So they had cut the turf and buried Granny Aching in the Chalk, watered the turf
afterwards to leave no mark, then they burned her hut.
Sheep’s wool, Jolly Sailor tobacco and turpentine . . .
. . . had been the smells of the shepherding hut, and the smell of Granny Aching.
Such things have a hold on people that goes right to the heart. Tiffany only had to smell
them now to be back there, in the warmth and silence and safety of the hut. It was
the place she had gone to when she was upset, and the place she had gone to when
she was happy. And Granny Aching would always smile and make tea and say
nothing. And nothing bad could happen in the shepherding hut. It was a fort against
the world. Even now, after Granny had gone, Tiffany still liked to go up there.
Tiffany stood there, while the wind blew over the turf and sheep bells clonked in the
distance.
‘I’ve got. . .’ She cleared her throat. I’ve got to go away. I . . . I’ve got to learn proper witching, and there’s no one here now to teach me, you see. I’ve got to . . . to look after
the hills like you did. I can . . . do things but I don’t know things, and Miss Tick says what you don’t know can kill you. I want to be as good as you were. I will come back! I will
come back soon! I promise I will come back, better than I went!’
A blue butterfly, blown off course by a gust, settled
on Tiffany’s shoulder, opened and shut its wings once or twice, then fluttered away.
Granny Aching had never been at home with words. She collected silence like
other people collected string. But she had a way of saying nothing that said it all.
Tiffany stayed for a while, until her tears had dried, and then went off back down
the hill, leaving the everlasting wind to curl around the wheels and whistle down the
chimney of the pot-bellied stove. Life went on.
It wasn’t unusual for girls as young as Tiffany to go ‘into service’. It meant working
as a maid somewhere. Traditionally, you started by helping an old lady who lived by
herself; she wouldn’t be able to pay much, but since this was your first job you
probably weren’t worth much, either.
In fact Tiffany practically ran Home Farm’s dairy by herself, if someone helped her
lift the big milk churns, and her parents had been surprised she had wanted to go into
service at all. But as Tiffany said, it was something everyone did. You got out into the
world a little bit. You met new people. You never knew what it could lead to.
That, rather cunningly, got her mother on her side. Her mother’s rich aunt had gone off
to be a scullery maid, and then a parlour maid, and had worked her way up until she
was a housekeeper and married to a butler and lived in a fine house. It wasn’t her fine
house, and she only lived in a bit of it, but she was practically a lady.
Tiffany didn’t intend to be a lady. This was all a ruse, anyway. And Miss Tick was in
on it.
You weren’t allowed to charge money for the witching, so all witches did some other
job as well. Miss Tick was basically a witch disguised as a teacher. She travelled around
with the other wandering teachers who went in bands from place to place teaching
anything to anybody in exchange for food or old clothes.
It was a good way to get around, because people in the chalk country didn’t trust
witches. They thought they danced around on moonlit nights without their drawers on.
(Tiffany had made enquiries about this, and had been slightly relieved to find
out that you didn’t have to do this to be a witch. You could if you wanted to, but
only if you were certain where all the nettles, thistles and hedgehogs were.)
But if it came to it, people were a bit wary of the wandering teachers, too. They were
said to pinch chickens and steal away children (which was true, in a way) and they went
from village to village with their gaudy carts and wore long robes with leather pads on
the sleeves and strange flat hats and talked amongst themselves using heathen lingo
no one could understand, like ‘Aha jacta esf and ‘Quid pro quo’. It was quite easy for Miss Tick to lurk amongst them. Her pointy hat was a stealth version, which
looked just like a black straw hat with paper flowers on it until you pressed the secret
spring.
Over the last year or so Tiffany’s mother had been quite surprised, and a little
worried, at Tiffany’s sudden thirst for education, which people in the village thought
was a good thing in moderation but if taken unwisely could lead to restlessness.
Then a month ago, the message had come: Be ready.
Miss Tick, in her flowery hat, had visited the farm and had explained to Mr and Mrs
Aching that an elderly lady up in the mountains had heard of Tiffany’s excellent
prowess with cheese and was willing to offer her the post of maid at four dollars a
month, one day off a week, her own bed and a week’s holiday at Hogswatch.
Tiffany knew her parents. Three dollars a month was a bit low, and five dollars would
be suspiciously high, but prowess with cheese was worth the extra dollar. And a bed all
to yourself was a very nice perk. Before most of Tiffany’s sisters had left home, sleeping
two sisters to a bed had been normal. It was a good offer.
Her parents had been impressed and slightly scared of Miss Tick, but they had been
brought up to believe that people who knew more than you and used long words were
quite important, so they’d agreed.
Tiffany accidentally heard them discussing it after she had gone to bed that night. It’s
quite easy to accidentally overhear people talking downstairs if
you hold an upturned glass to the floorboards and accidentally put your ear to it.
She heard her father say that Tiffany didn’t have to go away at all.
She heard her mother say that all girls wondered what was out there in the world, so
it was best to get it out of her system. Besides, she was a very capable girl with a good
head on her shoulders. Why, with hard work there was no reason why one day she
couldn’t be a servant to someone quite important, like Aunt Hetty had been, and live
in a house with an inside privy.
Her father said she’d find that scrubbing floors was the same everywhere.
Her mother said, well, in that case she’d get bored and come back home after the year
was up and, by the way, what did ‘prowess’ mean?
‘Superior skill’, thought Tiffany to herself. They did have an old dictionary in the
house, but her mother never opened it because the sight of all those words upset her.
Tiffany had read it all the way through.
And that was it, and suddenly here she was, a month later, wrapping her old boots,
which’d been worn by all her sisters before her, in a piece of clean rag and putting them
in the second-hand suitcase her mother had bought her, which looked as if it was made
of bad cardboard or pressed grape pips mixed with ear wax, and had to be held
together with string.
There were goodbyes. She cried a bit, and her mother cried a lot, and her little
brother Wentworth cried as well just in case he could get a sweet for doing so.
Tiffany’s father didn’t cry but gave her a silver dollar and rather gruffly told her to be
sure to write home every week, which is a man’s way of crying. She said goodbye to the
cheeses in the dairy and the sheep in the paddock and even to Ratbag the cat.
Then everyone apart from the cheeses and the cat stood at the gate and waved to her
and Miss Tick -well, except for the sheep, too – until they’d gone nearly all the way
down the chalky-white lane to the village.
And then there was silence except for the sound of their boots on the flinty surface and the endless song of the skylarks overhead. It was late August, and very hot, and the
new boots pinched.
‘I should take them off, if I was you,’ said Miss Tick after a while.
Tiffany sat down by the side of the lane and got her old boots out of the case. She
didn’t bother to ask how Miss Tick knew about the tight new boots. Witches paid
attention. The old boots, even though she had to wear several pairs of socks with