The Hollow Land appears under the heading “For Children” on the list of Jane Gardam’s work at the start of the book, but these nine linked stories read perfectly well as grown-up literature, too. The stories are mostly centered around a pair of children (Bell Teesdale, who’s eight when the book opens, and who narrates the first story, and Harry Bateman, who’s a few years younger), and the stories are partly about childhood experiences, but they’re also about landscape/place/culture: the Cumbrian setting of these books feels vivid, even though I’ve never been there.
The first story, “Harry and Bell,” introduces the title characters and their families and their circumstances: Bell’s dad is a farmer, and his grandfather lives with Bell and his sister and their parents, and one summer they decide to rent out the grandfather’s old farmhouse to a family from London, the Batemans. The Batemans almost leave early: they’re at the farm during haying time, and there’s a particularly noisy night when the Teesdales need to work the field past midnight to get the hay cut before it rains, but Bell and Harry between them help to set things right between the families, and then the Batemans keep on coming back—by the last story in the book they’ve been renting the old farmhouse, Light Trees, for twenty years, since 1979.
This book is often quite funny: there’s humor in the circumstances the characters find themselves in, and in how those circumstances are narrated. I loved the start of “Sweep,” whose first paragraph I can’t resist quoting in its entirety:
The chimney sweep, who also kept the fish and chip shop, had said that he would take the big London lads fishing one day and they had said thank you. Smashing. “Oh great,” they had said—and forgotten. They weren’t prepared then on a dark wet August day for a knock on Light Trees’ ancient oak door and the sweep—Kendal was his name—to be standing there sopped through, with floods streaming from his hat and his arms full of rods. (37)
Most of these stories are summer stories, but not all of them: the Batemans visit in the winter, too, at least once, and there’s a lovely wintry snowy icy story, “The Icicle Ride,” which also features this great sentence, about a farmer driving a Land Rover full of sheep: “A wall of yellow-eyed wool looked out over his shoulders” (85). So good. This is the third book I’ve read by Jane Gardam, and they’ve all been pleasing: I look forward to reading more.
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