The Levels Read Free

House is the prettiest house round here, in sunshine, with blossom on the trees and bees heavy with pollen, a picture. It’s the sort of place you see in photographs of people eating chocolates out of doors. It has windows of thick stone frames with lead between tiny panes of glass, Hamstone walls and a tiled roof. Over an open porch to the front door ivy climbs, up half the wall. All the shrubs and flowers in the front are overgrown, the borders are full of weeds. In the orchard, the trees haven’t been pruned for years, but crop as if they had been; nobody goes there to work anymore.
    A stream runs to the east of Higher Burrow Hill, I followed it to The Parret at Thorney, got Dick, and walked back again. We were seven or eight, he was a big boy. I had the brains. It was my idea to build a treehouse. I sent him off to find materials.
    â€˜What about this?’ He found a sheet of galvanized in a lean-to and pulled it over. It was hopeless, I told him it was planks of wood we needed. We found old clothes, more galvanized iron, some bales of straw, but nothing useful.
    We searched around the back of the house, to the shaded north walls, where it was cold, chill. It was the last hot day of spring, a day when even some birds shut up for half an hour in the middle of the day, exhausted after a spring flying for their nests, and after the eggs had been laid. But no bird would shelter in the lee of that wall, or in any of the places in the eaves; no amount of down could have comforted a nest. There was nothing there, the Bromptons had taken everything but the chicken house. Dick saw it first, but not the possibility. He wanted to rip parts away and use bales of straw for the walls, but I said we’ll take it to pieces and put it back together, ten feet off the ground in the forks of the biggest apple tree we could find.
    I took it to bits and Dick did the carrying. We found old rope in the pound house, and hauled the sections, one by one, into the tree. Floor, walls, door, window, roof — all we had to do was bang the nails already there back into the holes they had already made. We erected a fifteen fowl hen house in the double forks of the tallest tree, big enough for the two of us to sit in, and watch the moor around and the house in front of us. We could sit for an hour and watch the egg man on his round, driving from farm to farm, sometimes stopping for a long time, sometimes hardly stopping at all, with the leaves of the tree all around like green curtains.
    Nobody else ever went near Drove House, or if they did we never saw them. We always had a good view, but in all the time that summer, the closest people came was to count sheep. The nearest withy bed was two fields away. We didn’t know who farmed the land; someone from Kingston had taken it but there were so many people we couldn’t tell who. The house was only touched when the postman came with a card, and we looked in to see it sat alone on the mat, with the light from the letter box blocked by our heads pressed up against it. No one else came; the house stood like a fortress and we were its siege, camped in the perfect place.
    One day, Dick asked me if I thought we could eat the apples, like it was our garden. I said ‘Yes.’ He bit one, but though it was ripe it tasted so bitter, and he spat it out. As pieces of apple rained down on the ghosts, he changed towards me. I hadn’t known something, so now he’d have good ideas too.
    My mother asked me where I was playing with Dick. ‘Around the place,’ I said. I went to see my father, working on trugs for a gardening shop in Bristol. They were made on a spinner, fixed by a bolt to the centre of the plank, with raised ends, so the base of the basket was curved, like a boat.
    â€˜You been to Drove House?’
    â€˜Yes.’
    â€˜Seen the ghosts? Eh? They’ll get you,’ he said. I said Dick was bigger than any of them and was waiting for them anyway, so they