Part One: Mouse House

“After you,” said Stuart, holding back a bright shock of gorse. The gate creaked a strange welcome and I stepped through.

A smell of damp earth rose from mossy ground. High stone walls white with lichen enclosed a long orchard of trees laden with apples, some hunched low, others reaching skywards.

“The walls keep the flock out,” said Stuart. “Our trees are mostly Bramley, some Pippin.” He bent down and rubbed a straggly runner. “I planted some cloudberry bushes, but they’ve not taken. Too warm these days. Here, come and meet my favourite creatures.” Stuart led me to a pair of trees even more gnarled than the rest, stretching skeletal arms to one another across the path.

“Our two oldest. We think they were planted a century ago. When I was a kiddie I used to call one Nan and the other Grandpa.” He tapped his knuckles against a knot in one of the trunks. “You any good at cooking?”

“I love making apple pie,” I said. It was true. Despite protests from Dad and me, Granny had our small back garden paved over after Grandad died. She said she couldn’t manage it without him, although I wondered if the real reason was that she wanted to bury his beloved garden with him, like burning a Viking with his longship. Thankfully, the cooking apple tree in its island of soil against the back fence had been spared. Soon it would drop ripe fruit onto the paving slabs, and I’d turn them into apple pies and apple pigs to take to neighbours around our estate. Granny’s favourite was apple butter. I always made that for her with a dash of cider and served it thickly spread on toast.

“The orchard will be yours to see to, as well as the yows in the valley,” said Stuart. “You can harvest the apples next month.”

Sharp gorse pulled at my sleeves as we squeezed out and along the orchard wall, where the hillside plunged down abruptly to the river. Stuart took my hand to guide us down. His touch sent a shiver of pleasure through my fingers and I felt my cheeks turn pink. It was a long time since I’d held hands.  

“Watch your step here,” he said. “The bank has been dodgy since the storms. I lost a yow a few weeks ago, poor thing snapped her neck.” 

“It’s so beautiful, mind,” I said, as we picked our way over rocks and reeds to the valley.  

Stuart glanced at me, pleased. “Yep. Not everyone sees that.”

He kept my hand in his until we came to a narrow river rushing over dark stones. Squatting on the bank, he plunged in his hand. “The Bly Burn. The water comes straight off the moors, a mile upstream.” He stood up, wiping his hand on his trousers. “And that’s the Mouse House. All the families in the village brought their grain here once.”

We sloshed across in our wellies, towards the derelict stone building. Stuart stepped inside and I followed. Vast but hollowed out, light slanted from gaps in the roof and two high windows. 

“The barn owl’s torture chamber,” he said, his voice echoing. He pointed to a high corner where white streaks were most intense. “They don’t build a nest, just find a safe spot.”  

It was soft underfoot and I realised with a start that I was probably standing on dead mice. I bent for a closer look and recoiled at the smell, as sharp as a cat litter tray.

Stuart grinned. “Owl pellets. Bits of chewed up mice and rats he throws up.” He dropped his voice to a whisper. “Look. There he is.”  

A pale figure lay sideways along a crossbeam, blending into the wood. The owl’s moon-shaped face angled towards us, its eyes two dark stripes either side of a beak tucked into creamy feathers. The hunter at rest. What a buzz to see a wild animal on my first day at the farm. Anxious not to wake him, we tiptoed back into the daylight.

Part Two: Granny’s House

Dad hardly ever texted and I had to tear myself away from my new job to meet him at Granny’s.

Need to talk. When’s good?

They were knocking Dad’s street down, a project to demolish hundreds of homes on the south bank of the Tyne. Victorian terraces known as Tyneside flats: one flat upstairs, one downstairs, each with its own front door and long back yard. Had they been in nice parts of Newcastle, the townhouses would have been renovated, but not Dad’s, which was firmly earmarked for slum clearance. His neighbours had all left, their front doors sealed with corrugated steel, GAS OFF spray painted across in bright blue.

Dad hated the flats on the new estate, which had balconies but no garden for his cocker spaniel, his fishing gear and hundreds of plants. He inherited his green fingers from his grandfather, head gardener at a country estate. He’d finish a plum or a date and if he didn’t give the stone to his parakeet or cockatiel, he’d plunge it into a yogurt tub of compost, find just the right spot and get a plant growing within a few weeks.

A man of few words, he never taught his parrots to speak. Instead he imitated their squeaks and trills, and when all three were in high spirits his flat was full of song.

He was the last person left on his street. Last year he’d been interviewed on the local news, when a reporter went door knocking to find residents holding out against the demolition. Granny and I thought Dad came across quite well, although it was a shame they didn’t let him answer the question with a parrot on each shoulder.

“Do nowt and things work out,” he told me once. He called it a theory, as if he was imparting hard-won wisdom, but it was just his nature. In any case, he wasn’t hurting anyone, holding out there in that isolated flat, the one good tooth surrounded by the rotten. Dad would never hurt anyone. He might not hear them, that’s all. He might choose not to open letter after letter from the council, choose not to answer the same daft question from Granny. You could call it letting things be. Or you could call it neglect. It’s up to you.

I knew what he wanted to talk about. The three streets behind his had already been demolished. Rosebay willowherb swayed on beds of rubble where lives had been lived.

I got off the bus in Heddon-on-the-Wall and skipped over the ruins of the Roman wall at the top of our estate. I perched on a circular sentry post, danced my legs down to my knees, tapping my feet on stones worn smooth over almost two thousand years.

Looking south into our 1960s estate, I imagined myself a sentry guard in this northernmost outpost of the vast Roman empire. Over my shoulder lay the wild lands of the Scottish Celts. The wall that once cut the Scots from their pasture was nothing but a majestic relic of a lost world order.

They created a wasteland and called it peace.

I whispered the words from Tacitus. It was a Scots chieftain who said it, rallying his men on the eve of battle against an invading Roman legion. They were doomed from the start.

When I got home, my taciturn father was sitting on the front step, watching something.

“Mason bee,” said Dad.

The bee looked too big for the hole but kept pushing, sun bouncing off its fuzzy backside as it strained to get into a gap between two bricks.

“Solitary bee that,” he said. “Won’t bother you.”

We went through the garage to the garden, dragging two wicker chairs into the sun. It was better described as a yard now Granny had created her own wasteland by having it paved over, but I still thought of it as it once was.

“How’s the new job?” Dad asked.

“Mint. The shepherd calls me little sister.”

Dad raised an eyebrow.

“As my nickname, like,” I said. It sounded better when Stuart said it. 

“Seems like you’ve got yourself into a nice place,” Dad said. “I caught a rainbow trout on the Bly Burn once. I think you helped me tie the fly.”

We didn’t say anything for a bit. A plane rumbled overhead on its way to Newcastle Airport.

“I need to move back in now, love. You know I do.”

I studied a paving stone.

“The council gave us twenty eight days in September and that’s been and gone.”

“There are only two bedrooms here.”

“Aye, well that’s okay.”

“Granny’s got so much stuff. There’s all Grandad’s in the loft.”

“Most of it could go. We’ll manage.”

He lifted his flat cap, scratched his head, put the cap back on again. “She’s been gone six months, pet.”

If I spoke I was going to cry. Did he have to rub it in? The bungalow was Dad’s birthright, but I had nowhere else to go.

Part Three: Storm Rachel

The month after I started work at the farm, the fiercest storm of the autumn set in. Rain hammered against the windows as my bus rounded fields and villages.

The Bly Burn was a swollen torrent, flooding the old mill race. The Mouse House was knee-deep, water sliding down the inside walls, the barn owl hunched on a rafter.

Stuart was on the top fell on the quad bike, where yows sheltered from the gale on the lee side of every tree and hollow. Rain whipped into my eyes as I took hay to the tup and checked fence posts were secure.

The weather girl on the lunchtime news said it was an ex-tropical cyclone. “The remnants of Hurricane Rachel are battering Northumberland, with gusts up to 80mph on the hills,” she shouted above a howling wind, red raincoat slick, the Tyne Bridge behind her. “It’s the latest in a wild hurricane season, with record high temperatures in the North Atlantic driving torrential rain.”

Pushing into the humid wind on my way to salvage windfall apples, I heard frantic bleating.

A yow shifted from hoof to hoof on the waterlogged slope along the orchard wall. When she pressed one way, she scraped the stones, while on the other side the land fell away to the flooded valley. The bank was in a much worse state than when I first came, hollowed out where storms had bitten chunks away.

I dropped my basket and reached for my phone, raindrops blurring the screen. “Stuart, please come,” I shouted.

Kneeling, I reached for the yow’s ankle, but she backed away. The wind had picked up and it snatched her bleats away into the valley.

Stuart ran towards us. “Here, she’ll come to me,” he yelled, against the wind. He flattened himself into the mud and shuffled along the ridge on his stomach. His hands shook, eyes fixed on the yow rather than the drop as he grabbed for her horns, fingers slipping in the driving rain. “Oh God,” he groaned. “This bloody bank.”

The yow lifted a hoof to come towards him, but as she did so, the earth that she’d already worked soft crumbled from under her. There was a bleat like a scream as she rolled towards the rushing burn, thirty feet below.

Stuart and I raced down by the sloping route, sliding in the mud.

“She’s there!” I shouted.

The yow thrashed, struggling to stay above water. Stuart threw off his heavy coat and waded in, lunging for her as she was swept downriver. He swayed, and for a second looked about to go under, but recovered and dived headlong into the water, catching her up with swift strokes. They both disappeared under the surface.

I pounded down the riverbank after them.

At last, he emerged, holding her under the forelegs, and dragged her to the bank.

The yow stood up, dazed and dripping. Stuart bent to check her, water streaming off his shoulders. “A graze on her leg, looks like that’s it,” he said. “Fleece is a canny good shock absorber.” He grinned, running a hand through his wet hair.

By the time I came back with antiseptic, sheep nuts and a towel, he’d coaxed her to the bottom field.

“Mental storm, man.” He knelt to see to the graze. “We never used to get rain like this.”

I flicked back my soaking plait and hugged the yow with the towel. Across her back, our foreheads touched for the briefest of moments. His eyes met mine. “Having fun yet, little sister?” he asked. Mud streaked his smiling face, his shirt clinging to him.

“Whey aye, big brother.” A jolt went through me as cold as river water.

Big brother.

Who was I trying to fool?

I picked my way across the mud back to the farmhouse, as unsteady as a yow trapped on a precipice.

Ex-hurricane Rachel cleared overnight. Sunlight poured through the windows on the first bus from Granny’s. As soon as I got to the farm I went back to the orchard to salvage windfall apples. I found Stuart hammering in a post, fencing off the drop.

“Hiya, little sis,” he called, as I came out with my laden basket. He lay on his back, securing a thin line of barbed wire. “Apple pie for tea?” He pulled a cute face, a little lad asking for a treat.

“Okay, big brother, will do.” I tried to sound cheerful, but could not stop my voice from shaking.

“With custard?” he called. “Shy bairns get nowt, right?”

As dusk fell, Stuart lit a campfire on the old millstone. We sat side by side on two logs. The evening was mild and clear, Orion’s sword bright above us.

He gave my shoulder a nudge with his. “Owt wrong? You’re quiet.”

I shook my head, shivering despite the fire. I was thinking about Granny and Dad. What must it feel like for Stuart, to own the land he lived on? Envy twisted in me.

He bent towards the flames to stoke the fire with a stick, half of his face lit up. “You usually cheer me up. Less quiet with you here.” He put on an old-fashioned Northumberland rasp. “I like your pretty ways.”

A plume of wood smoke stung my eyes.

“Hey, you’re not crying are you?” he asked.

“No way.” But a cloud of sadness had settled.

His shirt was open at the neck and the fire lit up a narrow scar along his collarbone. Barbed wire, a fall from a tree? Hardly thinking, I ran my finger along it.

A flash of surprise crossed his face.

I looked away. Then I reached for his hand.

His fingers squeezed mine. His hand felt warm and broad. “Don’t go back to your gran’s tonight,” he said.

I pictured the lonely tree at Granny’s, dropping its apples onto unforgiving slabs. Then Stuart’s Nan Nan and Grandpa trees, stretching arms to each other in the orchard for a hundred years, and I gripped him to me as tightly as I could. His hair smelled of tobacco, now tinged with woodsmoke, but there was a good smell too, just of him.

“Let’s go inside,” I whispered.

“Howay then, Rachel,” he said, in a voice as hushed as mine, although there was no one to hear us, only the peaceful, scattered flock.

Shy bairns get nowt, Granny would say.

British landscape climate fiction desire family inheritance literary fiction Northumberland rural fiction sheep farming storm weather