The Tale of Hill Top Farm

by Susan Wittig Albert

As all this commotion was going on at Sawrey School, Beatrix was walking to Hill Top Farm with her sketch pad and a tape measure, intending to survey the area in front of the house, where she planned to put the new garden. She had never had much of a chance to garden, since her mother preferred that the care of the formal flower beds at Bolton Gardens be left to the once-weekly gardener. But she loved to sketch the gardens of the various country houses where her family spent their holidays. What she admired most were the little kitchen gardens, with flag-stone paths and glass-topped vegetable frames and wooden trellises and hives for the bees, and rows of cabbage and rhubarb and old-fashioned herbs—thyme and rosemary and lavender and mint—all growing in a tangle of blossoms and leaves against a wall or under a hedge.

  Now, as Beatrix stood in front of Hill Top, she saw a space occupied by a weedy garden, enclosed on all four sides by low stone walls. She began to sketch a plan, deciding that she would keep two of the walls and put in a new iron gate. She would replace the third with a tall hedge and the fourth with a brick wall, against which she would plant fruit trees. The walks would be laid with the local blue-green slate, and a new gravel lane would redirect the carts and farm wagons through the farmyard, rather than past the house. These projects would take some time, of course—they would give her something interesting to look forward to when she came next.

  “Would tha care to step in for a cup o’ tea, Miss Potter?”

  Startled, Beatrix turned to see Mrs. Jennings standing in the porch, the ginger cat at her feet. “Oh, yes, thank you,” she said with real pleasure, for she had wanted badly to see the inside of the house, but had been timid about asking Mr. Jennings for a tour. She closed her sketchbook and tucked her pencil behind her ear. “I was just drawing out a plan for the garden,” she explained, coming up to the porch. “I would like to make it larger, and plant a hedge, and—”

  “I doan’t have time t’ garden,” Mrs. Jennings said in a vexed tone, and turned to go inside. “Jennings does t’ milkin’ and I do all t’ dairy. Separatin’ t’ cream and churnin’ t’ butter takes more time than tha’d think. What with washin’ and cookin’ and cleanin’ t’ house, there’s not a minute left.”

  Beatrix followed Mrs. Jennings into the house—her house now, she thought with a barely suppressed delight. She had not been in it for several years, since her parents had spent the holiday at Lakefield and boarded their coachman and his wife at Hill Top, and as her vision adjusted to the shadowed interior, she looked around with great curiosity.

  They had entered a dark, narrow entrance hall, at the end of which was a staircase leading to a windowed landing and then up to the left, to the second story. On the right side of the entrance hall, a door opened into the Jennings’ bedroom, and on the left, another led into the main downstairs room of the house, which the family used for cooking and eating, for indoor work and relaxing.

  This room, the largest in the house, had a slate floor, partly covered by a rag rug. It was somewhat brightened by a window and warmed by the iron range that had been installed in the fireplace alcove, which had panel-door cupboards on either side. As Beatrix glanced around, she decided that, as soon as she could, she would tear out the partition that created the narrow entrance hallway, so that the front door would open directly into the main room and bring in light and fresh air. The place could certainly do with an airing-out, for it was smoky and smelled of boiled cabbage and onions.

  Mrs. Jennings, a thin, angular woman whose plain features were set in a unfriendly expression, did not invite her guest to tour the house. Instead, she poured tea from a china pot nestled in a crocheted wool cozy, and motioned Beatrix to a chair. The ginger cat leapt lightly onto the wide stone windowsill, where she raised one paw and delicately licked it, regarding Beatrix with bright, curious eyes.

  Beatrix, glad to see a friendly creature, smiled at the cat. “Hello, Miss Frummety. I trust you are keeping well.”

  “I am, thank you very much for asking,” Felicia Frummety replied decorously. “And yourself, Miss Potter?”

  “Frummety.” Mrs. Jennings snorted. “Foolish name for an animal. If a cat has to have a name, it ought to be simple, like Puss.”

  Miss Frummety sniffed distastefully. “I’d rather have no name at all than be ‘Puss.’ ”

  Beatrix felt rebuked, and her delight evaporated like a puff of smoke. “I’m sorry, Mrs. Jennings. I was only trying to make friends with your little girl and—”

  Mrs. Jennings didn’t let her finish. “Jennings sez tha’re wantin’ us to stay on here and farm,” she said brusquely, and took a chair on the opposite side of the table.

  “That’s my hope,” Beatrix replied, “if we can work out the living arrangements.” She stirred sugar into her tea. “I don’t think—”

  “Tha has to face facts, Miss Potter,” Mrs. Jennings interrupted. “There’s nay room for all o’ us here at Hill Top. There’ll be five Jenningses come April. There’s nay room for visitin’ off-comers, even if they own t’ place.”

  Miss Frummety scowled. “Really, Mrs. J.!” she exclaimed. “I call that rude!”

  Beatrix flushed. “I know it wouldn’t be convenient,” she said, “but I—”

  “If we can’t live here,” Mrs. Jennings went on with a kind of grim satisfaction, “I doan’t see as how we can stay and work t’ farm. Which is just what I said to Jennings last night, when he told me what tha wanted. ‘We got to face facts,” sez I to him. ‘Fact is, Miss Potter means to live here when she visits from Lonnun, and who’s to blame her,’ I sez, ‘since it’s her house now, which she bought ’n’ paid good money for, more’n she should, mappen, though there’s no help for that now. But there’s nay place for us to live in t’ village, so I doan’t see how we’re to stay.’ That’s what I sez to Jennings, and that’s a fact.”

  “What about Anvil Cottage?” Beatrix heard herself asking. When Mrs. Jennings stared at her, uncomprehending, she added, in a desperate tone she hardly recognized as her own: “Miss Tolliver’s cottage, I mean. It’s only a few steps away, and it’s every bit as large as this place. You could live there, couldn’t you?”

  “Anvil Cottage?” Mrs. Jennings frowned. “Well, I s’pose we cud. But I doan’t see as how we could afford it.”

  “Anvil Cottage?” Felicia Frummety brightened. “Plenty of mice there.”

  “If I paid part of the rent?” Beatrix hazarded. “If it were available, I mean. If you thought it large enough.” What was she saying? She didn’t have the money, either in hand or in prospect, to buy the cottage. And the place wasn’t likely to be let, since Mr. Roberts intended to sell it as soon as his aunt’s will was read out.

  There was a long silence, broken only by the hiss of the fire in the iron range. “I doan’t know about Anvil Cottage,” Mrs. Jennings said finally. “But we got to face facts somehow. I’ll talk to Jennings.”

  “Please do,” Beatrix said. She hurriedly swallowed the last of her tea and rose, feeling that she had confronted quite as many facts as she could manage for the moment. “Thank you for the tea, Mrs. Jennings. I must go now.”

  And with that, she escaped from the house and almost fled past the barn and down the long slope to the green bank of Esthwaite Water. Miss Felicia Frummety sat on the flagstone porch, watching her until she disappeared from sight.

  If you should visit Esthwaite Water, you will find it to be a clear, stream-fed lake, some eighty acres in size, cupped in a green glacial valley just to the west of Lake Windermere. The word thwaite, which means “a clearing in a woodland,” reflects the Norse influence in this part of England, and many of the local customs, like the arval bread made of the best wheat flour that was given at Miss Tolliver’s funeral, were brought from Norway by the Vikings in the early Middle Ages. The old Norse market town of Hawkshead—a little gem of a town, with higgledy-piggledy streets, unexpected squares and gardens, and whitewashed dwellings—lies at the upper end of the lake, while the two Sawreys lie near the lower end. On the west side of the lake, y
ou can still see the remains of the pits where wood was burned down to charcoal for the iron foundries and forges in the Furness Fells. On the Sawrey side, along the eastern bank, reeds and rushes flourish in the clear, shallow water, fished by kingfishers, herons, and great crested grebes. Esthwaite is much frequented by human fishers, as well, who pull brown and rainbow trout from its sparkling waters, and great numbers of pike and perch.

  During her earlier holiday visits to the area, Beatrix had spent a great many hours foraging in the woods and along the lakeside, and not far from here she had found and painted some lovely mushrooms and toadstools, in which she was greatly interested. She was younger then, and firmly believed in fairies, and would have not been at all surprised to see one of the Wee Folk pop out from under a toadstool or behind an oak tree, with a clover blossom cap on his head and a bundle of wild thyme sprigs tucked under one arm. In those days, everything she discovered in the Westmoreland woods and meadows and ponds and ditches seemed wonderfully, imaginatively enchanted, a stark contrast to the formal, frozen life of Bolton Gardens.

  Today, though, the fairies, real or not, were quite far from her mind. She had come to the lake to draw, and drawing would help to quiet the litany of Mrs. Jennings’ unpleasant facts echoing uncomfortably in her thoughts. So she walked along the bank, looking for possible subjects. Water hens, small black birds with bright red bills, were swimming close to the shore, almost within arm’s reach, their heads bobbing as they poked under the lily-pads for water snails. A half-dozen lapwings stood on one leg in the shallow water, napping, with their heads tucked under their wings, and a pair of great crested grebes, sorely threatened by the demand for their feathers for ladies’ muffs and hats, swam leisurely through the reeds. But although Beatrix walked for some distance, looking closely, she could find not a single frog—and a frog was what she needed, a cooperative frog who might be persuaded to sit for the drawings of Mr. Jeremy Fisher she planned to use in what she and Norman had laughingly called her “frog book.” Finally, she found a dry, sheltered spot, warmed by the sun, and sat down to sketch whatever she could see.

  Beatrix’s early books had begun as picture letters, written to the children of her favorite governess, Annie Moore. A dozen years before, when she was on holiday with her parents at Dunkeld, on the banks of the Tay, she had written an illustrated letter about the adventures of a mischievous rabbit named Peter to Noel Moore, Annie’s oldest son. The very next day, she wrote to Noel’s brother Eric: “My dear Eric, Once upon a time there was a frog called Mr. Jeremy Fisher, and he lived in a little house on the bank of a river. . . .”

  Beatrix’s new book—the one she was supposed to be working on just now—would tell more about Jeremy Fisher, a gentleman frog who gets more than he bargains for when he puts on a mackintosh and galoshes and goes fishing. Jeremy is snapped up by a hungry trout, and saved only by the fact that the fish doesn’t like the taste of his mackintosh and spits him out. Norman had chuckled out loud at her preliminary sketches, and seeing the project through his eyes, she had looked forward to completing the twenty-five or so detailed watercolors that would make up the book.

  But the memory of Norman settled over Beatrix like a sad, gray fog, and the sunshiny morning, already darkened by the gloomy Mrs. Jennings and her melancholy facts, grew even darker. Over the four years she and Norman had worked together, she had come to associate the happiness she felt in her drawings with his childlike delight in them, and she had always been inspired by his playful encouragement and gentle suggestions. In fact, as their relationship grew closer, she had begun to draw as much for him as for the children. And now that her most appreciative audience was gone, so was all her joy in her work. How could she draw without Norman’s smile and light-hearted chuckle of approval to confirm her sense of what was right about her drawings? How could she imagine a story without Norman’s exuberant imagination to inspire her?

  Despairingly, Beatrix looked down at the sketches of reeds and lily pads and water hens and lapwings that she had made in the last hour. They had no spirit, no energy, not a spark of life. They looked exactly the way she felt, flat and gray and gloomy. She ripped the pages out of the sketch book and crumpled them into a ball. There wasn’t any point in going on with the book—with any of the other books she’d planned, for that matter—if all of her drawings were going to look so lifeless. But if she didn’t go on with the books, she couldn’t earn any money, and if there was no more money, she couldn’t do anything with the farm. There would be no repairs, no new walls around the garden, no cows, no sheep.

  Beatrix wrapped her arms around her legs, propped her chin on her knees, and stared out across the water, her worries draped like a heavy shawl around her shoulders. Perhaps her parents were right. Perhaps she didn’t have any business trying to manage a farm, after all. What was she going to do about the Jenningses? If they stayed in the house, where was she to stay when she came from London? If she took the house, where were they to live? Mrs. Jennings may have been rude, but she was right. She had to face the facts, no matter how unpleasant.

  Beatrix had endured some very dark days in her life. There had been times when she was dangerously ill with rheumatic fever and confined to bed for months and months, and times when she felt totally paralyzed by the confining limits imposed by her parents. And since Norman’s death, there had been many times when she despaired of escaping from the prison of Bolton Gardens to find freedom and happiness of her own in the world. But she could not remember a time when she had been confronted with more difficult questions, or when she had less confidence in her ability to find answers, or felt more in need of help.

  She gave up trying to fight the hot, bitter tears and simply lowered her forehead onto her knees and gave way to wrenching sobs. She cried for what seemed like a long time, and then, exhausted with the effort of dealing with so many problems and facing so many facts, lay down on the grass, pillowed her head on her arm, and fell asleep.

  11

  Freedom!

  As their mistress was sleeping the sleep of discouragement and despair, Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle, Josey, Mopsy, and Tom Thumb were in quite a different frame of mind. The four of them were exploring their comfortable new hutch, which Edward Horsley had built of freshly sawn boards and wire netting and placed between the chicken coop (occupied by a dozen self-satisfied red hens and a cocky red rooster) and the lilac hedge, in the farthest corner of the back garden at Belle Green.

  “This is quite a lovely cage, I must say,” Mopsy remarked with pleasure. She nipped a dainty sprig of clover and nibbled it contentedly. Mr. Horsley had not built a floor for the hutch, but had merely set it down on the ground, so that the animals could enjoy a bit of fresh grazing.

  “Oh, yes, indeed,” Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle said happily, above the sound of a chicken cackling. She spoke with her mouth full, for she had pushed aside a clod of fresh earth and discovered a plump, wriggling worm nearly three inches long, a perfect mid-morning snack. “It’s pleasant here under the hedge. I do enjoy the cool shade.”

  “I would prefer more sun,” Tom Thumb said in a complaining tone. “My dear wife Hunca Munca felt that if we were going to the trouble of exercising out of doors, we should get a bit of warm sunshine whilst we were at it.” His eyes brimmed with tears. “Dear, darling Hunca Munca. She may be dead and gone, but she will live on in my heart.” He began to sob, so loudly that the words were almost swallowed by his weeping. “I shall always be true to her.”

  A large blue-black magpie wearing a tidy waistcoat of white feathers landed on the top of the hutch. “What’s this noise?” he cried, with a saucy show-off flutter of his iridescent wings. “What’s all this squeaking? Who are you?”

  “We’re visitors from London,” Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle said haughtily. “We’re here with Miss Potter.”

  “Tourists,” said the magpie, with a disgusted squawk.

  Josey, in her usual lively search for adventure, had been poking her nose into various corners of their new outdoor quarters. �
�Look at this,” she called excitedly, over her shoulder. “Mr. Horsley forgot to fasten the wire netting!” She pushed at the netting with her nose, and by the time the others had come over to see what was happening, she had shoved her head and shoulders through the flap of loose netting.

  “Josey,” Mopsy said, quite alarmed, “stop that this minute! What do you think you’re doing?”

  “I’m escaping from this cage, that’s what I’m doing,” Josey said, pushing with her back feet and wriggling her hindquarters energetically.

  “Oh, no!” Mopsy exclaimed, horrified. “You mustn’t!”

  “Oh, but I must,” Josey said, caught up in the sheer delight of her own happy mischief. And with a gleeful shake of her fat white tail, she slipped under the wire. “I’m free!” she cried, hopping back and forth in great delight. “I’m free!”

  “So you are,” said the magpie. “Free to make trouble—for yourself and everybody else.”

  Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle stood up on her hind legs and regarded the rabbit with displeasure. “Josephine,” she said sternly, “you must come back into the hutch. You know you’re not allowed out unless Miss Potter is with you.”

  Tom covered his eyes with his hands. “Oh, do come back, Josey! It’s dangerous out there in the wilderness! You’ll be snapped up by a dog or a fox.” And then, overcome by his own fearful prediction, he began running about in mad circles, squeaking tremulously, “A dog, a dog, a fox, a fox, a dog!”

  “Come back,” Mopsy cried, in an imploring tone, pressing her pink nose against the wire netting. “Oh, Josey, do come back where it’s safe, please, please do! You’ll get tangled in a gooseberry net, like Peter. Or Mrs. McGregor will put you in a pie!”

  “Mrs. McGregor?” Josey gave a derisive laugh. “Don’t be silly, Mopsy. That’s Miss Potter’s make-believe.” And with that, she hopped through the hedge and was gone.

  “She’ll be eaten,” cried Tom in despair. “We’ll never see her again, never more, never more!”