My Friend Walter Page 6

  ‘Storms?’ I asked. He was speaking in riddles as he often did. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I fear you will understand and that soon enough, but I can say no more. I shall meddle no more in your affairs. I will be with you but in spirit only. I would fain stay with you, cousin, and protect you from all that lies ahead of you, but I may not. I belong no more to your world. I had plans afoot to help you – indeed they were already much advanced, but I see now that I have always been the cause of more harm in this world than good, however noble my intentions – and I confess they were not always so. You may fare better without me, cousin, than with me; if you only remember that storms always pass by and give way to clear blue skies. Mark me well and remember these words. Only have faith that all will be well and it shall be so. Only believe a thing is and it is. Believe it is not and it is not. Count on it, sweet cousin, for it is true. We must bear all, and bravely too.’ He stepped back from me and wiped the tears from my cheeks with his cloak. ‘I must be gone, back to London; but I do not think I should take the horse again. It is commonly thought that ghosts can fly but they cannot, and so neither can I. How else then may I come to London?’

  ‘Father’s going in to town in the car and I can take you on to the station,’ I said. I did not try to change his mind because I could see it was already quite made up. It was no problem to find a good excuse to go with Father into Exeter that afternoon – I needed to change some library books.

  It was a sombre journey. Father was very preoccupied, and hardly said a word to me all the way. He wasn’t concentrating much on his driving either. More than once we nearly ran into the car in front, and he even lost his way in the city centre. I prattled on as best I could about Gran and Sally but I could tell that he wasn’t really listening to me. Walter sat in the back seat all the way looking out of the window and when we got to town Father dropped us off outside the library. He had to go to the bank, he said, and he’d be back in an hour and a half. I was to wait on the steps of the library for him.

  We walked in silence through the streets of Exeter, Walter and I, down towards the station. When we got there they said a train was due in a quarter of an hour. No one ever looks at the tickets at the barrier – not that we needed one. When the train came in I opened the door of a first-class carriage. Sir Walter Raleigh ought at least to travel first-class, I thought. I looked over my shoulder before I spoke. There were only a few people on the platform and they were all busy. I could talk without fear of being overheard. ‘How will you know your way in London?’ I asked.

  ‘I have travelled often on the Underground,’ Walter said. ‘Though I do not like the press of people about me it is a convenient way to get about. It is unnatural I think for a man to travel like a mole but I am accustomed to it now. Fear not, cousin. Tonight I shall rest in my bed in the Tower.’ Doors slammed to the right and the left and someone bellowed for me to stand clear. ‘Farewell sweet cousin,’ said my friend Walter leaning out of the window, and he lifted my hand and kissed it. ‘Think kindly of me, and often, I pray you.’

  I could not bring my voice to say anything, but I waved and blew kisses until the train had vanished and my friend Walter with it.

  ‘You all right?’ It was a railway guard, and he was frowning down at me, his cap on the back of his head. ‘I been watching you. First you walks along the platform and opens the door of the train. Then you closes it and then you talks like you was saying goodbye to someone. And then you waves goodbye and now there’s tears all over your face. It’s like you was saying goodbye to no one. You sure you’re all right?’ I nodded and walked away fast towards the stairs. ‘You on your own, are you? Where’s your mum?’ he called after me. ‘Where’s your dad?’

  I began to run. I think I ran all the way back to the library without stopping. I had a terrible urge inside me to catch the next train to London and follow him to the Tower. I had lost my friend and I was going to be alone again. I didn’t know if I was more sorry for him or more sorry for me. Either way I was miserable.

  I was sitting waiting on the steps of the library for Father when I had an idea. If I couldn’t have Walter with me then I would have the next best thing. I would find a book about him from the library and read it. That way I could find out more about him and I could get to know him better even if he wasn’t there. The book I found had very small print and only one picture of him, on the title page. It was of Walter Raleigh as a young man, but I recognised the way he stood leaning on his cane, a half-smile on his lips, his legs crossed.

  I was half way through the first page when Father drew up. I could see at once that something was wrong. He was grey and drawn and he said not a single word all the way home. I asked him what the matter was, whether he was feeling ill, but he didn’t even reply. It was as if he had never heard me. I had to wait until we got home to find out what had happened.

  He walked around the garden with his arm around Mother and then out into Front Meadow beyond. With Will beside me I watched and waited for them to come back. When they did I could see that Mother had been crying, but she tried not to show it. ‘I’ve got some bad news,’ Father said, ‘and your mother says I ought to tell you. Well, here goes. We’ve got to leave the farm. We’ve got to sell up.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ said Will. ‘What do you mean, sell up?’

  ‘Nothing else for it.’ said Father. ‘We can’t pay the rent on the place and so we’ve got to go. I’ve just been in to see the bank manager. He says we can’t go on, not any more. That’s all there is to it.’

  CHAPTER 6

  IT TOOK SOME TIME FOR IT TO SINK IN. WE SAT together, the four of us, in the hay barn. We could talk there, Mother said, without any danger of Gran overhearing. Beside me Father was sitting forward with his elbows on his knees picking the nail of his forefinger with his thumb nail. It was left to Mother to explain it all. To be honest it didn’t much matter to me why it happened. I mean it didn’t make any difference, did it? We were selling the farm and that was all there was to it. I suppose Mother was doing her best to make it hurt less.

  ‘We’ve done all we can,’ she said. ‘Your father’s worked himself to the bone. But it was always an uphill struggle on this land. It never was the best farm in the world but we knew that when we took it on, didn’t we dear?’ Father stared straight ahead of him and said nothing. Mother went on. ‘The land’s steep and a lot of it faces north, and it’s wet land, too. Still, we’ve managed to make ends meet over the years. But we’ve had a bit of bad luck just these last two or three years – poor lambing for the last couple of years, a lot of singles and then we had that scour. The price of pigs has fallen and you remember there was that blight in the potatoes last year. We hardly lifted any good ones at all. We were hoping for a good corn harvest this year, but it wasn’t good enough. The sums just weren’t adding up and that’s what farming’s all about in the end. The sums have got to add up. ’Course, if we owned the farm we could sell of a bit of land and we’d be all right again then, but we don’t. As you know, it belongs to Mr Watts.’

  ‘I don’t like Mr Watts,’ said Will.

  ‘Like him or not, Will, he’s the landlord,’ said Mother, ‘and we’ve got to pay him his rent. We’ve had to borrow money from the bank to pay the rent for three years now and Father says they won’t let us do it again. So there’s nothing else for it. Only way to pay the bank back is to sell up, but we’ll need to sell everything.’

  ‘Not everything,’ said Will.

  ‘Everything,’ Father snapped, standing up suddenly. ‘Cows, sheep, bullocks, machinery. And Sally, she’ll have to go too.’

  ‘But how are we going to farm without any animals, without any tractors?’ I asked.

  ‘We aren’t going to farm,’ said Father. ‘Not any more.’

  ‘Well anyway, we’ve still got the house, haven’t we?’ said Will.

  Father turned on us. ‘Don’t you understand, Will? We’ve got to go. We’ve got to leave the house as well. It belongs to the l
andlord, to Mr Watts, same as the farm does. If we can’t pay the rent, and we can’t, he’ll want us out. We’re six months overdue with the rent already and the bank won’t let us have any more money. Now do you understand?’

  ‘You mean we can’t even live here any more?’ I said, and as I said it I understood at last the whole terrible truth. So that had been the reason for Father’s black moods, for his long, deep silences of recent weeks. That was why Mother and Father were shouting at each other in the kitchen that evening. ‘We mustn’t say a word about it to Gran,’ said Mother. ‘She mustn’t know yet, not until she’s completely better. We’ve somehow got to tell her so it doesn’t upset her too much.’

  ‘But where are we going to live?’ said Will, his eyes full of tears. ‘Where are we going to go? We’ve always lived here.’

  ‘Over twenty years I’ve farmed this land, Will,’ said Father. ‘We’ll just have to find somewhere else, that’s all.’

  ‘Another farm?’ said Will brightening a bit.

  Father shook his head. ‘You need money to run a farm and I’m not borrowing it. What we make on the sale of the animals and machinery will just about pay off the bank. I’m never borrowing another penny, not as long as I live.’

  ‘I told Aunty Ellie this might happen,’ said Mother, ‘and she said right away we could go and live with her, just till we’ve sorted things out a bit. She’s got plenty of room. Perhaps it’ll be a blessing after all. You never can tell. As Gran says, “every cloud has a silver lining”.’

  ‘I know,’ said Will who was beginning to cry openly now. ‘And there’s a light at the end of every tunnel.’ And he rushed out of the hay barn. Father went after him.

  ‘I think your father’s more upset for Will than he is for himself,’ said Mother standing up and brushing the hay off her skirt.

  ‘How long before we’ve got to go?’ I asked.

  ‘The solicitor says we’ve got to be out by Michaelmas, and that’s less than two months away. There’ll be a lot to do, Bessie dear, and perhaps that’s just as well. Come on, young lady.’ And she took my hand and we went outside into the sunlight.

  ‘What will Father do?’ I asked.

  ‘He’ll find a job somewhere, I suppose,’ said Mother.

  ‘What if he can’t?’

  ‘Then I’ll find a job,’ said Mother.

  ‘But what if you can’t find a job?’

  ‘What if? What if?’ Mother said. ‘We’ll manage, you’ll see. We always have, haven’t we? Let’s just ride out this storm Bess, before we face the next one.’

  Hadn’t someone else talked to me of storms ahead? Is this what Walter had meant? Is this what he was warning me about? But how could he possibly have known this was going to happen? Why did he have to talk in riddles?

  ‘Not a word to Gran now, remember?’ was the last thing Mother said to me before we went back into the house.

  Within a day or two Gran was sent off to stay with Aunty Ellie. It would be better that way and safer, Mother said. Aunty Ellie would tell her gently, when she felt the time was right.

  At school it soon got around that the Throckmortons were being put off the farm and everyone wanted to know where we were going and why. In the playground after lunch one day Will had a fight with Simon Battle – it would be him, he picked fights with everyone. Simon Battle told Will that he’d heard Father had been drinking too much in the evenings at ‘The Mucky Duck’ (it was really The Black Swan, but everyone called it ‘The Mucky Duck’) when he should have been out farming, and that was why we were having to leave the farm. Will didn’t care too much for that and said so with his fists, leaving Simon Battle a bit bruised and battered. I was proud of my brother that day. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t like fighting, not normally.

  But in some ways life changed for the better, strange as that may seem. Everyone, except Simon Battle and one or two others, felt sorry for us. The teachers were all as sweet as pie, so that Will got away with blue murder; and my pictures and poems were always put on the wall in the classroom – I even had one up in the front hall. They were all good of course, but not that good. But this was small enough compensation for the misery facing us every afternoon when we got back home from school.

  You couldn’t call it home, not any more. The farm was full of strange people wandering around scrutinizing the cows and looking into the sheep’s mouths. They inspected the machinery and clambered all over the barn. They peered down the drains and wells, and sniffed at the hay. And they weren’t only out on the farm. They were in the house as well. I came back from school one day and found a man in a Sherlock Holmes hat up in my bedroom pushing his penknife into the window-sill. ‘Just testing for dry rot,’ he said. ‘Lots of it about in this house. No central heating, I see. Nothing much been done in this place for a few years, by the look of it.’ I felt like knocking his silly hat off. I never discovered who he was. I never knew who any of them were, except Mr Watts.

  I recognised Mr Watts, the landlord. You could hardly miss him. He had a face so purple and puffed up that I thought he might blow up one day and fly away snorting like a balloon. Of course I’d seen him out on the farm with Father from time to time. He used to come around a couple of times a year to inspect the farm gates and the ditches and the hedges. In spite of everything, Father and he still seemed very friendly and I could not understand that at all. After all, this was the man who was kicking us out of our home, and kicking Father off his farm. Well, I wasn’t going to smile at him nor have him give me one of his horrible humbugs he was always offering me. Will disliked him just as much, but the trouble was he loved humbugs, so he took all the humbugs he was offered; but at least he never smiled at Mr Watts and he never said thank you.

  It was at nights that I thought most about my friend Walter alone in his cold, damp room up in the Tower of London and I longed to have him with me again. Every night I read the book about him that I’d brought back from the library. There were a lot of long words I didn’t understand, but I understood enough to know that everything he’d told me was true. Walter Raleigh was never a traitor. They had taken everything away from him and they hadn’t even given him a fair trial. I could quite understand why he wanted revenge.

  I was angry at him, though, angry that he had left me when I needed him most. True, he had warned me of the ‘storms’ ahead, and now I knew perfectly well what he had meant by that. But I wondered over and over again how he had known about what would happen; and if he had known, then why hadn’t he stayed to help me? I remembered every night his words of hope to me just before he left and said them over and over to myself just before I went to sleep. I said them so often that I came to believe them absolutely.

  ‘Storms always pass and give way to clear blue skies. Have faith that all will be well and it will be so. Only believe a thing is and it is, believe it is not and it is not.’ If my friend Walter said everything would be all right, then it would be. I never doubted it. And because of that I can honestly say that those last few weeks at the farm were the happiest I can remember. I knew for sure that something would happen, perhaps at the last moment so that somehow we would be able to stay on at the farm. That’s what I told Will, too. Of course he wanted to believe me, and I think in the end he did. He must have done, because we certainly did not mope, either of us.

  Every daylight hour when we weren’t in school we’d be out together on the farm, the two of us, no matter what the weather. It was as if Will wanted to make the most of every day (just in case the worst came to the worst, perhaps) and for some reason he wanted me to be with him all the time. And I liked that. Maybe it was because Father was so busy getting ready for the sale and packing up. Maybe he just didn’t want to be on his own, I don’t know and I don’t care. Whatever the reason, Will turned into a proper brother during those weeks – or did I turn into a proper sister? Either way we scarcely ever quarrelled, though he did ask me time and again about the letter and the bottle he had found in my bedroom, each time probing deepe
r and deeper. I just told him it was a secret and I couldn’t tell him, not yet, but that one day soon I would tell him everything. Each day he wondered if that day had come and I had to put him off. We became such good friends that I was often tempted to tell him all about my friend Walter, but I didn’t like breaking promises and I still wasn’t sure whether Will would believe me.

  We went fishing together almost every day if the river wasn’t too high and he’d let me use his rod whenever I wanted. He taught me how to make a fly and how to tie it so it didn’t keep coming off and what flies to use in what weather and where the fish lie. We rode out on Sally, both of us up, with me behind clinging on. We picked every blackberry on the farm that wasn’t too green or too squashy to eat. We ate most of them ourselves and gave the rest to Sally and the pigs, and we came home black-mouthed and blue-lipped. We stripped the apple trees and went mushrooming every morning before breakfast. ‘Not going to leave a thing for the next people,’ Will said. ‘Saw the horrible Barrowbills looking over the farm this afternoon. Couldn’t bear it if they moved in here.’

  ‘There won’t be any next people,’ I said. ‘We’ll still be here. You’ll see.’

  ‘I hope you’re right,’ he said. ‘The sale’s less than a week away now, five days.’ My faith in Walter’s words was becoming a little fragile now, so I prayed each night too, just for good measure.

  By the morning of the sale I think I knew it was almost hopeless to go on believing that anything could stop it now, but I clung to the little faith I had left. You never know, I told myself. You never know. The whole farm had been invaded by lorries and Landrovers and laughing farmers leaning on sticks, and it was difficult for Will and me to get away and be on our own. In the end we found the haystack was the only place. I was sitting next to Will, high up in the haystack, looking down the yard where the auctioneers had set up a temporary sale ring.