The Blizzard
One late October day, just over a century ago, the farmers of the Endlands went to gather their sheep from the moors as they did every autumn. Only this year, while the shepherds were pulling a pair of wayward lambs from a peat bog, the Devil killed one of the ewes and tore off her fleece to hide himself among the flock.
Down in the farmlands, he flitted from one house to the next, too crafty to be caught, only manifest in what he infected. He was the maggot in the eye of the good dog, the cancer that rotted the ram’s gonads, the blood in the baby’s milk.
The stories began to reach the ears of the villagers in Underclough further up the valley, and while they were not surprised or sorry to hear that the heathen folk of the Endlands were being persecuted by the Owd Feller, they petitioned their minister to do something for their own sake. But he was frail and elderly and, unwilling to tackle the Devil on his own, he asked the bishop for an assistant, by which he meant a substitute.
The priest who arrived with his crucifix and aspergillum was a young man sceptical of his summons; he would think of himself as a missionary, he decided, a bringer of light to this dark valley. These people were no better than the gullible savages of the colonies who found spirits in everything from the clouds to the dirt. They deserved his pity.
But when he saw the animals decaying before his eyes and the blood dribbling from the wet-nurse’s teat, his nerve faltered and the Devil brought a blizzard to the valley that lasted for days.
The cottages in the village choked under drifts that grew to the windows and stores of wood and peat that should have lasted all winter were quickly gone. Across the bridge, the church was lightless and cowed and in the graveyard the dead were buried a second time as a bigger swell of snow blew down the valley and across the farmlands. Man and beast were forced to share the same warmth. Piglets and gun dogs slept on the hearth rugs. The tup steamed in the kitchen.
Days were late to lighten and quick to end and people began to die. The older folk first, coughing up their lungs in shreds like tomato skins, and then the children, burning with fever.
But the worst of it, the very worst of it, they said, was that it was impossible to know who the Devil would visit next. He left no footprints in the snow, there was no knock at the door. It was as if, they said, he was the air itself. The stuff they breathed.
The villagers of Underclough blamed the farmers of the Endlands and the farmers began to wonder if they’d brought it upon themselves; if there had been some sign that they’d missed and left to fester like an open wound. Hadn’t a jackdaw flown into the Curwens’ house one evening in the summer and clubbed itself to death on the walls? Hadn’t the Dyers’ children seen a hare digging up bones in the graveyard? Then there was that warm Saturday in September when Joe Pentecost, drunk on port and pride, dropped his glass as he made the toast at his daughter’s wedding
breakfast. They’d all laughed at him, forgiven him his moment of clumsiness and thought nothing of it. Yet now, they argued over the ritual that would have sponged away the bad luck with the spilled wine. But no one could remember what to do; only fragments of old, cautionary stories came to mind, that made them throw their cats out into the snow and sprinkle their doorsteps with salt.
Whatever they did made little difference in the end. Thirteen people from the farms and the village died that autumn. Their bodies were wrapped in blankets and left in outhouses and back yards until they could be taken to ground soft enough to bury them.
Briardale Moss
No, tell me a different story, says Adam. I know that one.
All stories in the valley have to begin with the Devil, I say.
But there must be ones I haven’t heard before, he says. You know hundreds.
These last few years, I’ve acquired a reputation for telling stories just like the Gaffer, my grandfather. Though there are some that Adam wouldn’t want to hear. Some that I’d be better off keeping to myself.
Come on, he says. Tell me one from when you were my age.
Later, I say. We came here to shoot snipe, didn’t we?
He nods in that funny way of his and strokes Jenny’s back with one hand, keeping the other firmly locked in mine.
You’ll have to let go, Adam, I say. Otherwise we can’t do anything.
He relaxes his grip but still stands close to me, within smelling distance, angling his head so that he can hear the lapping of the marsh water.
It’s a cold spring evening and the last of the daylight is starting to leave the Moss, slipping out of the valley and on to the moors, receding westwards to the sea. Dusk has already taken the colour from the fells and made the sound of water loud in Fiendsdale Clough. Somewhere in the gloom, the river moves against the banks it cut in the storms we had early last month and winds away to the black mass of Sullom Wood. The air feels skinned. But Adam’s been a good lad and not said a word about it. Like all boys of his age, he prides himself on his toughness. The ability to endure without tears is a badge all sons want to wear for their fathers. Still, I know that he’s asking for stories because he wants distractions. I know that he’s trying his best not to show that he’s scared of being so close to the water.
Remember what I told you to do? I say, dropping one cartridge and then the other into the Browning that Dadda passed on to me. The over-and-under with the walnut stock.
Now? says Adam.
I’ll tell you when.
Another couple of years and I should have been teaching him to shoot on the Moss. I was shooting at twelve. Woodcock and pigeons and pheasants. Things we could eat. Adam will never fire a gun, of course, but that doesn’t mean to say he can’t make himself useful. He can still raise the birds from their hiding places, he can be my beater.
The butt against my shoulder, I put some space between us and when he hears my voice further away than he expects it to be, further away than he would like, he says, Daddy, and holds out his hand for me to take.
I’m still here, I tell him. You’re all right. You’re nowhere near the water. Do what I told you to do. Go on.
He keeps his face in my direction for a moment longer and then starts to clap his hands.
A quirk of acoustics makes it sound as if the noise is coming from the fells and drives the birds out of the coverts towards us. It's
a trick Dadda taught me and one that was handed down to him by the Gaffer, who learned it from his old man, who’d learned it from his and so on, back and back. To be honest, I wouldn’t be surprised if fathers and sons have been coming here for centuries to hide in the dusk and shoot their supper out of the clatter of wings.
Louder, I say and Adam nods and now the echoes start to lift the teal and oystercatchers from the shallows, sending them weeping over our heads. A heron climbs, unhurried, and then the snipe burst out of the rushes and undulate low over the marsh, their reflections blurred on the water into little brown scythes. I put the barrels slightly ahead of them, losing one when it blends into the deepening shadows and taking the other on the second shot as it gives itself away against the white of the rowan trees near the gate. Adam’s shoulders jolt at the crack of the shotgun and the snipe startles in mid-flight and arcs to the ground somewhere in the field we’ve left fallow this year.
Keep hold of her, I tell him, and he grips Jenny’s collar tighter before she can dart off to pick up the bird. She needs to unlearn her worst instincts.
Make her sit, Adam, I say, as I break the shotgun and shake out the empty casings. Let her know who’s in charge.
He runs his hand down her spine and pushes her backside to the ground. The light drops again, and a stronger gust of wind bends the reeds. The Moss ruffles. Jenny blinks and waits.
Send her then, I say, and Adam makes the noise I taught him, a kiss of the teeth, and lets Jenny go. She sets off, wriggles under the field gate, giddy with the scent, and brings the bird back in rags.
Adam can hear her and smell her and she presses her forehead to his palm.
Drop it, he tells her, touching the bird in her mouth. When she won’t, he tries to work his fingers between her teeth.
No, I tell him. Across the nose.
He touches the side of her face with one hand and with the other gives her a hesitant tap that only makes her growl.
Harder, I say. Otherwise
she won’t learn a thing.
A downward belt on the snout and she does as she’s told. She’ll remember the pain next time. She’ll anticipate it in his raised hand and open her mouth as soon as he tells her to. She’s a bright girl. Gentle and good-natured on the whole. It’s enthusiasm rather than malice that’s decapitated the snipe.
Leave it for the jackdaws, Adam, I say. We’ve enough.
Hand in hand and muddy to the knees, we go slowly back along the lane to the farmhouse, as Jenny runs ahead and waits and runs again, torn between obedience to me and sniffing out the frame of her territory. Adam carries Dadda’s old leather game bag over his shoulder and can’t help putting his fingers inside and touching the mallards I shot earlier. The smell of their blood and the smell of the water is still on their feathers. When we get back to the farm, we’ll pick out the pellets and let them hang in the scullery until the morning. And then I’ve promised Adam I’ll teach him how to draw them and get them ready for the oven.
Is it dark now? he says. It feels colder.
Nearly, I say. Mam’s put the lights on.
Are there any stars out yet? he says.
A few, I say. Orion. The Plough.
He knows their shapes. I’ve held his hand and traced them with his finger.
Is the moon fat or thin? he says.
Fat, I say. Full fat.
A bloated, astonished face, like a dead man under water.
Where is it? he asks.
Behind us, I say. It’s rising over the Three Sisters. It’s making our shadows long.
A different night and he’d have asked a dozen more questions, but he’s tired and every step through the gravel is awkward, purposefully so. He won’t admit it, but he wants me to carry him. At least until we get to the tarmac.
Here, I say, and to keep him occupied give him the shotgun to hold.
He hooks it broken over his arm, as heavy to him as a couple of lead pipes and turns his face to my voice and grins. Despite everything, he’s in no doubt that this is all he wants. As soon as he was born, the farm was his; just as it was mine when Mam gave birth to me. He feels his grandfathers at his back and imagines his sons walking before him. I’d been exactly the same at his age. But then I lost my way.
Tell me a story then, he says. Tell me one about the Gaffer, not the Devil. We’ve got time for one now, haven’t we?
The problem is that in the Endlands one story begs the telling of another and another and in all of them the Devil plays his part.
The Endlands
I’d always known that when the Gaffer died it would be sudden, like a lightbulb blowing out and blackening the glass. But, even so, when Dadda called one night with the news I couldn’t help but feel shocked that he was gone. Shocked and suddenly very far away from the farm.
I was living in Suffolk then, freshly married, and teaching at a boys’ school on the edge of the fens. It was hard to get back to the Endlands more than two or three times a year, so I generally mucked in when another pair of hands was needed the most: Lambing at Easter, or Harvest in the summer, or at autumn time when the sheep were brought down off the moors. In fact, Kat and I had been packing to go up and help with Gathering when Dadda phoned a few days before the October half-term. And we still would, of course, only now there would be a funeral first.
Even though the circumstances were unhappy, Kat was excited about seeing the place where I’d grown up. With the nursery always being so short-staffed in the holidays, she hadn’t been able to come with me to the Endlands before and had only met the other farming families – the Dyers and the Beasleys – once, on our wedding day back in the June. Come to think of it, she hardly knew Dadda very well in those days either. After we’d got engaged, we’d driven up to meet him in Derbyshire a couple of times when he happened to be over that way selling off some of the four-shears, but it had only been a quick cup of tea and a sandwich between lots and he and Kat got no further than small talk about the farm or her parents.
He hadn’t said one way or the other, but he seemed to like her well enough. Not that I was asking for, or needed, his blessing. Now that I’d left the Endlands, who I married had no bearing on the farm. Yet at least he’d made the effort to meet her.
The Gaffer hadn’t come, of course, and the first time Kat laid eyes on him was at the Registry Office. Even so, when I told her that he’d died, she was as upset as everyone in the valley and all the way up on the train she asked me about him, disappointed that she would never get to know him now.
‘Sorry if I’ve been bombarding you,’ she said, as we clunked to a standstill at the last station. ‘I’m just interested.’
‘Well, don’t do the same with Dadda,’ I said. ‘He won’t want to talk about him. He’ll just want to get on with things.’
‘I know,’ said Kat. ‘I have been through this before.’
‘This is different,’ I said.
‘Denial’s pretty common, John,’ she said, as we stepped down on to the platform. ‘Little Emma Carter talked about her dad as if he were still alive for at least six months.’
About a year earlier, the father of one of the children at the nursery had died and Kat had thrown herself into helping the family cope. She’d assisted them with organising the funeral and written letters to the insurance company and the bank on Mrs Carter’s behalf; but mostly she’d busied herself with the domestic chores often
shoved aside by grief. She made sure that the house was clean and that they ate well; she put out the bins and fed the cats.
She’d invited the Carters to the wedding but they mustn’t have been quite ready for large social gatherings just then and had sent a card instead. A hand-made thing that the postman had to knock to deliver. I’d been painted as a stick man in a top hat and Kat had wings and a halo.
Every day in the run up to the wedding she’d come home with another two or three creations that the children brought in for her, the pipe cleaners and glitter and scraps of voile coming loose in transit. They were all more or less the same – a church, confetti, a big yellow sun – although one showed a little girl crying as Kat and I held hands.
‘What’s up with her?’ I said.
‘Oh, God, that’s Olivia Brown,’ said Kat, looking up from chopping onions. ‘I had to spend half an hour this morning trying to convince her that you weren’t going to take me away.’
Girls, especially, were fiercely possessive over her, drawn first to her prettiness and then to her sororal affection. It was on her knee that they sat to cry, her sleeves they snotted on, her hair they plaited with their jam-sticky fingers, her hands they clung to when it was time to go home.
Children quickly and intuitively put her at the centre of their lives, and even though she was a lot older than the ones Kat looked after at the nursery, Grace Dyer had been just the same at our wedding reception. She was Liz and Jeff’s only child, the only child in the Endlands at that time, in fact, and quick to latch on to anyone who gave her the slightest bit of attention. All night long she’d been Kat’s shadow. They danced together, kicked the balloons, sat with two straws in a glass of lemonade, talked into each other’s ears when the music was loud. And when Kat had had enough of her shoes and went alluringly barefoot instead, she let Grace wear them for the rest of the night until we left to go to the hotel near the airport. When everyone gathered on the street outside the King’s Head to see us off, Grace was the one who waved for the longest as the taxi pulled away.
‘I hope she’s not too upset,’ said Kat. ‘I did try to let her down gently.’
‘About what?’ I said.
‘I don’t know why,’ said Kat, ‘but the poor thing seemed to think that we were going to be moving into your dad’s farm now that we’re married.’
‘What did you tell her?’ I said.
‘That we’d go and visit her as soon as we could,’ said Kat. ‘What else could I say?’
‘She’ll hold you to that, you know.’
‘I don’t mind,’ said Kat. ‘She’s lonely.’
‘From what I hear, she doesn’t exactly do herself any favours,’ I said. ‘She’s not good at keeping friends for very long.’
‘From what she told me, they pick on her at school,’ said Kat.
‘She gives as good as she gets.’
‘Don’t be mean, John. It happened to you,’ she said. ‘You know how horrible it can be.’
She looked out of the back window and plucked her thumb against the teeth of the plastic comb Grace had given her. It was a present that newly married women always received in the Endlands. If Kat could keep her hair free of knots on her wedding night then she would be pregnant before the Harvest Moon.
‘I thought we were going to wait a while?’ I said, nodding at her hand.
‘I don’t think Grace will let us,’ Kat smiled. ‘She’s desperate for me to have a baby.’
‘Only so she’ll have something to play with whenever we see her.’
Kat waved back one last time as the taxi rounded the corner. ‘Well, what’s wrong with that? She’s a sweetheart,’ she said. ‘I’m going to miss her.’
And she had.
She’d sent Grace a postcard from Spain and on the long, sweaty bus trip to Granada decided that when she next saw her she would give her the locket she’d worn on our wedding day – the something old her mother had presented her with before she took her seat in the Registry Office.
But now she was carrying an even better present with her to the Endlands, and she was looking forward to giving Grace the
news especially.
Kat’s parents had been ecstatic, of course, particularly Barbara, but I’d warned her not to expect Dadda to react in the same way. He wouldn’t proffer names or start making plans to paint the spare room with jungle animals.
***
Here at the end of the line, the cloud was low on the hills that looked over the shops and terraces and a cold wind cut down the street. Clitheroe was the nearest town to the valley and in the summer folk came to look around the castle or walk along the river, but by this time of year, between the jangle of the ice-cream vans and the Christmas lights, there was a drabness about the place that was inescapable.
Kat sat on a bench with her little blue going-away case between her feet and picked up the newspaper that was lying next to her. The headline was about two children who’d been attacked by dogs on a council estate in Burnley, the younger one only a year old. In the photograph that filled the front page, the little girl held her brother on her knee, her chin on top of his head as he played with a plastic dinosaur. From what I could gather, the police seemed to think that the dogs had been set on them deliberately.
Without saying anything, Kat folded the paper and put it back where she’d found it. She looked down the street and touched her belly. Little by little, it was becoming real. At six weeks, he – Kat knew that it would be a boy – was no bigger than a split pea, but there were eyes of a sort; a spine; fleshy buds that would turn into arms and legs. A few months from now, she would sense the first flutterings inside her, and then it wouldn’t be long before the baby started to assert itself with heels and hands.
We waited until the station clock passed the half hour and I was about to suggest we walk around to the bus stop and see if there was still a service out towards the valley when I heard Dadda’s Land-Rover coming up the road.
A flash of the lights and he swung in behind a row of taxis, the engine trying to judder its way out from under the bonnet. He’d had the thing for years. It was older than I was, driven to within an inch of its life like one of those poor Spanish burros Kat and I had seen bearing overweight tourists up to the Alhambra. A cracked headlight was held together with sellotape and the blue livery that made me think of filing cabinets was blistering at the edges. Thrift had always been a stern mistress
with Dadda, and while he could patch up his heap with parts from Abbot’s he wouldn’t replace it.
‘Sorry,’ he said, when I opened the back door. ‘I’ve been at Halewood’s. You know what he’s like. You go in for one thing and he tries to sell you two of summat else. Is there enough room?’
‘Just about,’ I said, and wedged my duffle bag and Kat’s case in with the dented toolboxes, assorted boots and gloves, empty feed sacks, chains and ropes. Like an extra passenger, the straw-shit smell of the farm sat in with the junk as it always did and Kat pretended not to notice as she squeezed in next to me, closing the door on the third attempt.
‘How are you, Tom?’ she said, leaning across me and shaking Dadda’s hand.
She knew him better than she made out; she knew that he’d have been embarrassed if she’d hugged him. She was good like that, Kat. Good at reading people, knowing how to make them feel comfortable.
‘I’ll be all right once the ram’s better,’ he replied.
‘He’s still not well, then?’ I said.
‘I think he’s on the mend,’ said Dadda. ‘But it’s hard to tell. Leith says to keep an eye on him.’
And I had no doubt that that was exactly what he’d been doing; every hour, knowing Dadda.
‘Mum and Dad send their regards,’ said Kat. ‘They were so sorry to hear about the Gaffer. He really made our wedding day.’
Only after he’d downed a few pints, mind, and given up sulking. Then there was no stopping him. He’d still had everyone singing at two in the morning while the bar staff cleared up around them. He was a real character, everyone had said. Someone they wouldn’t forget in a hurry.
‘Aye, well, folk go when it’s time,’ said Dadda. ‘That’s all there is to it.’
He checked his mirror and then pulled away from the kerb and Kat looked at me. He was exactly as we’d both expected him to be and I was glad. If he’d been tearful and talkative, I wouldn’t have known what to do.
***
We crossed the Ribble at Edisford Bridge and headed out on the long straight road towards the valley. Autumn was well settled here and the hay meadows were full of crows and stubbled earth waiting to be turned. Sycamores and beeches crumbled a little more with each heft of wind. Standing water shivered. Every field had been stripped back to the first decisive touches of husbandry, ...
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