The Ocean at the End of the Lane

‘That’s why he came down here,’ she told me. ‘The end of the road. Nobody’s going to find him and stop him around here, three o’ clock in the morning. And the mud there is wet and easy to mould.’

‘Do you think he killed himself?’

‘Yes. Do you like milk? Gran’s milking Bessie now.’

I said, ‘You mean, real milk from a cow?’ and then felt foolish, but she nodded, reassuringly.

I thought about this. I’d never had milk that didn’t come from a bottle. ‘I think I’d like that.’

We stopped at a small barn where an old woman, much older than my parents, with long grey hair, like cobwebs, and a thin face, was standing beside a cow. Long black tubes were attached to each of the cow’s teats. ‘We used to milk them by hand,’ she told me. ‘But this is easier.’

She showed me how the milk went from the cow down the black tubes and into the machine, through a cooler and into huge metal churns. The churns were left on a heavy wooden platform outside the barn, where they would be collected each day by a lorry.

The old lady gave me a cup of creamy milk from Bessie the cow, the fresh milk before it had gone through the cooler. Nothing I had drunk had ever tasted like that before: rich and warm and perfectly happy in my mouth. I remembered that milk after I had forgotten everything else.

‘There’s more of them up the lane,’ said the old woman, suddenly. ‘All sorts coming down with lights flashing and all. Such a palaver. You should get the boy into the kitchen. He’s hungry, and a cup of milk won’t do a growing boy.’

The girl said, ‘Have you eaten?’

‘Just a piece of toast. It was burned.’

She said, ‘My name’s Lettie. Lettie Hempstock. This is Hempstock Farm. Come on.’ She took me in through the front door, and into their enormous kitchen, sat me down at a huge wooden table, so stained and patterned that it looked as if faces were staring up at me from the old wood.

‘We have breakfast here early,’ she said. ‘Milking starts at first light. But there’s porridge in the saucepan, and jam to put in it.’

She gave me a china bowl filled with warm porridge from the stove top, with a lump of home-made blackberry jam, my favourite, in the middle of the porridge, then she poured cream on it. I swished it around with my spoon before I ate it, swirling it into a purple mess, and was as happy as I have ever been about anything. It tasted perfect.

A stocky woman came in. Her red-brown hair was streaked with grey, and cut short. She had apple cheeks, a dark green skirt that went to her knees, and wellington boots. She said, ‘This must be the boy from the top of the lane. Such a business going on with that car. There’ll be five of them needing tea soon.’

Lettie filled a huge copper kettle from the tap. She lit a gas hob with a match and put the kettle on the flame. Then she took down five chipped mugs from a cupboard, and hesitated, looking at the woman. The woman said, ‘You’re right. Six. The doctor will be here too.’

Then the woman pursed her lips and made a tchutch! noise. ‘They’ve missed the note,’ she said. ‘He wrote it so carefully too, folded it and put it in his breast pocket, and they haven’t looked there yet.’

‘What does it say?’ asked Lettie.

‘Read it yourself,’ said the woman. I thought she was Lettie’s mother. She seemed like she was somebody’s mother. Then she said, ‘It says that he took all the money that his friends had given him to smuggle out of South Africa and bank for them in England, along with all the money he’d made over the years mining for opals, and he went to the casino in Brighton, to gamble, but he only meant to gamble with his own money. And then he only meant to dip into the money his friends had given him until he had made back the money he had lost.

‘And then he didn’t have anything,’ said the woman, ‘and all was dark.’

‘That’s not what he wrote, though,’ said Lettie, squinting her eyes. ‘What he wrote was,

“To all my friends,

Am so sorry it was not like I meant to and hope you can find it in your hearts to forgive me for I cannot forgive myself.”’

‘Same thing,’ said the older woman. She turned to me. ‘I’m Lettie’s ma,’ she said. ‘You’ll have met my mother already, in the milking shed. I’m Mrs Hempstock, but she was Mrs Hempstock before me, so she’s Old Mrs Hempstock. This is Hempstock Farm. It’s the oldest farm hereabouts. It’s in the Domesday Book.’

I wondered why they were all called Hempstock, those women, but I did not ask, any more than I dared to ask how they knew about the suicide note or what the opal miner had thought as he died. They were perfectly matter-of-fact about it.

Lettie said, ‘I nudged him to look in the breast pocket. He’ll think he thought of it himself.’

‘There’s a good girl,’ said Mrs Hempstock. ‘They’ll be in here when the kettle boils to ask if I’ve seen anything unusual and to have their tea. Why don’t you take the boy down to the pond?’

‘It’s not a pond,’ said Lettie. ‘It’s my ocean.’ She turned to me and said, ‘Come on.’ She led me out of the house the way we had come.

The day was still grey.

We walked around the house, down the cow path.

‘Is it a real ocean?’ I asked.

‘Oh yes,’ she said.

We came on it suddenly: a wooden shed, an old bench, and between them, a duckpond, dark water spotted with duckweed and lily pads. There was a dead fish, silver as a coin, floating on its side on the surface.

‘That’s not good,’ said Lettie.

‘I thought you said it was an ocean,’ I told her. ‘It’s just a pond, really.’

‘It is an ocean,’ she said. ‘We came across it when I was just a baby, from the old country.’

Lettie went into the shed and came out with a long bamboo pole, with what looked like a shrimping net on the end. She leaned over, carefully pushed the net beneath the dead fish. She pulled it out.

‘But Hempstock Farm is in the Domesday Book,’ I said. ‘Your mum said so. And that was William the Conqueror.’

‘Yes,’ said Lettie Hempstock.

She took the dead fish out of the net and examined it. It was still soft, not stiff, and it flopped in her hand. I had never seen so many colours: it was silver, yes, but beneath the silver was blue and green and purple and each scale was tipped with black.

‘What kind of fish is it?’ I asked.

‘This is very odd,’ she said. ‘I mean, mostly fish in this ocean don’t die anyway.’ She produced a horn-handled pocket knife, although I could not have told you from where, and she pushed it into the stomach of the fish, and sliced along, towards the tail.

‘This is what killed her,’ said Lettie.

She took something from inside the fish. Then she put it, still greasy from the fish guts, into my hand. I bent down, dipped it into the water, rubbed my fingers across it to clean it off. I stared at it. Queen Victoria’s face stared back at me.

‘Sixpence?’ I said. ‘The fish ate a sixpence?’

‘It’s not good, is it?’ said Lettie Hempstock. There was a little sunshine now: it showed the freckles that clustered across her cheeks and nose, and where the sunlight touched her hair, it was a coppery red. And then she said, ‘Your father’s wondering where you are. Time to be getting back.’

I tried to give her the little silver sixpence, but she shook her head. ‘You keep it,’ she said. ‘You can buy chocolates, or sherbet lemons.’

‘I don’t think I can,’ I said. ‘It’s too small. I don’t know if shops will take sixpences like these nowadays.’

‘Then put it in your piggy bank,’ she said. ‘It might bring you luck.’ She said this doubtfully, as if she were uncertain what kind of luck it would bring.

The policemen and my father and two men in brown suits and ties were standing in the farmhouse kitchen. One of the men told me he was a policeman, but he wasn’t wearing a uniform, which I thought was disappointing: if I were a policeman I would wear my uniform whenever I could. The other man with a suit and tie I recognised as Dr Smithson, our family doctor. They were finishing their tea.

My father thanked Mrs Hempstock and Lettie for taking care of me, and they said I was no trouble at all, and that I could come again. The policeman who had driven us down to the Mini now drove us back to our house, and dropped us off at the end of the drive.

‘Probably best if you don’t talk about this to your sister,’ said my father.

I didn’t want to talk about it to anybody. I had found a special place, and made a new friend, and lost my comic, and I was holding an old-fashioned silver sixpence tightly in my hand.

I said, ‘What makes the ocean different to the sea?’

‘Bigger,’ said my father. ‘An ocean is much bigger than the sea. Why?’

‘Just thinking,’ I said. ‘Could you have an ocean that was as small as a pond?’

‘No,’ said my father. ‘Ponds are pond-sized, lakes are lake-sized. Seas are seas and oceans are oceans. Atlantic, Pacific, Indian, Arctic. I think that’s all of the oceans there are.’

My father went up to his bedroom, to talk to my mum and to be on the phone up there. I dropped the silver sixpence into my piggy bank. It was the kind of china piggy bank from which nothing could be removed. One day, when it could hold no more coins, I would be allowed to break it, but it was far from full.

Chapter 3

I never saw the white Mini again. Two days later, on Monday, my father took delivery of a black Rover, with cracked red leather seats. It was a bigger car than the Mini had been, but not as comfortable. The smell of old cigars permeated the leather upholstery, and long drives in the back of the Rover always left us feeling car-sick.

The black Rover was not the only thing to arrive on Monday morning. I also received a letter.

I was seven years old, and I never got letters. I got cards, on my birthday, from my grandparents, and from Ellen Henderson, my mother’s friend whom I did not know. On my birthday Ellen Henderson, who lived in a caravan, would send me a handkerchief. I did not get letters. Even so, I would check the post every day to see if there was anything for me.

And that morning, there was.

I opened it, did not understand what I was looking at, and took it to my mother.

‘You’ve won the Premium Bonds,’ she said.

‘What does that mean?’

‘When you were born – when all of her grandchildren were born – your grandma bought you a Premium Bond. And when the number gets chosen, you can win thousands of pounds.’

‘Did I win thousands of pounds?’

‘No.’ She looked at the slip of paper. ‘You’ve won twenty-five pounds.’

I was sad not to have won thousands of pounds (I already knew what I would buy with it. I would buy a place to go and be alone, like a Batcave, with a hidden entrance), but I was delighted to be in possession of a fortune beyond my previous imaginings. Twenty-five pounds. I could buy four little blackjack or fruit salad sweets for a penny: they were a farthing each, although there were no more farthings. Twenty-five pounds, at 240 pennies to the pound and four sweets to the penny, was … more sweets than I could easily imagine.

‘I’ll put it in your Post Office account,’ said my mother, crushing my dreams.

I did not have any more sweets than I had had that morning. Even so, I was rich. Thirteen pounds eleven shillings richer than I had been moments before. I had never won anything, ever.

I made her show me the piece of paper with my name on it again, before she put it into her handbag.

That was Monday morning. In the afternoon, the ancient Mr Wollery, who came in on Monday and Thursday afternoons to do some gardening (Mrs Wollery, his equally ancient wife, who wore galoshes, huge semi-transparent overshoes, would come in on Wednesday afternoons and clean), was digging in the vegetable garden and dug up a bottle filled with pennies and halfpennies and threepenny bits and even farthings. None of the coins was dated later than 1937, and I spent the afternoon polishing them with brown sauce and vinegar, to make them shine.

My mother put the bottle of old coins on the mantelpiece of the dining room, and said that she expected that a coin collector might pay several pounds for them.

I went to bed that night happy and excited. I was rich. Buried treasure had been discovered. The world was a good place.

I don’t remember how the dreams started. But that’s the way of dreams, isn’t it? I know that I was in school, and having a bad day, hiding from the kinds of kids who hit me and called me names, but they found me anyway, deep in the rhododendron thicket behind the school, and I knew it must be a dream (but in the dream I didn’t know; it was real and it was true) because my grandfather was with them, and his friends, old men with grey skin and hacking coughs. They held sharp pencils, the kind that drew blood when you were jabbed with them. I ran from them, but they were faster than I was, the old men, and the big boys, and in the boys’ toilets, where I had hidden in a cubicle, they caught up with me. They held me down, forced my mouth wide open.