The Hollow Land (2 page)

“Not without paying their rent they won't,” says my dad. “I'd say they'd rested theirselves enough anyway.”

“It is their holidays,” said our Eileen, who likes the looks of the big London lads, though she won't let on. “It's a shame for them really. It's spoiling their summer. They'd wanted to come back and back for five years at least. And all that money they've spent on telephones and that.”

“Well they don't have to go,” says Dad. “All's quiet for them now. Hay-time's over. They can play their radios full tilt in peace.”

“They'll go and they'll never come back,” wails Eileen.

“Others'll come,” says my dad. “There's any amount of incomers without farmhouses to go round for them now. But they'll have to learn our ways. Standing there rowing in fields!”

My grandad says that hay-time's maybe not understood by them as important and maybe there's things of theirs we don't catch onto either.

I say, “And he weren't rowing, the London father, not
rowing
,” and my dad says, “You keep quiet.”

I'm up at the fell gate by now—and what d'you think? It's open! Stood right back on itself and wide open and even the John Robert gone that binds it. It's just what he said'd happen one day and never has. I stand there feeling that grand that I bothered to come out and see. No signs of stock straying yet, thanks be. But many more thanks be that I bothered to come.

I shut the gate, but it's still not fast without binding and there's plenty of John Robert down in Light Trees clipping shed, so off I go, taking the short cut down the slope of Hartley Birket and over the wall and through the Home Field with Light Trees standing in the middle of it. The field looks smooth now with the hay got in—light as my head when my grandad's clipped the hair off it. Hay-time done, grand hot summer ahead, my shadow twelve foot long from the moon. I feel quite drunk and cheerful.

They'd get some fright if they looked out and saw me now, this London lot, thinks I. Ghosts and vampires, thinks I, and begins to flap my arms about. I'm right up now against the back wall of Light Trees and I'm looking right in at the little back bedroom window (the house being dug down snug in the side of the fell, upstairs at the back having its chin on the grass so to speak) and I feel like gawping in the window and making whoo-whoo noises, scaring the moonlights out of the soppy lot.

But coming up to the window I sees it's open and there's the little lad, Harry, standing there looking out. Standing quite still. And it's way after midnight.

I near passed out cold. I just stood there.

Yet he weren't afraid a bit.

He must have seen me vampiring away from miles off. And he's not afraid a bit.

After a bit longer I see he's crying.

He's just a little lad see—maybe four or five. Maybe six.

I think maybe, though he don't look frightened, he's crying with fright, so to speak, and I say—when I get a bit of strength back—I sort of whispers it, thinking of that little house behind him all brimful of people, great knowing London people, “It's only me. Bell Teesdale.”

Sniff, he goes, sniff.

“I'm not doing owt,” I say.

Sniff.

“I just been checking on the fell gate. It's been left open.”

Sniff.

“I'm just coming on down here for the John Robert.”

Sniff.

Sniff. Then, at last—“What's John Robert?”

“Well, string. Farmer's string. For combines and that. It's always been called that. You don't know a lot, do you?”

He starts crying again. “What's the matter?” says I. “Don't get upset now.”

“We're going home tomorrow. I don't want to go home.”

“Why you going then?”

“My father says he won't be bossed by your father and there's too much noise. He works writing. He has to be quiet. Six weeks it was to be, our holiday here. All the school holidays.”

“It's only once a year,” I say. “We only cut once a year. Then it's quiet as owt. Except clipping time and dipping time and when lambs get taken from their mothers and there's a bit bleating, there's never a sound here. Not so much as a motor except once a day the postman.”

He says, “My father says he can't do with fumes and smoke and racket. That's what he came to get away from.”

“It's over till next year.”

“We're still going, though,” says Harry and starts to cry again. “My mother wrote a letter to your mother to say she was sorry if we'd given offence, but my father wouldn't let her send it. I don't want to go home,” he says. “It's just streets and streets. Why didn't your father
say
hay-time was just once?”

“Likely he thought there was nobody in the world didn't know. He were clashed. Could you not see how my dad were clashed out? And the tractor broke. And expecting rain. Anyway—noise! What about all your radios and stereos and portable tellies?”

He can't think what to say to this so he begins to cry again.

“Town yobs,” says I.

He picks up something heavy—maybe a transistor. Not even our Eileen's got her own and she's seventeen, and I say, “Now think on. Hold still. Let's have a think. Where's your mother's letter?”

“Thrown away. In the bin under the sink.”

“Crumpled up?”

“No—just thrown.”

“Can you get it?”

“Well, I could.”

“Get it,” says I. “I'm going for the John Robert in the shed. l'll come back round this way and you can give it me.”

When I come back he hands the letter over.

“D'you want to come out?” I say. “You can come up and fasten the fell gate with me if you want. Get some shoes on.”

He's over the sill in his shoes and his jersey over his pyjamas in half a minute flat, and we go off doing silent vampires over the Home Field. At the beck we make a change to spacemen and while I'm fixing the fell gate we're the SAS and have a bit of quiet machine-gunning. I see he gets back in through his window, for there's rain coming now, great cold plops at first, then armies like running mice, and the moon all suddenly gone. He takes a header in through his window from a standing start. He's not a bad 'un this Harry.

Then I'm away. Over the hill and down the road, past the quarry and under the bridge and into the village and dripping wet through our own front door. I left it unlatched (great snores still going on above) and I put the letter from under my shirt down carefully in the middle of the doormat. It's a pity she hadn't had time to put it in an envelope. They look a family for envelopes. But we'll have to see.

Then I dried myself off a bit and slithered into my bed and I didn't wake till long past milking.

 

When I got down they'd finished breakfast and my mum's been baking. Yawning but baking. Our Eileen's still in bed and not a sign of Grandad. “Grandad's seen plenty hay-times,” says my dad, “but he's slower now forgetting them.”

My mum's putting six or seven grand big tea cakes into a paper bag and my father's carrying eggs and some new milk in a can.

“What's yon?” says I.

“It's for them up at Light Trees,” says my mum. “They get little enough in London fit to eat. They may as well get some benefit here.”

 

I met up with the lad, Harry, later beyond the fell gate. He joined up with me behind Dad's tractor, which was laden up with dead sheep getting a bit ripe and on their way to being dropped down a shackhole. It's right horrible putting dead sheep down shackholes. You wait ages till you hear them splash. Just think of falling in yourself! Harry loved it. Our four dogs was dancing all around him, jumping up and licking his face.

“All's right then now?” I ask.

He says, “Seems like.”

“You're stopping then? Not away off back to London?”

“We're stopping. There's been not another word.”

“Nowt said?”

“No. Your dad just came walking in with buns.”

“Tea cakes.”

“Tea cakes. And milk and eggs.”

“What did your mum say?”

“When he'd gone she said, ‘This puts us to shame. I didn't even send that letter.'”

“I hope she doesn't see it's gone.”

“She won't. She'd never think. She's not sensible.”

“And that was all?”

“No. After that my father went across the yard to your father and they shook hands.”

Harry and I walked on after—away over Green Fell Crag behind the tractor, squidging in the soaking turf. And every now and then there comes the rain like Dad said, and the clouds are fat and purple with the sun flashing in and out of them, and my dad singing on the tractor cock-a-hoop and loud as larks because he's done with hay-time before the rain and there's other folks all round not yet dared start.

I said, “Harry, you're going to settle here now. I just feel it. There's not many do. Not incomers to these old farms and different, like you lot are. But I'd say you'd settle for plenty holidays now.”

And Harry said, “I've settled.”

H
arry sat happily on Jamie the old horse rake that stood in the yard with the nettles sticking up high through its round, rusty ribs. He sang as he bounced in the curved iron saddle and clanked the gears and handles. Behind in Light Trees every door and window stood wide open and Harry's mother lay spread about on a sofa, dabbing her face against heat and looking out every two minutes anxiously across the yard at Harry.

Around the yard stood the square of fortifications of stone barns and sheep pens and above them, stretching far, far away were the fells, bright pink-yellow turning hazy with heat. Their horizon jigged like the desert. Not a sheep or a cow seemed to move, humped in under the stone walls, looking for shadow. No walkers passed to the Pennine Way. Not even the curlews were conversational.

The rest of the Batemans had taken themselves off climbing in the car. “Climbing in the car,” sang Harry. They had gone to High Cup Nick, hoping for cool air. Harry's mother had stopped behind to mind him because Harry climbed—and walked too for that matter rather zigzag, which meant he went double the distance at half the speed. She had also stopped behind to get some peace and quiet, for except for Harry her family were going through a noisy and argumentative time just now, wagging their fingers a lot at each other and shouting above the radios.

When the car had roared away over the ribbony white road and they had watched the cloud of dust at its heels die away after it had tipped over forwards down Quarry Hill, the silence settled like limestone dust. Harry's mother gave a thankful sigh, walked back into Light Trees and fell on the sofa with a book, and Harry climbed up on Jamie and sang.

It was a drone perhaps rather than a song, and it went on and on. He droned at the nettles, at the invisible horse in the thin old dropped-down shafts of the rake, which was still faintly painted blue. He droned at the dusty cherry trees hanging over the orchard wall. He droned at the pink fell and the track up it to the haunted tarn and the old mines and the bumpy lines on Hartley Birket which people said were ancient railways.

Harry was happy. But his mother was not. Edgy, fidgety, she couldn't keep to her book. She looked at Harry once, twice. She wondered if there was something odd about him sitting there all by himself not wanting someone to play with.

So much younger than James, she thought. I oughtn't to be lying here. I ought to be off finding him a friend. He'll be getting shy and funny. It's not natural—droning on a horse rake.

Also it was Sunday, which always meant scrambled eggs for supper and she had run out of eggs. She would have to go down to get eggs from Teesdales'. Perhaps Bell Teesdale might ask Harry to stay down there and play.

So the two of them set off walking in the heat of the afternoon, up the ribbony road and tipping over the hill as the car had done, past the great sleeping lime quarry dazzling the sky; on past the row of dusty fir trees all covered in grey powder; under the bridge where the bones of a young woman and the bones of her child had been discovered by quarrymen last year. They had been curled together in a sleeping position, the child inside the mother's arms for about four thousand years. You could tell their date by the way they lay curled. They were Beaker People. Harry's mother thought that she perhaps ought to be telling Harry about all this, and especially about the date, because it would help with school.

But Harry was zigzagging and droning ahead. He droned at the showers of blackberry bushes hanging over the road, pricking with pins, and at the dry beck with the little bridges down the village street. Looking down at the beck and the village was a farm called Castle Farm where a Great Lord of the Marches had lived more than three hundred years ago. He had loved the king and had ridden all the way from the fells to Westminster for a coronation. The jewels in his sword and harness and on his clothes had cost so much that he had no money afterwards and someone wrote it all down in a book. Harry's mother knew all about it. She wanted to tell Harry. But Harry was too interested in the peeling paint on the rail of the little bridge and the ducks complaining of the lack of water in the beck. She wondered if it had been a dry day or a wet one when the Lord of the Marches had crossed the beck on his way to Westminster Abbey.

In the middle of the village street Flora the fluffy dog lay curled in a shallow pothole fast asleep. No quarry lorries came by on a Sunday and so Flora felt safe. She knew Sundays like a Christian. Four tired, hot hens jerked russet necks out of a hedge and made long complaining sounds in their throats and bobbed back in again. Not a soul stirred down the village street.

When Harry's mother knocked on Teesdales' front door—the farmhouse was close on the road—there was no reply and—a wonder, the door was locked. All Mrs. Teesdale's lupins in the narrow front garden, pink and pale yellow and purple and lavender blue and deep rich glowing red like the Lord of the Marches' rubies, stood there looking at Harry and his mother and saying clearly, “Did you forget then? They've all gone off to Morecambe to the sea. Even old Grandad Hewitson.”