(FROM MY BLOG) Eight-year-old Bell Teesdale watches with wonder when a family of Londoners -- "talking South" -- arrive to rent his parents' farm house. "There's not owt for 'em here. What's use of a farm to them? Just for sitting in. Never a thing going on." The visitors get off to a rocky start with their summer landlords -- the older visitors do, that is, but not their 5 or 6-year-old son Harry. When the Batemans are about to cancel their vacation because they find the sounds of haying too noisy, Bell watches the younger boy. I sees this little lad, Harry, looking out of his bedroom window and I catches his eye. And somehow I know he's all right, this one, London boy or not. I know he understands how we have to make all this racket to see hay cut ahead of rain. The boys become fast friends, the Batemans end up staying -- and returning year after year -- and the ensuing stories revolve about the boys' friendship and adventures, as they age year by year, into their early teens. Diligent followers of my blog will recall that, in 2012, my niece and I hiked some 70 miles through England's Lake District. We climbed fells, jumped over becks, walked beside tarns, crossed meadows, and enjoyed the rain. We talked to other hikers; we exchanged pleasantries with innkeepers. What we didn't do is talk to the folks who lived in the Lake District and who made their living from pursuits other than tourism.Maybe in the Lake District, everyone makes his living from tourism? I don't know. But I now know something of how folks live in Westmoreland, the former county (now absorbed into Cumbria) immediately to the east of the Lake District. After reading a laudatory review in the New York Times book section, I purchased and have just finished reading Jane Gardam's achingly beautiful collection of stories entitled The Hollow Land, published in 1981 in England and now published in America.Most of the stories have the shadow of a plot -- being trapped in a mine (the title refers to how the village and the Teesdales' farmland, rising up into the fells to the east, are built over a honeycomb of abandoned silver mines); visiting a scary old woman who sells eggs (the "Egg-Witch"); listening with a combination of scepticism and fear to local ghost stories, while outside the English rains beat down without mercy; a long bike ride and hike through bitter cold, at Bell's urgent insistence, to behold a wondrous display of icicles, icicles that raise philosophical questions in the youngsters' minds; a run-in with gypsies, who prove scarier by reputation than they are in person. But these plotlines serve primarily as devices for the author to describe with intensity and in detail the awe-inspiring beauty and the eccentric characters of the inhabitants of this corner of Westmoreland. She shows, without editorializing, how city dwellers -- including the Batemans, until they become acclimated -- zoom through life in a daze, failing to observe the wonders about them that are so obvious to the shepherds and farmers of the countryside. Not even professed lovers of nature -- trail hikers -- are exempt from Bell's boyish scorn: They walk in clumps -- great fat orange folk with long red noses and maps in plastic cases flapping across their stomachs. Transisters going sometimes too, and looking at nowt before them but their own two feet. I think back over my own hikes in Britain. I can only hope I seemed different!But it's not just the beauty of nature that Londoners ignore, and it's not only how the land serves harmoniously to raise crops and graze sheep and cows. What is equally important to the families who live here -- and whose ancestors have lived here from time immemorial -- is the history they have inherited. And if the history at times includes questionable horrors and terrifying ghosts -- the combination of history and legend and folk tale is a force that binds them to the soil and to each other. Mrs. Teesdale and Mrs. Bateman set out for the antique shop about half past two. It was only a few miles over Stainmore, over the wonderful old road the Greeks and Celts and Romans and Vikings, Angles, Saxons, and the odd Jute had used before them more adventurously. Ghost upon ghost haunts this road from Greta Bridge, where a spirit got caught under a stone and twice they've had to put her back; to the blue ghost you can see sometimes on bright sunny afternoons near Bowes, the wife of a Saxon lord still wearing her Saxon dress, but without her head; to the white ghost near the old mines who walks quietly in her apron. Londoners may have their transistors and their holidays on Spanish beaches; what they have lost is the richness of a life unself-consciously enmeshed in history and in nature.The final chapter jumps ahead twenty years to 1999, when Bell and Harry have become adults, and when the flow of petroleum has for unstated reasons dried up. Horses, railroads, and steam engines are again of critical importance. But the paradise of the Teesdales' world is threatened by a figure who represents all that endangers the family's happiness and their orderly world -- selfishness, rapacity, and an unthinking hunger for mineral wealth that gladly and willingly sacrifices both history and nature.
Published in Britain in 1981, this collection of short stories is considered a children’s book, which only demonstrates Gardam’s respect for children’s intellect. Filled with exacting lanquage and perceptive observations, the stories are told mostly through two boys, Bell Teesdale, the son of a farmer, and the other, Harry Bateman, the son of a London writer. The Batemans rent Bell’s grandfather’s farmhouse every summer from the time Bell is eight years old and Harry, a few years younger. The stories are filled with the small moments of farm life, the hard work tedious and monotonous for some, but full of wonder for the Londoners. Over the course of nine stories and thirty years, the Londoners learn about life in the Cumbrian countryside, the farmers and their neighbors develop a respect for the Londoners, and friendships emerge. Bell and Harry share adventures that bond them from childhood to adulthood, filled with quests to meet memorable characters such as the Egg-Witch, Granny Crack, and the Household Word and observe hidden icicles and a total eclipse. Both families witness major social and cultural changes and experience the comforts of new technologies over the course of the stories, but their love for “the hollow land” keeps them grounded. “And if we book the call in, we can telephone them. Telephone them to tell them not to worry about anything. Not ever again. For they are safe here for ever in the Hollow Land.”
What do You think about The Hollow Land (2015)?
This was among the books chosen for the last session of the Guys Read group I facilitated at my local library. You can read more about this here at my blog, Reading Rainstorm. While I quite enjoyed The Hollow Land, this is one I probably would not choose for another group, or at least not younger than the teen group. Not that it was inappropriate for younger groups, it was just a bit too wistful and languid to keep the younger kids' attentions, and relied heavily on this specific, detailed setting to the point of inaccessibility. It is nostalgic for a time and place I have no connection to, let alone the kids in the group.The Hollow Land is a loving ode to the power of place. The setting of the county of Cumbria in the north of England is the real star with its geography, climate, culture, and history coming through. Bell, a local farmer's son who introduces himself in the first chapter, befriends a slightly younger “incomer” boy from London, Harry, who quickly becomes his companion in rambles and adventures throughout the fells and valleys of the rural region. Meeting eccentric locals, exploring old mines and frozen waterfalls, and baling hay, the pair grow up together. Called the “Hollow Land” by the locals, including Bell’s loquacious grandfather due to the many mines and underground rivers, the seasons, natural splendor, local characters and legends of the land all play vital roles as Bell and Harry grow up. A detailed portrait of this time and place, it recalls with fondness even the odd prejudices of the locals and their dislike of "gyspies," Irish, Welsh, and Scottish, and those shifty Yorkshiremen in the next county. Filled with folklore like the Hand of Glory, the little people, the deep history of the region from the pre-Roman to the modern world, and the strange and it ends with a strange and unexpected interlude to a post-apocalyptic future after the oil runs out and industrial civilization fails, but the residents of the fells remain quite happy.
—Harris
Gardam has a real knack for descriptions of rural landscape. My favorite stories are "The Hollow Land" and "The Icicle Ride" though the stories are all linked and work best read in order. It's not obvious from the cover but this is classified in the list of Gardam's works as a children's book. About halfway through the book I was enjoying it so much that I began reading it from the beginning with my 9-year-old daughter. It's a wonderful book to read aloud. This is not a conservative or nostalgic work about preserving some idealized version of country Englishness. While it fits within the literary tradition of works about the English countryside, this collection of linked stories is primarily about the acceptance of change and difference.
—Wyatt
Can't say just how much I admire Jane Gardam's prose and oeuvre. This collection details a summer spent in the Lake District by a large rambling family, the Batesmans, from London. Its narrative form is nearly mythic the way it describes the countryside and experiences of its characters in the language of Cumbrians. The chapter titles ('The Egg-Witch' for instance) give you an idea of how she approaches the people of Britain: as carriers of mythic traditions communicated through shared language, industries, and ways of living on and with the land that indelibly imprint themselves on your mind and spirit. Impossible to forget, when I finished this brief book, I held it almost the way I would a sacred talisman.
—Elan Durham
