Read The Stranger House Online
Authors: Reginald Hill
The Stranger House
By the Same Author
Dalziel and Pascoe novels
A CLUBBABLE WOMAN
AN ADVANCEMENT OF LEARNING
RULING PASSION
AN APRIL SHROUD
A PINCH OF SNUFF
A KILLING KINDNESS
DEADHEADS
EXIT LINES
CHILD
’
S PLAY
UNDERWORLD
BONES AND SILENCE
ONE SMALL STEP
RECALLED TO LIFE
PICTURES OF PERFECTION
ASKING FOR THE MOON
THE WOOD BEYOND
ON BEULAH HEIGHT
ARMS AND THE WOMEN
DIALOGUES OF THE DEAD
DEATH
’
S JEST
-
BOOK
GOOD MORNING, MIDNIGHT
Joe Sixsmith novels
BLOOD SYMPATHY
BORN GUILTY
KILLING THE LAWYERS
SINGING THE SADNESS
FELL OF DARK
THE LONG KILL
DEATH OF A DORMOUSE
DREAM OF DARKNESS
THE ONLY GAME
For
Allan, Brian, John and Peter
To his friends a man should be firm in friendship
Sharing gifts and sharing laughter.
“The Sayings of the High One” Poetic Edda
2 • Una Familia Buena Y Devota
Part Two - The Valley of the Shadow
5 • A Nice Straight Country Road
Part Three - The Death of Balder
10 • Knock Knock, Who’s There?
Most of what I know about the incredible scandal of the estimated 150,000 child migrants shipped from Britain to the furthermost corners of its Empire derives from Margaret Humphrey’s moving exposé,
Empty Cradles
(Doubleday, 1994; Corgi, 1995), which I recommend unreservedly. But no character in my book is based on any individual involved in any capacity in that sorry tale of abuse of persons and of power.
Australia figures in my story and anything I have got right about matters Australian is almost certainly down to Mel Cain and Christine Farmer of HarperCollins, who organized my only visit to their lovely country and made sure I had a great time. By the same token, anything I’ve got wrong is down to me, so let me put my hand up now and save you the bother of writing!
But most of the action of
The Stranger House
takes place in Cumbria, England, which is the powsowdy the politicians made thirty years ago of the grand old counties of Cumberland and Westmorland, with segments of Lancashire and Yorkshire stapled on to straighten the boundaries and make it fit more easily into a filing cabinet.
This was the setting of my formative and is the setting of my degenerative years and I feel some natural unease at locating on my own doorstep a story which is full of eccentric people often behaving badly. So let me state without reservation that the valley of Skaddale and its village of Illthwaite are entirely figments of my imagination. Their names, population, history and topography are invented, and they bear no relation other than the most basically generic to any real places.
This means that my dear friends, my excellent neighbours, and indeed all occupants, native or new-come, of this loveliest of landscapes can rest peacefully in their beds.
And so can their lawyers.
My heroine’s terms of reference are mathematical, my hero’s religious.
No theologian or mathematician I have met provides a model here.
Yet, despite the above disclaimers, it should be remembered that just as theologians and mathematicians use impossibilities, such as the square root of minus one or the transubstantiation of wine into blood, to express their eternal verities, so it is with writers and their fictions.
In other words, just because I’ve made it all up doesn’t mean it isn’t true.
Be helpful to strangers who stop at your house,
don’t mock or demean them.
It’s hard to be certain simply by looking
what kin they may claim.
“The Sayings of the High One”
Poetic Edda
By dead-man’s shore in shadow-land
a hall was raised roofed with serpents
whose venom drips on those who dwell there
killers and defilers. All doors face north.
“The Sibyl’s Prophecy”
Poetic Edda
Blood & Wine
Here’s some advice a youngster should listen to,
helpful if taken to heart.
Be loud against evil wherever you see it;
never give your enemy an even break.
“The Sayings of the High One”
Poetic Edda
My people
On July 8th, 1992, a small girl woke up in her bed in her family house in the Australian state of Victoria and knew exactly who she was.
Samantha Flood, known to her friends as Sam and her family as Sammy, only child of Sam and Louisa Flood, granddaughter of Vince and Ada Flood, who between them had turned a patch of scrubby farmland on the fringe of the Goulburn Valley into the Vinada Winery which by the end of the eighties was winning golden opinions and medals to match at wine shows up to and including the Royal National Capital.
That morning Sam also knew two new things.
Today she was eleven years old and she was bleeding.
The bleeding was a shock. Not because Sam didn’t know what it was. Her ma had explained it all years back, and she’d been taught stuff at school, and the lesson had been complete when her best friend, Martie Hopkins, started not long after she turned ten.
Ten was early. Martie was proud of being the first in their class, just like she was proud of the rest that came early too, the boobs and the bush. Sam was a skinny little thing, not just flat but practically concave. Martie, complacent in her new roundness, once joked in the
school showers that you could serve soup on Sam’s chest. Sam retorted that at least she wasn’t a fat-arse, but secretly she envied Martie. They were always competing for top of the class and neither cared to see the other ahead in anything.
So the bleeding wasn’t altogether unwelcome, but on her birthday it seemed lousy timing.
She called to her mother, who came into the bedroom and soon put things right, both inside and out. Lu Flood had a great talent for putting things right. As she sorted her daughter out, she remarked that some of
my people
reckoned it was lucky to start on your birthday. Lu had worked out she was one-seventh Aboriginal and there weren’t many situations she hadn’t got a bit of
my people
wisdom for. Her husband just grinned and said she made most of it up, while Sam, who loved playing around with numbers, worked out you couldn’t be one-seventh something anyway, you had to be half or a quarter or an eighth, because everyone had two parents and four grandparents and so on.
It made no difference to Lu. One-seventh she was, which was a good proportion, seven being a lucky number, and Sam was one-fourteenth, which was twice as lucky.
Maths apart, Sam quite liked all this weird stuff her mother spouted about
my people.
It made her feel connected with that great emptiness outside her bedroom window. And if it got scary, which it did sometimes, the one-seventh (or one-fourteenth) weirdness was more than balanced by the comfort able certainties she got from her father’s side of the family.
She used to stagger to Gramma Ada with her great heavy leather-bound photo album and ask to be told
about the folk whose faces stared out at her. She liked it best when they got to the old sepia photos where the men had beards or heavy moustaches and the women wore long dresses and everyone looked like they’d been shot and taken to a taxidermist. Gramma knew all their names, all their stories.
With history like this, Sam knew for certain who she was, so it didn’t matter when Ma’s stories got a bit frightening, there was nothing in them that those old sepia men with their big moustaches and unblinking stares couldn’t deal with.
That morning as Lu cleaned Sam up, she recalled that up north where
my people
came from, when a girl started bleeding, she had to live by herself for a month or so, lying face-down in a hut so she couldn’t see the sun, because if she did, her nose would go rotten.
“So there you are, Sam,” she said when she’d finished. “Your choice. You can either head out to the old brew-house and lie flat for a few weeks, or you can take your chances, come downstairs and open your prezzies.”
So, no choice. And no change except that Sam was eleven and on a level with Martie.
She had a great day, ate as much chocolate as she liked, which was a hell of a lot, and got to stay up late, watching the telly.
There was only one thing to watch, which was a play everyone had been talking about called
The Leaving of Liverpool.
Sam would have preferred something that had promise of a bit more life in it, but her mother and Gramma Ada wanted to see the play, so that’s what they settled down to. Except for her pa. He said he had to check some new vines. If it wasn’t cricket or Aussie footie, Pa didn’t give a toss for television.
The play (as Sam explained it later to her friends) was about a bunch of English kids who got sent to Australia because they were orphans or at least their parents didn’t want them and there was some scheme here to look after them and see they got a proper education. Except it didn’t work out like that. They got treated rotten. Worse than rotten in some cases. They got treated like slaves.
It was late when Sam went up to bed but she couldn’t sleep. She lay there thinking about the play, and it all got mixed up with the bleeding somehow, and for the first time ever she had a sense of herself as something separate from her context.
Up till now she’d been Samantha Flood who lived with her ma and her gramma at the winery run by her pa and they all loved her. She went to school, she had a lot of friends, she wasn’t all that pretty but everyone said she had the loveliest red hair they’d ever seen. And she was really bright, particularly at sums. There was no place further away than Melbourne, no time longer than the months between now and Christmas, nothing sadder in recent years than the death of her kitten, Tommo, who got run over by one of the big drays, and nothing surer than that if anyone was going to live happy ever after with nothing much changing, that person was little Sam Flood.