Читать книгу The Children of Willow Farm - Enid blyton - Страница 6

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Benjy awoke first the next morning. The sun came in at his window, and when he opened his eyes he saw a golden pattern of sunlight on the wall. He remembered at once where he was, and sat up in delight.

“It’s our first real day at Willow Farm!” he thought. “I shall see Tammylan today—and Scamper. I wonder if Rory is awake.”

He slipped into Rory’s room, but Rory was still fast asleep. So Benjy put on his clothes and went downstairs all by himself. He let himself out into the farmyard through the big kitchen door. The early morning sun was pale and had little warmth in it, but it was lovely to see it.

“I wish there were hens and ducks clucking and quacking,” thought Benjy. “But there soon will be. My word, how the birds are singing!”

The early morning chorus sounded loudly about Benjy’s ears as he wandered round the farm. The chaffinches carolled merrily—“chip-chip-chip-cherry-erry-erry, chippy-ooEEEar!” they sang madly. Benjy whistled the song after them.

Blackbirds were sitting at the tops of trees singing slowly and solemnly to themselves, listening to their own tunes. Thrushes sang joyfully, repeating their musical sentences over and over again.

“Ju-dee, Ju-dee, Ju-dee!” sang one thrush.

“Mind how you do it, mind how you do it!” called another, as Benjy jumped over a puddle and splashed himself. The boy laughed.

“Soon the swallows will be back,” he thought. “I wonder if they’ll build in the barn. It will be lovely if they do. After all, their real name is barn-swallow—and we have lots of barns. I must peep in and see if I can spy any old nests.”

It was too dark in the barn to see if the remains of old swallows’ nests were on the rafters high in the roof. But Benjy saw the old nests of house-martins against the walls of the farmhouse. Two or three were just below his own window!

“I say—how lovely if they come back next month and build again there,” thought Benjy, gazing up at his little jutting-out window, tucked so cosily into the thatch. “I shall hear their pretty twittering, and see the baby martins peeping out of the mud-nests. I hope they come back soon.”

Far in the distance the shepherd moved in the fields. He was doing something to one of the sheep. Nobody else seemed to be about at all. There were no animals or birds to see to, nothing to feed.

But wait—somebody was about! Benjy saw the end of a ladder suddenly appearing round the corner of the farmhouse. Who could be carrying it?

A man came round the corner, whistling softly. He saw Benjy and stopped.

“Good morning, young sir,” he said.

“Good morning,” said Benjy. “Who are you?”

“I’m Bill the thatcher,” said the man. “I’m just thatching the house for you—and after that I’m going to take a hand on the farm to get you all going!”

“Oh, that’s fine!” said Benjy, pleased, for he liked the look of the man very much. His face was burnt as brown as an oak-apple, and his eyes were like bits of blue china in his brown face. They twinkled all the time.

Bill took the ladder to the kitchen end of the farmhouse. Lying on the ground nearby was a great heap of straw.

“I do wish I could thatch a roof,” said Benjy. “You know, we learn all sorts of things at school, Bill—like what happened at the battle of Crecy and things like that—and yet nobody thinks of teaching us how to do really useful and exciting things like thatching a roof. Think how good it would be if I could say to my father—‘Let me thatch the roof, Daddy!’ or ‘Let me clean out the duck-pond!’ Or, ‘Let me sweep the chimney!’ ”

“Well, you come and watch me do a bit of thatching.”

Bill laughed. “Well, you come and watch me do a bit of thatching,” he said. “Then maybe next year when the old summer-house over there wants patching up with straw, you’ll be able to do it yourself!”

Bill had a great many willow-sticks that he had cut on his way to Willow Farm that morning. He began to cut them into short strips and to sharpen the ends. Benjy watched him. “What do you want those for?” he asked.

“To peg down the straw thatch near the edge, young sir,” said Bill. “Look and see the piece I’ve finished.”

Benjy looked, and saw that the thatcher had made a very neat edging near the bottom of the thatched roof. “It looks rather like an embroidered pattern!” he said. “Do you put it there just to look pretty?”

“Oh no,” said the thatcher. “The straw would work loose if it wasn’t held towards the bottom like that—but the pattern is one used by many thatchers. My father used it, and his father before him. Look at the top of the roof too—see the pattern there? Ah, thatching isn’t so easy as it looks—it’s a job that goes in families and has to be learnt when you’re a boy.”

“Oh good,” said Benjy, glad that he was still a boy and could learn to thatch. “I say, do you think you could just wait till I call the others? They’d love to see you do the thatching.”

“You go and get the others, but I’ll not wait,” said the thatcher, going up the ladder with a heavy load of straw on his shoulder. “A minute here and a minute there—that’s no use when you’ve work to do. I don’t wait about. I’ll be at work all day and you’ll have plenty of time to see me.”

At that moment the other three came out. They saw Benjy and rushed at him. “Why didn’t you wake us, you mean thing? You’ve been up ages, haven’t you?”

“Ages,” said Benjy. “Everything’s lovely! Look—that’s the thatcher. His name’s Bill. See those willow-twigs he’s been sharpening—they’re for making that fine pattern to hold down the straw at the edges of the roof.”

“You have been learning a lot!” said Rory, with a laugh. “Tell us how a roof is thatched, Benjy!”

“Well,” said Benjy, making it all up quickly in his head, “the thatcher pulls off all the straw first—and then he ...”

The thatcher gave a shout of laughter. Benjy stared at him. “What’s the matter?” he asked.

“I’d just like to set you to work thatching!” he chuckled. “My, you’d give yourself a job! Now look what I do—I pull out about six or seven inches of this old rotten straw—see—and work in handfuls of the new—about twelve inches thick. That’ll work down flatter when the rain comes. You don’t need to pull off all the old straw—that would be a real waste. When a roof is re-thatched we just pull out what’s no use and pack in the new.”

“Do you mean to say then, that there is straw in our roof that may have been there for years and years and years?” asked Rory, in surprise.

“Maybe,” said the thatcher, with a grin, as he swiftly pulled and pushed with his strong hands, working in the new straw deftly and surely. “Ah, and you’d be surprised the things I’ve found hidden in old thatch—boxes of old coins, bits of stolen jewellery, bags of rubbish—a thatched roof was a favourite hiding-place in the old days.”

The children stared at him, open-mouthed. This was marvellous! “Did you find anything in our thatch?” asked Penny hopefully.

“Not a thing,” said Bill. “It’s the third time I’ve thatched and patched this roof—I don’t reckon I’ll find anything this time if I didn’t find it the first time! Now look—isn’t that somebody calling you?”

It was the children’s father, looking for them to come to breakfast. They left the thatcher and hurried indoors, full of what Bill had said. Penny thought it must be the most exciting thing in the world to be somebody who might at any moment find treasure in a roof. She made up her mind to go up into the loft above her bedroom and poke about in the thatch there. She might find something that the thatcher had missed!

“You must get out of our way this morning,” said their mother, as they finished up their breakfast with bread and marmalade. “The other vans are coming and we shall be very busy.”

“Oh—can’t we stay and help?” said Benjy, disappointed. “I do like seeing the furniture being carried up the stairs, Mummy.”

“Well, the men don’t feel quite so excited about that as you,” said Mummy. “No—I shall make you up a picnic lunch—and you can go and find Tammylan!”

There were loud cheers then! Everyone wanted to see Tammylan.

“Good,” said Benjy, pleased. “I’d like that better than anything. And it will be fun to come back and see all the rooms with their furniture in, looking so nice and homey.”

“Oh, you won’t find that yet!” said his mother, laughing. “It will be a week or two before we are straight. Now, what would you like for your picnic lunch, I wonder? I’ll make you some potted meat sandwiches, and you can take some cake and a packet of biscuits. There is a big bottle of milk between you too, if you like.”

Before they started off to find Tammylan the girls made the beds and the boys helped to wash up and to cut the sandwiches. Just as they were packing the things into two bags for the boys to carry, there came the rumbling of the big removal vans up the lane.

“Just in time,” said their mother, running to the door. “Now we shall be able to get rid of you children for a while whilst the men unload!”

The children got their hats and coats and went outside the big front door. The first van drew up outside and the men jumped down. They opened the doors at the back and the children gazed inside and saw all the furniture they knew so well.

“There’s the nursery table!” yelled Penny.

“And there’s the old bookcase,” said Rory. “I suppose Mummy has got to tell the men which room everything’s to go into. I half wish we could stop and help.”

“Go along now!” cried his mother. “Don’t wait about there in the cold!”

The children set off, looking behind every now and again. They decided to go over the top of Willow Hill and across Christmas Common to Tammylan’s cave. It was about two miles away. When they reached the top of the hill they looked down at Willow Farm. It stood firmly in the hillside, smoke curling up from the kitchen chimney. It looked alive now, with people running about and smoke coming from the chimney.

Then over the hill went the four children on their way to old Tammylan. They sang as they went, for they were happy. It was holiday time. The spring and summer were coming. They had a home in the country instead of in London. And Tammylan could be seen as often as they liked! They had missed him so much.

They rounded a small hill. Bracken and heather grew there, and birch trees waved lacy twigs in the wind. The children made their way to a spot they knew well.

It was a cave in the hillside.

It was a cave in the hillside. In the summer-time tall fronds of green bracken hid the entrance, but now only the broken, russet-brown remains of last year’s bracken showed. The new bracken had not even begun growing. Heather dropped its big tufts from the top edge of the cave.

The children stood outside and called. “Tammylan! Tammylan!”

“Let’s go inside,” said Rory. “I’m sure he’s not there—but he might be fast asleep!”

“Don’t be silly!” said Benjy, scornfully. “Why, old Tammylan wakes if a mouse sits up and washes his whiskers! He would have heard us coming round the hill long ago if he’d been here.”

They went into the cave. It was exciting to be back there again. It opened out widely inside. The ceiling rose high, dark and rocky.

“Here’s his bed,” said Rory, sitting down on a rocky ledge, on which Tammylan had put layers of heather and bracken. “And look—he still keeps his tin plates and things on the same shelf.”

The children looked at the little rocky shelf opposite the bed. On it, clean and neatly arranged, were Tammylan’s few possessions.

“There is the stool that Rory and I made for Tammylan for Christmas!” said Benjy, in delight. “Look—see the squirrels I carved round the edge!”

“And here is the blanket that Sheila and I knitted for him,” said Penny, patting a neatly folded blanket at the foot of the bed of heather and bracken. “I do hope he found it nice and warm this cold winter!”

“I wonder if the little spring that gives Tammylan his drinking-water still wells up at the back of the cave,” said Rory. He went to see. He flashed his torch into the darkness there, and then gave a squeal.

“What’s the matter?” asked Benjy, in surprise.

“Nothing much—except that one of Tammylan’s friends is here!” said Rory, with a laugh. The others came quietly to see. Tammylan had taught them to move silently when they wanted to see animals or birds.

Lying by the tiny spring that welled up from the rocky floor, was a hare. Its enormous eyes looked up patiently at the children. It could not move.

“Look—his back legs have been broken,” said Sheila, sadly. “Tammylan is trying to mend them. He has put them into splints. Poor hare—he must somehow have been caught in a trap.”

The children gazed down at the patient hare. It dipped its nose into the springing water and lapped a little. Benjy felt sure that it was in pain.

Penny wanted to stroke it but Benjy wouldn’t let her. “No hurt animal likes to be touched,” he said. “Leave it alone, Penny.”

“Listen!” said Sheila, suddenly. “I can hear Tammylan I think!”

They listened—and they all knew at once that it was dear old Tammylan. No one else had that sweet clear whistle, no one else in the world could flute like a blackbird, or whistle like a blackcap! The children all rushed to the cave entrance.

“Tammylan!” they shouted. “Tammylan! We’re here!”