Sarah Hall - The Carhullan Army

I shrugged. She was being kind and I knew it. ‘Anyway. How’s your shoulder?’ she asked. ‘A lot better now, thanks,’ I said. ‘It only hurts when I roll onto it at night.’ Lorry ran her hand along my collarbone. ‘It’s good it didn’t break or dislocate. Never would have healed right without being set, and you’d have been left with a weak spot.’ Her eyes in the flickering of the candles glimmered between brown and topaz. They looked flawed and lovely. She cleared her throat and her tone became more confidential and earnest. ‘Jackie’s picked up the Authority’s communications before, out on patrol. She’s good at tracking frequencies; hell, she’s had years of practice at it. There are things we’ve known for a while. But it’s quite another thing to hear what they are doing from someone else, first hand. It makes a difference.’

She stretched her legs out in front of her, under the long pleated skirt, and placed her elbows back on the table behind her. I had never seen her not looking tired, but she often stayed up late in the kitchen. ‘So what’s your story, Lorry?’ I asked quietly. ‘You mean why did I come here?’ I nodded. ‘Oh well, it was a long time ago now. I was in my forties, divorced, and pissed off at work — everyone in the health industry was back then. It was in bits, about to go bust. I was doing more bloody paperwork than anything useful.’ She paused, took a sip of her drink. ‘You were a doctor?’ She shook her head. ‘Nurse.’

She took another sip and continued. ‘There was one little atrocity too many for me to stomach I suppose. Domestic abuse. I was on duty. Nothing I hadn’t seen before. But … I had to hold this little girl together while she told the social worker her father had attacked her and her mother. He’d just got back from service in South America. He had Clough’s syndrome and wasn’t being looked after. Not a very popular diagnosis with the Ministry of Defence, you see. He was in the next room, yelling away; he’d had a go at himself with the knife too.’ Lorry paused and then grimaced. ‘Angharad, her name was. I remember it. Poor little thing. Six pints of blood she took and it all pissed away out of her. I suppose that was my tipping point. You just know when the world is about to break apart. I think you just know it, don’t you?’

She patted me on the leg and smiled. ‘I’m glad you came, Sister. But be careful, won’t you? And be sure about what you want. Jackie is a brilliant woman, but she has her demons. She’s seen more terrible stuff than everyone here put together. She’s had to do things you couldn’t even imagine. Some days I pity her. Other days … oh well.’ Her voice trailed away. She lifted her glass and drained it.

I stayed up with her and a couple of other women. They were careful not to ask me too much about anything I had said, as if it were out of bounds, or they were keen not to pry. Instead, perhaps to show camaraderie, they swapped memories of what had been topical in the years before they had come to the farm. There had been a spate of poisonings in London. House prices had started to drop as the insurance companies refused policies. The Red Paper on climate change had been published. Funding for the new Windscale reactor had been approved. And another wave of terrorist attacks had hit. It was news almost two decades old.

I drank more cider from the flagon before it was put away in the pantry. After the tension earlier, it felt good to drink until I was unsteady on my feet and the evening’s events blurred with the halos of the candles. A woman called Carla brought me a spoonful of her latest batch of lavender cream. It was homemade, she said, and it was great on chapped skin. She rubbed some on the backs of my hands, circling my knuckles, working the lotion in. The aroma of the flowers and the motion of her thumbs pushing into my palm and in between my fingers made me feel drowsy and loose inside. I closed my eyes and felt my head fall forward. After a few minutes I heard Lorry telling her something quietly, and though I didn’t want her to stop she took her hands away from mine.

The tallow wicks and the paraffin lamps were blown out and the women drifted back to the dormitories. It was only when I stumbled upstairs to bed that I realised nobody had given me the coil back. Somebody had kept hold of it as it was being passed round.

Megan had been right; the first winter was hard. The refreshing coolness of autumn gave way to bitter cold and damp. Early December brought freezing rain and low cloud. The farm fields were often lost in a mire of fog, and sleet drove down from the fells. In the worst weather the free-ranging animals were brought in to the byres. The cows seemed stupefied by the cold. But the goats did not care what kind of environment they were kept in. They chewed on everything in sight, even the wires of the farm pens, and gave plenty of milk. Lorry told me that a couple of them had escaped a few years back, and now there was a wild herd living on the other side of High Street. They were impossible to catch.

Jackie worried about the sheep most of all. They were not the main source of food and they were the most resilient of the farm’s stock, but she was loath to lose any of their number before time. I watched her bringing them in with a couple of collies, the dogs weaving skilfully at the edges of the flock. I could not imagine how hard it had been, training the sheep to remain faithful to a portion of the uplands. It was an extreme and difficult thing to do, almost a lost craft, and one of the oldest ways of farming in the region. Lorry told me that Jackie had stayed up on the tops with them for months, like a shepherd. And the yellow tunics had been made from the first few shearings. The wool had been carded and spun, and dyed the colour of the moorland lichen and gorse.

By then I had moved out of the main house and into one of the dormitories. A low wooden bed was quickly made for me and I kept my clothes in boxes beneath it, much as I had in the terrace quarter. But here, among the others, I felt happier and less confined. It did not matter that there was so little space or privacy, nor that I had so few material possessions.

Each little domestic burgess within the dormitory had its own personal touches: photographs taped up, a box of effects, borrowed books, candlesticks, and sometimes there were little wooden effigies made from thorn branches and wrapped with scraps of cloth. I had seen these left out by the Five Pins also. It seemed a pagan thing. There was no real talk of religion at Carhullan, except within the forum of the evening discussions. If there was faith of any kind then it remained personal; a discreetly practised creed. The votives were never mentioned and I could not guess what purpose they served.

The women in the dormitory were cheerful and practical; they let me sleep near the stove where it was warmest, keeping my spirits up when the temperature fell at night and I hunkered down under the covers, half dressed and inhaling as little of the frosty air as possible. They would call over to me, asking if I could still feel all my toes or whether some had snapped off, and they made me laugh despite the frigid discomfort. It was odd at first, so many women sleeping in the same room, but I was used to hearing close-by neighbours, and in a way I was glad there were now no walls to separate me from my fellow humans. Sometimes in the early hours I could hear two women together, moving under the sheets, whispering, and I listened until they were finished. It made me feel both lonely and reassured.

I had known it would be colder at this altitude than in the town. I could remember hoping for snow as I set off, but I soon realised there was less romance to the idea than I had imagined at the cooling end of summer. The reality was brutal. There was little insulation in the outbuildings other than a lagging of hay chaff in the lofts, and the stone walls glowed with dampness and cold. The wood-burning stove was stoked up in the evening, but if it had gone out by morning the air in the dormitory was gelid and painful to breathe, stinging the inside of my nose and throat, blocking my sinuses. I could not get warm until I had eaten a serving of oatmeal.