Haweswater (4 page)

– Rite bonny y’look, Jan. Tek off the muck an’ yer cud near pass as a lass.

She laughs uncertainly as if a joke has been made. She has never thought of herself as bonny before. It does not occur to her that her father might not be teasing. She enjoys her father’s humour, though there are times when she cannot quite grasp it and meet it head on, as if reciprocation remains a little beyond her. His head is held to one side, his eyes stacked with energy.

– Gotta minute bifor class? Cum see this.

He sets the cup on the lip of a metal basin. Her father lifts her up over the dairy shed gate and sets her on to his big booted feet. Then he walks her over to the corner of the construction, through the mess of the cows, through their sweet, rank smell, which seems to solidify in the air when they are kept inside. The older dog has given birth to her litter on the straw in the corner, safely away from the heavy press of hooves. Three or four tiny, blind forms are tumbled over each other, breathing rapidly, letting out an occasional yip and crawling blindly further in towards the pink, distended stomach for warmth and milk.

– Shouldn’t pick ’em up yit, eh?

Her father shakes his head in agreement.

– How long til their eyes open?

– Coupla days. Week. I’ll git yer fer it. Fust thing pups’ll see is bonny January with her clarty neck.

Her father flicks the tip of her nose with a balloon thumb. Janet’s mother is calling from the window of Whelter for her to hurry. She steps back through the mud and vaults the gate untidily. As she passes the farm’s kitchen window she has her coat pulled on backwards, over her chest, and a scowl pulled over her dry forehead.

As yet, she is an only child and there are just two other farmhands at Whelter, both of whom work part time at several properties in the district. There is no question that she will help her father before poring over the literature and the old atlas in the tiny classroom of the school, eager as she is for a more academic education. She has a deep love for the time spent writing or reading in the cheery, compact building with her classmates. Twenty-one pupils in all, mostly the children of farmers and labourers in the area, a substantial number for a village school and a recent increase since the closure of the Swindale institution.

On spring days the tall windows let in an abundance of sunlight and the single classroom of the school swims with brightness, trapped shafts of sun warming the back of her neck as she sits bent over the day’s text, the illuminated writing. On rainy days she will gaze out of the smeared window panes to the fields and the fells beyond the school gates. The sky a deep saturated yellow, dark, greyish blue to the west where the weather comes in from rocks with layers of water. The drenched bracken and foliage on the banks of the hill find their own patterns in the wind, and at this distance look like wet blown velvet. There is mist low in the valley over the river, then mountains, the spine of High Street, and finally mist again, dissolving into nothing. She imagines her father wrestling with tarpaulin by the feed, her mother rushing washing in from the line in the garden, wooden pegs in her mouth. She knows when she goes outside that the earth will have been turned loose by water. It will smell over-ripe, too full of itself, like a matured, dropped apple. And this is the only distraction she allows herself from the school books. An eye cast slowly over the external world, so slowly that it is as if the enormous brown-red sweep of fells becomes a view that somehow belongs inside. A gentle cough from the chalkboard at front of the room. Then she returns to the page, to
the old wars of the continent, or a tightly woven sonnet that she will have to peel apart, weigh, then piece back together.

Her teacher is a middle-aged lady called Hazel Bowman, who drives down from Bampton each day. Her wage is not generous, though her enthusiasm for the education of the children of Mardale is not reflected in this. Textbooks and funding for the tiny school are both limited, and the teacher encourages the older members of the class to assist with reading lessons and arithmetic, sharing their knowledge within the group. A true pragmatist, she has such ways of dealing with things. Hazel Bowman brings with her newspapers for the class to read, both new and old, saved in piles in her reading room, so that the children will become familiar with history as it passes and recognize their place within it. On weekday mornings she arrives early and sweeps the floor of the classroom, lays out the books of the day, or the folded newspapers. On fairer days she will sit outside for a spell on the wall circling the small building and breakfast on bread, or a little smoked fish, watching the reflections in the lake. What she thinks of during these moments is the small number of children that will go on to college or university. This is her greatest pleasure, though she remains in touch with many who stay on in the district to farm. Hers is not solely an academic pride. Then she clasps the roped clanger of the iron bell in the porch of Mardale school and rings out the call for assembly clear across the dale. Her summons will bring boys and girls running along the streams and paths towards the lakeside building, satchels banging on the backs of their knees, sisters and brothers trying to push past each other at the gate. After an address and prayers, class will begin. History and geography. The atlas falls open with a soft thump, the leather spine cracking a fraction more. Pages rustle.

In the newspapers, the names from the old Bartholomew’s atlas are brought to life, illustrated with event and nationality. Sometimes the world’s place names are changed and Hazel
Bowman will mark the changes into the atlas with her small square handwriting, careful not to smudge her ink or spoil the page. Poetic, colourful names become practical, or flavoured with a different poetry, another country’s mother-tongue. The shift and tussle of monopolies in this era.

Janet Lightburn approaches this volume of flat sections of the world with vague awe and wonders most of all at the pink shading of the Empire. It seems impossible that they, in their remote corner of a tiny island, should belong to such a vast expanse, such a sprawling, political colour, which includes far-off islands and archipelagos, obese, jutting land masses. It seems a wrong colour to her. It seems ineffectual, like a piece of cherry blossom, a streak of blood in water. A lurid purple would better suit, or a heavy, inching green. But such as it is, the tepid, inoffensive pink will, in her mind, always represent the impossible, a stray, romantic idea, like that of the colonial glacier.

The older yellowing newspapers describe the labour movements in the south, as well as the north, and women protesting for a younger vote, for family allowance. Cotton workers forming mass picket lines, stand-offs, the resistance to wage cuts in the textile industry. These are notable events, relevant to the north, Hazel Bowman says, effecting. Ask your parents about market prices. The Great War has been succeeded by other conflicts or schisms of the same bad spirits. There are occasional grey photographs of Flappers in bell hats with faces like flowers of war. The recent papers are bought from local towns, the
Gazette
from Kendal, the
Cumberland and Westmorland Herald
from Penrith. In the city of Carlisle they are bought from the man who stands in the market square near the citadel shouting ‘Ther’s nit miny lift’ over the groaning stack of three hundred or more broad folded sheets. Hazel Bowman rides the mainline train up to the city to visit the library and the Roman museum, to collect news for her children. But in these papers history is less dramatic and their region seems uncomplicated. London papers
shipped north are the real treasures, the ones that her class will devour and squabble over.

In them there are stories and events which fascinate and captivate the class, and so the pupils will cut out the articles, paste them into scrapbooks or on to the walls of the school building. Janet has her choices, already her mind is settling on fractures within tradition, the painful underbelly of the sick, elderly world as it rolls over in surrender to a new one growling above. In the year of her brother Isaac’s birth Clyde Tombaugh discovers the ninth planet in the solar system and christens it Pluto. Such an old, extraordinary sounding name. She searches for it in the night sky, eyes blinded by the million other stars and deaths of stars in space, mouth slow over the long vowels. Pl-u-to. Twelve years old and sitting on the pointed roof of the cattle shed. Most of all she wants a telescope, like the one in the Greenwich observatory, with all its scientific precision, its ability to suck in long tunnels of the night sky, so that she can magnify location, lift out the erratic planet from the darkness and with certainty say it exists. In 1930 also, fragrant May, Amy Johnson, the pioneer aviator, arrives in Australia after twenty days of flying. Hazel Bowman smiles, compliments the girl’s interests, the back of her eyes filled with sparkling grey light. In 1932 De Valera becomes president of the Irish Free State. October that same year and hunger marchers fight the police in Hyde Park, blood is spilled on the brown grass of London. And, a favourite, tragic article, almost two years later, Bonnie and Clyde are killed in an ambush in Louisiana, America. And the British press loves it, loves the simple unlikeliness and animation of it.

In the following months, close to the end of her schooling, Janet becomes aware of the dark figure emerging in Europe, across the icy North Sea, tightening the belts of his philosophy as he does so, purging his party of suspected traitors; this is ‘the night of long knives’, the papers announce, and the girl carefully cuts along the borders of Hitler’s rise.

The changing world is illustrated on the walls of Mardale school, murder and hatred and valour and a stratum of ideals find their way into the quiet countryside of the Lakeland, like silent modern friezes set against the slow lap of the lake, the patter of rain. It is strange that the children should be familiar with the clockwork cogs and wheels of the outside world, as familiar as with their Latin verbs or Homer, Keats and Shakespeare, though their parents also are now reminded daily of the world’s machinations, the airwaves lit up with news. Dislocated voices chip into their lives, issuing statements, reporting unrest, uniting the county. Bringing husbands and wives into the same room for long minutes before they move off towards the separate corners of their convenient lives.

Hazel Bowman has no husband, and though she is endeared to many in the area she has chosen a single life. She lives alone in a bungalow in Bampton Grange, with four baying otter hounds and towering bookshelves. Hers is a passionate and self-fulfilling existence. She brings the bouncing, troubled light of a new era into the remote valley, carrying it in her arms like a paper lantern, signed by a thousand men and women of the country. She brings with her a brilliant energy and liberating words, ideals belonging to the New World, perhaps, or the Antipodes. And there are off-kilter tones in her speeches, also; she has her demons. Let the class take note. Mary Shelley’s husband altered the last sentence of
Frankenstein
, commanding the reader to breathe a sigh of relief where it was not intended. Never breathe a sigh of relief, she warns. In this world there is always the intrusion of one structure or another into the sacred, self-governing heart. When she leaves this valley it will be without regret, with her bright arms open towards the Spanish Civil War, late in the summer of 1936. Behind her a legacy of unique and brilliant education. The space between this bowed rack of fells having become an unprecedented arena of learning.

By then, Janet Lightburn will be grown, she will have benefited from the influence of an exceptional woman. But in these dawn hours of her own childhood and before the school bell there are other small, hard lessons to be learned. From her father, from the way his hands move smoothly across an animal: superior, stewarding, so that there can be no question of his authority. There are signs of sickness she will be taught to recognize in beasts, fluid coming from eyes, lumps on the flat surface of a tongue. Or a sheep unable to get up, unable to back out of the corner of a wall, having strayed from its heft. On the scars and lower fells she often comes across the carcasses of dead sheep, immediately recognizing the stench coming off the earth. At first they are only missing eyes, the wool thinning off the face and a hurricane of flies anticipating above their bellies. With time their bodies roll into oblique positions and open like rotting flowers, dry flesh stretches and bones spread out over the rough grass. She kicks them with a shoe, back into close proximity, to create rudimentary maps of the world. She finds India, the Sargasso Sea, Tasmania, shaped by the ribcage of a Swaledale over heather. Eventually even the grey bones are removed, half-buried, or grown over with bracken. Nothing remains as a monument to death here. The land sucks back in what it once issued.