The Lost Guide to Life and Love

by Sharon Griffiths

  Now I knew we were cousins, the atmosphere was easier between us.

  ‘I didn’t know we had a supermodel in the family,’ I said. ‘How come you got to do that? I don’t suppose there are many girls from here who do something so exciting.’

  ‘Well, my mum did,’ she said. ‘So you can forget about us all being little country bumpkins as soon as you like.’

  I blushed. ‘Sorry.’

  ‘You’re all right. Don’t worry. Mum won a competition when she was a student—her flatmate entered her for it.’

  Suddenly it all made sense. There was definitely something about Kate Alderson, a natural poise that marked her out. I thought of that perfect skin, the little scarf that was eminently practical but also had an undeniable dash of style. Once you knew, it was easy to believe that she had once been a model.

  ‘Mum had all sorts of modelling jobs down in London, some of the big names too. She did a lot of magazine covers and some catwalk. And she could have done a lot more. But she’d already met my dad by then, known him forever, really. He farmed over in Cumbria with his brother. So when my grandad—Mum’s dad—was too ill to run this place, Dad came over here. Modelling and farming don’t mix really. Especially when we’re all the way up here. But Mum did a bit for a while. Brought in some very useful money. There’s not much money in hill farming. Great life, but no money. She used some of her modelling money to buy a bit more land and a tractor. Said she brought it as her dowry and Dad only married her for the tractor. Don’t laugh—that can be too near the truth in this part of the world.’

  ‘So did you always want to be a model too?’

  ‘Never really thought about it, though I always liked looking at the pictures of mum in her modelling days. Most I’d done was a couple of charity shows in the village hall. I didn’t mind it. But I always wanted to be a photographer.’

  ‘A photographer?’

  ‘Yeah, I was always impressed…Dexter. You know Dexter, who runs the pub now?’ Did I imagine it or did her voice go odd when she mentioned him? No, it must have been the effect of hailstones down the neck of her jacket. ‘Well, when I was a kid, well, early teens, he was working for an agency and doing a lot of work for himself. He had a studio in an old workshop down the dale and I thought he was wonderful, used to follow him around asking about cameras and pictures. I must have been a real pain in the arse, but he was really kind, answered my questions, even gave me my first camera and then, when he saw I was serious, helped me choose the next one. I was only a kid, but he really listened to me. I had the photography bug and he taught me a lot. He was so lovely, so patient…’ She paused and looked thoughtful, then shook her head as if to clear it. ‘When I thought of studying photography at college, he helped me look at courses, told me what to look for…

  ‘But he went down to London and got married and I ended up on the other side of the camera. Long story, but to do with an old friend of Mum’s. And yes—’ she grinned—‘it was exciting for a farm girl like me. I thought it would be a good gap-year thing, but that was five years ago and I still haven’t taken up my uni place yet.’

  ‘Will you?’

  ‘Don’t know at the moment. I’m not going to do modelling forever. Well, you can’t anyway, can you? It’s not really a job for a grown-up. But it’s good money and I have some plans, some ideas—but we shall see.’

  I remembered my suspicions. ‘So Dexter isn’t secretly gay then?’ I asked.

  ‘Dexter? Gay?’ Matt hooted with laughter. ‘Far from it. Whatever gave you that idea?’

  ‘Well, I thought you were a bloke when you were in the pub. Dexter’s eyes lit up when he looked at you, so—’

  ‘Did they?’ she asked eagerly, ‘Did they really?’

  She smiled to herself as she looked out through the open window and then said, ‘Anyway. I think that storm has moved away, the hail seems to have turned to rain. I think that counts as an improvement. Do you want to give it a go?’

  ‘Yes please.’

  This time, Matty left through the door, but it was such a fiddle to open it, and then try and close it so it didn’t blow down, that I could quite understand why she’d gone in through the window. I climbed on the back of the quad bike and felt the rain soak straight through my jeans as we shot off back down to the farm, this time with Tess loping alongside us.

  I squelched into the farm’s back kitchen, a huge stone-flagged square room, with a stone sink, two big freezers, a rack of ancient-looking coats and a row of industrial-strength wellies with waterproofs abandoned on top of them. In one movement, Matty stepped out of her boots and over-trousers, hung up her waterproof and shook out her hair. I’d taken my jacket off but was still struggling to undo the wet and knotted laces of my walking boots. When I did and saw that my soaked socks left wet, muddy footprints, I took those off too and padded barefoot into the warmth of the main kitchen.

  It was just as I had always imagined a farmhouse kitchen to look. In the centre was a long table, with a high settle on one side and solid-looking chairs on the other. Behind was a vast dresser, its shelves full of interesting plates and jugs and mugs, as well as bits of paper, keys and notebooks, photographs.

  One wall was taken up by an Aga, the alcoves alongside it full of pots and pans. From a huge steaming casserole, Mrs Alderson was ladling something that smelt delicious into a row of foil containers, lined up on a big tray. She worked quickly, methodically.

  ‘Hello, Mum,’ said Matty, passing me a warm towel with which to dry my hair. ‘I found a long-lost cousin up on the fellside. I thought I’d better bring her home to meet the family.’

  Mrs Alderson looked up. ‘Ah,’ she said, ‘I did wonder…’ She filled the last of the foil trays. ‘Matt, take these through to the back to cool down, please.’

  As Matty manoeuvred the huge tray, Mrs Alderson piled the empty casserole into the sink, along with the ladle, wiped the Aga and the table and then looked at me kindly.

  ‘Tilly Flint,’ I said, ‘short for Matilda. My mum’s Frankie, formerly Thwaite. She came to stay here when she was little.’

  Mrs Alderson laughed. ‘Ah, yes, I remember Frankie. We have some photos somewhere. She came to stay one summer when I was a child and insisted on keeping up with us, balancing on the bridge, wading across the beck, even though she could only have been four or five and the rest of us were about ten.’

  ‘Sounds like my mum.’

  ‘And is she—I’m sorry, we lost touch many years ago when our mothers died—isn’t she the one they call Fairtrade Frankie?’

  ‘That’s her,’ I said.

  ‘I thought it must be. I didn’t know her married name but when I see her on television I always think, ‘There’s an Allen. Same with you, though you have a lot more of the look and the build too. I’m Kate by the way.’

  I felt unduly pleased to think I had a real family. For so long it had just been me and my mum and I always envied other people their brothers and sisters, uncles, aunts, grandparents and cousins. The nearest I had to family was Bill and, lovely though he was, that still left quite a gap.

  A big four-by-four pulled up in the yard with a toot, and out tumbled a boy and a girl aged about twelve, clearly brother and sister, though the boy had the same fair skin and copper hair of his mother and older sister, while the girl had a mop of dark curly hair and bright pink cheeks.

  ‘School taxi,’ said Matty. ‘The twins. Ruth and Isaac, known as Zak.’

  The twins shouted as they came in through the back kitchen, dumping coats and bags as they headed straight for the cake tin.

  ‘This is our cousin Tilly,’ said Matt.

  Zak and Ruth stopped for a second, looked, smiled, said ‘Hello’ and carried on raiding the cake tin.

  ‘It’s stopped raining so I’m just going up to see Snowball,’ said Ruth.

  ‘Well, don’t go far. It’s very wet. Keep to the tracks,’ said her mum.

  ‘OK,’ and she was gone.

  ‘I’m going to help Tom on t
he van,’ said Zak.

  ‘But he’s not home yet. Hasn’t he got football or something? That’s why he took the motorbike.’

  ‘Football, yes, but he’s not staying long so I’ll go up and get started. Don’t worry—’ he said as his mother shot him a fierce look—‘I won’t do anything that Tom hasn’t said I can do. And yes I’ll be careful and yes I’ll put everything back and yes, I’ll put my overalls on. And yes—’

  ‘Go!’ said his mother laughing, and turned to me. ‘Will you stay for your tea and meet the rest of this family?’

  ‘Yes, please, I would like that, very much indeed.’ I had been standing near the Aga and realised there was steam coming gently from my jeans.

  A small motorbike buzzed into the yard. The boy riding it raised an arm in triumph as he nosed in just ahead of a Land Rover. He took off his helmet and shouted something to the driver getting out of the Land Rover and I thought I was seeing double. As they walked, laughing, into the house together it was clear they were father and son—two tall men, one broad-shouldered and solid, the younger still slim as a reed, yet both with dark curly hair, pink cheeks and open, cheerful expressions.

  ‘Hello. So who have we here?’ asked the older man, padding into the kitchen in thick socks and rootling with his feet under the Aga for a pair of bright red slippers.

  ‘This is Tilly Flint, a long-lost cousin that Matty brought in from the rain. And this,’ she turned to me, ‘is my husband Guy and out there is our son Tom.’

  Tom was still in the back kitchen struggling into a pair of overalls, his bag abandoned in the corner. He came and shook hands. ‘Hello, Tilly Flint,’ he said pleasantly, but clearly anxious to be gone as he glanced at his mother. ‘I’m going up to the workshop to do a bit on the van while it’s still light. I’ll do homework after tea.’

  His mother nodded. He smiled at me again and vanished.

  ‘He wants it ready in time for his seventeenth birthday,’ explained Kate. ‘And it will be.’

  Guy was beaming at me. ‘Now then,’ he said, in an accent a lot stronger than his wife’s, ‘another long-lost cousin, eh? We’ve had a fair few of those coming through here over t’years. Another Allen, are you?’

  ‘My great-grandmother was.’

  ‘Ah well, there’s plenty of ‘em around, especially in America. For every one we sent over there, I reckon there must be thirty coming back. You’re definitely one of the bonnier ones. Well, I’ll catch up with you a bit later, if you don’t mind. Will you give me a hand with the beasts, Matt?’

  Matt went back into the outer kitchen, climbed back into her boots, over-trousers and waterproof and followed her dad out across the yard.

  ‘Yes, there must be Allens in every corner of the world,’ said Kate, as she started tackling a pile of potatoes. ‘And most of them doing well for themselves. Granny Allen made sure of that. She might have been a tough old bird but she did her best by all the children.’

  ‘Why did they all go away?’

  ‘No work here. The lead mines were a huge industry, had been since Roman times, but they dwindled and died. And there was nothing else.’

  ‘But what about farming?’

  ‘Ha! Once there were more than twenty families living in this valley. Now, apart from a few holiday cottages, there’s only us. We use all the land that the twenty families had between them—two and a half thousand acres, a lot of land—and it barely keeps us going. Oh, it’s a great life, a marvellous life, I can’t imagine any other. But it’s not an easy one. And Granny Allen all those years ago saw the way it was going and she encouraged her children and grandchildren to seek work wherever they could find it—coal mines, iron works, America, Australia.’

  ‘My grandmother was in service in London before the war.’

  ‘That’s right. Two sisters want into service. One was in Durham, but the other went to Newcastle and then down to London. It’s what lots of the girls had to do. Their only chance of work.’

  ‘But not everyone went. Otherwise you wouldn’t be here.’

  ‘No. One or two of the lads stayed locally and some of the girls came back to marry. My grandfather kept the farm going, and then my father. I left, of course, for college. And stayed in London for a while afterwards. Could have stayed forever really, and that would have been the end of the farm. But I’d already met Guy and it seemed right that we should stay here. The house was dreadful! Practically falling down because my parents had had no money to do anything with it. So every modelling job I did, I thought, ‘Well, that’s a new bath,’ or, ‘That’s the windows fixed,’ or, ‘That’s the Aga.

  ‘I suppose I was just one of those like my grandfather, who just couldn’t leave this place, however hard it was. A lot of the lead miners had come here from other parts of the country, but I think we must always have been here. Even though the estate owns most of the land hereabouts, we own our house and a hundred acres—we rent the rest—so I think we must have been here way, way back, at least to the fifteen hundreds and possibly before. Like the sheep, we’re hefted to this dale.’

  ‘Hefted?‘

  ‘Sheep roam but they always come back to their own territory, their own patch of land where they know where they belong. That’s why there are no fences on the moors. Sheep are free to go where they like, because they’ll always come back.’

  Hefted. It was a good word, a good thought.

  ‘But then it makes life tricky,’ Mrs Alderson went on. ‘People like our Matt who go away to work but still want to be in the dale. Always a hard one, that.’

  Tea was a great family affair. Kate produced another dish of the same casserole. It was lamb slowly cooked with root vegetables: rich, sticky and full of flavour. Everyone ate huge amounts, even Matty. Not many models would dare eat that much. There again, I didn’t suppose many models would spend their spare time doing ten-hour shifts on a farm.

  At first I found it easiest to concentrate on the food. I was a bit overwhelmed by the sheer noise, the chat and teasing, the banter and bickering of family life. The cheerful chaos was so different from the meals of my childhood and adolescence—just my mother and me: congenial enough but a lot quieter than life with the Aldersons.

  Ruth was trying to convince Matty to take her back to London with her. ‘I could be the latest modelling sensation,’ said Ruth persuasively, leaning her elbows on the table with her knife and fork clutched firmly in her hands. ‘You could take me with you on shoots and photographers would say, “Who is that beautiful child? She has such an amazing face it positively sings to the camera. We must use her.” And then I would earn megabucks and could buy Snowball a smart new saddle. What do you say, Matt?’

  ‘I say that you should wait a few years and make the most of having Snowball and space and time to ride him,’ said Matt.

  ‘And if you’re not going to eat that, I shall,’ said Zak, his fork poised over Ruth’s plate. She snatched it and tucked in quickly, thoughts of stardom temporarily forgotten.

  Kate dished out second helpings and, in the lull, tried to bring me into the conversation. ‘So you work for a food magazine do you, Tilly?’ she asked. I explained a bit about what I was doing, which seemed to meet with general approval. ‘We need people to take more interest in where their food comes from, to realise the work that goes in to doing it properly,’ said Guy. And Ruth was wonderfully impressed when she heard who my mum was.

  ‘You mean I’m related to Fairtrade Frankie? That is so-o cool,’ she said. ‘Why are you working on a magazine? Don’t you want to work with your mum?’

  ‘No, not really,’ I said, ‘and it would be tricky. It’s not a question of just helping out in the coffee shops any more—I’ve done plenty of that. It’s big business now and very much Mum’s baby.’

  Faced with their cheerful confidence, I couldn’t quite explain that, lovely though my mum was, she always made me feel so inadequate somehow. She wouldn’t trust me near her company. Fine when I was a student waiting or washing up, but actually involved
? Making decisions? No, I couldn’t do that.

  ‘Anyway,’ said Guy comfortingly, ‘you need to make your own way in the world. You might come to it one day. Like one of these might come to the farm.’

  ‘There are far easier ways to make a living,’ said Kate.

  ‘Aye, there are,’ said Guy, sighing for a moment, but then he grinned at his wife. ‘But you wouldn’t change it, love, would you? Not the twelve-hour days, seven days a week, fifty-two weeks a year. Why, you could prance around all day in fancy frocks having your photo taken like our Matt does now. All champagne cocktails and parties and whatever other nonsense she gets up to. But why would you want that when you could be up at dawn sorting out the mole traps in the dark, or on the fellside, foddering, with a nice easterly wind blowing round your back? No contest, is there?’

  Kate laughed. ‘No contest.’

  ‘Well, I shall be a model too,’ said Ruth confidently. ‘Or I might be an actress. I haven’t quite decided yet.’ I loved her confidence, and envied it too.

  We finished the meal with a thick creamy rice pudding with a swirl of sharp, tangy sauce. I couldn’t place the flavour.

  ‘There’s apple in there, but something else. Not blackberries? I asked.

  ‘Crab apples and elderberries,’ smiled Kate. ‘We don’t have many trees round here, but at least those we have produce something useful.’

  ‘And delicious,’ I said, already thinking of a ‘Food for free’ feature, with lovely pictures of elderberries and those small crab apples on the tree with the red ribbon.

  After we’d cleared the table, loaded the dishwasher and had a cup of tea, the twins disappeared to do their homework, still arguing as they thundered up the stairs. Tom and Guy went to do a last round of the animals. Kate offered me the computer to check my email. ‘We’ve got broadband down here, but it took a call from our MP before we got it.’ There on the wall in the hall was yet another sampler. Waste not, want not.

  ‘Where did all those samplers come from?’ I asked. ‘Everywhere I go I’m faced with improving texts. Here, up in the cottage, and there’s at least three in the pub.’