Read Online Above the Harvest Moon by Rita Bradshaw - Free Book Online
Authors: Rita Bradshaw
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grandmother’s hallowed front room, used only on high days and holidays or when the priest or doctor called at the house. He had pulled a chair over to the small black-leaded fireplace which held a dried flower arrangement and peered into his grandma’s brass-framed mirror above the wooden mantelpiece holding two candlesticks and a clock.
He had stared at his reflection for a long time.When he had finally climbed down and wiped his eyes, restoring the chair to its place by the door, he had understood why the pretty little girl who had come to the house had been so frightened. The very next week he had started school and the limited but happy world within the four walls of the house was gone for ever. There were folk who labelled the animal kingdom as cruel. He had discovered animals couldn’t hold a candle to humankind.
There were no lights in the windows of the four labourer’s cottages built in a terrace at the end of the lane, but he hadn’t expected there to be. Everyone would be in the barn Farmer Shawe had ordered to be swept and cleared out for the end of year feast and celebrations to welcome the New Year in. No doubt the revelry was well underway by now and everyone would be making merry on homemade wine and beer and cider. Seamus Shawe was a good master in plenty of ways and progressive in his views, treating man and beast well, and he always provided plenty of food and drink.
Once past the cottages which had no gardens at the front but long narrow strips of land at the back where each labourer’s wife and children cultivated their own crop of vegetables, the lane divided into two wide tracks. One led to the large sprawling farmhouse with its massive farmyard to the front and enclosed garden to the rear, with a wash-house and separate privy and beyond that an overgrown tangle of lawns and flower beds. The other snaked past a number of barns, the stables and other buildings, including the pigsties. It wound along at the side of fields enclosed by drystone walls until it came to the edge of a steep quarry. Here all the human excrement from the privies at the famhouse and cottages was dumped weekly by a farm cart kept specially for that purpose. Jake had visited other farms with Seamus and he counted himself fortunate there were no foul, stinking cesspools at Clover Farm. In some places the smell from the human waste far exceeded that of the animals.
Taking the right track, he walked along the frozen ridges of dirt and snow to the back of the farmhouse which he entered by way of the kitchen. This room was enormous and the heart of the three-storey building which had been built towards the end of the seventeenth century by an ancestor of the present farmer. As well as the kitchen, there was a pleasant dining room and study on the ground floor, a sitting room and two bedrooms on the first floor and three bedrooms at the top of the house underneath the attic, but it was showing signs of severe neglect. Dust was thick, the stoneflagged floor didn’t look as if it had been scrubbed in weeks, and the black-leaded range was caked in fat and grime. Nevertheless the smell of bacon and burning wood was comforting; it meant home to him.
Jake had first come to live at Clover Farm as a lad of fourteen, initially residing with an old couple in one of the labourers’ cottages before moving to the farmhouse itself shortly after the Shawes’ son was killed at the Somme in 1916. In those days Bess, Seamus’s wife, had been alive and the whole farmhouse had been as clean as a new pin. Enid Osborne, one of the labourers’ wives who cooked and cleaned for the two of them now, was not so particular.
‘You’re back then.’ Seamus was sitting smoking his pipe in front of the glowing fire, his slippered feet resting on the fender and a glass of whisky in one hand.
‘Aye, I’m back.’ Jake smiled down on the shining bald head of the man he thought of as a father. The man who had been
He had stared at his reflection for a long time.When he had finally climbed down and wiped his eyes, restoring the chair to its place by the door, he had understood why the pretty little girl who had come to the house had been so frightened. The very next week he had started school and the limited but happy world within the four walls of the house was gone for ever. There were folk who labelled the animal kingdom as cruel. He had discovered animals couldn’t hold a candle to humankind.
There were no lights in the windows of the four labourer’s cottages built in a terrace at the end of the lane, but he hadn’t expected there to be. Everyone would be in the barn Farmer Shawe had ordered to be swept and cleared out for the end of year feast and celebrations to welcome the New Year in. No doubt the revelry was well underway by now and everyone would be making merry on homemade wine and beer and cider. Seamus Shawe was a good master in plenty of ways and progressive in his views, treating man and beast well, and he always provided plenty of food and drink.
Once past the cottages which had no gardens at the front but long narrow strips of land at the back where each labourer’s wife and children cultivated their own crop of vegetables, the lane divided into two wide tracks. One led to the large sprawling farmhouse with its massive farmyard to the front and enclosed garden to the rear, with a wash-house and separate privy and beyond that an overgrown tangle of lawns and flower beds. The other snaked past a number of barns, the stables and other buildings, including the pigsties. It wound along at the side of fields enclosed by drystone walls until it came to the edge of a steep quarry. Here all the human excrement from the privies at the famhouse and cottages was dumped weekly by a farm cart kept specially for that purpose. Jake had visited other farms with Seamus and he counted himself fortunate there were no foul, stinking cesspools at Clover Farm. In some places the smell from the human waste far exceeded that of the animals.
Taking the right track, he walked along the frozen ridges of dirt and snow to the back of the farmhouse which he entered by way of the kitchen. This room was enormous and the heart of the three-storey building which had been built towards the end of the seventeenth century by an ancestor of the present farmer. As well as the kitchen, there was a pleasant dining room and study on the ground floor, a sitting room and two bedrooms on the first floor and three bedrooms at the top of the house underneath the attic, but it was showing signs of severe neglect. Dust was thick, the stoneflagged floor didn’t look as if it had been scrubbed in weeks, and the black-leaded range was caked in fat and grime. Nevertheless the smell of bacon and burning wood was comforting; it meant home to him.
Jake had first come to live at Clover Farm as a lad of fourteen, initially residing with an old couple in one of the labourers’ cottages before moving to the farmhouse itself shortly after the Shawes’ son was killed at the Somme in 1916. In those days Bess, Seamus’s wife, had been alive and the whole farmhouse had been as clean as a new pin. Enid Osborne, one of the labourers’ wives who cooked and cleaned for the two of them now, was not so particular.
‘You’re back then.’ Seamus was sitting smoking his pipe in front of the glowing fire, his slippered feet resting on the fender and a glass of whisky in one hand.
‘Aye, I’m back.’ Jake smiled down on the shining bald head of the man he thought of as a father. The man who had been
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