Black Harvest Read online

  Chapter Twenty

  THE DAY BEFORE the Blakemans went back to England a burial took place in the chapel ruins above Ballimagliesh Strand. When Father Hagan appeared at the gate that led into the overgrown graveyard a small group of people were waiting for him, the O’Malleys, Donal Morrissey, and David Blakeman with the three children. The priest had assured her that it didn’t matter, but Mrs Blakeman thought Alison might make a lot of noise and ruin everything, so she was waiting down below, on the beach.

  Father Hagan walked through the grass towards them followed by four men carrying a coffin. When they reached the small pool of water that Prill had found, he knelt down, dipped his hand in, and made the sign of the cross. Then he walked on again slowly and stopped at last before an open grave.

  Instinctively everybody moved back. The Morrissey headstone had been dug out and laid flat on the ground. Under their feet was a yawning hole and there was a smell of fresh earth and grass. Birds flapped about overhead and a seagull balanced itself on one of the graves, very close to Colin.

  It was a highly varnished coffin with brass handles. A plate on the lid said “Morrissey – 1848”. It was strange to be so near to it. Last year Colin had gone with his parents to Grandpa Blakeman’s funeral but it wasn’t like this. Then all he could think about was his funny, tobacco-smelling grandfather being sealed up in that awful container, shut away from them all, for ever. He tried to tell himself that today was different, that this was about a meaningless collection of bones, but when the service started he no longer knew how he felt.

  Father Hagan only spoke for a few minutes, first in Latin, then in English. “Dona eis requiem Domine, et lux perpetua luceat eis. Give them rest, oh Lord, and let light perpetual shine on them.” As she listened, Prill’s eyes filled with tears.

  When it was over, the men lowered the coffin into the ground on thick ropes. John and Kevin O’Malley bent down and threw handfuls of earth on it, but Donal Morrissey remained upright, swaying slightly as the soil pattered on the polished lid. The farmer’s wife tucked her arm through his and walked slowly away with him, along the footpath towards the village.

  The Blakemans stood and watched the men shovel earth into the grave. Colin stared down, his hands behind his back. Oliver peered forward curiously, like a bird. Without thinking, Prill had taken hold of her father’s hand. It was too solemn a moment for happiness but inside she was calm. She knew for certain that the peace that had come to the Morrisseys was theirs too.

  It was only later, when they sat on the beach eating a picnic, that Prill said what everyone was thinking. Father Hagan didn’t look very comfortable somehow, perched on an old bath towel, munching a ham roll, and still wearing his shabby black hat. “Do you think he sleeps in it?” Oliver giggled.

  “Why should it have happened when it did?” Prill said. “And why to us?”

  The priest was peeling a hard-boiled egg. He took his time over it, then sent Oliver off to get some salt. “Prill, dear, I don’t really know. I’ve thought about it. One possibility is the fact that the new bungalow was only finished a few weeks before you arrived, and you were the first people to live in it. Nobody had lived on that spot since the Morrisseys died, and you were a family, like theirs. You had a small child too. Do you see?”

  She shook her head. “But what about the dreams, Father Hagan, and the rottenness of everything? What about those awful nightmares?”

  “I know. But sometimes, when there has been violence and great hardship in the past, the power of it reaches out and touches people. What the Morrisseys endured somehow came into your lives, just for those few days. You suffered with them, their pain was your pain. Even when they were dead, and in the pit, you felt the decay, the sense of death.”

  Prill said nothing. She drew patterns in the sand with one finger, and chewed her lip.

  “Just look at Alison,” Colin said loudly, thinking that Prill was about to burst into tears. “Look at her hair. She’s got yoghurt in it, strawberry yoghurt mixed with sand. Ugh! She’s a human disaster area.”T hat made Prill laugh. Then he added, “Perhaps she made it happen.”

  “Your little sister?” the priest said. “How?”

  “Well, don’t little kids come into ghost stories sometimes? You know, the kind where things get thrown around? Aren’t they supposed to activate things, like chemicals or something?”

  “That can’t be it,” Prill said emphatically. “It got worse when Mum went to Sligo with her, much worse.”

  Father Hagan wasn’t looking at Alison but at Oliver who was running along the beach throwing sticks for Jessie. Colin remembered how he had hated the dog at the beginning of the holiday, and thought how different he was now. He was quite brown. He’d stopped fussing about his clothes and insisting on wearing shoes. He wore some old cut-down jeans of Colin’s and a baggy T-shirt advertising Whipsnade Zoo. His small, bare feet made dents in the wet sand. They would miss him when he went back to London.

  “I don’t know,” the priest said. “You could be right. But all kinds of people take babies with them on holiday, and go to places where things have happened in the past. Why should little Alison be special?” His eyes followed Oliver back up the beach. “It could be something quite different. You know, there are people – quite rare, of course – who see more than the rest of us, people who are, well, very sensitive to the feeling of a place. They can often understand its past, and tell you things about it, without ever having been there or anything. They can even tell what’s going to happen in the future. That sort of person can stir things up quite innocently, without knowing a thing about it. They don’t have to do anything, they’re just there.”

  Colin and Prill knew Father Hagan meant Oliver, but neither of them said anything. He spoke briefly to Mum and Dad, shook hands with everybody, and set off up the cliff path. “I’ll just look in on old Donal now, thought he looked a bit shaky this morning, didn’t you?”

  Mrs Blakeman was packing up the picnic. The last three weeks had been sunny and warm, with the odd wet day, but there had been no more of that stifling heat. It was late afternoon now but the sun was still strong. It shone down and made spiky shadows out of the rocks, striping the sand. Then Prill felt cold drops on her face. Rain was starting to fall softly, from a peach-coloured sky.

  Oliver came running up with the dog. “Are there any sandwiches left, Auntie Jeannie?” Then he looked up. “Oh heck, it’s raining. Oh well, I suppose there would be a rainbow. It’s sunny and wet both at the same time, and that’s when you get them. So my father says.”

  And there was, the clearest he had ever seen. They all stood and watched it form, a shimmering arc over the peaceful sea.

  Postscript

  Books can change your life, and a book that changed mine was The Great Hunger by Cecil Woodham Smith. It was published in 1962 and is a factual account of the Irish potato famine of the 1840s. When I read the harrowing descriptions of how the people suffered as they succumbed to starvation conditions and then to death, I wept, and when I had finished the book I remained still for a very long time. Across the years the sufferings of those people had become mine.

  The Great Hunger is a masterly account of one of the worst tragedies in human history. For four years the potato crop, which was the staple food of the Irish peasants, was putrefied by blight. The bright green plants became a black harvest as they rotted in the fields, the land stank and the people began to die. In 1845 Ireland was one of the most densely populated countries in Europe; by 1850 it was the thinnest. And it has never recovered.

  Most agonising in The Great Hunger are the descriptions of children. Starvation turned them into wizened monkey-like creatures covered all over with fine down; hospitals were silent places, filled with iron bedsteads where children opened and shut their mouths noiselessly, waiting for death. Unable to pay the rent, whole families were driven from their pathetic hovels which were then razed to the ground to prevent their return. An eye-witness of such a scene wrote this:


  At a signal from the sheriff the work began. The miserable inmates of the cabins were dragged out upon the road; the thatched roofs were torn off and the earthen walls battered in by crowbars. The screaming women, the half-naked children, the paralysed grandmother and the tottering grandfather were hauled out. It was a sight I have never forgotten. I was twelve years old at the time, but I think that if a loaded gun had been put into my hand I would have fired into that crowd of villains as they plied their horrible trade. The winter of 1848–49 dwells in my memory as one long night of sorrow.

  When I read The Great Hunger I had not published a book, but on the strength of a short ghost story called Gibsons’ I had been commissioned by HarperCollins to write two “horror” novels. Over the next few years I actually wrote four (Black Harvest, The Beggar’s Curse, The Witch of Lagg and The Pit). After the fourth I took a long break from creepy stories, but returned to them when I wrote The Empty Frame.

  I was delighted to be commissioned but was uneasy about horror novels. Horror was a genre I associated with “pulp”, with cheap, overblown writing where the author stands on tiptoe throughout to achieve various ghastly effects. I associated it with ectoplasm and mutants, a world in which I had no interest. I decided that any spine-chilling story I might attempt would have to be rooted in reality.

  In The Great Hunger I found it: a story earthed in human history and more chilling than anything I could invent, so first I created a family in the Enid Blyton tradition. In my own childhood reading I had always looked forward to meeting the same people (and their dogs and cats and parrots) having different adventures. So along came Colin and Prill, their wimpish cousin Oliver, and their dog Jessie. I sent them to Ireland, a country of great beauty which I knew and loved. Mum and Dad came too, and a baby sister, but these I gradually eliminated from the scene so that the three children had centre stage. When young, I was always irked by parents in books who were around too much.

  I sent my children not to a sinister cottage with spiders and creaking doors, but to a comfortable seaside bungalow where ghostly happenings were unimaginable. At first they had quiet times, but a series of unexplained and disquieting events began to disturb them until, left alone, they became almost unhinged. In developing my story I drew again and again on The Great Hunger. Here I found descriptions of the monkey-like children, of the mother who tried to pay for bread with her dead child, of the skeletal women combing the barren fields for crumbs of food. Here too was the cruel eviction scene described above which supplied the frame for the whole plot. All these things were true.

  But I still wanted a happy ending. In the classic ghost story, order is restored only when the troubled dead are in some way comforted. This happens in Black Harvest and it is the three children who, having suffered with the famine people, resolve their unquiet and give them their rest. That is why my final image is the biblical one of the rainbow, not a weapon of war but a promise of peace.

  Black Harvest was my first published book but, although I have written many since, it is the book with which, to quote Vita Sackville-West, I am “the least dissatisfied”. When I wrote it I knew nothing about rules, about “ideal lengths”, about “levels of vocabulary”. I wrote it in my own way, exactly as it came to me, with an intense, ever-increasing involvement until, in the end, I became my own characters.

  The day I finished it I went to visit my next-door neighbour who said, “Goodness, Ann, you’re so pale! You look as if you’ve seen a ghost.”

  I remember my answer as I sank into a chair. “I’ve just finished my book about the Irish Famine. Could I possibly have a cup of tea with you?” Because, you see, it was hard to separate myself from the people who had lived with me so long.

  A storyteller’s first aim should surely be to deliver a good read, but I’d like to think Black Harvest might also enlarge the sympathies and understanding of those who turn its pages. If it does it will, in its own dark way, have achieved what Robert Frost said a good poem can do, which is to “begin in delight and end in wisdom”.

  ANN PILLING

  About the Author

  Ann Pilling was brought up in Warrington, Cheshire, and many of her books are set in the industrial North West. She read English at London University, where she wrote a thesis on C. S. Lewis for the M Phil degree. For some years she taught English in Buckinghamshire, then spent time in America before returning to Oxford, where she now lives. She is married with two sons.

  Ann has been writing books for children since 1983. Among her many titles are several novels of contemporary life, including Vote for Baz, Mother’s Daily Scream and Henry’s Leg, which won the 1986 Guardian Award and was subsequently televised. She has also written several books for younger children, a children’s Bible and two adult novels. Black Harvest was her first published book.

  Apart from literature, Ann enjoys music, both listening and singing. If she had not become a writer she would have liked to have been a vet—she loves animals, and Arthur, the family cat, has a starring role in one of her most recent books, The Empty Frame.

  Also by the Author

  The Pit

  The Witch of Lagg

  The Beggar’s Curse

  The Empty Frame

  Copyright

  First published in Great Britain by Armada 1983

  First published as a Collins Modern Classic 1999

  HarperCollins Children’s Books is an imprint of

  HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd,

  77–85 Fulham Palace Road,

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  www.harpercollins.co.uk

  Copyright © Ann Cheetham 1983

  Postscript copyright © Ann Pilling 1999

  Ann Cheetham asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

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  Source ISBN 9780006754268

  Ebook Edition © NOVEMBER 2013 ISBN 9780007392414

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