The Lost Guide to Life and Love (13 page)

‘Sounds like my mum.’

‘And is she—I’m sorry, we lost touch many years ago when our mothers died—isn’t she the one they call Fairtrade Frankie?’

‘That’s her,’ I said.

‘I thought it must be. I didn’t know her married name but when I see her on television I always think, ‘There’s an Allen. Same with you, though you have a lot more of the look and the build too. I’m Kate by the way.’

I felt unduly pleased to think I had a real family. For so long it had just been me and my mum and I always envied other people their brothers and sisters, uncles, aunts, grandparents and cousins. The nearest I had to family was Bill and, lovely though he was, that still left quite a gap.

A big four-by-four pulled up in the yard with a toot, and out tumbled a boy and a girl aged about twelve, clearly brother and sister, though the boy had the same fair skin and copper hair of his mother and older sister, while the girl had a mop of dark curly hair and bright pink cheeks.

‘School taxi,’ said Matty. ‘The twins. Ruth and Isaac, known as Zak.’

The twins shouted as they came in through the back kitchen, dumping coats and bags as they headed straight for the cake tin.

‘This is our cousin Tilly,’ said Matt.

Zak and Ruth stopped for a second, looked, smiled, said ‘Hello’ and carried on raiding the cake tin.

‘It’s stopped raining so I’m just going up to see Snowball,’ said Ruth.

‘Well, don’t go far. It’s very wet. Keep to the tracks,’ said her mum.

‘OK,’ and she was gone.

‘I’m going to help Tom on the van,’ said Zak.

‘But he’s not home yet. Hasn’t he got football or something? That’s why he took the motorbike.’

‘Football, yes, but he’s not staying long so I’ll go up and get started. Don’t worry—’ he said as his mother shot him a fierce look—‘I won’t do anything that Tom hasn’t said I can do. And yes I’ll be careful and yes I’ll put everything back and yes, I’ll put my overalls on. And yes—’

‘Go!’ said his mother laughing, and turned to me. ‘Will you stay for your tea and meet the rest of this family?’

‘Yes, please, I would like that, very much indeed.’ I had been standing near the Aga and realised there was steam coming gently from my jeans.

A small motorbike buzzed into the yard. The boy riding it raised an arm in triumph as he nosed in just ahead of a Land Rover. He took off his helmet and shouted something to the driver getting out of the Land Rover and I thought I was seeing double. As they walked, laughing, into the house together it was clear they were father and son—two tall men, one broad-shouldered and solid, the younger still slim as a reed, yet both with dark curly hair, pink cheeks and open, cheerful expressions.

‘Hello. So who have we here?’ asked the older man, padding into the kitchen in thick socks and rootling with his feet under the Aga for a pair of bright red slippers.

‘This is Tilly Flint, a long-lost cousin that Matty brought in from the rain. And this,’ she turned to me, ‘is my husband Guy and out there is our son Tom.’

Tom was still in the back kitchen struggling into a pair of overalls, his bag abandoned in the corner. He came and shook hands. ‘Hello, Tilly Flint,’ he said pleasantly, but clearly anxious to be gone as he glanced at his mother. ‘I’m going up to the workshop to do a bit on the van while it’s still light. I’ll do homework after tea.’

His mother nodded. He smiled at me again and vanished.

‘He wants it ready in time for his seventeenth birthday,’ explained Kate. ‘And it will be.’

Guy was beaming at me. ‘Now then,’ he said, in an accent a lot stronger than his wife’s, ‘another long-lost cousin, eh? We’ve had a fair few of those coming through here over t’years. Another Allen, are you?’

‘My great-grandmother was.’

‘Ah well, there’s plenty of ‘em around, especially in America. For every one we sent over there, I reckon there must be thirty coming back. You’re definitely one of the bonnier ones. Well, I’ll catch up with you a bit later, if you don’t mind. Will you give me a hand with the beasts, Matt?’

Matt went back into the outer kitchen, climbed back into her boots, over-trousers and waterproof and followed her dad out across the yard.

‘Yes, there must be Allens in every corner of the world,’ said Kate, as she started tackling a pile of potatoes. ‘And most of them doing well for themselves. Granny Allen made sure of that. She might have been a tough old bird but she did her best by all the children.’

‘Why did they all go away?’

‘No work here. The lead mines were a huge industry, had been since Roman times, but they dwindled and died. And there was nothing else.’

‘But what about farming?’

‘Ha! Once there were more than twenty families living in this valley. Now, apart from a few holiday cottages, there’s only us. We use all the land that the twenty families had between them—two and a half thousand acres, a lot of land—and it barely keeps us going. Oh, it’s a great life, a marvellous life, I can’t imagine any other. But it’s not an easy one. And Granny Allen all those years ago saw the way
it was going and she encouraged her children and grandchildren to seek work wherever they could find it—coal mines, iron works, America, Australia.’

‘My grandmother was in service in London before the war.’

‘That’s right. Two sisters want into service. One was in Durham, but the other went to Newcastle and then down to London. It’s what lots of the girls had to do. Their only chance of work.’

‘But not everyone went. Otherwise you wouldn’t be here.’

‘No. One or two of the lads stayed locally and some of the girls came back to marry. My grandfather kept the farm going, and then my father. I left, of course, for college. And stayed in London for a while afterwards. Could have stayed forever really, and that would have been the end of the farm. But I’d already met Guy and it seemed right that we should stay here. The house was dreadful! Practically falling down because my parents had had no money to do anything with it. So every modelling job I did, I thought, ‘Well, that’s a new bath,’ or, ‘That’s the windows fixed,’ or, ‘That’s the Aga.

‘I suppose I was just one of those like my grandfather, who just couldn’t leave this place, however hard it was. A lot of the lead miners had come here from other parts of the country, but I think we must always have been here. Even though the estate owns most of the land hereabouts, we own our house and a hundred acres—we rent the rest—so I think we must have been here way, way back, at least to the fifteen hundreds and possibly before. Like the sheep, we’re hefted to this dale.’

‘
Hefted?
‘

‘Sheep roam but they always come back to their own territory, their own patch of land where they know where they belong. That’s why there are no fences on the moors.
Sheep are free to go where they like, because they’ll always come back.’

Hefted.
It was a good word, a good thought.

‘But then it makes life tricky,’ Mrs Alderson went on. ‘People like our Matt who go away to work but still want to be in the dale. Always a hard one, that.’

Tea was a great family affair. Kate produced another dish of the same casserole. It was lamb slowly cooked with root vegetables: rich, sticky and full of flavour. Everyone ate huge amounts, even Matty. Not many models would dare eat that much. There again, I didn’t suppose many models would spend their spare time doing ten-hour shifts on a farm.

At first I found it easiest to concentrate on the food. I was a bit overwhelmed by the sheer noise, the chat and teasing, the banter and bickering of family life. The cheerful chaos was so different from the meals of my childhood and adolescence—just my mother and me: congenial enough but a lot quieter than life with the Aldersons.

Ruth was trying to convince Matty to take her back to London with her. ‘I could be the latest modelling sensation,’ said Ruth persuasively, leaning her elbows on the table with her knife and fork clutched firmly in her hands. ‘You could take me with you on shoots and photographers would say, “Who is that beautiful child? She has such an
amazing
face it positively sings to the camera. We must use her.” And then I would earn megabucks and could buy Snowball a smart new saddle. What do you say, Matt?’

‘I say that you should wait a few years and make the most of having Snowball and space and time to ride him,’ said Matt.

‘And if you’re not going to eat that, I shall,’ said Zak, his fork poised over Ruth’s plate. She snatched it and tucked in quickly, thoughts of stardom temporarily forgotten.

Kate dished out second helpings and, in the lull, tried to bring me into the conversation. ‘So you work for a food magazine do you, Tilly?’ she asked. I explained a bit about what I was doing, which seemed to meet with general approval. ‘We need people to take more interest in where their food comes from, to realise the work that goes in to doing it properly,’ said Guy. And Ruth was wonderfully impressed when she heard who my mum was.

‘You mean I’m related to Fairtrade Frankie? That is
so-o
cool,’ she said. ‘Why are you working on a magazine? Don’t you want to work with your mum?’

‘No, not really,’ I said, ‘and it would be tricky. It’s not a question of just helping out in the coffee shops any more—I’ve done plenty of that. It’s big business now and very much Mum’s baby.’

Faced with their cheerful confidence, I couldn’t quite explain that, lovely though my mum was, she always made me feel so
inadequate
somehow. She wouldn’t trust me near her company. Fine when I was a student waiting or washing up, but actually involved? Making decisions? No, I couldn’t do that.

‘Anyway,’ said Guy comfortingly, ‘you need to make your own way in the world. You might come to it one day. Like one of these might come to the farm.’

‘There are far easier ways to make a living,’ said Kate.

‘Aye, there are,’ said Guy, sighing for a moment, but then he grinned at his wife. ‘But you wouldn’t change it, love, would you? Not the twelve-hour days, seven days a week, fifty-two weeks a year. Why, you could prance around all day in fancy frocks having your photo taken like our Matt does now. All champagne cocktails and parties and whatever other nonsense she gets up to. But why would you want that when you could be up at dawn sorting out the mole traps in the dark, or on the fellside, foddering, with
a nice easterly wind blowing round your back? No contest, is there?’

Kate laughed. ‘No contest.’

‘Well, I shall be a model too,’ said Ruth confidently. ‘Or I might be an actress. I haven’t quite decided yet.’ I loved her confidence, and envied it too.

We finished the meal with a thick creamy rice pudding with a swirl of sharp, tangy sauce. I couldn’t place the flavour.

‘There’s apple in there, but something else. Not blackberries? I asked.

‘Crab apples and elderberries,’ smiled Kate. ‘We don’t have many trees round here, but at least those we have produce something useful.’

‘And delicious,’ I said, already thinking of a ‘Food for free’ feature, with lovely pictures of elderberries and those small crab apples on the tree with the red ribbon.

After we’d cleared the table, loaded the dishwasher and had a cup of tea, the twins disappeared to do their homework, still arguing as they thundered up the stairs. Tom and Guy went to do a last round of the animals. Kate offered me the computer to check my email. ‘We’ve got broadband down here, but it took a call from our MP before we got it.’ There on the wall in the hall was yet another sampler.
Waste not, want not.

‘Where
did
all those samplers come from?’ I asked. ‘Everywhere I go I’m faced with improving texts. Here, up in the cottage, and there’s at least three in the pub.’

Kate laughed. ‘You’ll find them in just about every house in the dale. That’s Granny Allen for you. She was apparently horrified at the shiftlessness of some of the families up here, especially when times were hard. If the girls could stitch and sew neatly, then they stood a better chance of getting a decent job in service. So, as if she didn’t already
have more than enough to do, she started sewing lessons, first of all as part of the Sunday school, and then for some of the older girls too. God knows where she found the time. But the samplers were a sort of instant reference that the girls could show to potential employers. And, being Granny Allen, of course the mottoes had to be of a strictly improving nature.’

‘So they must have been, well, I don’t know, the equivalent of showing someone a diploma or something.’

‘Exactly. For the girls seeking jobs, a neatly stitched sampler would have been as good as a couple of A-levels. Brilliant idea really. Stitch your own reference.’

‘Granny Allen was pretty special.’

‘Very special—even if she did look a bit of a battleaxe.’

I quickly checked my mail. Damn.

‘Something wrong?’ asked Kate, who was sorting out some papers on the other side of the desk.

‘Just two people that I’ve been trying to get hold of. They’ve come back to me at last, but they’ve both suggested the end of next week. And I should be back in London by then. One of them’s a monk—he runs the orchards at the abbey—and says he’s running a retreat so it’s a bit difficult to take time out for the media. Fair enough, I suppose. It’s hard to argue with a monk.’

I stared at the screen helplessly. I wanted to see both these people as I thought they would make good features. ‘I suppose I could go down and come back up again for one night.’

‘Do you have to go back yet?’

‘Well, yes, though I suppose…’ I realised that I wasn’t ready to go back yet. I liked this place, felt sort of at home here, even though it was totally different from anything I’d ever known. Besides, I’d just discovered this amazing family I didn’t know I had and I longed for a greater chance
of family life—now I’d almost got used to the noise. ‘I suppose I could stay for a little while longer. The magazine wouldn’t mind because I’d only be out doing features in any case. Ah, but I’ve only booked your cottage till Saturday morning…’

‘That doesn’t matter. Look, we’ve got no one booked in until New Year. Why don’t you stay on for a week or two? Until you’ve got your interviews done? After all, you’re family. If I can’t put up a cousin for a week or two, then it’s a bad job.’