The Song of Hartgrove Hall

by Natasha Solomons

  ‘It just seems a shame that you’ve given up.’

  ‘There aren’t people left any more who sing the old songs. If they do, it’s because they’ve learned them from a book or a CD. There weren’t many such chaps around even when I was a boy. I worry that they’re all extinct now.’

  ‘Dorset dodos.’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘Haven’t all the songs been collected in any case?’

  ‘I suspect that’s impossible. There’s always one more song to be found.’

  ‘So you are still looking, then?’

  I laughed. ‘You got me. Perhaps I am.’

  We sat quietly for a minute, watching the cloud shadows trawl the hillside below, and listening to the melodic hum of the telephone wires.

  I talked about Robin. She sat with her hands folded neatly in her lap and said nothing until I’d finished. Then she turned to me and asked, ‘But what do you think? Do you think he should stop lessons with you and go to London?’

  ‘I can’t teach him what he needs. The teacher Albert’s found at the Royal College is experienced with very young children.’

  ‘But travelling to London twice every week. It’s a lot. Won’t the lessons be awfully expensive? I mean, we’ll find the money somehow . . . but what about school?’

  ‘They won’t charge for the lessons. Or only a nominal amount.’

  This wasn’t true. The lessons were indeed expensive, but I’d arranged for the bills to be sent directly to me. Clara never need know.

  ‘And I suppose either his new school will accommodate him or somehow he’ll have to be taught at home.’ She kicked at a stone with her walking shoe. ‘But despite all of that he might never succeed.’

  ‘No. He probably won’t.’

  ‘For God’s sake, Daddy.’

  ‘You need to know the reality.’

  ‘It sounds like a lot of misery for everyone.’ She paused. ‘Will it even make Robin happy?’

  I told her the one thing I knew with any certainty. ‘The boy is happiest at the piano. If he has a chance of making it his life, don’t we have to give it to him, even if it’s only a little chance?’

  Clara didn’t answer. The wind buffeted the trees.

  June 1947

  George wants to know precisely how it will happen. He’s like a man whose horse needs to be shot, pleading with the veterinary surgeon for reassurance that the wretched animal won’t suffer. He forces us to cycle to Turnworth where they’re demolishing the old manor. Apparently it’s happening to stately homes all over England. Hardly anyone can afford to keep the damn things going or make the necessary repairs after the neglect of the war years. We cycle to the top of the hill and puff along the ridge. It’s a glorious day – the sky a shining cobalt blue, the hedges strewn with dog roses and honeysuckle, and the air brimming with the hum of bees. We sweat in the midday sun, feeling sympathy for the long-haired cattle huffing in the shade of a solitary beech tree beside the road. We pause briefly to fill our water bottles in a stream and pedal on through the swarms of drowsy flies, arriving at Turnworth shortly before the demolition men.

  We know the house well. The General and Colonel Winters, the owner, are old pals; before the war we went there to luncheons, suppers and parties, for carol singing on Christmas Eve. It’s a grand old place, much larger than ours, cradled in a chalk valley formed by Jurassic seas. It can’t be seen from the road; only the curling drive is visible, and if out riding or walking you won’t discover it until you’re nearly on top of it. The honeyed stone seems to emerge from the hillside as if it had grown there.

  I’ve never really thought about the manor before. It would have been like asking me whether I’d thought an aunt or a cousin attractive. Yet now, standing with Jack and George on the ridge, gazing down at the façade of mullioned windows each reflecting a hundred suns, with the ivy creeping shyly around the porch, I appreciate that it’s beautiful. I’m sure that inside the timbers are rotten, infested with dry rot and death-watch beetle, and that the roof leaks whenever it rains, but from up here, on this lazy, sun-filled afternoon, it looks perfect, as if it had always been here and as if, in the years before it was built, the valley was simply waiting for it to appear.

  Men carry out the last few pieces of furniture and lay them on the lawns some distance away like corpses removed from the scene of a terrible accident. The three of us remain where we are but below us at the far end of the drive a crowd starts to form. If I squint I could probably make out the colonel, but I can’t bear to look for him. Jack reaches into his jacket and produces a hip flask, opens it, knocks it back and wordlessly passes it to George, then to me. A man with a whippet by his side seems to be directing the men. It is the colonel. I’ve never seen him without his dog. He stores his soul in that creature.

  An hour passes. George nudges me and I observe men stuffing sticks of gelly into the boreholes in the hulking outer walls, while other men ferry yet more explosive charges. A sideboard is heaved onto the lawn and dumped there beside a dining table for twenty, as though at any moment the Mad Hatter will show up with the Queen of Hearts to host a tea party amongst the roses and packing boxes. I’m sleepy from the whisky and, in all honesty, a little bored. George passes me a meat-paste sandwich. Edie made them for us. She refused to join us, telling us that we were all morbid for coming to watch this spectacle. I can’t say that she was wrong – I’m still not quite sure why we’re here and yet at this moment none of it seems real. We’re watching what will happen to our house in a week or so but we’re picnicking in glorious sunshine. A peregrine falcon soars overhead – if he sticks about, he’ll have a perfect aerial view of the whole thing.

  Then it’s time. The colonel and his whippet walk to the far side of the garden. A man in a trilby remonstrates with the crowd, presumably asking them to leave, but they won’t budge. We peer down, and I can’t help my excitement. The man strides over to stand beside the colonel. By their feet is a plunger with a length of wire running to the gelly. The two men speak for a moment and I assume that the man in the trilby is asking the colonel whether he wishes to press the plunger himself, but he shakes his head. That, clearly, is a step too far.

  A moment later, the other man pushes it down, quickly and firmly. Nothing happens for a minute. And then there’s a boom, followed by another. And another. They rumble around the hillside and I feel it in my chest rather than hear it. And it’s thrilling; blood pumps through me and I’m breathless. There’s an awful exhilaration to the destruction, the boyish impulse to knock over a tower of bricks or stamp on a beetle, magnified a thousandfold. The house trembles as though the ground beneath is shaking with a terrible, terrible force. The tiles on the roof lift up, slowly, it seems, like a feather being held aloft by a funnel of breath, and the house appears to pause. For a moment I think it won’t fall but then it does. All the windows shatter and the wall furthest from us topples, then the next, crashing down like vast dominoes as the charges go off one by one, until at last the entire house slumps, collapsing in on itself. The noise is catastrophic and the stillness of the afternoon is split open. A cloud of dust rises up, thick as fog, and conceals the ruins.

  Jack passes me a cigarette but I wave him away, sickened at the spectacle, at myself. George looks stricken. He’s a nasty greenish colour and his skin is coated with sweat.

  ‘Here, George, are you all right?’ I ask even though it’s perfectly obvious he is not.

  He nods, then turns round and vomits on a patch of dandelions behind his bicycle.

  ‘It’s the noise,’ he says at last, spitting in the grass. ‘I don’t like the noise.’

  ‘Come on, old chap,’ says Jack, holding up George’s bicycle, his voice gentle.

  We shouldn’t have come.

  Edie produces a box of sugar plums and a record of the young pianist Albert Shields performing Rachmaninov. She waits until Jack and George retreat to bed
before placing it on the gramophone. We sit on the worn rug in the Chinese room, our mouths sticky from sugar plums – Lord knows how she found them – and we listen. Except I don’t. I only watch her listening – her rapt expression, her eyes lightly closed as though sunbathing, her skin flushed from the warmth of the fire. There is a snowfall of sugar dusting her top lip. I clench my fists to stop myself from leaning over to kiss her.

  It takes a force of will not to resent Jack. I stamp on my envy as if on a swarm of wasps. I stare at the blinking embers in the grate.

  ‘Can I tell you something?’ I ask.

  ‘Of course,’ says Edie.

  ‘If we’re really to give up Hartgrove, I’d like to preserve her memory through the songs I’ve been collecting. At least then this place will exist in music if nowhere else. But the prospect of simply sweeping up the songs into my book and keeping them as some kind of musical scrapbook of ancient England feels wholly inadequate. I have this notion of using the songs as the basis of some kind of pastoral symphony about the loss of home and of an England vanished in the war’ – I falter, worried that I’m sounding grandiose, but Edie is listening with patient interest – ‘but I don’t have an idea for the main theme. I think I’m probably doomed to gathering up songs and pinning them in my wretched book like desiccating moths until I’m falling to bits myself.’

  Her mouth twitches in a smile, but she doesn’t laugh. ‘Perhaps you’ll discover the theme in a song you’ve yet to find.’

  I nod but really I’m terribly afraid that I won’t ever experience that feverish surge of creativity.

  ‘Most composers have been at it for a decade by the time they are my age,’ I say, trying not to sound peevish. ‘Think of Mozart and Delius and Mendelssohn.’

  ‘Well, don’t forget Vaughan Williams. He didn’t get going until he was nearly twenty-five.’

  ‘Oh, yes. So he didn’t.’

  Despair recedes a touch.

  She folds her arms. ‘I should think by that reckoning you’ve at least three more years before we can write you off as an absolute failure and all hope is lost.’

  She smiles at me with that funny lopsided smile and even though she’s teasing me, I feel a ruffle of optimism.

  The following day Edie takes the train back up to town for a concert, and George leaves with her, whether for business or out of squeamishness in not wanting to be here so close to the end, I’m not sure. The morning after they depart I’m up before dawn and hurrying across the lawn before the others are awake. Knowing that in a matter of a week – no, less: six days – the house will be gone, I want it over. I’m in a prison cell, counting the hours until my execution. Afterwards, I may not go back up to Cambridge but instead venture abroad for a while. I hear there is a folk-song hoard in the Appalachian Mountains. Perhaps I will travel to the USA and gather up songs over there. And then the thought of being away from Edie makes me feel sick, like having a sudden hangover.

  Farmhands have started to empty Hartgrove Hall of the few pieces of decent furniture and stack them in one of the barns. I wonder where the General will go – I presume to his occasional wartime lair, the bungalow on the other side of the hill – but I can’t bring myself to ask him. I can’t forgive him. He hasn’t asked us where we’ll go or what we’ll do. In fact he carries on precisely as before, taking his breakfast with The Times in the morning room, Chivers bringing him coffee and rolls and marmalade from Fortnum’s. He clearly intends to spend his last few days in the house as he has spent the previous sixty-eight years, barring the inconvenient interruptions brought by two world wars. For an awful moment I wonder whether he means to go down with the ship, sitting at the breakfast table with his newspaper and his jar of marmalade with its silver spoon as the house falls around him, burying him in the rubble.

  I want to be far away and I can’t bear to leave. I walk up to the ridge as dawn breaks behind the hill, setting the gorse and the brambles ablaze for an instant. It’s cool and the ground is thick with dew; thousands of spiders’ webs wobble in the grass, catching the light and looking like the corners of discarded lace handkerchiefs. As I hurry up the steep slope, I realise that I’ve spent the last few days tramping my favourite walks, bidding them goodbye. The routes I’ve taken to collect songs in pubs and farm cottages have corresponded exactly with an internal map of the places I love the most. I’ve been walking the path of my own memories, and, if I think about it, I could trace the last few days by singing the songs I’ve collected along the way – ‘The Foggy Dew’ from a gardener unearthing rows of wet brown carrots at the rectory in Belchalwell, through ‘The Banks of Sweet Primrose’ sung by a pair of labourers burning a pyre of dung at Hedge End, to ‘The Spotted Cow’ sung by the curate of Woolland, red faced and fastidiously removing his dog collar before he’d sing such an irreverent tune.

  I’ve created an elaborate song map of Hartgrove, of her hills and barrows and dells and woods. I know that, in years to come, I can find my way here again by singing. Perhaps it’s the impending grief of losing our home, but I find myself retreating from the rational and into myth. I hoard songs and stories, visions of a better, older world. I don’t know whether they were ever true, these ballads of clear crystal streams and weeping birds, but I wish I could slide inside a song and escape there for the duration of the melody.

  Despite the brightness of the morning I feel dreary and grim. My shoelace snaps and I curse, profoundly irritated as I try to knot the frayed pieces back together. I cast about for Max Coffin, the shepherd, and I spy him resting at the top of the field, half concealed by the hedge, but as I draw closer I see that he’s not resting but crouched over the bloodied body of a dead sheep. It’s been badly mauled and a tangle of red guts spews out across the grass, early flies gathering.

  ‘Dog,’ says Max miserably. ‘Third bloody sheep lost this week. Sat up all night wi’ a shotgun but seen nothin’. Mus’ be a dog blacker ’n hell an’ quieter.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I say.

  Max shrugs. ‘Weren’t your dog. See, she’s still warm. If we get ’er to the house quick like, I can cut her up and still git sommat for her.’

  I grab the forelegs and help Max heave the body into a wheelbarrow he’s conjured from somewhere. The sheep’s legs stick up in the air, stiff and ungainly. We wheel the unlikely load along the track at the top of the ridge, jolting in the deep ruts so that once or twice the corpse is thrown out and we have to haul it back in. After ten minutes we reach the dewpond marking the entrance to Ringmoor. The air is cool but I’m sweating from the exertion, though to my shame I see that Max isn’t even out of breath. He’s a slight man, somewhere between forty-five and sixty – his face aged and weathered but his arms revealing tight coils of muscles. His hair was once red but is mostly fading to white.

  I sit on the garden wall while he discards his shirt, brings out a knife and starts to butcher the sheep, nimbly slitting the belly and letting the rest of the guts tumble out into a bucket, before starting to peel back the fleecy skin. He works quickly and cleanly, grunting a little with the effort, his hands slippery with blood.

  ‘Right, you can help me string ’er up in the shed.’

  Hoisting the remains over his shoulder, he leads me into a small flint shed beside the cottage. It’s chilly inside, cold as a larder, with the wind blowing through the holes in the walls and under the corrugated-iron roof. A rope is strung up across the joists from which dangle socks and a few shirts. Max motions to me to make space and we hang the sheep upside down, fastening its hind legs to the washing line. It looks mighty strange, swinging there amongst the laundry.

  We retreat outside and I sit on a tree stump as Max disappears to wash. I wonder vaguely where he gets his water – I expect with buckets from the spring. He reappears, clean and proffering a tin mug of tea. I take it, grateful. It’s sweetened with ewe’s milk and has an odd, sour smell, not unpleasant.

  ‘You’re wanting
songs, you say.’

  ‘Yes. I’m hoping you’ll sing me something.’

  ‘Well, since yer helped me wi’ the sheep. Sure yer wouldn’t like a few chops better?’

  ‘I’ll take them too.’

  He chuckles. ‘What you going ter do wi’ the songs, once you got them?’

  I dislike this question immensely and I swallow a sigh. A headache ticks in my temple. ‘For now I write them down in a book.’ I hold out my pad to him, realising as I do that it’s streaked with brownish blood. ‘Sometimes I send copies off to London and they add them to a bigger collection there.’

  Max frowns. ‘If yer lookin’ fer new songs, yer bang out o’ luck. I ent learned nothin’ new fer years.’

  ‘No, no – those are exactly what I do want to hear. I want old songs. Maybe even ones that haven’t been collected before.’

  ‘So there are other such—’ he pauses, hunting for the appropriate description, ‘other such “gentlemen” as yourself?’

  He says ‘gentlemen’ but his tone implies ‘perfect idiots’.

  ‘Yes, there are others like me. Not many but a few. We’re all folk-song enthusiasts. Song collectors, I suppose.’

  ‘Song collectors?’ He nods and slurps his tea to hide a smile. I have an image of how he sees us – as tweed-clad fools, rushing around the countryside with nets like butterfly hunters and specimen jars stuffed with songs.

  ‘Will you sing?’ I ask.

  He shrugs. ‘You can have a song fer summer. A song away from its time and place is jist a purty ditty. Something for little girls ter warble. This is a song calling fer rain ter come before autumn. I need more sun and a bit o’ rain or these ’ere lambs will starve out ’ere on the hillside come winter. This ent no parlour tune. My father sang it ter me, and his father ter ’im. And I ent got no son, so I suppose I’ll ’ave ter sing it ter you. Collector or not. But don’t jist pin my song in a book, so he curls up at the edges like a dead thing.’