The Opened Cage

by S. C. Howe

  ‘Yes. And I don’t quite know what it is.’ Joss read out the details. ‘Close to the marshes, near heathland. In a small secluded hollow. Seventy acres of pasture and ten acres of old arable.’

  ‘Sounds perfect.’

  ‘Would you go out and view it?’ Joss was looking at Tom directly; his blue eyes were intense. ‘I need you to go and see it for us.’ He sensed a hesitation in Tom. ‘We need to start thinking about this now. The war’s going to end sooner or later, and my bet is that land prices will start rocketing when this country starts thinking about living, rather than dying.’

  Tom blew his cheeks out. ‘It’s a hell of a big step.’

  ‘Are you having second thoughts?’ Joss tried to sound neutral, but sweat suddenly beaded on his forehead. What would he do if Tom backed out? Surely he hadn’t misread him so badly?

  ‘No, of course I’m not!’ The words were said so emphatically Joss visibly relaxed. ‘I just want to get the decision right.’

  ‘And all I want is to get somewhere where we can live together, and be in decent, rural surroundings. The buildings can be renovated, it’s the land that matters. And you know what you’re talking about with that.’

  Early the next morning Tom stepped out the front door of Woodham Hall and walked down the drive, lined with sweet chestnuts. Looking back, he saw Joss standing at the open window, holding up an arm, a big grin splitting his handsome face.

  The air smelled dew-damp and of earth; felt cool and clean. Looking up, Tom thought of the rain overnight and the sun rising steadily and certainly in the east, and it was as though just for a moment, that the war was over, like some vile dream. But a twisting in his gut reminded him it was still going on and was pulling him closer as each day passed.

  Within a hundred yards, he found he was at the start of the estate’s meadowland, and he looked up and saw the unfolding spring as he had never seen it before. In the trees, the buds were fattening, soon to unfurl into miniatures of themselves. Whatever they did on the battlefields, they could not stop this movement into life. With, or without them, it would still go on.

  The sun was lemon-white and gentle, and danced, diamond-like, off new cobwebs. A rabbit and her young gambolled over the new grass and cows ate contentedly and watched Tom, with no particular interest, as he took a short cut over the fields to the halt. The sun warmed his face as it had on mornings in the trenches when he dared not look over the parapet. For several moments he tensed as he smelled sweet hawthorn blossom, then the chattering of birds reassured him, and he relaxed and walked on. A sparrow pecked between the cobbles at the halt for traces of corn from an earlier delivery. Seeing Tom, it cocked its head, stared at him with interest, and then resumed its feeding, and in its own time flew off. Its indifference, its self-containment, made Tom smile. The train wheezed up in a torrent of smoke, somewhat at odds with the clean, early morning, and he climbed aboard and the vehicle shuddered to a start and rattled off towards Worcester.

  The business of the city surprised him, but then he realised it was after eight thirty; people here went to work as they had always done and kept to the same time rules and patterns, almost oblivious to the war and to a country over the sea tearing its very land to bits. His uniform drew a few glances and he wanted to raise his voice and ask them, ‘Do you know what’s going on in France? Do you even bloody care?’ Instead, he joined the back of the mass as it dawdled down the steps into Foregate Street.

  The estate agent’s was not far up. He asked for the details and was given the key by a bored-looking, middle-aged woman. One of the older partners walked in and peered over Tom’s shoulders at the paper.

  ‘Hmm… Heathend Farm,’ he mused. ‘Now that’s a renovation for the right person.’

  Tom looked around at him. ‘Pardon?’

  ‘It’s been on the market for some time,’ the man explained. ‘My advice is strike while the iron’s hot. They’ll be a lot of interest when the war’s over.’

  Almost word for word what Joss had said.

  ‘Which regiment?’ the man asked.

  ‘Worcestershires.’

  ‘Ah, local boy, then.’

  ‘I came from Durnley. My grandfather was the postmaster.’

  The man eyed him appraisingly. Why don’t you just say it? thought Tom. How can the likes of you afford something like that?

  ‘I’m viewing it on behalf of a potential buyer,’ Tom explained, biting down. Why did he say that? Why the justification?

  ‘If you take the train out to Heathend Halt, then it’s a short walk down a track to the farm,’ said the man more seriously. ‘Do you have a map?’

  Tom produced Joss’s Ordnance Survey and unfolded it. The man put on his reading glasses and circled the farm, a small spot in a mercifully expansive landscape. ‘The train stops there every hour, so if you get going now, you’ll catch the next one.’

  ‘I also want to know how the cottage I’ve put up for sale is coming on. Tom asked. ‘The old post office cottage at Durnley?’

  ‘Is that yours?’ The man could not hide the note of surprise in his voice. ‘Sorry my colleague must have dealt with that.’

  ‘Yes he did,’ Tom said.

  ‘Oh. The details are being prepared. How do we get in touch with you? I mean, out there?’

  Tom wanted to say ‘by carrier pigeon’, but instead said, ‘I’ve left the details with your secretary. But you can let me know through Woodham Hall, through a Mr John Deerman.’

  The effect on the man was instant. ‘The Deermans! John’s the youngest I believe.’

  ‘Yes, he’s a stretcher-bearer with me at the Front.’

  ‘Ah.’ The man looked lost as for what to say next.

  Tom turned to go.

  ‘I hope you find Heathend Farm to your liking,’ the man called after him.

  Running up the stone steps to the platform, Tom found the next train in was going to stop at Heathend Halt. Buying the ticket quickly, his heart pounding in his ears, he alighted just before the guard blew the whistle and the train started to pull away.

  Nearly forty minutes later, he stood at Heathend Halt, the sun shining down on an enclosed valley. Reading the details again, he looked over woodland touched with new green and saw the sun shining on a gable end of stone. Heathend Farm.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Heathend. A dour heath, brown with winter, stretched beyond the intimate hollow of trees where buildings peeped out, and pastures, old pastures, extended up a steep hill to a plateau to stop suddenly against the brooding mass of moorland. In the distance and beyond the heath, small pools glinted in a deeper darkness of a marsh that stretched away to an uncertain horizon. Tom did not notice these, seeing only the newness of green in the woodlands and the sun shining on the farm below.

  A grassed-over and sunken track descended between old, thick hedges. Where the soil was visible, Tom noticed it was a pale pinkish-brown, a friable sandstone soil – well drained he thought automatically. The track levelled off as it reached the bottom of the slope and swung left towards the tree-sheltered hollow where the buildings nestled, as if dozing in the sun. Quickening his pace, he walked into an overgrown courtyard where last year’s grasses were waving dry and pale brown in the light breeze, and where strong green shoots were showing between the cobs. Turning south, he stood facing the old stone farmhouse that made up one part of the three sides of the courtyard. It was built of rubble stone, warm-hued with what looked to be early, if not the original, windows, many-paned in lead and mounted in weathered stone casements. The panes caught the sun so they reflected in the way of old, uneven glass. At first floor level were wide but low dormer windows.

  The front door was bare of paint or varnish and greyed by centuries of rain and sun – the planks had the knots and whorls of ancient oaks, like oaken eyes. There was an old stone seat to one side of the main door and Tom sat and gazed around the rest of the buildings. Opposite was a stone barn with its roof missing and its doors hanging off drunkenly. There was another, lo
wer range of rubble-coursed stone buildings off to one side. Walking over, Tom peered into a sour-smelling dairy with walls glistening with water and algae. Half-doors hung on one remaining hinge in front of what had been a stable. The roofs on both were hung with brown-reddish pottery tiles, cushioned thickly with moss. Many of the tiles were missing, so areas of damp darkened the old beaten earth floors.

  Walking back to the main house, Tom unlocked the unwieldy lock and pushed the door inwards and it screeched across the stone flags and then nearly collapsed off its hinges. The smell of damp hit him, yet there was an immediate sense of comfort in this room, as though he was coming home, as though this was the refuge they had been expecting, needing. As his eyes grew accustomed to the light, he focussed on an inglenook fireplace of massive proportions in the centre of the inner wall. It had a huge smoke-blackened wooden beam, roughly shaped and perfectly spanning the width. Looking up the cavernous chimney, so large he could stand in it, he saw a mass of dry, solid twigs of decades upon decades of jackdaw nests, and through these, he glimpsed the spring-blue sky above. The smoke chamber was enormous and spoke of smoking hams and sides of beef of centuries long gone. There were the remains of a pot crane and various iron hooks. Tom pictured a log fire, which would not be allowed to go out, even when the days lengthened and the air was mild. Being cold, numbingly cold would not follow them here. He realised what he had just thought so naturally: that it was their home. It seemed natural, as it should be.

  The ground floor was covered with pale brown sandstone flags, perhaps fashioned from the very rock that lay beneath this hidden landscape of farm and home. They were of different sizes and only roughly rectangular or square, and were dipped in the doorway in silent testimony of centuries of feet. A couple of rough-hewn beams in the ceiling spanned the length of the room – they were of gigantic proportions and Tom wondered at the size of trees that had been used in the building of this farm. The walls were plastered but the plaster was worn and peeling away in large patches to reveal the rubble stone walls beneath; the colour of the walls may have been a creamy-brown, but Tom was not sure whether this was browning from the fire or whether it had once been deliberately coloured. Dark wood settles lined the inner wall and a pale-scrubbed beechwood table stood to one side of the fireplace. A back door led off to a one-storey scullery and wash house with a corroded tin bath, an old watering can and several rusted-through pails hanging from hooks. Through a small window, he spotted a wooden shack that probably housed a privy. A rusted hand pump stood over a grated well beside the scullery door. Going back indoors, he opened a door and entered onto a narrow, twisting staircase of unpainted wood which had a simple rail fixed to the inner wall. Difficult to get large items up, Tom thought, but it whispered of privacy and a security beyond. A door opened into a surprisingly light, large room looking out over the courtyard. The chimney stack wound through the inner wall suggesting warmth and easy slumber. There was a simple black grate and a slab of slate reaching out from it – the rest of the floor had wide, age-polished oak floorboards. Tom visualised their bed, headboard to the inner wall, looking out through the window. The ceiling arched inwards gracefully with ancient plaster above the small dormer window; surprisingly small for the amount of light it allowed in. It too spoke of secrets and protection.

  There was a further room on the other side of the landing at the top of the staircase and its door was open, revealing an equally well-lit room but without the chimney breast and grate. The doors were of a superficially plain design, made of warped planks moulded on the leading edge that overlapped slightly. Both doors had wrought iron catches and were perfect in their imperfection. The edges had been incised when the metal had still been malleable, with an exuberant flourish that spoke, not of utility but of artistry – and the sheer joy of it, too – nearly three hundred years ago. Tom walked back into what would be their bedroom and sat in the low window seat and rubbed the grime from a pane, peered out and saw a pasture beyond the stone barn with gaunt and bent apple trees going down to a stream, which ran like a blue-silvered gash through the grass. Beyond this was meadowland with waving dried-out stems of last year’s unmown grasses. Further still, woodland clothed a slope up to a plateau that stretched to a hoar-misted horizon, which the sun had not quite claimed that day. The plateau was covered with bottle-green broom, bluish-green gorse and patches of browned heather, giving the land a speckled appearance, like the side of a trout.

  Tom went noisily down the staircase and out into the courtyard. There was certainly a large amount of work to do, but it felt as if this place was to be their home, their journey’s end.

  Walking out into the fields and finding a stick, he sharpened it with his pocket knife, forced it into the grass and dug the soil from beneath. It was sandy soil, underlain with oval, stream-smoothed cobs, one of which he dug up and felt the silky smoothness of the stone. It would be hungry soil and if they ploughed anywhere, it would need mulching and manure to give body. But something in him rebelled against turning this thick sward with a plough; it murmured of the destruction at the Front. And however much he argued with himself that this ploughed land would be producing food, it still rang of misuse. The fields further out from the stream would be better land to plough he hoped, and was relieved when he found the grass here was less verdant, less ancient.

  Then he did not care whether the soil was sandy, chalky or marshy, he wanted this place, wanted the peace and the freedom it suggested. It was a place where they could be safe, where they could love openly. They would be able to stand on the plateau and stretch, jump or run, and not be machine-gunned down or ripped apart by a shell. Before the war that might have sounded quaint; now it was an absolute necessity.

  It would be a relief to produce food and tend the land, rather than just surviving in holes in devastated landscapes. Thus, in spite of the damp, which ran in dark green, mildewed fans down the gable ends of the house; in spite of the uncultivated grass, which lay flattened after he had walked over it; and in spite of the disordered, dishevelled outbuildings, he knew he wanted this farm and the dream, and he wanted it badly. Glancing at his watch, he realised he only had twenty minutes to get back to the halt, and reluctantly locked the main door after manoeuvring it into position, before walking back up the increasing slope.

  ‘Well?’ said Joss, sitting up as straight as he could. The expectation on his face made him look painfully young, like a boy.

  Tom sat on the side of the bed. ‘It’s superb! But it needs a lot of renovation to the buildings, especially the barn and stable and outhouse. The main farmhouse seems to be in fairly good repair.’

  ‘I want you to go down and ask my mother if she will call the family solicitor,’ Joss said, casting around for a pen. Tom handed him his. ‘How much do you think we should offer?’

  ‘I would go in at the asking price. The agent did say that these places will start to go quickly when the war ends.’

  The message was delivered to his mother who had bustled in, looking worried.

  ‘What are you doing, John?’

  ‘Buying a farm,’ Joss replied, not looking up from the details.

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  Joss looked up, as though his mother’s question was a mere irritation.

  ‘We’re buying a farm,’ he repeated.

  ‘“We”?’

  ‘Yes, we.’

  ‘What with?’

  ‘Money.’

  ‘Stop being impertinent.’

  Joss looked at her with rounded eyes.

  ‘Thomas,’ said Mrs Deerman. ‘Would you excuse us for a few minutes?’

  Tom moved towards the door, hesitated and then went out. Waiting at the bottom of the stairs, he heard their raised voices from within the room and dared not imagine what was being said. It seemed a long time before he heard the bedroom door open and Mrs Deerman’s assured footfall descending the staircase.

  She waved him through into the sitting room. ‘I want a word with you.’

&nb
sp; Tom followed, a knot tightening in his stomach. How could he guess what Joss had told her, what he had left out?

  An older female maid came into the room shortly after Mrs Deerman rang the bell.

  ‘Would you send for Jameson, the family solicitor,’ Mrs Deerman said. ‘And send up tea and cake for John, not too much cake, please.’

  Tom tried not to smile.

  Mrs Deerman turned to him. ‘John tells me that you have nearly a decade of working in farm management.’

  ‘About eight years. I started on a farm when I was sixteen and grew into it.’ Tom heard the words and wondered why his precise and over-honest way always had to triumph. Why not just say, yes, nearly ten years, hard to believe, isn’t it! Why did he have to be so bloody exacting, and, in effect, make out that Joss was exaggerating?

  ‘Did you put him up to this?’ she asked. Her tone changed completely.

  ‘Pardon?’

  ‘Are you taking advantage of my son’s financial situation?’

  The look of horror on Tom’s face made Mrs Deerman move back a little.

  ‘No, I haven’t,’ said Tom. ‘John was going to buy a farm anyway, and I’m selling the house I was left to add to the purchase.’

  Mrs Deerman considered this.

  ‘I’ve told John I can only contribute to about a quarter of the cost,’ Tom continued. ‘But he wants me in on it.’

  Mrs Deerman paused for a moment, looking slightly away from Tom. ‘That is exactly what John has just told me,’ she said. ‘Do you think you have enough experience to run a farm at your age?’

  ‘Yes, I do. We’re going to start small and work up.’

  ‘I see.’

  The maid brought in the tray and informed them the solicitor had been called for.

  ‘Do I understand you had to fend for yourself from the age of sixteen?’ Mrs Deerman asked. The incredulity in her voice made Tom sit back.

  ‘Yes.’ In truth, he had never had time to think about it. It was a case of making do and being grateful that he had the house. ‘My grandfather appointed the solicitor as my guardian and executor in his will, so I did have someone looking out for me.’