by Jane Gardam
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.
“Are we down?”
“Aye—but wait till I get—”
“It’s not deep.”
“Not yet. Wait. Where’s the torch?”
“It’s a queer smell.”
“It gets worse. Nearer the trucks. Like dead bodies. Mind, we’re not going far. We take a quick look at them trucks and we go straight back. To get back you get onto my shoulders and I jump you up again. Then you lean down in and pull me out after. See? Look.” He turned his torch up to the faint light from the blazing day outside, then along the tunnel they stood in. They had dropped through its roof. Stones and rubble lay underfoot. The tunnel went in two directions, each into deep darkness. The torch, when Bell shone it at the roof, picked out small glitters and spangles like frosted cobwebs.
“Is it real silver?”
“I’d say so.”
“Already? But we can’t be that far down inside?”
“The mines over Alston you can see the silver from the very pit-head. Just by looking through the bars of the grille-thing at the entrance. We went at our school. For history.”
“Can we get some? Why did they leave it?”
“Not worth picking out, this lot. The stuff worth having is deep down. Miles down. They used to take folks down there for jaunts in the old days. All dolled-up folks. Rich folks. Used to go down for kicks, wrapped in fancy dustsheets to see the poor miners slaving away. Used to travel down in the little wagons. Sat on little benches, screaming and hugging each other like in a ghost train.”
“Why can’t we go down?”
“Don’t be soft. It’s not maintained now. It’s probably all fell in further off. We’d get down there and there’d be a shift and we be gonners. I’se not daft.”
“What’s a shift?”
“It’s what you get round here. Limestone. Ask yon James. It’ll be in his book. It was a shift when my grandad flattened his leg. In Light Trees Home Field. It just suddenly rippled about and threw him down. Like someone moving about under blankets—some giant—he said. Rocks all came tumbling. They call them earthquakes in Japan. Hey—look. Here we are.”
Walking one behind the other, one hand to the tunnel wall and the torch jerking here and there, Bell’s foot had come up against something that wasn’t rock.
“Here’s the rails. Feel.”
“They’re not wood. They clank.”
“They didn’t stay wood. That was in old ancient times. This mine was in business not that long since. It only stopped when Grandad was a lad. It got too expensive and there was a war and that. Look.”
The torch shone on the back of a little wagon. It was attached to another, and another. A little string of them.
Propped against the side of one was a fine large pick and a spade.
“Just left here. Just left. Look here—”
There were cans and buckets and a couple of spidery, rusty lanterns and two or three tin mugs.
“My—they must have left in a hurry. Fancy leaving all this when they was all poor and going to be out of jobs. What was that?”
“What?”
“Noise like a sort of a shower.”
“I didn’t hear.”
“A sort of rumble. Oh!”
From behind them down the tunnel there came a long swishing noise. A sort of sigh, then silence.
“It sounded like water or something,” said Harry.
“No. It’ll not be water. It’s dry enough.”
“I heard your grandad say ‘The drier on top’—”
“Aye, I know, ‘the wetter below’. But that’s the underground rivers. There’s no rivers down here. It’s a ship-shape mine. It’s dry as dry. Look.” He shone the torch along the slope of the floor, which was dry, though in the two runnels the rails were set in was a thick gluey white liquid like condensed milk.
“I don’t like look of yon,” said Harry. Before Bell could correct the yon, there came from down the tunnel a very long and hostile swish and hiss—a sound like a great serpent stirring towards them from the bottom of the mine. Then a thundering long rumble, and a puff of something. They clung to the wagon, and their eyes and noses stung and they began to cough. After what seemed a long time the air cleared, and there was complete silence.
“What was it Bell?”
“We’d best go see.”
They walked the little way back again to the hole they had dropped through, feeling the wall as it curved round and slightly down, and came to where they had started out. A solid barrier of earth and rocks completely blocked the tunnel. The hole in the roof, its edges loosened first by them and by the dryness of the earth around, had crumbled and dribbled and showered into the darkness below. First the soil, then smaller stones and then the huge chunks and blocks of rock had settled in tons into the space prepared for them.
There was no sign in the tunnel where five minutes ago they had looked up at the sky that the sun and the grasses and the sheep and the flying grouse were still passing a summer’s day hardly ten feet above their heads.
And there was not the least chance in the world of getting out.
Mrs. Bateman, back from Penrith with her arms full of clean washing a
nd a lot of parcels, walked into Light Trees’ kitchen and called, “Harry?”
She looked in the back dairy and saw that the sandwiches for Harry’s lunch were still under the Pyrex dish and the apples and chocolate lay uneaten beside them. He’ll be hungry, she thought, when he does get home. He’s been off on the fell a long time. Still, he’ll be all right with Bell. Bell knows every inch up there and it’s a fine day. No mist to get lost in.
She opened up one of the parcels she had bought in Penrith market and shook out a flannel nightdress with ribbons and lace, and a long apron of white cotton and a sacking apron to wear over it. “Lovely,” she said, parading about. “Museum pieces. Lovely.” She put on the white apron, which had a pinny top and cross-overs at the back. “Florence Nightingale,” she said, twisting before the mirror hung in the porch. She tied the sacking apron over it. “Now I’m ready to clean out my chicken-houses,” she said.
“Silly,” she said next, “playing at being someone else. Ridiculous. Just as well I’m alone.” She began to unpack the rest of the shopping and the grandfather clock struck five.
“I wonder where he is though?” she said, and went and stood on the step and stared about. Then she picked up the field glasses and went and stood in the Home Field. Through the glasses the fells lay as still and empty as they did through her eyes. “Harry!” she called. Her voice echoed. She went in and got the bell she used to ring for Harry to come in for meals when he was smaller and played in the beck, just out of sight.
She kept calling and looking and ringing, but nothing happened. She went in and began to wash salad for supper, thinking that the sacking apron was just the thing for cleaning vegetables. She switched on the radio. She made a pudding. She realized that the radio had been telling her for some time the stock market prices in London and the details of the shipping forecast for the next twenty-four hours, and that listening to it she had been thinking all the time about Harry.
She put down the potato peeler and set off up the fell.
I suppose I could have waited till James came in or Robert got back from London. I’m over-anxious. I always was a bore about the children. Silly to worry so.
