The Hollow Land

by Jane Gardam

  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.”

  “Something.” (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.

  “They’ll be walking the geese and the cattle along here soon,” I said, “like in the Middle Ages.”

  Dad goes back to silence.

  “Harry says in the Middle Ages the cattle used to wear special little shoes on the hard roads to stop their hooves wearing out. And the poor geese had their feet dipped in hot tar.”

  Dad’s not listening.

  “First in hot tar and then in sand and then in hot tar again. Awful, Harry said.”

  “It’ll not come to that,” said Dad. “Come on—we’ll miss the train.”

  There’s such a crowd on Oxnumb platform it looks like the old films of the war long long ago and I’m afraid, all of a sudden, I’ll miss Harry. Especially as Dad, who’s tall, wouldn’t come on the platform with me to see over heads. He’s still standing dumb in the station yard with the dog and the digby. For a minute in the hubbub—for it’s standing room and hanging-out-of-doors-room in the trains now—James, Harry’s brother who’s travelled a lot as a geologist, says it’s like India here now—I think, he’s not come. He’s not managed it. They didn’t keep his seat. He’ll never get another ticket. He’s stuck in London till next spring.

  Then there he is.

  Harry.

  A bicycle under one arm, a rucksack on his back, and his lovely, untroubled face. And I rush and I cling and I hug him.

  “We’re int’ yard. Dad’s int’ yard with the cart. I came on.”

  “Now then, Anne.”

  “Oh, Harry!”

  “Now then. We’re all set up.”

  His voice is London but it’ll start changing by the time we reach Sedbergh. He’ll be talking like Dad by time we reach the Midland Hill.

  “Now then,” says Harry as he sees Dad.

  “Now then,” says Dad with one of his nods—but not with his usual brightening up of eyes.

  We set off.

  “Something amiss then?” Harry looks down as we cross the motorway bridge. “My, but the flowers! Look at them cracks.”

  “It’s not for ever,” says Dad. “No good getting moped. A crisis gets over. It’s meant remarkable little change and much more labour to be got for farmers. Things’ll change. They must. We’re not that near finished.”

  “Aye, they’ll change. They do,” said Harry, taking the dog on his knee, “and there again they don’t.” He began to hum o
ne of his tunes. He’s not got much of a voice, Harry. Usually Dad starts groaning when Harry sings. “Well you’ve not changed” or “Put the cat out someone” or “This is where we all start suffering” etc. But today Harry drones on and Dad seems not to hear him. It quite puts Harry off.

  When we pass Hannah’s house—the fox has gone and the chickens are out round her feet like autumn leaves and the blue smoke’s not noticeable now—we see her pinning up her washing on a line. Two sheets, two pillowcases, like squares of snow that lie all year at the top of Skidder Mountain. I see Harry look away over at Hannah and think Hannah’s washing looks like squares of snow that lie all year on Skidder Mountain. His thoughts are my thoughts quite often.

  “Now then,” Hannah calls and we see her wave both arms and nod her head up and down far away, and her voice comes over to us a second later. “Now then, young Harry.”

  At top of the Midland Hill the day’s getting on and we’re in sight of home—or rather Harry’s home, which is Light Trees. You can just see it if you know where to look. First find the quarry, pale orange and white, then keep your eyes moving upwards and left a bit. Then up and left again beyond the top field—and there’s Light Trees with its white end wall: and in an arc around it the bright green of the Home Field in the middle of the brown fell, like its halo.

  Dad stops the cart and Harry looks.

  “Hay in then?” he says.

  “Just about.”

  “In off the Home Field. Grand green fog growing.”

  “Aye. There’s still some hay to get off Miners’ Acre.”

  “Aye, I can see. And there’s still some not cut by the looks of over Tailrigg. What’s all them dinosaurs standing about in Wharton Hall? Didn’t know we’d gone that far back.”

  Dad laughs—at last!—“Three old balers broken down together. No proper oil. Well—scything’s only thing now, and pitchforks if you can teach how.”

  “Your grandad out pitchforking then?”

  (This is a joke because as I said Grandad Hewitson is cruising around towards a hundred years old.)

  “Quarry’s improved in looks,” says Harry, letting his eye go lower again. “Trees is coming back. Hanging gardens. It’ll be back to Granny Crack’s days next.”

  “As long as it’s not back to Granny Crack,” says my father. And I feel much much better. Even a feeble joke like this is better than the long, terrible, unhappy silence. What’s more, Bell, my father, seems to have given himself a shake and his mouth’s gone sensible again.

  “Anne,” he says, “jump out lass. We’ll walk the horse down the hill. Stop back, and Harry and I’ll take his bridle. The surface is bad and he’ll slither hisself down else.”

  “Wait on,” says Harry, still staring far away over at Light Trees, “there’s folks in the Home Field. Men. Four of them.”

  “Walk on down, Anne,” says Dad. “Go on. Walk on now. We’ll catch you.”

  I don’t. I climb the hedge-side just behind them and start picking meadowsweet and vetches and as they move down I move down behind them, but so as I can hear. They forget me.

  “Four men standing about. Walking about. Look you there now, Bell—they’ve got posts in their hands. I’ll have to get shot of them. They’ll ruin the fog. Who’s let ’em go marching about yonder?”

  “Harry—” says Dad. There’s a terrible pause.

  Then quiet and steady and simple, as Dad is, he tells this most awful thing.

  This man, this queer South American man as came lately all smooth in a pale suit with a pale face with pale eyes like a sheep with fluke and sloped-down, drippy shoulders—he has come to take Light Trees away from Harry.

  All these years and years Harry’s family has rented Light Trees from us, since he was a baby, and thought it to be theirs for ever—for who of us would want a house so high to farm (save me)? And so did we think it theirs. Yet all this time it has really been just waiting for this South American. It’s to be his because he is a Hewitson and long ago someone with some sort of say in the matter wrote down that it was always to be owned inside our family. It’s for this man to do as he pleases with—all long ago arranged.

  For a long time—the time it takes to go weaving down the Midland Hill holding the bridle of a tired and slipping horse at the end of a long journey—Harry never spoke.

  Then he said, “I’d think it’d be of little use to him? Light Trees? He’ll not have need of it. He’s rich then?”

  “He’s rich. He’ll not have need of it. It will be no use to him.”

  “Then he’ll go on letting, as you have done?”

  “He’ll not let.”

  At the hill bottom on Coffin Bridge they climb in the digby, but Dad doesn’t move off. The water goes tearing by below them, talking its head off, amber and slate and foamy white over the half-sunk backs of the rounded stones. I still stand to the side, behind them.

  “He’ll not let the farm any more, Harry. He’s no need for Light Trees but as soon as Grandad’s dead he wants it. For his fancy. He’s retired from work. He says things are going to start moving again here soon. Seems he’s been to do with mining.”

  “With mining?” There’s fright now in Harry—real fear and fright.

  Steady as the stones below, my dad says, “He thinks there’s ores up there. Ores still worth a fortune. The lead and the silver, he says, was never worked out. They’re ahead of us with engineering. He talks even of oil up there in the Hollow Land.”

  Then my, but I feel thrilled! For Harry, who’s so gentle and sweet some folks call him almost daft sometimes, he gives himself a shake and says, “Come here now then Bell, and gis them reins and let’s get on. Oil there may be, and silver and lead there may be, but he’s not looking for it now. At present he’s no more right in the Home Field than passing campers. And even campers asks permission. Did he ask permission?”

  Dad looks a bit bewildered. “No—”

  “Because he’s family? He doesn’t have to ask permission to go in my field because he’s family? Seems to me I remember that the terms of our lease were that the field is ours except for what hay you take off it. I may not be your family, Bell Teesdale, but my family’s Light Trees’ tenants and he’s trespassing on my tenancy and he can get hisself off.”

  We go clattering and thundering like the hordes of the Celts and the Visigoths, and when Gran and Mum come out to greet Harry when they hear us, their smiles turn into round surprises as we fly past. I’ve hitched myself up in the back with the bike and the rucksack again now. I try to call back to them what’s up and wave my arms and point up Quarry Hill, but Harry shouts, “Sit still will you? Sit down there, Anne, and keep your mouth shut.”

  I’m so surprised I thump down in the bottom of the digby floor on top of Kipper who gives a scream.

  “Keep that damn dog quiet,” bellows Harry and round the bend of Quarry Hill we go with Dad holding his old hat and the pony with his eyes rolling as if his heart won’t last five more minutes. Then he gives a scream, too, because under the old red bridge on Quarry Hill—the place where Kendal’s always on about the skeleton of a prehistoric woman and her prehistoric baby; probably they were run over, when you come to think of it—comes this great, wonderful, smoothly running silvery car with the South American driving it and three men in town clothes in the back and nobody smiling. He pulls up not four feet from us.

  “Reverse!” yells Harry at them.

  Toot, toot, toot, goes the South American.

  “Get yon car sided by!” bawls Harry. “Get on. Get ower there int’ bank. Git ower.”

  The South American gets out of the car and makes to stroll towards us.

  “I said OWER,” said Harry, “git ower. You been in my field. I seed you from Midland Hill. Ruining the fog. Trampling the ground. Trespassing.”

  “I guess I can’t trespass on what’s to be my own.”

&nbs
p; “I guess you can,” says Harry and grabs the horse whip.

  Henry Roberto Hewitson III, or whatever he’s called, steps back into his car, locks the doors and winds up the windows. Harry pulls our pony over to the side and points down the hill. “Git going. Keep away. We’ve still got a police force and lawyers in this struggling country.”

  Then he turns to Dad. “And you get home an’ all,” he says, and he flings the horse whip back in the cart and he starts up to Light Trees on foot by himself.

  Dad sits there.

  The pony’s got foam at his mouth and a drooping head and the dog’s jumped out and disappeared. Dad just sits—on the dangerous bend. Just sits.

  After a bit I pick up the flowers and rucksack and lift down the bicycle and I look at Dad for a bit. Then I go on up Quarry Hill after Harry.

  And the next day—this morning—there is an eclipse of the sun. I don’t mean that Harry caused it and I don’t mean that it was unexpected. Harry tells me it was known to be on the way by someone good at calculations several thousand years ago. “Goodness,” said this astronomer, “what do you think? August 11th, 1999, at eleven o’clock allowing for British Summertime, ten if you call it GMT, there’s to be a total eclipse of the sun in Cornwall where the Phoenicians live. They’ll make a great fuss of it all over that cold changeable country where the wild folks are.”

  That is the way Harry spoke of it anyhow last time he was here. He makes things seem very alive. We have all been looking forward very much to this eclipse. If Harry hadn’t been coming up here I would somehow, somehow have got to Cornwall where there’ll be the real dramatics—the flames streaking out on either side of the black disc on the sun, the luminous haze for miles beyond, like spying at heaven. And the stars will come out in broad daylight. In Ancient Greece, Harry said, you got executed if anyone heard you say that an eclipse of the sun was due to natural causes. In China even today, Harry says, some folk think that an eclipse of the sun is when a serpent comes eating it up. In the South Sea Islands, Harry says, they think an eclipse is the sun and the moon making love with each other and all the stars are their children.