Constable Across the Moors Read online

  I dropped into Ashfordly, rode through the sleepy market town and out towards Eltering before turning high into the moorlands which overlooked Ryedale. Here, the roads were reduced to tracks and I marvelled at the new growths blossoming from the depths of dead vegetation. The grass was showing a brighter green, new leaves were bursting from apparently lifeless stems and animals romped in the fields, glad to be rid of winter’s burden and looking forward to the joy of spring.

  My machine and I climbed across the ranging hills with their acres of smooth moorland, and I enjoyed the limitless vista of steep slopes, craggy outcrops and deep valleys. They combined to produce a beauty of landscape seldom found elsewhere. And there was not a person about. I had the moors to myself.

  True, I did pass one or two cars, and in the villages I noted ladies going about their daily shopping or cleaning their cottage windows, but beyond the inhabited areas, there was a sense of isolation that was intriguing. It was like entering a deserted world, an area devoid of people and houses but full of living things like birds and plants and animals. In some respects, it was like a fairyland, with wisps of mist hanging near the valley floors and shafts of strong sunlight piercing the density of the man-made forests and natural woodland. The smell of peace and tranquillity was everywhere.

  Ellersfield lay snug in one of these deep valleys, a cluster of stone-built houses nestling at the head of the dale. All had thatched roofs, and they were sturdy dwellings, somewhat squat in appearance but constructed to withstand the fierce winters of the moors. Oak Crag Cottage stood at the far end as I rode into the community, using a road which ended in a rough cart track as it climbed steeply on to the moors before vanishing among the heather.

  It was a neatly kept house. The thatch was carefully maintained and an evergreen hedge acted as a boundary between the cottage and the track by which it stood. The wooden gate was painted a fresh green and bore the name of the house in white letters. I parked the motor cycle on its stand and opened the gate, walking clumsily in my ungainly suit.

  The house had three windows along its front with two attic windows above, all with tiny panes of glass and all neatly picked out in fresh white paint. I knocked on the door and waited. There was no reply.

  I tried again, with the same result, and guessed the lady of the house must be around because she’d called in the police to solve her problem. As policemen are wont to do, I moved away from the front door and walked along the sandstone flags to the rear. At the back was a long flat garden with sheds and poultry runs, and I saw a woman repairing a wire netting fence at the far end.

  “Hello!” I shouted.

  She stood up, placing a hand on her back to indicate some form of backache. She smiled a welcome.

  “Oh, hello. Is it the police?”

  “Yes,” I confirmed, realising my gear made me look like a refugee from the Royal Flying Corps of World War I. “I’m P.C. Rhea from Aidensfield.”

  She came towards me looking pleased as she removed some rubber gloves. She wore a headscarf which almost concealed her face, and I wondered if she was pretty.

  “Katherine Hardwick,” she introduced herself. “Miss,” she added as an afterthought. “I’m sorry to trouble you, but I thought I’d better put an official stop to my unwelcome visitor.”

  “You did exactly the right thing,” I endeavoured to comfort her a little. “You know who it is?”

  She shook her head and said, “Come inside, I’ll make a coffee. You’ll have a coffee?”

  “There’s nothing I’d like more.” The spring air had given me a healthy appetite and thirst, and she led me through a rear door into the dark interior of her cottage.

  It was very dark inside and I noticed the rear windows were very small, so typical of these moorland houses. They aided warmth and security in the harshest of weathers. Her kitchen was a long narrow room with modern electric equipment, but she led me through and into her lounge.

  As the kettle boiled, she settled on a Windsor chair and smiled pleasantly, removing the headscarf as she talked. She was a very tall woman, with an almost angular body and she appeared to be shapeless beneath her rough country clothes. She had a long overcoat which was all tattered and greasy, corduroy trousers and Wellington boots, but as the headscarf came away, I saw that her face was beautifully smooth and pink. Her eyes were bright and alert, her teeth excellent and her hair as black as night, cut short but not severely so. I estimated her age to be less than forty, but probably beyond thirty-five. She was very attractive in a rural way, and I wondered what she’d be like in an evening dress or a summer frock. Did she ever wear nice clothes? I wondered.

  The kettle began to whistle and she took off her old coat to reveal a well proportioned figure clad in a rose-coloured sweater.

  She vanished into her kitchen and returned with two cups of steaming coffee, a jug of fresh cream and a basin of sugar. Some home-made fruit cake and ginger biscuits adorned the tray.

  “This is lovely,” I congratulated her. “You shouldn’t have bothered.”

  “It’s nice to get visitors, and besides, it’s ’lowance time anyway. Now, Mr Rhea, did your sergeant tell you what this is about?”

  “Somebody’s playing pranks, being a nuisance, frightening you?”

  “That’s about it, Mr Rhea. I’m not one for calling the police, I usually sort out my own troubles but I felt this one ought to receive the weight of the law. There’s other folks who live alone up here, you see, and some are elderly. I don’t want them terrified.”

  “There’s not many folk live out here is there?” I sipped my hot coffee. It was delicious.

  “Seventy or so, it’s not many,” she confirmed.

  “You have an idea who’s doing these stupid things?”

  “I have,” she said, “and I’ve warned him off. He says it’s not him, but things keep happening.”

  “Such as?” I wanted her to tell me more.

  “It’s nothing serious. Last back end, for example, he opened my greenhouse door after I’d closed it for the night and the cold air ruined some young plants and flowers. He’s let the hens out of their run and they ruined my garden when I was in Middlesbrough for the day; he knocks on windows and runs off when I’m alone in the house. One day, he cut all the heads off my cabbages and ruined them, and another time took the seat off my bike and threw it into a field.”

  “Are you frightened?”

  “No,” she said. “No, I’m not frightened. It’s just a bloody nuisance, Mr Rhea, and I wonder if he’s doing it to others in Ellersfield, others who are too shy or old to report it. People are shy out here, you know, they don’t like making a fuss.”

  “I know,” I knew enough about the stolid Yorkshire character to fully understand her remarks. “Right, who is it?”

  “It’s a youth called Ted Agar,” she said, with never a doubt in her voice.

  “You’ve seen him doing these things?” I put to her, enjoying the cake.

  “No,” she admitted. “But it’s him.”

  “How can you be so sure?” I had to ask.

  She hesitated and I wondered if I had touched a sensitive area. I allowed her to take her time before replying. She drank a deep draught from her cup.

  “Mr Rhea, I’m a woman and I live alone. I’m thirty-six, and I’m not bad looking. Ted’s been pestering me to go out with him – to the pictures, for walks, over to Scarborough for a Sunday trip, that sort of thing. He’s only a child, Mr Rhea, a lad in his early twenties I’d say. I’ve turned him down every time and these things started to go on.”

  “Over what period?”

  “Maybe a year, no longer.”

  “Is he a local lad?” I asked.

  “Not really. He came from Eltering, looking for farm work and Atkinsons took him on.”

  “Atkinsons?”

  “Dell Farm, at the bottom of the hill on your way in. That big spot with double iron gates.”

  “I know it,” I smiled. “OK Well, Miss Hardwick, I can have words w
ith him for you. I can threaten him with court action – we could proceed against him for conduct likely to cause a breach of the peace. That way, we could have him bound over to be of good behaviour, and if he did it again, he’d be fined or sent to a detention centre of some kind.”

  “I don’t want to take him to court, a warning from you would be fine,” she said. “I know he’ll think I’m using a sledgehammer to crack a little nut, but he won’t stop when I ask him. I thought a word from you might help.”

  “I’ll speak to him. Will he be in now, at Atkinsons?”

  “He’ll be about the premises somewhere,” she acknowledged.

  I drained my coffee and stood up. “I’ll let you know how I get on – I’ll come straight back.”

  Before I left, I briefly admired her home. The kitchen was a real gem. The fireplace, for example, had an old stone surround with a black-leaded Yorkist range, complete with sliding hooks for pans, and a side oven. It was set in an inglenook and to the right was a wooden partition beyond which was a passage into a further series of rooms.

  “It’s a fascinating house,” I observed.

  “It’s an old cruck house,” she explained. “It used to be a longhouse, that’s a farm house where the family lived at one end and the cattle at the other. The living quarters were warmed by the animals as they wintered next door. The crucks are like tree trunks, and they support the building. It’s very old – I couldn’t hazard a date.”

  “Did you move out here?”

  “No,” she smiled. “It’s been in our family for generations. There’s always been a Hardwick here, as long as anybody knows.”

  I walked around the spacious kitchen, and expressed delight at the ancient woodwork, so crude but effective, and then I noticed the carved wooden post at the outer end of the partition. I ran my hands down it, fingering the delicate workmanship.

  “This is nice – what’s the carving?”

  “That’s a witch post,” she informed me. “Lots of houses had them installed.”

  “What’s it for?” I had never come across this type of thing before.

  “They were built into many houses in this area to protect the occupants against witches,” she smiled. “They date from the seventeenth century mostly, but I’ve never dated ours.”

  “Was witchcraft practised here?” I was intrigued by this decorative post.

  “A good number of old women were reputed to be witches,” she said. “They were supposed to make the milk go sour, or cause the fruit not to ripen – stuff like that. Nuisances more than anything. There wasn’t your dancing naked bits or rituals in lonely woods. They were just old ladies who terrified the superstitious locals and got blamed when things went wrong. Those posts protected the inhabitants against them.”

  After my obvious interest in her house, she showed me the rest of the layout of the fascinating building with its nooks and crannies, beamed bedroom ceilings, sandstone floors and rubble walls. It was a house of considerable age, albeit modernised to meet her modest needs.

  I left my motor cycle near her gate as I walked down the steep hill to Dell Farm. This was a neat homestead with freshly painted gates and a scrupulously tidy farmyard. I made for the house, although I could hear activity in one of the outbuildings, knocked on the door and waited. At my second knock, a woman’s voice shouted, “Come in, the door’s open.”

  I entered a spacious farm kitchen with hams hanging from the ceiling and the smell of new bread heavy in the air. An old lady sat in a chair beside a roaring log fire. I think I must have aroused her from her slumbers.

  “And who might you be?” she demanded, looking me up and down.

  “P.C. Rhea,” I said. “The policeman. From Aidensfield.”

  “You’re a bit off your area, aren’t you?” she quizzed me sharply, her keen grey eyes alert and bright. I reckoned she was well into her seventies, or even older.

  “Not any more. Now we’ve got motor cycles, we go further than we did on bikes. We share the area.”

  “You’ll have come for our Reg, have you? Summat to do with his guns, is it?”

  “Are you Mrs Atkinson?”

  “I am, but Reg is my son. He’s the boss here – I’m just an old lady who lives in. Our Reg’s wife, that’s young Mrs Atkinson, is down at Ashfordly, shopping. Susan, that is.”

  “It’s really young Agar I want to see,” I explained.

  “Why would you want to see him, then? He’s not in trouble is he?”

  “No,” I said, “but I hear he’s been making a pest of himself.”

  “Pest? What sort of pest?”

  I provided brief details of his alleged misbehaviour and she listened intently, leaving me standing in the middle of the floor. She smiled fleetingly, and when I’d finished, she said, “Lads will be lads, it’ll be due to his sap rising, Mr Rhea!”

  “I agree it’s nothing serious, Mrs Atkinson, but his behaviour is unnerving for Miss Hardwick.”

  “Hardwick, did you say?” she threw the question at me, with those eyes flashing brightly.

  “Yes, up at Oak Crag Cottage.”

  “Then she ought to know better than to bring you in, should that one,” the old lady said. “Fancy bringing you all the way in for a trifling thing like that … she ought to be ashamed.”

  “It’s not nice, Mrs Atkinson, having unknown lads making nuisances of themselves when you’re a woman living alone. I don’t mind coming out to help put a stop to it.”

  “Nay, it’s not that, Mr Rhea, it’s that woman. Hardwick. It’s the first time I’ve come across a Hardwick woman that couldn’t sort things out by herself.”

  “Why?” I asked, intrigued. Katherine Hardwick seemed a perfectly ordinary young woman.

  “They’re witches,” she said with all seriousness. “All Hardwick women are witches.”

  I laughed. “Witches?” I said, thinking she was joking.

  “You’ll have heard of Nan Hardwick, haven’t you? Awd Nan Hardwick, who was a witch in these hills years ago?”

  “No,” I had to confess.

  “Then just you listen, young man,” and she motioned me to a wooden chair. I sat down, interested to hear her story. I knew that old ladies tended to ramble and reminisce, but Mrs Atkinson appeared totally in control of her senses, and deadly serious too. She spoke with disarming frankness.

  After leaning forward in her chair and eyeing me carefully, she unravelled her extraordinary story. She was in her late eighties, she told me by way of introduction, and then related the fable of Awd Nan Hardwick. She was a witch whose notoriety was widespread in the North Yorkshire moors when Mrs Atkinson was a young girl; everyone for miles around knew Awd Nan.

  She told me a story about a farmer’s wife who was expecting a baby. One afternoon, Awd Nan chanced to pass the house and called in for some food and a rest as she was several miles from home. She asked for a ‘shive o’ bread and a pot o’ beer’. The food was readily given to her and during the conversation, she let it be known she was aware of the young wife’s condition. She wished the girl well and said, “Thoo’ll have a lad afoor morning, and thoo’ll call him Tommy, weeant thoo?”

  The girl replied that she and her husband had already decided to name the child John if it was a boy, but Awd Nan replied, “Aye, mebbe thoo has, but thoo’d best call him Tommy. And now, Ah’ll say goodbye,” and off she went.

  Both the husband and the girl were determined to name the child John, and later that evening, the prospective father drove a pony and trap across the moors to collect his sister-in-law. She had offered to help with the birth. Three miles from the farm, he had to cross a small bridge, but the horse stopped twenty yards before reaching it and steadfastly refused to move. Try as he might, the farmer could not persuade the animal to proceed, so he tried to leave his seat on the trap. To his horror, he found he was unable to move. In his words, “Ah was ez fast as owt.”

  Eventually he concluded that Awd Nan had put a spell on him and shouted into the air, “Now, Nan, wh
at’s thoo after? Is this tha work?”

  To his amazement, a voice apparently from thin air replied, “Thoo’ll call that bairn Tommy, weearn’t tha?”

  The husband, still determined to select his own name, shouted back, “Ah’ll call ma lad what Ah wants. Ah weearn’t change it for thoo or for all t’Nan devils in this country.”

  “Then thoo’ll stay where too is until t’bairn’s born and t’mother dies,” came the horrifying response.

  The poor young farmer was placed in a terrible dilemma. He could not move his pony and trap, nor could he climb from the seat, and he was faced with the death of his dear wife, all for the sake of a lad’s name. As he sat transfixed, he reasoned it all out, and decided there was an element of uncertainty because the child might be a girl. For that reason, he capitulated. He agreed to call the child Tommy if it was a boy. And at that, he found the horse could move and he went on his way.

  My storyteller did not tell me whether the child was a boy, and I did not ask in case she was talking about her own ancestors, but she went on to relate more stories of Awd Nan Hard wick, all showing belief in the curious power of these local witches.

  As I listened, it was evident that she believed the stories, and I could imagine her family relating these yarns as the children gathered around a blazing fire during the long dark evenings of a moorland winter.

  “Is Katherine Hardwick a descendant of Awd Nan?” I asked.

  “She is,” the lady nodded her grey head seriously. “All those Hardwick women were witches, and she’s no better. Mark my words, young man.”

  “What sort of things does she do then?”

  “Turns milk sour if she comes in the house, makes folks ill by looking at them. Little things like that, like her mother and the other women folk did. Milk would never come to butter if a Hardwick was around.”

  “Is that why you said she could sort out her own trouble with this mischief maker?” I asked.

  “Aye,” she said, “any witch worth her salt could sort out that kind of trouble.”

  “But with all due respect, Mrs Atkinson, witches don’t exist …”