The next day she sidled out of the side door, down the cinder path from the yard to the little summer hut where, she’d been told, on sunny days Grandpa sat outside, smoking his pipe and looking down the valley at the view, dreaming up words for his preaching.
It was just a wooden shed with an open front and railings round, and a bench inside out of the breeze. No one would find her there, she thought. She needed to calm her thudding heart and think of what to write to Burrows.
The bench was icy, and icicles hung from the roof like lollipops. How she wished she was back up on the tops at World’s End, far away in her own fireside. If she was grown up she would run away for ever and make that hidy-hole safe from prying people; somewhere to get away from meddlers.
She sat hunched up, trying to summon up courage to go back in, when she sensed at the corner of her eye someone standing to the side, hovering, not knowing whether to cough or not. It was Jack Sowerby. She glowered at him, hoping he’d slink away.
‘Hutch up,’ he said. ‘In a bit of hot water, I hear. Tom was down at The Fleece telling Mam all about it. I thought you might need a friend.’
‘No, go away!’
‘Pity I sort of wondered if we could find a way round the bother at school. It’s not a bad school.’
‘It’s a rubbishy school,’ Mirren snapped. ‘I hate old Burrows’.
‘Why?’
‘I just do, and he smells of whisky,’ she replied, sitting with her arms folded in defiance of Jack softening her up.
‘Let me tell you a story about Harold Burrows. For one, he’s not old, just over thirty. For two, he’s a brave man who won medals in the war. For three, he saved many men’s lives and he was injured in the head. For four, I’m told he gets terrible headaches that make him scream out in the night with pain. The whisky gives him heart. Shall I go on?’ Jack paused, searching her scowling face.
‘So what? He’s caned me for nothing and doesn’t teach me anything.’ Mirren stared at him.
‘What do you do to help him?’ Jack stared her back, his dark eyes piercing into hers. She looked away into the distance, not sure where all this was leading. Teachers were there to drum stuff in. Mirren had never thought of them as having headaches and homes and pain, just like everyone else. ‘What do you mean?’
‘Come on, you know how to be helpful, fetch and carry, look interested when he’s talking. You could be quite pretty if you smiled more.’
‘Thanks for nothing,’ she quipped, but was interested just the same.
‘There you go, thinking of yourself. You’ve got the brains, so use them. Work it out like arithmetic. Don’t sit there feeling sorry for yourself. Give him some hope by passing the blessed qualifying exams. Show him you’re a winner. If you get stuck I’ll always help if I can.’
Why was Jack being so kind? Was it something to do with the fact that Uncle Tom was visiting his mam a lot?
‘Is World’s End haunted?’ she asked, changing the subject.
‘What do you think? You’re the one that slept there.’
‘I wish I could go and live up there like a shepherd, and go for walks and keep hens and not have to go to school,’ she sighed.
‘By the time you’re ready to leave, it’ll have fallen down. It’s like an eagle’s eyrie up there, but very lonely,’ Jack smiled, showing a line of white teeth.
‘We mustn’t let it fall down. It’s my friend and I want to live up there one day,’ Mirren replied.
‘Don’t be daft. Whatever could you do up there? It’s a poor living off thin topsoil. Even I know that.’
‘I don’t care. They mustn’t pull it down. Uncle Tom could mend it.’ Then she remembered that she was in the doghouse and Uncle Tom wouldn’t do anything if she didn’t go back to school.
‘Why should he help you when you won’t go back to school?’ Jack had read her thoughts.
‘If I go back and behave, will he mend the roof for me?’ she smiled.
‘Well, that’s a start, but you’ll have to ask him yourself and he’s got other ideas in his head at the moment. He’s courting my mam, by the looks of things.’
‘Do you mind?’ she asked, not sure what courting meant.
‘Nothing to do with me…Mam’s a widow. As long as he doesn’t want me to be a farmer. You’ve got a few bridges to mend before you ask any favours off anyone.’
She looked at Jack, her hero, with growing admiration. He was already at the boys’ grammar school, and if he was on her side the battle was as good as won.
Her battle was yet to come in going down to Windebank with her tail between her legs but if it meant a new roof on World’s End, then it was worth it.
That night on the moor had changed everything. She knew now she was part of these hills like her ancestors before her: Miriam and Sukie and Adey and Mother.
Sitting in the twilight of that icy December afternoon, Mirren knew that one day she would make this farming way of life her own, but how she wasn’t sure. Tomorrow she must make her peace with Mr Burrows. That was enough to be going on with…
In the days that followed the snow fell hard and there was no school, no chance to find a path to World’s End. By the time New Year came and went, she was much too busy with lessons to think much about it again.
29 June 1927
The total eclipse of the sun was going to be the most exciting event in Mirren Gilchrist’s life since that snowstormy night at World’s End.
Granny Yewell was throwing a leaflet from the council on the table, telling them the hours when they must dowse their fires, so as not to spoil sightings of the sun with smoke. ‘If I hear one more word about this blessed eclipse…’ she called out to Grandpa Joe, who was kicking off his boots in the back porch and then knocking over his mug of tea on the clean tablecloth.
‘There, look what you’ve done,’ she snapped. ‘What a fuss about nothing. You’d think it were the end of the world!’
Poor Gran got so flustered and crabby when the farm workers invaded her kitchen, but there was always something warm waiting for Mirren on the table after school: a pot of broth or warm oven-bottom teacakes dripping with rhubarb jam. Adey Yewell had taken a great interest in her schooling ever since she’d marched down to Windebank with her hackles raised on her granddaughter’s behalf and tore a strip off Mr Burrows.
‘We can’t have our lass wasting that brain of hers trying to knock some learning into lumps o’ lard like Billy Marsden. You should be grateful to have such talent. I want no more nonsense. She’s taken her punishment from us so just you treat her right or you’ll have me to deal with!’ Of course, news quickly spread and the whole village was agog at Adey’s stand. Mirren felt so proud of her.
Now that Mirren and Mr Burrows had come to an understanding after she wrote her own letter of apology, and the vicar had stepped in as referee with the family over the runaway episode, school was not so boring. She was going to be put in for a prize scholarship. The Head was giving her extra coaching and he didn’t have whisky breath any more. A new girl called Lorna Dinsdale arrived in Mirren’s class. They became best friends and they were both trying for the scholarship together: no skiving off for Mirren with Lorna chasing her heels in class for top marks.
One of their projects was to study the total eclipse of the sun, due that summer, and the vicar brought in lantern slides to explain the ‘fenominer’ and how their dale