Free The Hollow Land by Jane Gardam Page A

“Get that James back here. Mrs. Bateman, stay up there on the bouse. We’re in for a hard evening. It’s going to take the lot of us.”
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    â€œAnd for my part,” said Mr. Teesdale at past ten o’clock at night, “I’d a mind to leave them there.”
    â€œAnd mine,” said Mr. Bateman in his London suit, which was not looking its best.
    â€œSitting there like two fond monkeys. Deserve nuts and water for a week.”
    â€œBeyond me. Beyond me,” said Mr. Bateman.
    â€œI just couldn’t believe—I couldn’t believe it,” said Mrs. Bateman. “All I did was appear and everyone screamed and scattered. Ghost! Do I look like a ghost?”
    â€œYes,” said Eileen, Bell’s sister, “you did. I seed it once. I seed that ghost when I was just about to be a teenager. Just before you’re teenage you see ghosts easiest. I read it in a magazine. Just before you’re teenage you’re very psychic and impressionable.”
    â€œI’d give Bell psychic and impressionable,” said his father.
    â€œI’d not call that Kendal teenage,” said Mrs. Bateman, “at least not in years.”
    â€œI saw no ghosts,” said Bell, “I was that busy getting us out.”
    â€œGetting us out?” said Harry. “You was going on about dead skeletons and terrible Indians. Who got the chain moving?”
    â€œAye well, you did. I’ll say that.”
    â€œA pair of loonies,” said James.
    â€œWho went running?” said Harry. “Ghosts of dead miners. Dead miners’ mothers! And you a scientist.”
    â€œThat lad of Meccer’s never got lost up the mines anyway,” said Mrs. Teesdale. “I heard tell he took off to South America and got to be a millionaire.”
    â€œIt was still very dreadful for his mother,” said Mr. Bateman.
    â€œTell me when it ever isn’t,” said Mrs. Bateman, collapsed on the Light Trees sofa, still in her aprons. “Tell me when it ever isn’t.”
    â€œWhen they’re safe home,” said Grandad Hewitson. “Give thanks. They’re safe home. And both of them a bit wiser than when the sun rose up this morning.”

G RANNY C RACK
    T he Egg-witch had a mother, a very old woman nobody saw because she lived in bed.
    She had been in bed for years. There was nothing at all wrong with her, but one day she just didn’t get up. The Egg-witch and the Egg-witch’s children and sometimes even the Egg-witch’s wispy husband, who spent as much time as possible out of doors on his farm, began to carry up trays. Nightdresses of ancient design appeared upon the Egg-witch’s clothesline but that was the only outward sign of Granny Crack. When anyone asked after Granny Crack, the Egg-witch’s mother, she just said “Nicely thank you”. Or nothing, and glared. They had always been a glaring sort of family, the Cracks.
    The Egg-witch had been a Crack, Mrs. Teesdale told Mrs. Bateman, before she married. Yorkshire people and we know what
that
means.
    â€œNo,” said Mrs. Bateman.
    â€œThey tell you nothing, Yorkshire people, they’re not like here.”
    â€œBut Yorkshire is hardly ten miles away over the fell.”
    â€œThey’re different folk.”
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    Now it happened that Harry had become a friend of the Egg-witch. All those years ago, before he was even school age and had trampled eggs into her front path and run off, he had been made to go back next day and say he was sorry. His father had gone with him but had waited at the gate.
    Harry had knocked on the Egg-witch’s black door and been told through it to go round to the back. His father had watched him depart and return with an enormous bucket and with the scrubbing brush they had brought with them. He had settled down to scrub the path, which was as white as snow already, having been scrubbed clean some hours before at the first