.

  “Well, they use scanning equipment called magnetrometry, which helps identify any buried archaeological features.”

  “Like treasure?”

  “Generally things like ditches, pits, postholes…”

  “Ditches and pits?” Jo screwed up her face in disgust. “You don’t need to dig to find ditches and pits. There’s ditches and pits everywhere.”

  “Why aren’t you digging in South Meadow?” asked Sam. “That’s where we found our Roman coins. Look.” He grabbed the archaeologist’s arm. “I’ll show you the place.”

  The woman looked uncomfortable. She shrugged her arm out of Sam’s grip. Jasper licked her shoe and she stepped backwards.

  “Do you want to see my coin?” asked Sam.

  “Another time, maybe. We need to be getting on now. Nice to meet you.” She gave an awkward wave and hurried across the field to join her colleagues.

  Sam turned to Hannah. “Do you want to see my Roman coin?”

  “Is it the same squashed piece of tin you showed me last time?”

  “No, we found another one.”

  “I’ll look at it later, when you’ve cleaned it.”

  “You’ll have to pay the entrance fee, though,” said Jo. “Once it’s in the museum.”

  “What museum?” asked Lottie.

  “The Bean Museum of Archaeology, obviously.”

  “And where’s that?”

  “In Sam’s wardrobe. All our finds are there. It’s 50p entrance, or two pounds for a season ticket. We think you’ll find that’s a very reasonable price.”

  “Sounds like a bargain,” said Lottie. “I mean, the British Museum’s free, but what’s that compared with the Bean Museum of Archaeology?”

  “Exactly,” said Jo. “Manu went to the British Museum and he said it’s really boring. And nobody’s said that about ours. See you later.”

  They trotted off up the field, with Jasper plodding behind them.

  “Wow,” said Owen. “They really are wacko.”

  Hannah bristled. It was one thing for her to question the Beans’ sanity, but it was quite another thing for other people to do so.

  “Hey, Hannah, is that your granddad?” asked a Year 8 boy called Harry, who was playing one of the Capulet servants.

  Hannah glanced to where he was pointing, beyond the wasp people to the ancient oak tree in the middle of the field. Somebody was standing in front of it, dwarfed by the tree’s enormous trunk.

  Her granddad?!

  “That’s my dad,” she said, and gained some satisfaction from the look of mortification on Harry’s face.

  “Oh, sorry,” he muttered. “He’s quite far away. I just thought…” He tailed off.

  A couple of people giggled and others glanced at Hannah, looking embarrassed on Harry’s behalf.

  As they came closer to him, Hannah suddenly saw her father as the others must see him. She had always known, of course, that he was older than her friends’ dads, but in his torn and tattered jacket, he looked as windblown and weather-beaten as the hawthorn bushes in the hedge. Hannah felt a sudden rush of guilt. What was she doing, messing about with plays, while he was shouldering all the worry of the threat to their farm on his own?

  Well, at least after she had been to the meeting next Thursday, she would know more about what they were up against. Then she could help him fight Aqua’s plans.

  Dad looked rou
nd as they approached. “Ah, Jo, er, Martha, er, Hannah, give me a hand with this, would you?”

  He passed Hannah one end of a tape measure. “Hold that firm on the trunk there.”

  “What are you doing?” Hannah asked.

  “I need to measure the girth.”

  Lottie laughed and Hannah had a sudden vision of Dad fitting the oak tree up with a new frock.

  Rags bounded into the centre of the group and planted her front paws on Ben’s chest. This prompted another chorus of oohs and aahs, as people surrounded her, patting and stroking her. Delighted by the attention, Rags rolled over on to her back to be tickled.

  “Why are you measuring the tree?” asked Hannah, holding the end of the tape measure firm with her thumb as Dad wound it around the trunk. The rough bark was deeply creviced and loose in places. Holes in the trunk looked as though they might be homes for owls or bats. Huge mushroom-type fungi sprouted from one side of it.

  “It’s a good way to tell the age, they say.” He read the measurement at his end of the tape. “Six metres twenty-eight centimetres.”

  He took a little blue notebook from his coat pocket and wrote the number down.

  “Six metres?” repeated James, who was slightly less distracted by the puppy than most of the others. “Six metres around the trunk? That’s massive!”

  “So how old does that make the tree?” asked Hannah.

  Dad took a folded piece of paper from his other pocket and straightened it out. It was a photocopied page from a book.

  “One of those ecology people gave me some information.”

  He ran his finger down the paper. “Here we are. Six metres twenty-eight centimetres means this tree dates roughly from the time of Elizabeth I.”

  Lottie gaped at him. “Elizabeth I? Really?”

  “So this tree was alive,” said Hannah, “when Shakespeare was writing Romeo and Juliet.”

  “Wow,” said Priya. “Imagine that.”

  “Imagine what?” said Jonah, straightening up from playing with Rags.

  “This tree is over four hundred years old,” said Hannah. “Imagine all it’s lived through, all it’s seen.”

  “It’s probably seen a lot of grass and cows. It looks half dead, anyway.”

  “It is half dead. Oak trees take hundreds of years to grow and hundreds of years to die.”

  “Are you cutting it down?” Jonah asked Dad, his eyes lighting up. “Do you want some help with the chainsaw?”

  Dad turned to him with a look of horror. “Am I what?!”

  “Of course he’s not cutting it down,” said Hannah. “Old trees are habitats for masses of rare wildlife.”

  “All right,” said Jonah, “keep your hair on.”

  “It’s amazing when you think about it, isn’t it?” said Lottie. “We just take trees for granted, but a tree lives longer than anything else on earth. Did you know there are yew trees still living in England that were planted when the Romans were here? Isn’t that amazing?”

  “Yeah, well, if they could talk, it might be interesting,” said Jonah. “But as it is, they’re never going to tell us anything, are they, so what does it matter how old they are?”

  Dad was frowning at Jonah as though trying to place him. Suddenly his frown cleared.

  “Are you Jim Hadley’s son?”

  Jonah looked surprised. “Yes.”

  “So Ted Hadley was your grandfather.”

  “Yes. Why, did you know him?”

  “Knew him well. Used to come up here in my father’s time and help with the harvest. Old Middleham family, the Hadleys. Been here generations.”

  “So your great-great-grandfather might have climbed this tree,” said Hannah. “Imagine that.”

  Jonah looked up into the leaf canopy far above them, tinged with orange and gold. “I guess so.”

  “And yet Aqua want to destroy it.” She turned on Jonah with a fierce rush of anger. “But that’s OK, isn’t it? Because you’ll have all the windsurfing and scuba-diving you could want, right on your doorstep. So everything’s fine.”

  Jonah shifted his gaze.

  “Nobody would allow a seven-hundred-year-old cathedral to be destroyed, would they? But this farm,” Hannah said, and she flung out her arms to take in the hedgerows full of berries, the enormous parkland oaks and the sweep of meadows leading up to the ancient wood, “this farm has been here at least that long. And if things turn out the way you want, every single tree, every hedge, every plant you can see right now will disappear forever. Do you really think that’s right?”

  Hannah looked at her watch. “It’s two minutes to seven. Isn’t anyone else going to come?”

  Lottie glanced up from an information board headed Water Resources Demand Management Strategy. There were several of these boards placed around Croxton Village Hall. For all the sense Hannah could make of them, they might as well have been written in Ancient Greek.

  “Well, it’s hardly the most fun way to spend an evening, is it?” said Lottie. “I mean, would you be here if it wasn’t about your farm?”

  “No, I wouldn’t. But that’s the whole problem, isn’t it? Who else is going to care?”

  There were four other people, including Hannah’s dad, looking at the information boards. One of them was the excitable fuzzy-haired woman who had been at Dad’s tea party. Several rows of plastic chairs had been set up to face a trestle table and screen at the front of the room. Apart from one old lady in the second row, every seat was empty.

  “Well, I’m here, aren’t I?” said Lottie.

  “Yes, you are. And I’m really grateful.”

  “There’s nothing about the reservoir on these boards. Maybe they won’t even mention it.”

  “It’ll probably be just like that brochure,” said Hannah.

  A glossy Aqua brochure had arrived in the post on Tuesday. On the cover, in bold black lettering, were the words: Draft Water Resources Management Plan. The photo showed a laughing girl in shiny wellies splashing in a puddle. The puddle water sparkled with cleanliness. There wasn’t a speck of mud anywhere.

  Hannah had flicked through the pages, looking for information about the reservoir. The brochure was full of graphs, tables and columns of print with headings like Supply Demand Balance and Base Deployable Output.

  Wow, she thought. They’re really doing everything they can to make sure people don’t understand what they’re up to.

  When she did eventually find the one tiny paragraph about the reservoir, all it said was that Clayhill Farm had been identified as a possible site and investigations were being carried out.

  She had brought it to that day’s rehearsal to show Lottie, but Lottie had seen it already.

  “They must have sent them to every house,” said Katy.

  “Yeah, my dad was reading it at breakfast,” said Jonah. “No idea how. It’s the dullest thing I’ve ever seen. And I do geography with Mr Turner, so you can imagine.”

  Now, the village-hall door opened and a tall, slim man with thick shiny dark hair walked in and sat at the trestle table. He wore a smart black suit and he looked very pleased with himself. He took a laptop from his briefcase and opened it up.

  “If you’d all like to take a seat,” he said, in a smooth voice that made Hannah prickle with irritation, “then we’ll make a start.”

  Lottie and Hannah went to join Hannah’s dad, who had sat, as he always did, in the back row.

  The door banged and another man walked into the hall. He looked vaguely familiar.

  Hannah nudged Lottie. “Who’s he?”

  Lottie looked at him. “Jonah’s dad,” she whispered.

  Of course. He wanted to find out more so he could get the catering contract. So did everybody else here support the reservoir plans? Hannah felt even more depressed.

  “Thank you for coming along to this Public Consultation Evening,” said the man at the front, with a smile that didn’t reach his eyes. “I’m Nick Constable, Aqua’s Assets Director.”

  He pressed
a button on his laptop. A slide appeared on the screen. It said: Supply and Demand Analysis.

  Lottie groaned. “Just kill me now.”

  Hannah’s heart sank. This might turn out to be the longest evening of her life.

  Nick Constable didn’t mention the reservoir. Instead, he droned on about “demand forecasts” and “projections” and “long-term strategic planning.”

  “I’m actually going to die of boredom in a minute,” Lottie muttered.

  But Hannah forced herself to concentrate. He wants us to switch off, she thought. He’s using these words on purpose, so we won’t understand. But I have to understand.

  Nick Constable put up a slide showing a graph. He said that people were using a lot more water than they used to, and that there was also a big demand for more houses in the south-east of England, so even more water would be needed to supply those houses. Millions and millions more litres of water every day.

  “And so, as part of our strategy to meet projected demand, we are proposing to build a new reservoir on the outskirts of Middleham, three miles east of here.”

  Hannah’s stomach contracted. She nudged Lottie and sat up very straight.

  “This proposed reservoir will be an extremely valuable resource, providing the essential extra fourteen million litres of water per day to the local area.”

  Hannah was filled with a deep, dull despair. It was exactly as Miranda had said, wasn’t it? People needed water, and this reservoir would provide that water. What right did they have to object to that?

  Nick Constable clicked the remote again to show a picture of a beautiful lake on a summer’s day. Geese pecked on the banks and weeping willows trailed their leaves in the water. Smiling couples strolled around the perimeter.

  “The reservoir will also,” he said, “provide excellent leisure opportunities, as well as being a highly attractive landscape feature.”

  He clicked the remote to show a happy group of windsurfers.

  “We envisage the reservoir as a focal point of the community in terms of leisure and relaxation.”

  The next slide pictured children in sailing boats. The one after that showed anglers fishing from the banks. With each slide, Hannah’s despair deepened.