The Levels Read online

  ‌1

  I riddled the stove, stoked it, and carried the ash to the heap. A breeze came off the sea, miles away, a flooding wind.

  I stood on the back porch with a cup of tea. My mother and father took up all the room in the house, we hadn’t had breakfast, they were washing. The moor stretched out; here and there, rows of pollard willow, the odd cow, Chedzoy’s whistle and his dog. Dogs remind me of Dick. Dick and I used to stand on one side of the river, throwing stones at Chedzoy’s father’s cows. Old man Chedzoy watched them bolting up the bank, and came to see us throwing, but he couldn’t do anything but swear, we were on one side of the river and he was on the other.

  I carried my tea to the workshop, and soaked enough sorted willow for the morning. Some people soak the night before and mellow their rods under sacking, but they work as well straight out of the tank; besides, some mellowed stuff goes mouldy. I was by the door, staring at a tree I’d planted against the wall, but it looked dead. Though it looked dead months ago, I can’t dig it up; I get a feeling that something might happen.

  ‘Bacon?’

  ‘Two.’

  ‘Let the chickens out!’

  ‘Now?’

  ‘Now!’

  I could hear them in the coop, scratching at the floor and beating their wings against the perches. They went wild when I let them out, and though they knew I wasn’t going to feed them, they bustled around my feet, while I tried to get back, through the run, to the gate. I didn’t talk to them, who feels like talking? I didn’t look for eggs. I didn’t give them any straw, anything at all. I just left them and went in for breakfast.

  Eaten in silence, usually, my father slopping his bacon almost damn raw down his neck, greasy and dripping, almost too much to sit by. From my chair I could see Chedzoy in the distance, ducking in and out of his parlour, the gentle buzz and pump of the machines floating in the wind. A pair of ducks flew towards the river and disappeared behind a stand of poplar trees. My mother told me always to wash the dishes before the gravy dried, else the devil will come for it, so now I do the washing up without thinking, though I know I’m doing it against myself.

  It’s spring. In the meadow beyond the bottom of our orchard, the first bulldozers are finding the ground firm enough to perch on and rip out a line of trees. Chedzoy will find the luxury of an extra quarter of an acre cancelled out when he’s down there next winter with a shovel, trying to clear the rhine (a drainage ditch). The roots of the trees keep the bank from collapsing; he gets rid of them and the devil will eat his gravy. Tough lumps on Chedzoy. I threw stones at his father’s cows, but I’m sorry for that.

  My father sat in a chair by the vegetable garden while I went to the workshop. Years ago, he shovelled tons of muck into the ground, cart load and cart load. On a still day you could smell Blackwood in Langport. The patch sits off its original level like a mattress, vegetable seeds just have to look at it. It’s like this: two plants of the potato Arran Banner filled a log basket. He said, ‘Come here, pick him up and crack your spine!’

  He grew a parsnip for show, Tender and True, two foot and six inches tip to top. He made a hole with a crowbar, three foot deep, filled it with compost, and the seed just saw green lights all the way down. To get it out in one piece he dug a small grave right round it, and treated it like a baby. He washed it in warm water with a lint-free cloth, and wrapped it in a sheet for the night before the show. He won second, but you couldn’t eat it, nobody wanted it, and it stank like a fish as it rotted out back.

  The chickens’ mash has never been flooded because my mother keeps it in a bin, raised on blocks against vermin. They recognized the sound of her footsteps, and the galvanized lid banging open against the wall, and started a row. I fetched the willow from the tank, drained it off on my bench, and sat down to work. I have rods tied in small bundles of 31 cut rods and enough uncut stuff for making what I call a stake-up. I’ve done all this cutting and tying the night before. I used to soak all sorts, like my father, but found lately I could sit in the evening and save time for the morning by sorting the stuff then. I don’t know why I save the time when I only use that time to save more time to never do the things I want anymore. My father moans about it, but what have I got to do now? He doesn’t work anymore. His back’s gone.

  I work in silence. I listen for the pump pump of Chedzoy’s machines to clack off. I’m ramming the pointed ends of the rods into a base. The door is open. I can see the orchard. She lived in that direction. Imagine what I feel like. I have a good memory. I remember everything. Clear as a bell, ringing over the moor on bird’s wings. My memory. I work without thinking. My mind wanders. I think about people who visit. I have interested women here, watching, from that association or that guild. They are the kind of people who first came when my father asked them years ago, and I have inherited them. He comes and stands behind them in the door, but can’t be bothered to say anything, who can blame him? Why he ever asked them is a mystery. They have nothing in common with us, other than the word ‘common’, which they think we are. They always ask how many baskets I make in a day and say how nice the workshop smells. I have to tell them about willow. They bore so quickly. They always look lost between something they forgot to do when they were younger and something terrible that is going to happen one day. I try to say things that will make them think I’ve wits, and some things old basketmakers say, like ‘Never stand to the right of a basket-maker’. I tease them. They wear work shirts with ironcreased sleeves. They never buy anything, though say they’re lovely and I’m so clever. One or two ask to have a go, but I tell them I can’t stop. They will crouch and stare at me.

  In the morning, the sun climbs higher in the spring day, it flattens the lands so the trees seem to disappear into the blueness between ground and sky. A haze hangs so close you could touch it. I prick the stakes up. I put a hoop of cane over them, and a brick on the base, lower my seat so I’m sitting on the floor, and pick four of the uncut rods for the first group of four. I weave them in front of three stakes and behind one. When I’m halfway round the base, I add another four rods, when the first four are woven out, I weave these out to do the same with four sets of three rods, and bang them all down with an iron. This is a wale.

  The workshop is dark, and cool, on purpose. It has one window, facing south, and the door looks west onto the orchard. Herons often fly over the garden and past the window to the rhine and hardly move all day. Then, in the evening, they’ll stand in the river pretending to look straight ahead, feeling for the movements of fish through their feet. The river is called The Isle. I got up and went to the kitchen for some tea.

  ‘What you doing?’ My father, still sat in a chair, watching the vegetable garden.

  ‘Slocombe’s.’

  ‘All right?’

  I walked past him, into the house, and filled the kettle.

  ‘Twenty to go,’ I shouted.

  ‘He collecting?’

  I made the tea while we carried on this conversation, which was about Slocombe being tight as well as bent.

  ‘You made me one?’ My mother banged the front door shut, I heard the egg man’s van in the road. Her smell in the hall; she smells of Ajax and chickens — bomb material.

  ‘In the pot, got to work ...’

  I still think about Muriel. I remember her walking in the orchard. I saw her on the river bank with a book. She sat in the grass and smoothed her dress down her knees. Because it was summer, many butterflies flew around her, and swallows wove arcs the size of storms in the sky. I saw her on a bicycle, along the lane, going to the post office. I saw her bent over a tap in the yard at Drove House, cleaning her teeth. She drove an ambulance. Dick said that was bloody stupid for a girl.

  I just did more stake-ups and wales, half an hour before lun
ch my father wandered down. It’s his business, so he pretended to pretend to do something useful. It’s a joke, but I don’t mind, he can come up, it’s his workshop, he taught me, I like his company. When I was a boy, we got into real trouble, here and at other places. He didn’t care then, but of course he never had my reasons. My mother has always had him.

  ‘You’re quiet,’ he said.

  ‘Problem for you?’

  ‘No.’

  He sat down with a clunk, his back’s gone, the doctor ordered him an iron vest, but he wouldn’t look at it. A basketmaker’s vest.

  ‘You’re quieter than ever, it was never like this.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘Your mother said something.’

  ‘A miracle!’

  ‘Don’t talk like that! If she said something she’s been thinking!’ I didn’t need this, I was tired, didn’t want shouting, much, so I said, ‘I’m all right,’ and ‘just let me get on.’

  Dick turned up, looking for his dog, Hector.

  ‘Found him?’ I said.

  ‘No.’

  ‘No what?’ said my old man.

  ‘Found Hector.’

  ‘Lost him?’

  ‘Would he be looking for him if he knew where he was?’

  ‘Just being friendly,’ he turned to Dick. ‘Bring him a cup of tea and it bites your head off.’

  ‘You don’t have to tell me.’

  ‘What’ve I done?’ I said. ‘You have an off day!’

  ‘Off day?’ My father laughed. ‘Off bloody year!’

  ‘Right!’ said Dick.

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Welcome,’ he said.

  See what it’s done to me? They took their tea out and left me alone. A flock of lapwings blew out of the moor, and the sun dipped behind the Quantocks, the sky faded from blue to pink. When I’d finished work, my mother came out to see to the chickens. She threw them some corn and started looking for eggs. ‘Where are they?’ she screamed. They just stood around, used to the mad woman who fed them. ‘You might as well tell me now, I’ll only find them later.’

  From my place at the supper table, I could watch the road. A waxing moon slid up the sky, a clearing sky, a gloomy evening mist eased itself into the spaces between the trees that bank the rhines. We ate a tin of apricots and I washed the dishes while they sat down.

  When I’d finished, I left the house by the back door, walked through the orchard, and followed the river where it straightens. I walked over South Moor towards Drayton. As the sun grew bigger, it sank, the pink deepened in the hour to an orange and bloody red. I could see Langport and Muchelney Abbey. Many of the houses here are built from Hamstone. They were glowing in the evening. We walked this way once, but all she said was, ‘There are ten people in the world, and eight of them are hamburgers.’ I hated that.

  ‌2

  Drove House is on the West Moor, towards the canal and Barrington, to the west of Higher Burrow Hill, south of the leak of a River Isle. For a long time it was an empty house, so Dick and I spent afternoons there. Many apple trees grew around the place, we knew more about Drove House than anyone. We built a den against the outside wall of the pound house, and counted eggs in their nests. We cut mistletoe for Christmas and gave it to my father to sell off our road wall.

  It had been empty since the Bromptons; the moor has never been a place where commuters live. It’s damp, and many of the other places those people live, where there are old farms and cottages for sale, are sheltered from wind and rain. Drove House was em pty for years. The old wash house still had its coppers, the thick stone walls of the house never did become weak.

  Dick and I would wait till late, and walk over after tea, clouds laying ribbons of orange and red across the sky. Many things happened there. We played ghosts. We looked through the dirty windows at the rooms, dusty, dark, the views from partly opened doors showing other partly opened doors into rooms we couldn’t see through any window. An overgrown elder scratched at the galvanized roof of a lean-to, once, twice, in a cold winter night.

  At school, stories went round about Drove House. No one had known anything about the Bromptons, but everyone said he was a secret agent from the war who’d lived there to escape the enemy, and his wife was the sister of an enemy general, who had been a farm girl, and tried to run Drove House as she had learnt abroad. They moved because of the ghosts. The ghosts lived on the upper floor, and walked between the bedrooms wailing and screaming, looking from windows over the moor, staring with blank, white eyes, at the wind and rain of dark winter nights. Anyone who said they had been up and seen the ghosts hadn’t; the sight of them drove men to cry for weeks, their breath killed. On summer days, when froths of seed blew around the hazy apple trees, we dared each other to come up on a winter’s night. We played ghosts! What did we know? Some summer days at Drove House I see clear as if they were happening now, great bowls of blue and yellow and green, steam rising from the withy beds, the sun glaring off houses miles away. Autumn in the orchards, when they cropped in the heaviest harvest for twenty years, apples a penny a sack, we couldn’t walk for windfalls. The smell of apples and boiling willow ghosts. When you’re young. Ghosts in every corner. Winter in the orchards. We had to be foolish at Drove House, Dick and I, then, there.

  Everyone had their idea about the ghosts. Old man Chedzoy said they were two women whose brother had been white-feathered in the war, driven out of the district, beaten to death in a wood near Spaxton, alone, on the damp leaves in the dark, but the news had never got back to Drove. He had been a botanist of sedges; his sisters died within three days of each other, and had walked the landing ever since. My mother said it was nonsense, and had no answer, except there was nobody at Drove House. She was right about that. She didn’t believe in ghosts.

  ‘Billy,’ said my father, going to the store shed, ‘got work for you. Come on.’ We went in the loft, and he told me he knew the Drove House ghosts were mother and daughter, abandoned wife and daughter of a farmer of 1685, the year of the battle of Sedgemoor. The evening it was fought he was at Stathe, fixing eel traps, when the Rebel army swept him up as they were led by the young Godfrey, through the moor, towards the Royals, who could be heard, drinking in Westonzoyland, making enough noise to cover the Rebels’ splashes and clinks of metal in approach. It was clear, moonlit, and they were creeping in the right direction when a mist came down and covered the place. They stopped dead, voices, muffled by circumstance, agreeing on the blessing of the cover, but other voices, asking if anyone knew the way. Young Godfrey knew, said he did, but when they turned towards an impassable dyke, the farmer from Drove knew it was trouble, got as close to Monmouth as he could, but the outriders were asking what use he was, so he left them, headed back to Stathe and the long walk home. It happened fast, the crack of the first accidental shot, the Rebel panic, the King’s cavalry riding out of the mist, slashing at our farmer, you’ll see the ghosts of his wife and daughter at Drove House, you don’t want to go there.

  Drove House is the prettiest house round here, in sunshine, with blossom on the trees and bees heavy with pollen, a picture. It’s the sort of place you see in photographs of people eating chocolates out of doors. It has windows of thick stone frames with lead between tiny panes of glass, Hamstone walls and a tiled roof. Over an open porch to the front door ivy climbs, up half the wall. All the shrubs and flowers in the front are overgrown, the borders are full of weeds. In the orchard, the trees haven’t been pruned for years, but crop as if they had been; nobody goes there to work anymore.

  A stream runs to the east of Higher Burrow Hill, I followed it to The Parret at Thorney, got Dick, and walked back again. We were seven or eight, he was a big boy. I had the brains. It was my idea to build a treehouse. I sent him off to find materials.

  ‘What about this?’ He found a sheet of galvanized in a lean-to and pulled it over. It was hopeless, I told him it was planks of wood we needed. We found old clothes, more galvanized iron, some bales of straw, but nothing useful.
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br />   We searched around the back of the house, to the shaded north walls, where it was cold, chill. It was the last hot day of spring, a day when even some birds shut up for half an hour in the middle of the day, exhausted after a spring flying for their nests, and after the eggs had been laid. But no bird would shelter in the lee of that wall, or in any of the places in the eaves; no amount of down could have comforted a nest. There was nothing there, the Bromptons had taken everything but the chicken house. Dick saw it first, but not the possibility. He wanted to rip parts away and use bales of straw for the walls, but I said we’ll take it to pieces and put it back together, ten feet off the ground in the forks of the biggest apple tree we could find.

  I took it to bits and Dick did the carrying. We found old rope in the pound house, and hauled the sections, one by one, into the tree. Floor, walls, door, window, roof — all we had to do was bang the nails already there back into the holes they had already made. We erected a fifteen fowl hen house in the double forks of the tallest tree, big enough for the two of us to sit in, and watch the moor around and the house in front of us. We could sit for an hour and watch the egg man on his round, driving from farm to farm, sometimes stopping for a long time, sometimes hardly stopping at all, with the leaves of the tree all around like green curtains.

  Nobody else ever went near Drove House, or if they did we never saw them. We always had a good view, but in all the time that summer, the closest people came was to count sheep. The nearest withy bed was two fields away. We didn’t know who farmed the land; someone from Kingston had taken it but there were so many people we couldn’t tell who. The house was only touched when the postman came with a card, and we looked in to see it sat alone on the mat, with the light from the letter box blocked by our heads pressed up against it. No one else came; the house stood like a fortress and we were its siege, camped in the perfect place.

  One day, Dick asked me if I thought we could eat the apples, like it was our garden. I said ‘Yes.’ He bit one, but though it was ripe it tasted so bitter, and he spat it out. As pieces of apple rained down on the ghosts, he changed towards me. I hadn’t known something, so now he’d have good ideas too.