Free The Hollow Land by Jane Gardam Page B

possible minute after Sunday, when work is wicked. He had scrubbed the clean slabs all the way from the gate back up to the front door, making everything rather puddly. His father had settled down outside the gate with his back to the wall and a book to read.
    As Harry reached the front door, wiggling backwards on his knees, it had opened behind him and there had stood the Egg-witch with an apple in her hand. She looked at the path and then at Harry. “It’ll do,” she said and handed him the apple.
    That the Egg-witch had given somebody a present had been talked about in the village for quite some time.
    Later Harry’s mother had met the Egg-witch in Market Street shopping, and nodded. The next summer when the Egg-witch was out in her garden digging a huge trench for potatoes, Harry and his mother went by and she straightened herself up and glared and said, “Are you comin’ in?”
    After that they looked in often and sat in the Egg-witch’s kitchen (they never went into the awful parlour again) for a cup of tea, and on one occasion Harry’s mother mentioned mothers—and then the flood gates opened.
    â€œSeven years,” said the Egg-witch, “seven years she’s been up there. The doctor comes and looks to her every now and then. Says she’s right as a ninepence. Just given in, that’s what she’s done. Worked all her life—up before five every morning, milking fifty years, never a holiday all her life. Right away up on Kisdon we lived, miles from nowhere. Made her own butter and cheese and bread. Fed the nine of us out of twenty-five shilling a week, my father was a pig-killer till he died, going round the farms killing and helping here and there hay-times, as we did, us and mother too, carrying pots of stew on harnesses on our backs away up the fell. Such a cook she was! She’d fill a big black pot—one of them with bright, thick silver insides—with potatoes and onions and carrots and a bone, and cover it with water and boil it up slow. Beautiful. Every day oft’ week, and bread and syrup for supper. Sundays there’d maybe be a spare rib pie. Proper spare rib, not this so-called spare rib now. And a crust over it. She could heft the sheep and clip the sheep and dip. She could salt the pig and make the sausage and the black puddings. She could stack a rick of hay and corn and she could paint a house inside and out and mend the great roof tiles. She could milk and separate and calve a cow. She never had a day’s sickness in her life, no more had we. We never saw a doctor. She had us out of our beds six o’clock each day including Sunday, and she was always last to bed at night. And look at her now.”
    â€œDoesn’t she even want to talk to anyone?”
    â€œNo. She does not.”
    â€œDoesn’t she read or listen to the wireless?”
    â€œNo. She does not. She lies there night and day looking at the ceiling. Night and day, winter and summer, these seven years.”
    â€œWhatever can have set it off?”
    â€œWe don’t know. She’d been down here living with me for a bit when it happened. Mind I think I know.”
    â€œOh?”
    â€œIt was something on television. Something she saw on the news. It was about the time them Americans went to the moon.
    â€œShe’s not silly, mind,” the Egg-witch added, “she’s still sharp. What’s more, we all know she doesn’t stay in bed all the time. We can’t catch her at it, but when we’re out hay-timing or it’s ram sales in Kirkby, or Ravenstonedale or Brough Show and there’s no alternatives to leaving her alone, there’s signs she gets up to things.”
    â€œUp to things?”
    â€œUp to things. However else would she know the colour we’d painted the kitchen? ‘Never liked black in a kitchen’ she said the other day.
We
never told her. No—she’d been down.”
    â€œWhat