Far From My Father's House (2 page)

Two

Since she had been a little girl, Annie’s mother had told her about Ireland. It had always been her favourite story, until her mother tired of telling it.

‘You’ve heard it a hundred times from your grandma,’ Rose would say.

‘I know. That’s why I like to hear it,’ Annie would say, snuggling down into her bed with Madge almost asleep nearby.

Rose would settle herself at the end of the bed and stare across at the wallpaper and then she would begin.

‘Once upon a time there was a family in Ireland. They weren’t considered by some to be a rich family but they were titled, they had breeding. They had a great big house with hundreds of acres of land and they had horses and carriages. The ladies didn’t work and the gentlemen fished and shot and rode to hounds and looked after their land like big farms and the ladies played the piano and drew and planned dances and dinners and shopping in the towns with their friends.

‘The son of the house was very handsome but he would not marry any of the pretty ladies he was introduced to and the family could have done with a fortune and some of the ladies who had fortunes would have had him.

‘Now in the house there was a parlour maid and she was called Mary and Mary was the prettiest girl that he had ever seen, and they fell in love and he wanted to marry her. When his family found out about this and he refused to give her up they told him to leave the house and never come back and they would never hear his name again and they would never see him. And being stubborn as well as handsome he would not give up his Mary so they ran away to England and were married. He never went back and he never saw his family again and he and Mary never had any money because he had been taught no trade and he found it hard to learn but learn he did eventually. They settled in England and they were very happy.’

Annie frowned because Rose had finished the story early.

‘They had a little girl – Grandma.’

‘Yes.’ Rose tucked her in.

‘And great-grandpa died, didn’t he, a long time ago?’

‘Yes,’ Rose said and she kissed Annie and went back down the stairs, the brass rods clinking under the weight of her feet. Madge was already asleep, she knew the story well. Annie never tired of hearing it. Her great-grandmother had married a lord. In time she too would marry one. She snuggled down into the bedclothes for warmth. The farm was quiet now. Sometimes when it was very quiet she would think that she could hear the river but it was only wishful thinking. The river was at the very bottom of the valley, down beyond the bottom pastures and even on a still night you could not hear it because mostly it ran shallow over flat stones. They had plodged there and built dams since they were very small. Annie’s brother, Tommy, had recently begun playing the cornet and he went down into the fields near the river because his mother couldn’t bear the noise and there he would sit practising with the cows all around him, he said, appreciating the music.

Tommy had left school, he was fifteen. He helped his father around the farm though he also took out the post. He wanted to be a joiner but there was no way that would happen, there was so much to do.

Annie was still at school but she would leave that summer. Madge was almost twelve and little Elsie was ten.

Their farm was called Grayswell. Annie loved the name. In fact she loved everything about the farm. They had not always lived there. She had been born in their first house, two rooms above the joiner’s shop in the village. She thought that was maybe where Tommy had got the idea that he wanted to be a joiner because he had been born to the sound of Jackie Stephenson’s saw and plane and hammer as Jackie made the coffins down below.

The farm had been their grandfather’s, at least tenanted by their grandfather. The Harlingtons owned nearly all the farms in the valley and on the valleysides, apart from the odd one like Western Isle which was owned by Charles Vane and his family. The Vanes were rich. Alistair Vane went away to school and was only seen in the holidays riding his sleek horse.

Annie wondered sleepily who Gray had been and when he had found the well.

*  *  *

Blake didn’t know how to leave the farm. Mr Hodgson, Mr Harlington’s assistant, had come to the farm and officially told Blake that he must leave because there were new tenants. Everything that belonged to him would be sold and he would have the money. Blake privately doubted this would amount to much. The new tenants were to be Mr and Mrs Austin and somehow over his head they had agreed to take everything, including Bessie. That was the worst thing of all, having to leave Bessie, but Blake didn’t know where he was going. Bessie belonged here at the farm, she knew the land, she would be unhappy anywhere else. He probably would not be allowed to keep her at some orphanage or whatever. Blake had privately resolved to run away at the first opportunity. The only good thing about it was the fact that Mr and Mrs Austin seemed like nice people and had taken to Bessie and she had taken to them so she would help them because nobody knew the farm or the sheep like the old dog.

Blake didn’t listen to anything so he didn’t hear about arrangements being made for him until the day when Jack Lowe arrived at the farm. Blake knew all the farmers in the dale. He knew Mr Lowe’s children from school but only just because he went to school so infrequently. Jack was tall and red-haired. He walked into the barn where Blake was working, not right in, just stuck his head around the door and Blake stopped and regarded him carefully.

‘Now,’ Jack said. He didn’t say any more until Blake nodded in acknowledgement and then, ‘I want a word with you.’

Blake walked out of the barn into the sunlight.

‘Come for summat, have you?’ he said.

Jack said nothing to that.

‘It’s all sold,’ Blake said.

‘I know. It isn’t about that. What are you going to do?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Do you have anybody to go to?’

‘I’ll find somewhere.’

‘You could come to us.’

Blake eyed him suspiciously.

‘Why?’ he said.

‘You could help.’

‘Work on the farm?’

‘You do know how to do that, don’t you?’ Jack said, smiling a little. ‘And you could go to school.’

‘I don’t go to school.’

‘You’d have to.’

Blake looked hard at Jack Lowe and wondered what reason the man had for offering to take him in. It was unpaid help of course but they had to put up with him and feed him and give him a room or at least a bed.

‘Are you my father?’

Jack went on looking at him and shook his head.

‘Does Mrs Lowe want me there?’

‘She seemed to think it would be all right.’

‘You’ve already got four children. What do you need with another?’

Jack didn’t answer straight away and Blake watched him carefully to see the answer in his eyes before he said anything but it was difficult.

‘I know you have to leave the farm but there seems no reason to me why you should leave the dale.’

‘There seems no reason to me why I should leave the farm.’

‘I’m sure there doesn’t,’ Jack said. ‘Will you think about it?’

Blake wasn’t going to. When Jack Lowe had gone he worked at twice the speed, he was so angry. The next day he had another visitor, Mr Lawrence, the vicar.

The snow was all gone by then but it was bitterly cold on the hillside and Mr Lawrence’s cheeks were purple with cold and broken veins. It was almost tea-time and Blake should have asked the man inside but he didn’t. He liked keeping Mr Lawrence in the freezing yard, knowing that the animals were warm.

‘You’ll have to leave soon, David,’ he said, his voice partly torn away by the wind. ‘I know it will be difficult for you but Mrs Lawrence and myself would be glad to give you refuge at the vicarage.’

He made Blake want to laugh somehow. Mr Lawrence couldn’t contain the triumph in his voice and he thought himself more godly for offering a place in that bloody awful old house. Blake had been in it once and had never seen such a cheerless building in his life. It smelled of mould and mice and rancid fat, and as for Mrs Lawrence . . . Blake had tried to imagine Mr and Mrs Lawrence in bed together and couldn’t bear the thought. Mrs Lawrence had what he imagined were large, wobbling thighs and big drooping breasts and Mr Lawrence probably said his prayers at the bedside. Watching Mr Lawrence now Blake suddenly thought that Jack Lowe’s offer was a good one. After all, he didn’t have to stay there if he didn’t like it. There was nothing to keep him anywhere now and when he was fourteen in the summer he would be free.

‘It’s very kind of you,’ he said, ‘but Mr Lowe’s already asked me to go and stay there.’

The vicar actually looked relieved, Blake thought.

Experience of difficult things didn’t make it any easier, Blake discovered, the day that he left. Finding his grandfather dead in the field, watching the ambulance taking his grandmother out of sight, none of that made leaving any easier. It made it all harder, it was like an act of betrayal, as though something in the stone buildings and the newly green fields was still his grandparents. Blake never forgot the sight of Bessie standing just outside the door. He wondered whether she would wait for him to come back as she had waited for his grandfather, and if she remembered that his grandfather had never come back again and if that would help when he never did. He watched until it was all out of sight and he knew that however many times he saw the place again it would never be home any more, that other people would live there and dim the memories of his grandparents and himself and their life together on the little hillfarm.

Three

Annie found them all gathered in the parlour when she came back from her ride. Every morning either before school or at weekends she took her black horse, Shard, and rode a long way. It was, she thought, the only way she could face the rest of the day because she hated school and she hated the work there was always to do. She would have liked to have helped her father outside but her mother maintained that she had to do the housework. Annie would rather have milked half a dozen cows than wash a floor. She had her own cows to milk as it was but they were a pleasure compared to washing the big kitchen floor. Her mother washed the stone flags with buttermilk to make them shine. There was also the dairying to be done, the cream to be separated from the milk each day and the toing and froing up and down the stone cellar steps, and worst of all the butter had to be made. Sometimes it seemed to her to take forever and if her mother wasn’t well, which she sometimes wasn’t, or if she was busy Annie had to walk to the station with fifty pounds of butter, take the train to Stanhope and walk to the shop which was quite a long way from the station. The buttermilk which was left over was given to the calves. There was always another job to do, no matter how many you had already done and at the end of the day the cows had to be milked.

‘They can’t milk themselves,’ her father used to say.

For the family to be gathered in the parlour before breakfast meant that something important was happening. They were all sitting down too except her father and it was such an unusual sight for her family to be seated doing nothing that she stood in the doorway and stared.

‘Come in,’ her father said. ‘We were waiting for you. I’ve got something to tell you.’

Annie glanced across at her small, brown-haired mother for some clue as to what was happening but her mother was sitting with her head down so there was no help there. She sat.

‘You know that David Blake’s grandparents have died,’ her father said. ‘David has nowhere to go. Now we could do with another pair of hands around here. I’ve suggested to him that he should come here—’

‘Like Prudence?’ ten-year-old Elsie asked. Prudence had been their servant girl.

‘Yes, like that except that he’ll have to go to school for a little while until he’s fourteen which won’t be long—’

‘Mr Ward says Blake should have been at the grammar school,’ Madge announced.

‘He never goes to school. He knows nothing,’ Tommy scorned. ‘I don’t see why he has to come and live here. He could work here and live somewhere else.’

‘If he does that he has to be paid,’ Annie said. ‘Isn’t that right?’

‘Something like that,’ her father said.

‘Well, he’s not sleeping with me,’ Tommy said. ‘He could sleep in the attic, keep the rats company.’

‘There are no rats in the attic,’ Rose said shortly.

‘Prudence didn’t sleep in the attic,’ Madge said.

‘He isn’t a very nice boy,’ Annie said.

‘He can have the little room next to yours.’

‘It’s hardly big enough for a bed. Do we have to eat with him?’

‘He’ll be here some time next week,’ Jack said.

Nobody said much over breakfast. Afterwards Annie helped her mother to wash the dishes.

‘Why can’t Blake stay where he is?’ she asked.

‘Because he’s too young to run the farm.’

‘I don’t understand why he has to come here.’

‘He doesn’t have to come here—’

‘Then why are we having him? He can’t be the only boy in the dale who was ever left to fend for himself and Daddy didn’t bring them in to live with us.’

Her mother didn’t answer and Annie didn’t dare go on somehow. She knew Blake from school because they were about the same age but he was not talkative, especially to girls, he didn’t like being there – at least they had that in common – and he was nearly always missing.

As soon as her mother would allow she escaped outside. It was a bright spring morning. She tried to remember what life had been like when she was small and Prudence lived with them. It could hardly be like that having a boy to stay. Still, if he had lived on a farm all his life at least he would know how to go on and there would be less for the rest of them to do.

*  *  *

Alistair Vane was home for Easter. It was not his choice. He had been asked by friends to go and spend the holidays with them in London but the directive from his parents had been clear: he was to go north for Easter to where the weather would be freezing cold and there would be nothing to do and nobody to do it with.

The journey from his school in North Yorkshire took hours, having to change trains, standing around on draughty platforms but when he finally reached the dale it was impossible to be there without feeling something. He had grown up here and his family had lived at Western Isle for generations. There had been a time when he was happy among the farms and fields here when he was a child. That the happiness had gone was not the fault of the winding river or the budding trees. There were lambs in the fields unsteady on their legs or dancing about together and the best thing of all was that the dale was so unchanging. It looked exactly as it had done all his life.

No one was waiting for him when he got off the train at the tiny village station so he left his luggage there and walked the half mile to the house. It was quite dark by then but he knew every inch of the road.

There was no one even to answer the door but when he reached the hall his mother was halfway down the stairs.

‘Darling. I thought it was tomorrow,’ she said.

Alistair loved to come home and hated it. Every time he did so part of him said that it would be like the old days when his grandparents had been alive. It was almost a different house then. Since that time his parents had spent a great deal of money changing everything. They had ripped out fireplaces and put in the very latest designs. Everything was modern and sparse. There were telephones in every room, three large bathrooms. The drawing-room looked as though no one ever sat there; there was nothing in it, no books, no dogs, it was cream, everything was colourless, there were lots of tiles, the bookshelves had been ripped from the downstairs rooms. In the huge garage outside were expensive cars, an Alvis sportscar in which his father roared up and down the tiny winding dales roads and a Lanchester 40, a huge beast of a car which his mother drove precariously and grandly when most other people in the area had no car at all.

Part of him was bored and wished to be away, wished for something, for anything exciting, to be with friends, to try new things and new places and new times. He was all guilt and responsibility, he wanted to be there, he wanted to be away. When he was at school he wanted to be at home here in the dales where he had been born and when he was here he wanted to be away to he knew not quite what, just that he had lost the best times when he was small and his parents were young. He didn’t know what had gone, only that there was some kind of vacuum in its wake, some emptiness that ached, some possibility, some future that was no more. He hated the way the days piled up behind him. The future all misty like the river in the early morning.

There were a dozen horses in the stables, exercised regularly. When he was here riding was Alistair’s greatest pleasure especially now when the weather was getting warmer. Every morning of the holidays he left the house early, hours before anybody else but the servants was about, and he rode in the quiet about the dale enjoying the peace. He began to think that there was something to coming back here for the holiday. In the afternoons he walked his father’s labradors across the fields and occasionally he called in to see Tommy. They were almost the same age.

As his mother came down the stairs towards him now, smiling, Alistair went to her.

‘We’re having a dinner party tonight, darling,’ she said. ‘You will find yourself something to do, won’t you?’

Alistair nodded and smiled and said that he would. He knew exactly what he would do, he would go down to the river and do some sketching until the light faded. His parents would never know, they would be too busy eating, drinking and smoking with their guests.

*  *  *

Jack Lowe’s farm was the kind of place, Blake thought as he arrived, that every man would want to farm. It was low down near the river so that the grass was good and the soil was rich. There were no small stony fields such as his grandfather’s place had had, no places where you couldn’t put cattle because the grass was only good enough for sheep.

The house was big, it had four bedrooms and downstairs there was a back kitchen and then a big kitchen with a fire, stairs leading out of the room and a parlour next to it. There was even a garden, small but well-tended by Mrs Lowe. The garden had a sundial.

The buildings were big and had stout doors. The yard was cobbled and in a big L-shape with the buildings all around it. From the upstairs windows you could see the river in the valley bottom. Blake envied the Lowe family their farm so much that he could hardly breathe for it.

When he arrived – in the doctor’s car – the children disappeared and it was left to Mr and Mrs Lowe to greet him. Mrs Lowe showed him his room upstairs. Blake couldn’t remember having seen her before, she was small and very thin with neat brown hair and a sing-song accent which betrayed that she had not been born in the dales. The room was much smaller than the one he had had at home. Blake had brought nothing with him but a few clothes which were all he had. The money from the sale of the animals had been put in the post office for him. He could think of nothing he needed. Mrs Lowe made tea and Blake politely sat in the back kitchen with her and drank it and ate a scone but although the scone was perfectly made he could hardly swallow, it stuck dryly to the roof of his mouth. Afterwards Mr Lowe took him around the farm and showed him where everything was and then Blake helped him with the evening milking.

The children were there for supper. They said little. Blake said nothing. Eating was beyond him. When he finally escaped up the stairs to bed he pulled back the covers experimentally only to find that someone had soaked the bed with water. He turned the feather mattress over and lay down just as he was. The night was cool. He blew out the candle. It was the first night he had ever spent away from Sunniside. Mr and Mrs Lowe were talking softly downstairs just like his grandparents had done. Blake closed his eyes against the darkness.

*  *  *

The next morning Blake was up early to help with the milking. Mr Lowe thanked him for what he did and Blake was glad. He liked milking cows, as long as they didn’t stand on him or push him into the wall. A cow could crush you and some of them had nasty habits but the cows he was given to milk were patient and stood still. He liked the warm smell of them and the way that they let down their milk easily so that it frothed into the bucket. Annie did some milking too but she didn’t speak to him so he said nothing to her, he just got on with the work.

When he was about to go in to breakfast some time later and was alone in the byre Tommy walked in. He was bigger and older than Blake.

‘Sleep all right, did you?’

Blake ignored him and the tightening feeling at the realisation that Tommy didn’t like him or want him there for some reason.

‘You’re only a servant here. You should speak when you’re spoken to.’

Blake didn’t even look at him and Tommy went to him and got hold of him and pushed him up against the wall.

‘Let go of me.’

‘Why, what are you going to do about it?’ Tommy banged his head off the wall.

‘Leave him alone, Tommy, or I’ll tell Dad.’ Annie’s voice was clear and level as she paused in the doorway. When he didn’t obey her she walked across the byre to them and glared at her brother. ‘What is the matter with you?’ she said.

Tommy gave Blake another nasty shove and then released him and walked quickly out of the byre.

‘He’s always been the only boy,’ Annie said. ‘Mam says the breakfast’s getting cold.’

It reminded Blake so much of his grandmother that he thought he could hear her voice calling him inside: ‘Davy, Davy, hurry up.’

‘I don’t want any,’ Blake said and turned away.

Annie went but only a minute or two later Mrs Lowe’s small figure was framed in the byre doorway.

‘Ham and eggs is nasty cold,’ she said, ‘and if you don’t eat it now you’ll get it for your dinner.’

Blake looked at her determined little figure and smiled.

‘Huh,’ she said, ‘your face’ll crack next,’ and Blake followed her in to breakfast.

*  *  *

That night the other side of Blake’s bed was drenched so that he wouldn’t have been able to sleep on it at all but he didn’t get as far as thinking about sleeping. He went out of his room and down the hall and burst in on Tommy who was half-dressed and turned the other way. By the time Tommy had turned back Blake had launched himself at him and they ended up on the cold linoleum floor, struggling. Blake vaguely heard the girls in the doorway and then Madge who ran to the head of the stairs, crying, ‘Daddy, Daddy, the boys are fighting! Come quick!’

And then he was being pulled off Tommy and on to his feet. Jack held them apart.

‘What is going on?’

‘Blake wet the bed and blamed it on me,’ Tommy said, recovering quickly.

‘I did not!’

‘Whoa, whoa.’ Jack had to hold Blake off Tommy again.

‘He did it, two nights running.’

‘Liar!’

Jack dragged Tommy off to Blake’s room and there with Tommy still held he examined the bed. Then he stared at Tommy.

‘Why?’ he said.

Tommy looked down.

‘Why behave like a child?’ Jack said.

Tommy said nothing.

Jack looked at him for a long time and then he released Tommy.

‘Leave him alone. Next time you do anything like that I’ll take you out to the barn and thrash you,’ he said to Tommy before he went.

Tommy glared at Blake before he went off to his bedroom.

Mrs Lowe changed the mattress and the bedding, her brow creased into a frown all the while. Annie helped her. Blake stood about. When her mother had gone Annie lingered for a moment or two.