The Hollow Land (16 page)

He was introduced. Mr. Teesdale and Bell were out, but Eileen was over with Poppet. Eileen was often over with Poppet and Poppet's Anne. They were talking about cake entries for Appleby Horse Fair and how to get them there. Old Hewitson was there—close up against the fire, though it was a hot day. He sat at the edge of a big stretch of newly washed stone floor because all the rag rugs were out airing in the yard with the cats and most of the furniture.

“You are moving house?” said Henry Hewitson III. “I apologize. I should have made an appointment.”

“Moving house? No—it's just it's kitchen day. Eileen, bring in yon rocking-chair for Henry. Poppet, shake him up a cushion. Anne—mind your head now, Henry, on the clothes airer. It's been good blanket weather this week, in and out of showers. When we daren't risk hay I wash blankets, but they tend to hang about and the ceiling's low. This is Grandpa.”

Grandad Hewitson turned his old head.

“It's an honour, sir,” said Henry.

“It's William!” said Old Hewitson. “William over again. He had the TB had William and something muscular the matter with him, too. Started with him hitting his finger with the chopper when he was hewing hawthorn sticks. He had his arm off int' end. But then, Jimmie Meccer'll have told you.”

Henry said he had not seen Jimmie Metcalf for—

“Legs lasting out with Jimmie Meccer, I hear,” said Old Hewitson. “Mind you, he rested them long enough. Sat in yon shed for fifteen years till he struck lucky with his kitchen table and got hisself sorted out.”

“Unfortunately I have only met him—”

“We had his dog. It used to lie in the road day after day. Nice dog, but not much go about it. It died seven or eight years back or you could of seen it and told him about it. You can see his cottage anyway. You'll like to see that. It's close by. Our Bell and his wife, Poppet, and their Anne live there.”

“That,” said Henry, “will be the old farmhouse, Light Trees?”

“No,” said Grandad and turned back to the fire. It might have been that Henry had never existed. The room, for Grandad Hewitson, had emptied of him.

“Light Trees is a hill farm away up above the quarries,” said Mrs. Teesdale. “It belongs to Grandpa. It's tight away up the fell.”

“It is Light Trees I came to England about,” said Henry, and he put every one of his fingers together and then his two thumbs and his elbows very precisely on the ends of the arms of the rocking-chair. “My father once told me of Light Trees. Your daughter lives at Light Trees?”

Eileen said after a little pause that, no, she lived beyond, in the only farm beyond. It was her husband's own farm and grand low-lying land. Dark Trees. No, they didn't own Light Trees.

“And you live here with your daughter, Mr. Hewitson?”

“Yes, he lives here with us,” said Mrs. Teesdale, since Grandad Hewitson was closely examining the coals. “He's lived here long since. Ever since Mother died. He does own Light Trees, though.”

“So Light Trees stands empty?”

“Light Trees,” said Mrs. Teesdale—while Eileen and Poppet and Poppet's Anne stood still—“is let. It's been let over twenty years. To the same family.”

“To a local family I take that to be?”

“No. No. Friends. Old friends.”

“Not members of our family then? My family said that the house—there is a tradition that the house was never to pass out of the family and often passed to cousins?”

“It hasn't passed out of the family,” said Poppet. “It's Grandpa's. He lets it. To London folk. They've taken good care of it. It was a bonny mess when they took it on, by all accounts. They've been coming up here a thousand years.”

“They will be sorry to leave it,” said Henry. “It would be bad luck I understand for it to pass out of the family. I remember my father saying this. It's an old tradition.”

Poppet suddenly thumped down a pot of rum-butter she was holding and crashed out of the room. Her temper was still uncertain.

“I remember distinctly my father saying that the one who should rightly inherit Light Trees would be me. Over the years I seem to have remembered it more clearly. Before I came away from South America I looked it up in his papers and it is all written down. The deeds of Light Trees. Here they are,” and he took from his expensive slithery briefcase an old piece of paper and laid it on the stool on top of Old Hewitson's feet.

Then he left—to walk the Quarry Hill to survey the property to be left to him when Grandad Hewitson died.

 

I am Anne Teesdale. I am the daughter of Bell and Poppet Teesdale. I am eleven and shall marry Harry Bateman, who is a friend of my father, though younger; he is a friend of all our family. He does not know that I shall marry him, nor does anybody else except perhaps my Grandfather Hewitson, and nobody knows exactly what my grandpa knows or doesn't know because he's about ninety years old.

Harry Bateman is the most beautiful, glorious, peaceful man and he lives in London but really belongs up here, where he's been visiting since he was a baby. Here is the ancient kingdom of Cumbria and our part is the Hollow Land, which is where I was born and have never left, except when they sent me to a boarding-school. I came back before the Crisis and I shan't leave again.

This place was the home of Eric Bloodaxe the Viking, the Lord of the Marches of Harcla, the Headless Horsewoman of Stainmore, the Hand of Glory, Granny Crack the Loony and my grandfather, who is almost in folklore already. It was not the home of my mother Poppet, but you'd never guess. She came here about my age; my mother, on holiday with my important grandmother, who is a household word. We never see her. My mother Poppet decided to marry my father the day she met him. Harry will settle here for good too when he can afford to—say six years from now when I marry him, and he'll not fret for other places neither. It's that sort of a place, the Hollow Land, and he's that sort of a man.

But it isn't easy to get a footing here.

Just wait.

This is the account of the two most eventful days of my life to date. They ended this evening and must be recorded at once before I go to sleep, in case the slenderest detail should be lost to the world.

 

Harry was to come on the steam train from London yesterday morning. He'd booked the ticket months ago, as you have to with only one train a day, and my father and I were up at dawn with the dew soaking white on the fields outside the kitchen window, white ash in the fire grate and nobody stirring, not even the five yellow cats asleep on chairs. My father opened the back door and slung the cats out in the yard one by one. He can't bide cats, he says, though they come trying to sit all over him. We drink each a cup of tea and I'm hoppity skippety mad round the place because of Harry coming.

“Give over,” he says, Dad, while I'm dancing and flapping toast about. “You'll wake your mother,” and I notice he's right gruff.

Just standing, he is, staring out at the fields with the sun ready to come up over them, turning the four big oaks black and throwing spars and bars of dazzle across the lane and up towards Quarry Hill. You can't see any fells from down here. It's alongside my Granny Teesdale's farmhouse, this one, a little old house once lived in by some fat American with no legs called Jimmie Meccer. I never worked out who he was, but he found some magic bit of furniture or pot of gold or some such and away he went and married a millionaire.

Anyway, we got his little house with its shed and it's grand. Behind it there's a stable, old as Henry VIII, with a little trap in it as old as Henry VIII's grandfather but a godsend since the Crisis. When the oil dried up and we all had to think again, my father, Bell, burrowed about in the stables and came out with this old trap, called a digby. It needed new springs, which Harry made last year—“He can do owt” my dad says—and it needed new seats, which my Gran Teesdale made out of old patch quilts, and new wheelspokes, which Harry went passionate over and painted reds and blues and yellows like the gypsies, said he, though gypsies seem to me always just to be sat by the road in old tin cans. Since the Crisis the gypsies have no colour in them. They mend old petrol tins and sit by the roadside watching you, and then move on. They're still good at finding horses. They've not left one wild now, though Harry says that there were many a dozen ponies all over Wateryat Bottom when he was my age, dropping big fat foals that never knew saddle nor bridle and lived and died free.

Well, away we're to go to Oxnumb station, Dad and I, to pick up the steam train and Harry off it. It's the best day of the year, the first day of Harry's holidays, the day he says he comes to life on, the day he comes back to Light Trees, the farmhouse that has been his real home since he was four or five year old; that you feel was Batemans' always, even before the Romans.

“
Git
over,” swears my dad, Bell, at the pony. He thumps down the little digby shafts either side of the pony's round fat tum—not so round as once, for the pony gets plenty exercise these days, though he doesn't often get so far as Oxnumb, which is twenty miles.

And oh, the lovely ride in the sunrise, through the village down Jingling Lane and over Coffin Bridge (“Why's it Coffin Bridge, Harry?” I used to ask when I was young. “Well, because it caught a cold being so long with its feet wet. You can hear it coffin all night.” Harry makes
wonderful
jokes) and along and along under the wild roses blowing, tangled over us ten feet high since we can't get any machinery to them now. And up the Midland Hill.

Then we turn left and the round low hills of Sedbergh stand ahead. “Old as the moon,” says Harry, “but softer.” So old that all the edges has been washed and rounded away, and the turf like velvet all to their tops. The sun's well up now and I never saw such a morning. Coming up to Cautley Spout the waterfall's hanging like a white thread far down the end of the dale—and closer in there's a red fox running in the bracken and looking quick and angry at all the henhouses still shut up in the yard of old Hannah's white farm where she went when her husband, Tatton, got over-excited living in a signal box when trains came back. (But he's well looked after now.)

Hannah's kitchen window is steamed over, so she's up. There's a spire of blue smoke going up from her chimney—a blue thread going up like the white waterfall coming down. And then I see two red squirrels. Two! They seem to be coming back since the traffic went. “Oh Dad,” say I, “oh Dad!”—because of the red fox and the red squirrels and the white water and the blue smoke and the pale soft morning hills and the dew glittering on the grass poking up all down the middle of the broken tarmac road. “Oh Dad—it's grand!”

He just sits there looking at nothing at all except the backside of the pony.

“Dad?”

“Uh?”

“Dad—it's
grand
. It's a grand day. Isn't it?”

“Aye,” and he gives the most terrible great sigh. A sigh to end the world.

“What's up then?”

“Not owt.”

“Well, summat's up.”

“Some
thing
.” (He goes on about words though civilizations fall. I have to use different words from his, don't ask me why.)

“What is?”

“Nowt.”

We clip-clop on. Now and then the pony, who's feeling happy as I am, gives a great blow down his nose and twirls its tail around.

“
Give
over,” says Dad like thunder.

Our little daft dog—Border terrier—looks like a scrubbing brush. When it dies, Harry says, we'll nail a board to his back and
use
him for a scrubbing brush. This dog, Kipper, it starts walking out along the digby shaft. Dad doesn't see it at first. It goes tippetty-tappitty, tappy-lappy along the shaft till it gets right up against the pony's ear. Then it sits down to have a quiet chat just as Dad sees it.

“GIVE OVER!” he bellows. So Kipper falls off.

We have to stop and me get down and go and scrape it out of a ditch where it's weeping and carrying on and pretending its back legs is done for. I'm nearly dying laughing—as Dad would be normally—and I drop it back in the digby and climb up beside it—and a minute later it's walking up alongside the pony's ears again.

“Dad,” I say, “what is it? What's up? You're right twined.”

“Stop talking so broad.”

“Well you're miserable. What is it? Harry's coming. Come on—
Harry's
coming.”

“Aye, I know,” he says, “it's nowt. Just something I have to tell him. Don't tek on now. It'll be right. I dare say. In time.”

I've never known him low like this—and quiet. We go past the dew pond with the starey-eyed house behind it, past the queer old farm with the long Quaker windows, on and on through Sedbergh and away the other side. At last we get to the bridge that crosses the old motorway, and we stop to give the pony a rest, and we get down, hoping maybe to see a car go by.

It's cracking already, the old road, and the white lines nearly worn away. The verges are like flower shows—every wild flower you can think of tossing about now there's no fumes or cutters to keep them away. It's a disaster of course, but it's funny how it seems usual now. Down what they used to call the central reservation there are some fair-sized trees and shabby great clumps of pink willow-herb. Down the tarmac the carriageway is being forced open in a long crack like in chocolate cake when you bend it over too tight, when you're making a Swiss roll. And out of the crack's coming bright green grass and white daisies.

“It'll look like a Roman road soon,” I say. “Antique.”

“Oh—it'll not come to that. Give it time. It's just till they get things sorted out. It's had its advantages, the Crisis. Look—here's a car coming.”

We watch the solitary little electric car coming bashfully along the great motorway at about 30 mph, all the big daisies nodding at it. I run to the other side of the bridge and watch it disappearing for miles, clicking away to the horizon and the long rocks near Penrith.