The Stranger House. Reginald Hill
you don’t let go.
‘Hi. Sorry to disturb your drinking, but my name’s Sam Flood and it could be that my grandmother who was also called Sam, that’s Samantha, Flood came from Illthwaite. It would be back in the spring of 1960 she left. I just wondered if any of you who were around back then could recall anyone of that name round here.’
There. Cue for deluge of information. Long pause.
Then a voice, upstage, left. ‘Weren’t there a Larry Flood up Egremont way, used to win the gurning at the Crab Fair wi’out needing to pull a face?’
Second voice, upstage right. ‘Nay, tha’s thinkin’ of Harry Hood.’
Chorus. ‘Aye, Harry Hood. That were Harry Hood.’
Why was she thinking of this in terms of theatre? Sam asked herself.
Because that’s how it felt. Like a performance.
‘If any of you do recall owt, let me know to pass it on,’ declared Mrs Appledore.
The hubbub resumed as she turned to Sam and said, ‘Sorry, dear.’
‘No problem,’ said Sam. ‘What’s gurning?’
‘It’s making ugly faces through a horse’s collar. There’s a competition for it at the Egremont Crab Fair. Thought everyone knew that.’
‘I must have forgotten,’ said Sam. ‘A prize for being ugly? Is that where they give prizes for telling lies too?’
‘No,’ said the landlady indignantly. ‘That’s not Egremont. That’s at Santon Bridge. Thought everyone knew that too.’
‘My memory!’ said Sam. ‘I’m off to bed now.’
‘Hope you sleep well. Don’t worry about laying over. The way these boards creak, I’ll hear you when you’re up.’
‘Great. By the way, Mrs Appledore, I don’t think I’ll be wanting anything cooked in the morning. Way I feel now, a fox’s breakfast will do me fine.’
‘A fox’s breakfast? And that ‘ud be…?’
‘A piss and a good look round. Thought everyone knew that.’
Be polite to the Poms. But don’t let the buggers get on top of you. Pa’s last words at the airport.
We’re keeping our end up so far, Pa, she thought as she headed out of the door.
Mr Melton, presumably just returned from the Gents, was in the hallway.
‘Goodnight,’ she said. ‘Thanks for the beer. I’ve left you one in the till.’
‘No need,’ he said. ‘But kind. I understand you are seeking for some local connection with your family.’
‘That’s right. I thought my gran might be from these parts, but I’m beginning to think I might have got it wrong.’
He said, ‘And when did she leave England?’
‘March 1960. She was still a kid.’
‘A kid? In 1960?’ He looked at her doubtfully.
He might be dotty but he could still do arithmetic, she thought approvingly.
‘Yeah, I know,’ she said. ‘She got pregnant not long after she arrived in Oz. My dad was born in September 1961.’
‘I see,’ he said. ‘Interesting. But I’m keeping you from your bed, and this isn’t the place to talk. If you care to drop in on me tomorrow, Miss Flood, perhaps I can assist you with your enquiries.’
For some reason the phrase seemed to amuse him and he repeated it.
‘Yes, assist you with your enquiries. I have…connections. I live at Candle Cottage, beyond the church. I’m at home most of the time. Goodnight to you now.’
He went back into the bar.
Funny folk! thought Sam as she climbed the stairs. Two invites in a night. Maybe that was the automatic next step if you survived being pushed off a ladder! Anything was possible in a place where Death had his own door, the sausages were six feet long, and they held competitions for telling lies and making faces through a horse’s collar…
She pushed open her bedroom door and all thought of funny folk fled from her mind.
Someone had been poking around her things. This wasn’t feeling but fact. Her eidetic memory didn’t only work with the printed page. A postcard home she’d been scribbling was a couple of inches to the left of where she’d set it down on the dressing table, one of the drawers which had protruded slightly was now completely flush, and her rucksack leaned against the wall at an altered angle. And it wasn’t just Mrs Appledore tidying up. The intruder had clearly been inside the rucksack as well as out.
She thought of going downstairs to make a fuss. But there was nothing missing, and anyone in the bar could have come up, or someone who just came into the pub.
She brushed her teeth, got undressed, pulled on the old Melbourne University T-shirt she slept in, and climbed on to the high old-fashioned bed. Usually she launched herself into sleep on a sea of maths. She’d started age seven with an old edition of a book called Pillow Problems which Gramma Ada had picked up in a second-hand shop. In it the guy who wrote the Alice books laid out a variety of calculations he occupied his mind with when he couldn’t sleep. By the time she was twelve she’d moved beyond Carroll’s problems, but the principle remained. Nowadays she usually played with things like Goldbach’s Conjecture which required her to hold huge numbers in her head.
Tonight, however, she turned to the measured nineteenth-century prose of Peter K. Swinebank in search of a soporific.
She found the page she’d reached in the bar and reread the last line:
Be advised, it is not a tale for the faint-hearted.
Sam paused and consulted her heart. No sign of faintness there, though a little lower down there was an awareness that sometime in the not too distant future her consumption of all that excellent beer was going to require another trip to the bathroom.
‘OK, Rev. Peter K. Swinebank,’ she said. ‘I’m ready for you. Do your worst!’
And turned the page.
Some time towards the end of the sixteenth century, a waif boy was taken into the care of the Gowders of Foulgate Farm whose descendants still live and work in the valley.
The boy’s age is variously reported as from twelve to sixteen and his origins have been just as widely speculated. Some suggested he was the bastard child of one of the local gentry, kept locked away from public gaze for shame these many years till finally he escaped. Equally popular was the notion that he was a child abducted by the fairies in infancy and returned when puberty rendered him of no further interest to the little people. Some even asserted that he was Robin Goodfellow himself. Such theories at least have the merit of facing up to the supernatural elements of the legend without equivocation.
To my mind the most likely explanation (supported by references to his swarthy colouring and lack of English) is that this youth was in fact a scion of that strange nomadic group misnamed Egyptians who had become increasingly prevalent in Britain during the past hundred years. Perhaps he had been ejected from his tribe because of some fraction of their strange and pagan law. Being young, he was likely to be much more fluent in the Romany tongue than in the English vernacular.
Where all versions agree is that, by taking him in, the Gowders displayed an unwonted degree of Christian charity. Though since somewhat declined, in those days the Gowders of Foulgate were by local standards a well-to-do and powerful family.