“That’s sense, that is,” replied Jock contentedly, “but likely if you’d gone he’d have been asking rent for his buildings: I knew he was short of labour and we fixed it so there was no money in it. I can see his beasts haven’t broken out and that while I’m along there foddering our own cattle.”
3
Five minutes later Macdonald was striding over the rough fell which lay between his boundary walls and the fences of High Garth. The two steadings were nearly a mile apart: it gave Macdonald immense satisfaction to see his own well-tilled fields, enclosed by drystone walls which were now in excellent condition, and to compare them with the rougher pastures of High Garth: here, most of the walls had gaps in them, the gaps closed by posts and barbed wire—a botched-up job, Jock called it, but Jock was a skilled waller.
Macdonald knew all about High Garth because he’d asked Giles Hoggett about it. The land and buildings were the property of a very old man named Nathaniel Borwick. Nat Borwick had been born at High Garth Hall in the year 1873: he had worked there as unpaid labourer to his father until the latter’s death in 1918, when Nat had inherited the land and had got married. (He hadn’t been able to get married before, his father wouldn’t allow it, said Giles Hoggett.) From 1918 until the 1940’s Nat Borwick and his wife and son had farmed High Garth, living in the gaunt stone farmhouse on the fell in conditions akin to those of medieval peasants, save for the two amenities of glazed windows and chimneys. Nat’s son, Sam, had run away in 1942 and joined the Lancashire Fusiliers, and never been heard of since, according to Giles Hoggett. In 1948, Nat Borwick, then seventy-five years of age, had “given it best” and had gone to live, with his wife, in a cottage in Kirkham, in the river valley. Nat had refused to sell his farm: he maintained obstinately that his son Sam would come back one day, and Sam would farm High Garth: Borwicks had farmed it for three hundred years and Nat meant them to go on farming it. The land would have gone back to the fell had it been left untilled and ungrazed, so Nat rented the land to Matthew Brough, a prosperous farmer in the valley, and Brough used it as grazing land for beef cattle and sheep, mowing the meadows and housing the hay in the barn for winter fodder. The house, meantime, was uninhabited, its windows shuttered and barred, its doors bolted and padlocked, waiting until Sam Borwick came back to live in it. Since everybody was certain that Sam never would come back, it looked as though the house would never be lived in again—and Macdonald had his own private and personal reasons for taking an interest in it.
Macdonald strode on over the fell and turned along the track which led past the gaunt stone house to the fold-yard and buildings. The gate had long since fallen, the wood rotted away from the hinges; the flagstones and cobbles of the yard were overgrown with tussocky grass, bramble, and bracken and gorse flourishing in the cracks and crevices. It was a sad sight, but the stone house and outbuildings still stood foursquare and sturdy, as though waiting for an owner to put them to rights; there was nothing ruinous about the place: it was neglect, not decay, that made it melancholy.
Passing the front of the house, Macdonald walked the length of the barn to the shippon entrance at the gable-end: he could hear Lassie, the sheep dog, barking, and Jock cursing her; no farmer lets his dog bark itself into spasms of excitement, a sheep dog has to be obedient. There were four young Galloway steers in the standings, fine young beasts, which Jock and Betty had bought. Jock had to take them out to the trough in the fold-yard to water them, and he mucked out the shippon while the beasts drank their fill, watched over by Lassie, so that they didn’t break away and go galloping over the fell. Then Jock forked down hay from the loft above the shippon and cut up some mangles in an ancient cutter which he had found and put to rights.
While Jock was busy, Macdonald wandered round the great barn and inspected some of the rusting implements which Nat Borwick had left there. After Lassie had driven the cattle back to their stalls, the dog raced round the barn barking, until Jock called her to heel again.
“ ’Tis the rats she’s after,” he explained. “She went fair mad when I first brought her here; she’s caught a lot of ’em. I’m going to bring Tom and Lucy along here, champion ratters they are.”
Tom and Lucy were cats, real farm cats, who hunted for their living and brought in rats, mice, and rabbits to consume outside Betty’s kitchen door, where a bowl of milk was put out for them morning and evening after milking.
Having admired the sleek black cattle, Macdonald turned and looked round the barn again.
“It’s a fine barn,” he said. “It doesn’t seem any the worse for being neglected all these years.”
“Aye, ’tis a good barn,” agreed Jock. “The doors want painting—Mr. Brough hasn’t bothered—and I’ll bring some lime along for the walls and bostings. You see, I don’t reckon Mr. Brough wants the barn no longer. Labour costs so much, ’tisn’t worth his while to send a man up all this way twice a day to fodder and water the beasts: pays him better to winter his young stock down there, where he can keep an eye on his hired men.” Jock grinned cheerfully, and added: “Suits us: we can do with more standing room for
