Haweswater Read Online Free PDF Page B

of a new era into the remote valley, carrying it in her arms like a paper lantern, signed by a thousand men and women of the country. She brings with her a brilliant energy and liberating words, ideals belonging to the New World, perhaps, or the Antipodes. And there are off-kilter tones in her speeches, also; she has her demons. Let the class take note. Mary Shelley’s husband altered the last sentence of Frankenstein , commanding the reader to breathe a sigh of relief where it was not intended. Never breathe a sigh of relief, she warns. In this world there is always the intrusion of one structure or another into the sacred, self-governing heart. When she leaves this valley it will be without regret, with her bright arms open towards the Spanish Civil War, late in the summer of 1936. Behind her a legacy of unique and brilliant education. The space between this bowed rack of fells having become an unprecedented arena of learning.

    By then, Janet Lightburn will be grown, she will have benefited from the influence of an exceptional woman. But in these dawn hours of her own childhood and before the school bell there are other small, hard lessons to be learned. From her father, from the way his hands move smoothly across an animal: superior, stewarding, so that there can be no question of his authority. There are signs of sickness she will be taught to recognize in beasts, fluid coming from eyes, lumps on the flat surface of a tongue. Or a sheep unable to get up, unable to back out of the corner of a wall, having strayed from its heft. On the scars and lower fells she often comes across the carcasses of dead sheep, immediately recognizing the stench coming off the earth. At first they are only missing eyes, the wool thinning off the face and a hurricane of flies anticipating above their bellies. With time their bodies roll into oblique positions and open like rotting flowers, dry flesh stretches and bones spread out over the rough grass. She kicks them with a shoe, back into close proximity, to create rudimentary maps of the world. She finds India, the Sargasso Sea, Tasmania, shaped by the ribcage of a Swaledale over heather. Eventually even the grey bones are removed, half-buried, or grown over with bracken. Nothing remains as a monument to death here. The land sucks back in what it once issued.
    In these early hours she learns skills without knowing that it is an education of one form. The way to hold down a ewe for clipping, with the upper body a brace and one leg an anchor, the strong arm free. She will pry open the mouth of an orphaned lamb, hold its tongue down with a finger and thumb to introduce milk through a fake teat. The point on the side of a head to place the rifle barrel, exact inches from an eye, where the bullet will meet with least resistance. She will not ask if it is the same for humans. Already she understands limits.
    One morning she watches her father kill a lame cow. It is still upright in the field, but one hind hoof is rotten. It will not move and cannot be saved, must be destroyed before it destroys the herd, her father says. It sways and lets out an occasional quiet bellow. The decision is made quickly and, without remorse, her father leaves for Whelter Farm to get some cartridges and the gun. For a time she is left alone with the animal. During the wait she prays that the cow will somehow recover and move from the middle of the field where it is stuck. Even two rotten steps to the left might mean it could be saved, so that she could take her father by his cuff and say, See, see, it is still capable. Salvation. Her mother would say the word, the place, is reserved for humans, for they alone can be redeemed through God. Not the animals who have not been blessed under His Mercy. What, then, of this beast without choice or hope of mercy? Only a bullet in the brain to stop its energy and the eventual spread of its bones across the soil. And the land will borrow back that which was lent, as always. She