The Hollow Land

by Jane Gardam

  She walked along the dry beck strewn everywhere with whitening thistles and climbed up to the top of the bouse, where someone seemed to have been digging lately. A lot of earth had fallen into a deep delve in the fell, with turf torn up and the roots of a may tree sticking up at an angle, feeling the fresh air for the first time since Queen Anne was on the throne. A shift, she thought. A landslip. Like when poor old Mr. Hewitson got injured. Quite a big one. Maybe it’s subsidence in the old mine. She thought of the honeycombs of rocks beneath her feet, and the rocks, hollow like bones, leading to underground rivers and ballrooms and cathedrals below, and shuddered. The one thing I’d regret about us coming up here would be if any of them ever took up potholing.

  She thought for a moment that she heard voices, and stopped. Then she thought she heard a faint metallic hammering noise, very thin and distant. “Kendal says it’s haunted up here,” she said, and hurried on, and up to the top of the fell where you could see in all directions, right to the Nine Standards, the huge old stones that watched from the horizon.

  She stood in the long white apron, shading her eyes.

  “Wake up,” said Bell, “wake up Harry lad. Here. We’ve got to yell again.”

  Harry stirred but didn’t wake. Bell shook him. “Here. Harry. It’s late. It must be about night. They’ll be looking by now. There’s sense yelling now. More sense than before when they was all away.”

  “My throat’s sore.”

  “It’ll be sorer if we’re here all night. It’s going to get right cold soon. This place has never seen the sun in a million years.”

  They were behind the iron-barred grille at the entrance to the mine, peering out into the cave beyond it over the rubbish and rubble of the sixty years since the bars had been fixed. The outer cave mouth was a maddening ten feet away from the inner, barred opening. From the cave mouth the bouse fell steeply away so that you could see the light beyond beginning to change to shadow as it drew to evening. To Bell and Harry it seemed near midnight.

  “We ought to start bashing again, too.”

  “The tin cans and that are wore out.”

  “There’s the pick and shovel. Come on.”

  Bell began a great assault on the thick iron bars.

  “It’s killing me ears,” said Harry.

  “Get to work with that shovel.”

  Harry made some lesser noises with the shovel. Then they both stopped and cried “Help” for a while.

  Then they sat down again and stared at the bars. After a while Harry said, “We’ll likely die.”

  “Get away,” said Bell. But dismally. His face was streaked with dirt. It looked gaunt. He kicked the bars with his foot. “By God,” he said. “I’se sorry for animals.”

  “Animals? Sheep could get out. They could ease their way out if they ever wandered in. Dogs could get out. Rabbits could get out. Hares could get out.”

  “I mean gorillas. Lions and tigers.”

  “Foxes could get out. Ferrets could get out.”

  “I mean zoo animals. Caged up. We’re caged up. We’re caged up like slaves or gorillas. I’ll never go near a zoo again.”

  “Snakes could get out.” Harry picked up the end of a chain which hung from the wagon behind him. Already they had tried to heave at the wagons to make them roll up against the iron bars and break the grille down; but it meant pushing uphill and they were anyway afraid that they might block the entrance altogether and bring down everything. “I’d say we were going to die,” Harry said again. He began to feed the chain through the bars. After a bit he had to help it along by jabbing it with the shovel, pushing the shovel sideways through the bars and holding tight to the other end.

  “Have you read Huckleberry Finn?” asked Bell.

  “No.”

  “Just as well. What you doing?”

  “Watching the chain being a snake. Why is it just as well?”

  “There was a place like this in Huckleberry Finn. Some kids got lost in caves. When they got themselves out—miles away back from the place they’d started—everyone thought they was dead. So all their families blocked up the proper entrance so no other kids could go in again.”

  “Well I don’t wonder at that,” said Harry, pressing his face into the bars and jabbing on at the chain with the shovel end, urging it down the slope towards the cave mouth.

  “No, but there was someone else left inside. A terrible Indian. Ages later when someone went up to have another look around, there was this dead skeleton lying, stretching out its poor bony hands. Horrible.”

  Harry stretched his hands and his arms out to their furthest extent through the bars and forced the chain forward a few more links. “Dead skeleton,” he said. “That’s not so bad. It’s live skeletons I don’t like.”

  “Aye. Think of his last hours.”

  “D’you think these are our last hours?”

  “If we don’t get clanking and shouting again they are. Go on. Get clanking that shovel against the bars again. Gis hold of the pick and I’ll have a thrust at that chain.”

  After the morning’s thistling Old Hewitson had gone off down Quarry Hill with his scythe over his shoulder like Old Father Time, and James alongside. They waited a while on the wooden bridge in the village for Kendal the sweep. When Kendal’s Land-Rover appeared Old Hewitson, James and the scythe were all installed in it and the Land-Rover turned and made for a remote farmhouse on Stainmore where propped against the yard wall there stood a large brass bed.

  The two ends of the bed and the metal base were lifted into the Land-Rover and then everyone went into the farmhouse for tea.

  This took a very long time, for there was a lot to talk about—there is always more to talk about in places where not much seems to happen—and the farmer and his wife did not set them over the yard to the Land-Rover again to say goodbye and thank them for taking the bed off their hands until after five o’clock.

  Then there had to be another long talk from the steering-wheel and by the time they eventually rattled off and reached the village, it was time for the stock market prices and the shipping forecast, had they been interested in either.

  Through the village they went and up Quarry Hill past Light Trees and as far as the culvert bridge over the dry beck.

  “Now’s the problem,” said Kendal. “How to get the bed up the fell.”

  “I thistled this place this morning,” said Old Hewitson. “We might see if it’ll run along the beck bottom.”

  The Land-Rover lumbered down the bank and into the stream bed. It took its way along with the two old men, now and then hitting their heads on the Land-Rover roof, and James constantly holding his shin. “Good for the liver,” said Kendal.

  “Not good for the bed,” said Old Hewitson. “It’s making music like the Sally Army.”

  They passed the foot of the bouse, where James’s geology book still lay surveying the evening sky, and turned the corner at the bottom of the cleft and the broken wire fence. They lifted down the bed, removed the old wire from the gap and fastened the bed-ends and the metal base across the dry beck.

  “Fits a treat,” said Old Hewitson. “Very handsome. No need to mention it to the authorities.”

  “Last a hundred years,” said Kendal, “and very interesting it looks. Just the thing for an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty . . . Hello?”

  “What?”

  “Did you hear something?”

  They stood. The evening, gentle with the warmth of the long day, smelled of gorse and wild thyme and a hundred miles of clean turf. Through the silence came a faint sound of metal, rhythmically hammering from the top of the bouse, and thin and strange lamenting cries.

  At the same moment Mrs. Bateman in her long apron paced into view and stood mournfully shading her eyes and looking into the distance.

  James gave a scream and fled, kicking aside his geology book and
vanishing into the sunset.

  He was closely followed by Kendal, who made for the Land-Rover, shouting wildly to Old Hewitson to follow him, and starting the engine.

  Only Old Hewitson—and Mrs. Bateman—stood their ground, and only Old Hewitson saw something come into view in queer jerks at the top of the bouse and watched a rusty and enormous chain emerge from what looked like the very earth itself, gather speed, slide lumpily forward, drop through the air and fall at last at his own uneven feet.

  “Turn that car, Kendal,” he cried. “Get that James back here. Mrs. Bateman, stay up there on the bouse. We’re in for a hard evening. It’s going to take the lot of us.”

  “And for my part,” said Mr. Teesdale at past ten o’clock at night, “I’d a mind to leave them there.”

  “And mine,” said Mr. Bateman in his London suit, which was not looking its best.

  “Sitting there like two fond monkeys. Deserve nuts and water for a week.”

  “Beyond me. Beyond me,” said Mr. Bateman.

  “I just couldn’t believe—I couldn’t believe it,” said Mrs. Bateman. “All I did was appear and everyone screamed and scattered. Ghost! Do I look like a ghost?”

  “Yes,” said Eileen, Bell’s sister, “you did. I seed it once. I seed that ghost when I was just about to be a teenager. Just before you’re teenage you see ghosts easiest. I read it in a magazine. Just before you’re teenage you’re very psychic and impressionable.”

  “I’d give Bell psychic and impressionable,” said his father.

  “I’d not call that Kendal teenage,” said Mrs. Bateman, “at least not in years.”

  “I saw no ghosts,” said Bell, “I was that busy getting us out.”

  “Getting us out?” said Harry. “You was going on about dead skeletons and terrible Indians. Who got the chain moving?”

  “Aye well, you did. I’ll say that.”

  “A pair of loonies,” said James.

  “Who went running?” said Harry. “Ghosts of dead miners. Dead miners’ mothers! And you a scientist.”

  “That lad of Meccer’s never got lost up the mines anyway,” said Mrs. Teesdale. “I heard tell he took off to South America and got to be a millionaire.”

  “It was still very dreadful for his mother,” said Mr. Bateman.

  “Tell me when it ever isn’t,” said Mrs. Bateman, collapsed on the Light Trees sofa, still in her aprons. “Tell me when it ever isn’t.”

  “When they’re safe home,” said Grandad Hewitson. “Give thanks. They’re safe home. And both of them a bit wiser than when the sun rose up this morning.”

  GRANNY CRACK

  The Egg-witch had a mother, a very old woman nobody saw because she lived in bed.

  She had been in bed for years. There was nothing at all wrong with her, but one day she just didn’t get up. The Egg-witch and the Egg-witch’s children and sometimes even the Egg-witch’s wispy husband, who spent as much time as possible out of doors on his farm, began to carry up trays. Nightdresses of ancient design appeared upon the Egg-witch’s clothesline but that was the only outward sign of Granny Crack. When anyone asked after Granny Crack, the Egg-witch’s mother, she just said “Nicely thank you”. Or nothing, and glared. They had always been a glaring sort of family, the Cracks.

  The Egg-witch had been a Crack, Mrs. Teesdale told Mrs. Bateman, before she married. Yorkshire people and we know what that means.

  “No,” said Mrs. Bateman.

  “They tell you nothing, Yorkshire people, they’re not like here.”

  “But Yorkshire is hardly ten miles away over the fell.”

  “They’re different folk.”

  Now it happened that Harry had become a friend of the Egg-witch. All those years ago, before he was even school age and had trampled eggs into her front path and run off, he had been made to go back next day and say he was sorry. His father had gone with him but had waited at the gate.

  Harry had knocked on the Egg-witch’s black door and been told through it to go round to the back. His father had watched him depart and return with an enormous bucket and with the scrubbing brush they had brought with them. He had settled down to scrub the path, which was as white as snow already, having been scrubbed clean some hours before at the first possible minute after Sunday, when work is wicked. He had scrubbed the clean slabs all the way from the gate back up to the front door, making everything rather puddly. His father had settled down outside the gate with his back to the wall and a book to read.

  As Harry reached the front door, wiggling backwards on his knees, it had opened behind him and there had stood the Egg-witch with an apple in her hand. She looked at the path and then at Harry. “It’ll do,” she said and handed him the apple.

  That the Egg-witch had given somebody a present had been talked about in the village for quite some time.

  Later Harry’s mother had met the Egg-witch in Market Street shopping, and nodded. The next summer when the Egg-witch was out in her garden digging a huge trench for potatoes, Harry and his mother went by and she straightened herself up and glared and said, “Are you comin’ in?”

  After that they looked in often and sat in the Egg-witch’s kitchen (they never went into the awful parlour again) for a cup of tea, and on one occasion Harry’s mother mentioned mothers—and then the flood gates opened.

  “Seven years,” said the Egg-witch, “seven years she’s been up there. The doctor comes and looks to her every now and then. Says she’s right as a ninepence. Just given in, that’s what she’s done. Worked all her life—up before five every morning, milking fifty years, never a holiday all her life. Right away up on Kisdon we lived, miles from nowhere. Made her own butter and cheese and bread. Fed the nine of us out of twenty-five shilling a week, my father was a pig-killer till he died, going round the farms killing and helping here and there hay-times, as we did, us and mother too, carrying pots of stew on harnesses on our backs away up the fell. Such a cook she was! She’d fill a big black pot—one of them with bright, thick silver insides—with potatoes and onions and carrots and a bone, and cover it with water and boil it up slow. Beautiful. Every day oft’ week, and bread and syrup for supper. Sundays there’d maybe be a spare rib pie. Proper spare rib, not this so-called spare rib now. And a crust over it. She could heft the sheep and clip the sheep and dip. She could salt the pig and make the sausage and the black puddings. She could stack a rick of hay and corn and she could paint a house inside and out and mend the great roof tiles. She could milk and separate and calve a cow. She never had a day’s sickness in her life, no more had we. We never saw a doctor. She had us out of our beds six o’clock each day including Sunday, and she was always last to bed at night. And look at her now.”

  “Doesn’t she even want to talk to anyone?”

  “No. She does not.”

  “Doesn’t she read or listen to the wireless?”

  “No. She does not. She lies there night and day looking at the ceiling. Night and day, winter and summer, these seven years.”

  “Whatever can have set it off?”

  “We don’t know. She’d been down here living with me for a bit when it happened. Mind I think I know.”

  “Oh?”

  “It was something on television. Something she saw on the news. It was about the time them Americans went to the moon.

  “She’s not silly, mind,” the Egg-witch added, “she’s still sharp. What’s more, we all know she doesn’t stay in bed all the time. We can’t catch her at it, but when we’re out hay-timing or it’s ram sales in Kirkby, or Ravenstonedale or Brough Show and there’s no alternatives to leaving her alone, there’s signs she gets up to things.”

  “Up to things?”

  “Up to things. However else would she know the colour we’d painted the kitchen? ‘Never liked black in a kitchen’ she said the other day. We never told her. No—she’d been down.”


  “What would happen if you just carried her downstairs and put her in the car and took her for a drive?”

  “Oh—she’d create. She’d take a stroke after all this time, the doctor says. It’d be murder. It’s the countryside she’s turned against you see. It’s the land she hates. She hates it. She’s had enough—all them long Swaledale winters, all that scratting and scraping and never in all her life seeing anywhere more than ten-twelve miles from her home. She hates anyone that’s a traveller. She always was venomous with the gypsies—there was never a gypsy dared come anywhere near Kisdon. I wouldn’t take you up to see her, Mrs. Bateman. She’s still got a very bitter tongue. I wouldn’t trust her to see a Londoner. It’s what got into her that morning we switched on the moon and saw them men in their suits bobbing about.”

  “I suppose,” said Mrs. Bateman, “that she has really gone—well, a little bit off her head. In London they would take her into hospital now and then, just to give you a break.”

  “That I will not have,” said the Egg-witch, all her whiskers bristling. “I know my duty.”

  Just before the Batemans left at the end of summer there was a great blackberry picking going on in the Hollow Land. It was a wonderful blackberry year and everywhere you could see people patiently picking in the lanes with plastic bags and bowls and even buckets. The best place for a bramble, as everybody knew, was the Egg-witch’s lane and they went there first as soon as the berries had ripened. Harry had been sent out to get some to take home to London. He got a lift down with Mr. Teesdale on the tractor to Teesdale’s farm and then walked the rest.

  But he was too late. The bushes were bare. He thought that he would walk on to the Egg-witch’s and ask if she knew anywhere else there’d be some, down behind Blue Barns in the woods perhaps.

  When he got to Blue Barns he was puzzled because everything was so quiet. It was as quiet as on the first frightening Sunday he had called there for eggs long ago. The yard and the garden were quite empty—even the kennel was empty. The whole farm stood sunbathing in peaceful early autumn light—rosehips by the gate, bright dahlias in the borders, healthy bright potato flowers, and two or three swallows sitting on a wire warm as toast and wondering if there was any point in going to Africa.