Ravenscliffe
Jane Sanderson is a former BBC radio producer, and has used some of her own family history as background for her novels. She is married to author and journalist Brian Viner. They have three children and live in Herefordshire.
Netherwood
Published by Hachette Digital
ISBN: 978-0-7481-3071-9
All characters and events in this publication, other than those clearly in the public domain, are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
Copyright © Jane Sanderson 2012
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
Hachette Digital
Little, Brown Book Group
100 Victoria Embankment
London, EC4Y 0DY
Reading Group Discussion Points
Acknowledgements
I
began the acknowledgements in
Netherwood
with my mum and dad, Anne and Bob Sanderson, and I’m going to do the same again. Once more, they have helped so much with detail and information, with books and photographs, with memories and anecdotes. Added to this, their interest and encouragement continues unabated and for this I’m deeply grateful. Thanks also to my mum for her one-woman campaign to sell my books throughout – and far beyond – the Worsbrough Bridge Bowling Club. Her commitment to this task is unswerving.
My wise and steady agent Andrew Gordon has been a fount of sound advice from the beginning and I’m truly happy to have him on my side. At Sphere, Rebecca Saunders made my whole year with her response to
Ravenscliffe
, and I thank her not just for her generous praise but also for picking up the baton last summer in such a reassuring and enthusiastic way. Thanks to Zoe Gullen at Sphere for her face-saving forensic approach to the edit, and to Louise Davies, for tempering with compliments her notes and queries: an unexpected kindness and much appreciated.
To my three beloved children, Eleanor, Joseph and Jacob,
I’d like to say thanks for remaining so resolutely and endearingly yourselves: keep up the good work. And to Brian, my most ardent and loyal champion: your love and support underpins everything. Thank you.
Chapter 1
H
igh on the northern side of the mining town of Netherwood was a windblown swathe of common land – not vast, certainly not a wilderness, but wide and varied enough for a person who walked there to feel unfettered and alone. It wasn’t much to look at: coarse grass more yellow than green; pockets of unchecked scrub; spiteful, unruly gangs of hawthorn; the occasional craggy outcrop hinting at a wild and different geology before man farmed the earth, or mined it. An ancient bill of rights gave the people of the town licence to graze their livestock here, but in this community of miners it wasn’t much of an advantage. Instead the grass was kept down by a herd of retired pit ponies, stocky little Shetlands that had survived the rigours of their long, underground life and been given the freedom of the common in return. Once in a blue moon someone managed to acquire a pig, but the common was unfenced, and while the wary ponies never strayed, pigs seemed driven by curiosity and wanderlust: even a sturdy pen built by Percy Medlicott a few years ago had failed to contain his Tamworth sow. She had rubbed her snout against the latch until it slipped open, and the liberated sow had met an early end
on Turnpike Lane in a collision with a coach-and-four. The driver, unseated from the box by the accident, was compensated in pork; he had travelled home to York the following day with a fractured collarbone and a bag of loin chops.
So Netherwood Common, not being of any great practical benefit to anyone, was simply enjoyed by the townsfolk for what it was: a natural open space – rare enough in this grey industrial landscape – where children could play out of earshot of their mothers and a working man could smoke a Woodbine in peace. The common in its present form had evolved over the past hundred years and it owed its existence to the three collieries that dominated the town, because as coal production replaced agriculture in Netherwood’s economy
,
the fertile land became less useful than the stuff beneath. The area’s farmland origins could still be seen in the hedgerows and ancient field boundaries that criss-crossed the common, but it was over a century now since the soil there had been tilled or crops planted.
Like everything else in the neighbourhood, the common fell within the vast acreage of the Netherwood estate, and from its highest point, and facing south, an observer could map the principal features of the earl’s Yorkshire dominion. New Mill, Long Martley and Middlecar collieries – positioned respectively north, east and south of the town – dominated the outlook, their muck stacks, headstocks and winding gear stark against the sky. The residential terraces, long rows of doughty stone houses, stood like stocky bulwarks, built to withstand the worst of the four winds. Victoria Street, Market Street and Mill Lane claimed precedence on the south side of town and formed its modestly prosperous commercial centre, where small shops, stalls and barrows plied their trade and vied for custom with the Co-operative Society, whose premises, like its profits, seemed to grow annually. One town hall. One town hall clock tower. Three public houses. Three churches – one high, two low. And then beyond Mill Lane and Middlecar
Colliery, but still visible from the common, the road gradually narrowed and dipped, following the contours of a shallow valley and leading to a gate – one of four – to the ancestral home of Edward Hoyland, Sixth Earl of Netherwood, and his wife Clarissa. The great house itself, Netherwood Hall, was tucked away out of sight: a remarkable feat, given its size, and a fortuitous one. Not only was great privacy accorded the aristocratic family within, but also they were spared the unlovely sight of the scarred landscape of the Yorkshire coalfields. But beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Eve Williams and Anna Rabinovich, standing on this clear August day on the highest point of the common, saw nothing to offend the eye as they regarded the familiar vista before them.
‘See?’ Anna said, her arms spread before her in a proprietorial way, as if she was personally responsible for the view. ‘World at your feet.’ Her accent, her hybrid dialect of Russian and Yorkshire, made most of her statements sound comical. She had no end of colloquialisms to hand, but still wasn’t mistress of the definite article.
Eve laughed. ‘Always knew it was only a matter of time,’ she said.
‘But imagine, Eve. All this, ours.’
‘Aye, ours and three thousand other folk’s. It’s a common, y’know, not a back garden.’
Anna shrugged. Mere detail, and detail was the enemy of an adventurous spirit. She had brought her friend up here, dragging her unwillingly from all the things she should be doing, to look at a house. It was the only property on the common, a large, detached villa, deeper than it was wide, double-fronted with generous bay windows and its name and date carved in stone over the door: Ravenscliffe, 1852. Like everything else, it belonged to Lord Netherwood, though it had been designed and built by the same architect who was responsible for most of the dwellings in the town. Abraham
Carr had sought and been granted permission from the present earl’s father to erect a house for his own use and at his own expense, and had named it for the Yorkshire village of his birth. Then, just five years after taking up residence, he had passed away: born in one Ravenscliffe, died in another. The house was bought by the Netherwood estate, absorbed into all its other possessions and instantly put to work. Various tenants had taken it in the forty years since Mr Carr’s demise, merchants, mostly, or people from the professional classes whose wages stretched further than those of the miners. Now, though, it was empty. Unfurnished. Unloved. And Anna wanted to live there.
Something about the house spoke to her, and you should listen to a house, she believed. She wasn’t in any other way a fanciful person, never looked for meanings or omens in everyday happenings, never tried to interpret her dreams or fathom the patterns of the stars, but a house was another matter: there were good ones and bad ones and the two could look identical, but while one would bring happiness, the other would bring only misery. As a child in Kiev, in another life and time, she had lived in an imposing mansion with round towers and six wide steps up to the front door. It was her father’s statement to the world that he was a successful man, but for all its fineness Anna knew, even as a little girl, that it was riddled with misery, from its foundations to its roof tiles. She never understood why: some houses were afflicted, that was all. When her parents disowned her for marrying a Jew, when they spat on the floor at her feet and told her never to return, she had thought, it’s the house speaking: you two have been here too long.
This house on the common, though, this Ravenscliffe, held
the promise of happiness. Its hearths were empty and cold, but there was warmth here. Anna had stood before it, looked it in the eye, and recognised this at once. So her mission in persuading Eve that the rent – though more than four times what they currently paid – was of negligible concern compared with the ease and comfort it would bring, came directly from the heart. She felt compelled to win this battle, overcome her friend’s reservations, press her point. In any case, from a purely practical point of view, they were bursting at the seams in Beaumont Lane. And when Eve and Daniel were wed, he would be there too, because Eve and the children couldn’t live in that doll’s house they’d put him in at the Hall. And then babies might come. No. There was simply no other course of action.
They walked back down towards the house, and Anna could tell from the silence and her friend’s unfocused gaze that Eve’s mind had drifted elsewhere.
‘Bedrooms for us all,’ Anna said, to pull her back to the matter in hand. ‘Space for your children and my little Maya. Fresh air.’
‘Mmm, as fresh as it gets round ’ere, anyroad.’
‘And kitchen big enough to dance polka. And bathroom, Eve. No tin tubs and outdoor privy.’
‘Yes, Anna. I know. It’s just …’
‘I know. Beaumont Lane was Arthur’s home,’ she said, with the slightest hint of weariness, as if she’d heard it once too often.
‘Don’t say it like that, as if it’s not rational of me to think of it.’
Eve, provoked, stopped abruptly so that when Anna turned to face her she had to trot back up the slope a little way.
‘That’s not what I meant,’ Anna said, though it was, in part. ‘What I meant was, I understand how you feel, how leaving Arthur’s home would feel.’
‘It’s not just me,’ said Eve, setting off again. ‘I mean, I’m not only worried on my account.’
Anna sighed. ‘Seth?’
‘Aye. ’e’s already ’ad too much to take on.’
No more than Eliza and Ellen, thought Anna, but she held her tongue. Eve’s eldest child made heavy weather of life, in her view, and was as rude and withdrawn with Daniel as he had been with Anna herself when she first moved in to Beaumont Lane eighteen months ago, after Arthur was killed. It was a long road ahead for Daniel, if her own experience was anything to go by. All of this ran through Anna’s mind as the two women walked in silence down the slope, then rounded the bend towards Ravenscliffe. Her heart lifted at the sight of it.