All Among the Barley Read online

  ALL AMONG THE BARLEY

  The past is not dead, but is living in us, and will be alive in the future which we are now helping to make.

  ~ WILLIAM MORRIS

  ALSO BY MELISSA HARRISON

  Fiction

  Clay

  At Hawthorn Time

  Non-fiction

  Rain: Four Walks in English Weather

  As editor

  Spring: An Anthology for the Changing Seasons

  Summer: An Anthology for the Changing Seasons

  Autumn: An Anthology for the Changing Seasons

  Winter: An Anthology for the Changing Seasons

  CONTENTS

  Also by Melissa Harrison

  Prologue

  I

  II

  III

  IV

  V

  VI

  VII

  VIII

  IX

  X

  XI

  XII

  XIII

  XIV

  XV

  XVI

  XVII

  Epilogue

  Historical Note

  Acknowledgements

  Note on the Author

  Also available by Melissa Harrison

  Prologue

  Last night I lay awake again, remembering the day the Hunt ran me down in Hulver Wood when I was just a girl. It was December, as it is now, and I had ventured out into the icy afternoon to cut some green boughs for the house. None of the others minded much about decorations, but I loved the way the firelight flickered on the glossy leaves of holly I always hung above the parlour hearth.

  Frost had hardened the furrows of the ploughland and at the fields’ margins ice stood in the cart ruts, bubbled and opaque. I had a sack, and a set of pruning-shears, and I wore a pair of my brother’s old work gloves on my chilled and clumsy hands. As I walked, a white owl kept pace with me, drifting silently at head-height on the other side of the hedge; perhaps it hoped I would startle some blood-warm creatures from its tangled base.

  It was dim that afternoon in Hulver Wood, and no birds sang. I pushed deeper and deeper in, stopping at the jill hollies with their blood-red berries and wriggling my toes inside my boots to keep off the frozen ache of the ground.

  The sound of the ‘gone away’, blown close, cleaved the still December air. Heart pounding, I crushed the prickly leaves down into the hessian and twisted a rough knot with trembling hands. But they were far too close already, and from the top of the wood bank I saw them streaming towards me from The Lottens into Long Piece: the hounds ahead and questing in full cry, the pink- and red-coated riders urging the thundering horses on behind.

  ‘Get on! Go!’ shouted the Master of Hounds as the first of the baying dogs reached the trees. ‘For God’s sake, girl, will you move!’

  But trembling, I froze, and the pack broke around me like water before my legs could carry me out of the way.

  I

  My name is Edith June Mather and I was born not long after the end of the Great War. My father, George Mather, had sixty acres of arable land known as Wych Farm; it is somewhere not far from here, I believe. Before him my grandfather Albert farmed the same fields, and his father before him, who ploughed with a team of oxen and sowed by hand. I would like to think that my brother Frank, or perhaps one of his sons, has the living of it now; but a lifetime has passed since I was last on its acres, and because of everything that happened I have been prevented from finding out.

  I was an odd child, I can see now – certainly by the phlegmatic, practical standards of the farming families thereabouts. I preferred the company of books to other children, and was frequently chided by my parents after leaving my tasks half-done, distracted by the richer, more vivid world within my head. And sometimes I talked to myself out loud without meaning to, usually as a way of drowning out a thought or a memory I didn’t want to have. Father would sometimes tap his head and call me ‘touched’ – only in fun, I’m sure – but perhaps, looking back, he was right.

  I was thirteen in 1933, the year our district began to endure its famous – or infamous – drought. It crept up on us: the hay came in well, and when the rick was thatched Father was pleased, because he knew it was dry and wouldn’t spoil; this meant that the horses would have enough fodder to last the winter, and he would not have to buy any in. But without any rain the field drains ran dry and by August even the horse-pond by the house had shrunk to a thick green scum. I remember John Hurlock, our horseman, taking buckets of well-water to Moses and Malachi when they came in from the fields at three o’clock; I can see as though it were yesterday how greedily and noisily the great horses drank, how at last he would fill the buckets again and fling the water over their twitching flanks, washing away the white rime of sweat from their chestnut coats. Oh, my beloved creatures, how they must have missed walking into the cool horse-pond, as they always had, and drinking their fill.

  Frank was sixteen by then, and doing a man’s work on the farm; Father was starting to rely on him almost as much as he did on John. My sister Mary, who had married Clive that spring, already had a baby boy, and although Mother harnessed our little pony Meg to the trap and drove over to Monks Tye once a week with a loaf or a suet pudding, we saw little of her at Wych Farm. With Mary gone I felt strangely suspended, as though awaiting what would come next – although I couldn’t have told you what that was. It was like hide-and-seek, when you’re waiting for someone to find you; but the game had gone on for too long.

  Of course, the drought meant that the cornfields suffered, and that year the harvest was down, our wheat barely sixteen bushels to the acre.

  ‘Seven Acres will lie fallow next year,’ Father said as John and Doble, our yardman, came in for their supper after the last of the corn was in. It wasn’t what you might call a Harvest Home, but there was ale, and a ham, and boiled batter pudding, and Mother had twisted a few ears of barley into a rough figure and set it on the kitchen table. Opposite me Frank glanced up, alert, at Father’s words. The men took their places, and John remarked that Seven Acres had lain fallow only the year before.

  ‘Do you think to tell me how to farm?’ asked Father; but John did not reply. Mother sat down, I mumbled Grace, and we began to eat.

  The autumn of that year was the most beautiful I can remember. For weeks after harvest-tide the weather stayed fine, and only slowly that year did summer’s warmth leave the earth.

  In October, Wych Farm’s trees turned quickly and all at once, blazing into oranges and reds and burnished golds; with little wind to strip them the woods and spinneys lay on our land like treasure, the massy hedgerows filigreed with old-man’s-beard and enamelled with rosehips and black sloes. Along the winding course of the River Stound the alder carrs were studded with earthstars and chanterelles and dense with the rich, autumnal stink of rot; but crossing Long Piece towards The Lottens the sky opened into austere, equinoctial blue, where flocks of peewits wheeled and turned, flashing their broad wings black and white.

  At dawn, dew silvered the spiders’ silk strung between the grass blades in our pastures so that the horses left trails where they walked, like the wakes of slow vessels in still water. At last, wintering fieldfares and thrushes stripped the berries from the lanes, and at night the four tall elms for which the farm was named welcomed their cold-weather congregations of rooks.

  The dew dampened the stubble in the parched cornfields, drawing from it a mocking green aftermath that had Grandfather recalling the flock of purebred ewes that once were overwintered on the land.

  ‘It’s not worth the shearing of them these days,’ Father said. ‘I’ve told you that.’

  ‘I wholly mislike good fodder going to waste,’ the old man replied, banging his sti
ck upon the floor, ‘and that’s a fact.’

  The year wore on, the leaves torn from our elms by autumn gales until the branches were stark. I read The Midnight Folk and spent my days pretending to be Kay Harker and embarking on imaginary adventures involving knights, smugglers and highwaymen, Rollicum Bitem Lightfoot the fox and a coven of witches so terrifying I eventually wrapped the book in a feed-sack and buried it under the dung-heap in case they should burst from its pages and carry me away, so consuming had my enthusiasm become.

  Father sent Doble out with a billhook to brash the hedges of their summer growth, and as he worked his way around the farm his bonfires sent columns of smoke into the winter sky. Stenham Park, a few miles away, held a pheasant shoot, and Father and John were beaters; they returned with two couples each and a brace of hares John shot near Hulver Wood on the way back.

  We threshed in late November. Woken at dawn by the roar of an engine, I watched from my bedroom window as the huge and curious contraption processed along the lane towards the farm, helmed by the machinist and trailing its ragtag crew. Its wheels seemed nearly to top the hedges, and I was glad that we had not had rain; one year it had become stuck in the lane’s deep mud and was only dug out in the afternoon. There had been rough words between Father and the engine driver over who would pay for the lost time.

  Downstairs, Mother was making tea and frying bacon.

  ‘I expected you down half an hour ago, child. Cut some bread, enough for the threshers; the men have already eaten. And wash your face.’

  I fetched two loaves from the pantry. They were round and dense and wrapped in white cloths; Mother could never get the bake as light as she wanted and blamed the range, but I loved the way her bread always stuck to your back teeth and made you feel fed. Father often told her that she should use the brick bread oven in the hearth, but she said it was old-fashioned and dirty and took up too much of her time.

  When breakfast was ready she went to the back door, wiping her hands on the blue apron that was always tied around her waist, and called to the machinist and his crew; they took off their caps as they came in, and sat awkwardly at the kitchen table. Shy of their strangeness and the deep accents of their speech, I made myself some bread and jam and took it outside.

  Doble was in the barn making it ready for the grain, the terrier that travelled with the threshing crew busy about his feet after rats. In the rick-yard the thatch had already been stripped from the ricks; Father and John were by the engine, helping to check that the drum was level. Frank was up on the first rick, pitching the first sheaves down to the platform, his breath pluming white in the morning air; I wished that I could be up there with him, pitching sheaves, but although I helped with haymaking and weeding and standing the cut corn into stooks to dry in the fields, threshing was men’s work.

  All day, while I was bent over my school-work and breathing the odour of damp books and ink and chalk, the ricks diminished steadily. When I returned at four they were nearly gone, the engine still clanking and roaring, the men serving it as though it were some kind of heathen god. In the barn the new yellow straw was beginning to stack up, and there were sacks of chaff and seed-corn and two piles of the precious grain, ready for the merchant’s lorry that would soon come to take it away.

  ‘What a mess, what a mess,’ Doble muttered to himself, stooping to collect the stakes and wooden spars that he called ‘springles’, which had helped hold the sheltering thatch on the ricks. He hated the barn to be in disorder, as though the storing of grain were an imposition and not its true purpose.

  I went to find the cats, for I felt I should be useful and surely they would be needed to keep the mice out of the barn until the lorry came. Nibbins, the matriarch, was sleeping in the stable, but her grown-up kittens, feral and unpredictable, were nowhere to be found. I clapped my cold hands in their rough wool gloves and she raised her head and regarded me, but wouldn’t stir. She knew the little terrier was at the farm, no doubt.

  ‘Another day of it,’ Mother said, inside. She looked weary; even more so than usual. ‘That’s what your father says.’

  ‘Just two days?’ I asked, taking my satchel from my shoulder and hanging it on the back of a kitchen chair. ‘Are we keeping some over? John says wheat often fetches a better price come summertime.’

  ‘No, your father means to thresh it all now. It’s just – there isn’t much. It saves the wages, I suppose.’

  Christmas came and went more quietly now that Mary had left home. As he always did, John brought in two huge ash faggots from where they had been seasoning in the dairy, and Mother lit them with kindling she had kept back from last year’s fire. But we had no green boughs to dress the house with that year.

  The fields were always rested until Plough Monday, which that year fell on the eighth of January. We’d had no snow, but the earth was frozen; it wasn’t wet, which was a blessing, for a wet winter was hard on all of us, especially if the lane to the village became impassable with mud.

  The light failed at around three each day, and the nights were cold and long. A few days into the new year I ran out of books to read, and one morning defied Mother’s dire warnings about pneumonia, slipping out while she was busy baking to go and see the trees.

  At the junction of the two meadows with Crossways was what had long been the Mather children’s special place: a tight circle of stunted oaks that Father said had sprung from the same coppice tree, many centuries ago. What made it magical were the vast flints they gripped in their roots, or that seemed to grow from their gnarled trunks; one was a hag-stone with a hole through, the largest by far on our land. When I was really little I believed the ancient oaks had drawn the flints up from the earth and were showing them to us for some mysterious reason of their own, and I counted these trees among my most particular friends.

  Of course, there were any number of old stories about the place: that it was a fairy dell, and that any horse led past it would hear their music and be dragged down to their silver halls; that a Saxon queen had been baptised there in a long-gone spring that had washed the soil away from the oaks’ exposed roots; that an oak had been split into six by the Devil, enraged that he had lost a scything contest with Beowa, who we called John Barleycorn. One trunk held a couple of links of an iron chain, sunk deep in the living bark; when I was little, Frank had loved to frighten me by telling me it was where a murderer had been manacled and left to die, and that at midwinter his ghost returned, only permitted to move towards the graveyard by one cock-stride a year. It was complete and utter nonsense, of course. The oak had merely been a hitching-post at one time.

  Generations of Mather children had played there; Father and his younger brothers when they were little boys, and Grandfather and his siblings, no doubt. Frank and his friend Alfred Rose made it their camp when they played Cowboys and Indians; Mary and I played shop among the roots, read our books, or simply went there to escape. Not long before she got married I discovered that Mary had taken Clive there when they were courting, something I struggled to forgive her for.

  I hadn’t been to see the oaks for nearly a whole month, and I couldn’t bear the thought of them out there in the cold fields, alone. To me, several of the trees on our land were alive, by which I meant that they had thoughts and feelings of their own. The big oak in the lane, for example, loved me and greeted me warmly when I passed, keen to know how I was and what I was up to; and the four strong elms that sheltered the house liked me best of my siblings, and disliked Alfred Rose very much.

  Now I laid a gloved hand on each oak’s trunk and whispered a ‘hello’, and then I stood in the circle of trees for a while, glad to have comforted them in their bare winter solitude and feeling their loneliness ease.

  The trees may have been lonely, but I would never have agreed that I was. Loneliness was something that happened to old people, but I was young and had all my family around me, so it couldn’t very well have been that.

  When I was little and still shared a bed with Mary, I woul
d sometimes ask her to tell me stories before we went to sleep: about the balls that had once been held at Ixham Hall, about a local girl who was said to have run away with the gipsies, or my favourite story, the one about the end of the Great War. Looking out over our bleak, muddy land that winter’s day brought it once again to mind.

  I don’t suppose Mary truly remembered every detail as perfectly as she told it, but over the years what she did recall became embroidered, I suppose, and fixed into place, so that in time it was as though I remembered it, too. She would describe how she and Frank, who was only a baby, were in the barn with Doble one afternoon. Frank was grizzling so Doble was dandling him on a hay-bale while she played on the threshing floor with her peg dolls. Then she looked out to the yard and saw a strange man bringing in the horses: a man in uniform, holding the two bridles, leading the tired team home. ‘Look, Doble, a soldier!’ she said, and he cried out and rushed to the barn door; but of course it wasn’t his son Tipper but John Hurlock our horseman, and Doble stood with his arms hanging at his sides and sobbed then, like a child.

  The War must have been over for weeks, although Mary had no memory of hearing about it – or of the armistice celebrations I presume the village held. And Doble must have known by the time John returned that his son was dead, his body smashed into Flanders mud by a shell. I suppose it was just the sight of John, in uniform, with no Tipper or Uncle Harry: our sole survivor a man from another county, all that Wych Farm had been spared.

  Of course, Doble mastered himself and fetched baby Frank and Mary, and Father and Grandfather appeared from wherever they had been working to welcome John home. Mary would tell me how poor Doble grasped John’s hand in both of his, how he shook it and shook it and wouldn’t let go. And then came the part about John taking the horses to the stable, how he insisted upon it, and asked to be let alone with them for a while, saying to Father that he’d thought of this moment every day since joining up two years before.