The Hollow Land (6 page)

B
ell and Harry lay on their stomachs in the Celtic Camp like machine-gunners, looking over the landscape at James far below them.

James sat on another slope beneath a crag with a book open on his knees and in turn watched a figure below him—old Grandfather Hewitson—who was parading along the dry bed of a beck slashing thistles.

The four figures were the only signs of life for miles. It was a hot, still day. Light Trees was the only building in sight. No smoke rose from its chimney. Far away the Lake District mountains swam with heat.

“However long is it going to be?” said Harry.

“He could sit there all day. And when he does get hungry and go in, there's still your grandad.”

“You'd think he'd know every word of that book by now,” said Bell. “Does he do owt else but take exams?”

“Not much,” said Harry. “He's good at them.”

“Not surprised, the time he spends.”

“He's talking to your grandad now. Look, he's put the book down. Maybe he'll forget it and they'll go off together somewhere. Maybe he'll start helping your grandad thistle.”

“I doubt. Grandad's talking back at him now. He's leaning on the scythe. James is in for a session. We'll not get there today. We'd best give up and do summat different.”

“Oh no. No! Let's wait on. He can't sit there for ever. We mightn't ever get another chance. All of them off to Penrith or London or walking, and nobody coming after us.”

*

“Are you sitting there for ever, Slim Jim?” said Old Hewitson to James on the lower level.

“Till I know this chapter,” said James.

“Chapter eh?”

“Exams. It's work. I've got to work this holiday.”

“Work eh?”

“Science.”

“Science eh? I never seemed to hear much in my day about science. It must be enjoyable. ‘Thou doesn't look as though thou's working when thou
is
working' as my father used to say to the travelling tinker.” He leaned on the short handle that stuck out of the long handle of the huge scythe and took a coloured handkerchief out of his pocket and tied it round his head. His large red face grinned piratically beneath. One of his blue eyes looked at the wide and silent fell and the other down at the thistles. The fells were pink with drought and the only sparkle came from the white of the salt-lick blocks for the thirsty cattle under the grey and silver trunks of the may trees. “Unusual hot,” he said, looking intently at the bumpy outline of the Celtic Camp. “Unusual quiet. Must be grand for you after London. Not that I've ever been there. Grand having nothing to do.”

“My mother says there's plenty to do. Same old shopping and cooking and washing—and the washing's more trouble because you have to take it four miles to the launderette. And my father has plenty to do. He writes for newspapers. He's had to go to London today.”

Old Hewitson considered this. Then he gave a sweep of the scythe and eight huge thistles toppled like towers. He was a short-legged, large-headed man like a gnome and not only did his eyes look in different directions, his feet had something of the same complaint. One of them seemed to press down deeper than the other. Like Rumpelstiltskin he had the look of somebody who had just stamped. The scythe, which he swung again, and again down crashed a city, was much taller than he was. He walked away up the beck swinging it and turned and came swinging back again.

“Unusual, unusual, unusual hot,” he said. “Day for the seaside. Not that I were ever there above twice and the last time two year ago when that Harry had the fight with the Egg-witch and there was better entertainment at home. I'd not weep and die if I never saw the sea more.”

He took a water bottle out of somewhere inside his trousers and offered James a drink.

“It's all right. I'm going in to get some lunch soon.” He looked at the thistles—fat and lush, silver-grey and copper-lavender in the sun. “Funny,” he said, “so many thistles.”

“Funny's what it's not.”

“They ought to have discovered a selective weedkiller.”

“They have, it's called a donkey.”

“Why doesn't Mr. Teesdale get a donkey?”

“He's got one. It's called Old Hewitson. What's thou laughing at?” he added. “Come on now. Stir thy sinews. Take a swipe and leave that exam. What is it anyway?”

“Geology. The study of rocks.”

“Rocks eh?” He gave another two-way glare at the Celtic Camp. “Come on. Take a swipe.”

James put down the book, slid off the bank and took a great swing with the scythe.

“LOOK OUT!” cried Old Hewitson leaping the beck. “Are you right?”

“Nothing much,” said James rolling about in agony and holding his shin.

“Take my headband. Bind it tight. It's not over damp. You'll be right in a half hour. It's not work for a tawny-ket. Nor yet was Tommy Littlefair's but that was because it was too far the other way, for the leg was a gonner. Survived splendid mind. The only wooden-legged man I ever knew to ride a bicycle. What's that you said about thistles being funny?”

James lay and rolled on the beck bank looking pale, and far above Harry said, “Your grandad's cut James's leg off. Shall we go down?”

“We'll move in closer,” said Bell, “while they're off guard. Come on. Sideways and down into the ravine and over the broken fence. Then up and round behind them. If he can still walk they'll maybe go now.”

“You'd think your grandad would want his lunch. He's been out since about dawn.”

“He eats on the hoof. Why he has to thistle there today I don't know. And why your brother has to choose that very bouse to sit on and do his exams I don't know.”

“Is the opening right near then?”

“Right near.”

“And they've never seen it? Not even your grandfather, living here all his life?”

“It wasn't there all his life. It's a shift in the earth. He's not been able to get up the bouse since the day he got his leg flattened. Not even my dad knows about the opening and there's not much he doesn't know. He knows about the pit-head mind. Well even you've seen that. The pit-head's obvious, once you've walked in the cave in the fell-side. You can't miss that opening with them great iron bars over it. But not even my dad knows about the overhead hole up beyond. You can't get a tractor up there and I've seen to it no sheep gets stuck in it. I put a slab over.”

“Have you ever been down?”

“Aye. Once. With a rope. We shan't need a rope today, being two of us. I never been along inside though. It's no place to be in alone. Mind we're not going far inside today neither. We just walk around a bit and climb out again.”

“But you said there's a railway in there. A real one.”

“Aye.”

“With lines.”

“Rails. And little trucks.”

“Little trucks? Go on. Tell on.”

“What?”

“What you tell't before.”

“Told before. All I said was there was silver there. It's a silver mine. You can see the silver glints in the walls. Down further there'll be long layers of it. They never finished working it out. There's poison down there. In the channels of the rails. All running.”

“Could we get it out? The silver?”

“Don't be daft. You had to have worked twenty years before you were trusted to knock out the real stuff.”

They had left the Celtic Camp far behind them now and dropped off the fell into a deep cleft. James and Old Hewitson were out of sight. They began to climb the far side of the cleft, pulling themselves up by bushes and rocks. A sheep racketed away from them from behind some gorse bushes and once a family of grouse shot up from under their feet making a noise like wooden rattles. Bell and Harry stood still for a minute, then fell on their stomachs and crawled to the edge of the crag top and looked down. James and Old Hewitson were much nearer now, directly below, but still too far off for Bell and Harry to catch their voices.

“See where your brother's left his book? He was sat not twenty feet below the hole, if he did but know it. He might have been safer there than in the beck scything. Looks as if he's landed now for another hour. And so are we. Look.”

 

Old Hewitson was bringing a picnic out of another compartment of his trousers and passing things to James.

“Are you right?”

“I'm all right,” said James doubtfully, trying to stand.

“That's the lad. When Henry Cleesby got lamed on these fells he never sat up again. He got rolled on by his tractor liming the Quarry Field. And as for Jimmie Meccer, he's reduced to yon shed all day. Doesn't even let the doctor see his legs. Nothing of course to the old mining accidents. There's been mines up here since the Middle and Dark Ages you know. Accidents and various mysteries happened not a hundred yards from this spot even in my lifetime. Now—what's this you say about thistles being funny?”

“Just . . . ” said James, “just it's funny they're so big and juicy-looking when the ground's as dry as rock.”

“The drier on top,” said the old man, “the wetter below. The drier a place looks on these fells the deeper the water running secret beneath. This is hollow land.”

“Hollow?”

“Listen.”

They sat together in the burning, still morning, but James could hear nothing.

“I can hear nothing.”

“Ah well.”

“What is there to hear?”

“The rivers running. Way, way below the ground. But you're not practised. You'll not hear them yet. That's why you should never go potholing round here. Not unless you're with experts and know the tunnels like bees know the honeycombs. It's not only natural tunnels and channels under the fells, see. It's old mines. No one in their senses goes near them—nor anything else humans copies from nature, aeroplanes being no exception. There's no such thing as accidents—just clumsiness and daftness and butting in where nature knows best.”

“This cut on my leg's an accident, isn't it?”

“No—clumsiness and daftness. Thy clumsiness and my daftness in letting you try a sickle without showing you how. No—there's no one with one iota of sense that'd go down the old mines now. Roofs all caved in. Gases. Falling rock. Fumes. There's miles you could wander seeking a way out if you got lost and never be heard of more. The mine you've been sitting below has been sealed off solid these sixty years.”

“Sitting below?”

“Aye. You were on the bouse—the tip at the mine mouth. Can't you see the slope's a different shape? Yon hump? Even different plants grow on it. Different lichens on the stones.”

They both looked up at the bouse and Bell and Harry bobbed down their heads from the top of the crag above it.

The day had grown immensely still, immensely hot. There was a curious silence, the sky so blue that it seemed here and there to hold darkness in it, to be almost black.

“It's said to be haunted up here you know,” said Old Hewitson. “Not many would come up here behind Light Trees at night. Me, I find there's more ghosts about in the day. On hot quiet days like this one. There's those say if you listen you can hear the old hammers going, the picks of the miners long ago, and the trucks running over the wooden rails. Now and then you can just about catch old voices with old words in them. Then there's the woman that's often seen walking. She walks just up yonder.”

He pointed. Bell and Harry's heads bobbed down again. James's spine prickled right up to the back of his neck and then round to his cheeks.

“A ghost?”

“Aye. Likely. She goes walking in a white apron over the bouse. She walks to the top and shades her eyes and looks in all directions. Then she's gone. Just disappears. Into the sunshine. Nothing left but the air and the fell and the birds. Like a creature walking through water she is, Mrs. Meccer used to say.”

“Have you seen her?”

“Maybe once. That sweep, Kendal, makes out he's always seeing her—quite a friend of his. Our Eileen seed her once, too—the day the tractor rolled on Henry Cleesby. I seed her when I was about Harry's age, the day I got my leg flattened in the shift. Mrs. Meccer seed her twice, but that's not surprising since it's her own grandmother.”

“What—the woman is? The ghost is?”

“Aye. She was Mrs. Meccer's gran out looking for her son. That's to say Mrs. Meccer's uncle. He came on up here when he was a lad of sixteen or so. There was this family row and he goes storming out, like lads do that age, leaves his dinner half-eaten, grinds back his chair from the table. ‘If that's how it is, I'se leaving home.' You know the sort of thing.”

“Yes.”

“Well, he goes storming up the fell. They never seed him more.”

“What—he
disappeared
?”

“Aye. Long since. She never got over it. Walked the fells looking for him for days and nights. Then she died. But she goes on looking for him. You see her before there's some disaster. Walking quiet. Shading her eyes. In a white apron.”

“I think I'll go in now. Can you give me a hand up?”

“Have I sobered you, young James? Well, I'se sorry. Dear me.”

“No. Well—no. It's just coming over rather thundery. I think I'll go back up to Light Trees. It
is
rather a depressing sort of story.”

“Oh don't worry about it. I'd say the lad took off somewhere and made his fortune. The old woman was a right misery by all accounts.”

“But still . . . ” James looked up at the wide watchfulness of the fell.

“Oh, come on lad. We'll both get off. Why don't you come off over Stainmer with me and that Kendal this afternoon? We're jaunting. There's no harm can come to you up here you know if you don't do owt daft and slipshod.”

As the two of them turned away (both limping), Bell and Harry slid forward. Bell eased a huge slab of limestone from a slight dip in the ground, laying bare a hole that might have been a narrow fox-hole lying beneath a shelf of earth and quartz. Then he slid inside it and dropped into the dark, turning to catch Harry, who slid into the dark beside him.