Seven
Three weeks after she had died, Clare’s mother was laid to rest. Clare stood in a pew numbly singing hymns and murmuring prayers, then sat listening to Ivy deliver a touching eulogy about Cindy and her love for Brambleton and the orchard. Ivy had suggested that Clare make the speech, but she couldn’t – not after seven years apart. Some of Ivy’s anecdotes brought a smile to Clare’s face; a few had her biting hard on her cheek to stop the tears while she desperately scrolled through her mental to-do list as a distraction.
She managed to make it through the wake and the villagers’ condolences without crying, and the following day threw herself back into running the farm and clearing up ‘Cindy chaos’. She spent hours chivvying the garden into shape and driving box loads of clutter to charity shops.
A few days after the funeral, Clare was in the kitchen washing straw off warm eggs when she heard a rat-a-tat on the door. Through the frosted glass top half, she saw the smudgy outlines of three people. The door opened and in walked Ivy, Fred and Anna. Ivy wasn’t smiling, and why was Anna, with her busy architect’s practice, here at 10 a.m. on a weekday?
‘What’s up?’ asked Clare, trying to sound cheerful.
‘Can we come in?’ asked Ivy.
Clare felt her jaw tighten. They already were in. She looked pointedly at her watch.
‘I’ve brought cake,’ said Ivy, placing a hand gently on Clare’s arm. ‘Your mother’s lemon drizzle recipe.’ Clare let out a soft sigh. ‘I’m not sure I’ve time for cake, Ivy. I’m quite busy.’
Fred took a seat at the kitchen table, slung his tie over one shoulder and shunted the neat stacks of correspondence with APHA into a single pile. Clare frowned, collected her paperwork and rearranged it back into date order on the pine dresser. ‘Please, don’t touch those.’
‘I’ll put the kettle on,’ announced Ivy. ‘Every crisis needs tea.’
Clare raised her voice: ‘Crisis? What crisis?’
Anna gave Clare a hug murmuring, ‘I think you’ll want tea when you hear what he’s done.’
Deciding to ferret out the reason for the impromptu tea party, Clare asked, ‘Who’s done what?’
‘Richard,’ said Anna, shaking bunched fists as if having a tantrum. Clare squinted at her friend. Her hair hung loose. What was so dire her friend had forgotten to secure it in a clasp? ‘He’s going to start doing eggs,’ said Anna.
Clare let out a short laugh. ‘There’s nothing quite like a newly laid free-range egg, but I’m having difficulty picturing him cleaning out the henhouse.’
‘Not like you do eggs,’ said Ivy softly.
Clare swallowed.
‘He’s applied for planning permission for a battery hen farm,’ said Anna. ‘Wants to house 40,000 chickens.’
‘40,000?’ said Clare, an image of rows and rows of Veras crouched in their own waste clouding her mind. ‘Why does he need so many and where’s he going to put them all?’
‘Right by our cottages,’ said Fred. He removed a knife from its home in a wooden block and passed it to Ivy, who sliced the cake into thick wedges.
Clare dragged her eyes away from the crumb-coated knife and looked at Anna. ‘You’re the architect. Can he do that?’
Anna let out a long sigh which disturbed Clare. It wasn’t a reassuring sound. ‘Depends if his land is classified legally as agricultural .’
Clare snorted then said, ‘There’s nothing agricultural about his land. He’s got plenty of tenant farmers, but he doesn’t grow anything in his own fields except grass.’
‘It might still be classed as agricultural,’ said Anna
‘And Brambleton Hall is a farmhouse?’ Fred chortled.
Clare’s eyes tracked Fred. He dropped the dirty knife end on into her sink, making Clare wince, then pulled at her kitchen towel roller in the same way Stop-it tugged at his rope toy, unfurling a ten-foot length which he bunched in his hands. Clare darted over and ripped the paper free before he could unravel any more, then picked up her knife and examined the end for damage.
‘Well, thanks for letting me know,’ she said.
‘We’re not just letting you know,’ said Ivy, wrapping pieces of cake in paper towel and passing them around. ‘We need you to help.’
Clare took her time wiping her knife clean and returning it to the block. ‘Help?’ she stuttered.
‘We must stop him,’ said Ivy.
‘Yes, you must,’ said Clare.
‘Not us,’ said Ivy gently. ‘You.’
‘I won’t be here. Besides. I don’t know anything about planning law.’ She bit into her slice of cake. It was moist and sweet with the sharp tang of lemon she remembered so well from her childhood. She chewed, pushing memories of her mother to the back of her mind. ‘Anna this is one for you.’
‘I’m not a lawyer. I know a bit about planning, but this is more about the law – procedures, evidence ...’ said Anna.
‘No’ said Clare, ‘absolutely not.’ She had her hands full. She didn’t have time to become an expert on planning law.
‘Please,’ said Ivy. ‘He listens to you.’
Clare laughed grimly. If this was why Richard had offered to extend Ivy and Fred’s leases, hoping to buy their support for his planning application, he had underestimated them.
‘We’ll all help,’ said Fred, scrunching up his spent paper towel and dropping it into a bucket labelled Compost .
‘Can we talk about this another time?’ asked Clare, transferring Fred’s rubbish to the bin.
‘That’ll compost down,’ said Fred defensively.
‘It’s got sugar on it,’ said Clare.
‘I don’t think you understand,’ Anna said. ‘This won’t just affect the almshouses. They will suffer most, but the whole village will share their pain. How many holidaymakers are going to put up with the smell and noise of an intensive chicken farm? There’ll be traffic jams from lorries collecting eggs and delivering feed. And what’s going to happen to all the waste?’
Clare’s thoughts vacillated between fixing her pig fencing and the implications of what Anna was saying. She didn’t like the sound of waste from 40,000 birds. Richard would not be as diligent with chicken poo as she was.
Her eyes fell on her piles of APHA letters. ‘There’ll be regulations controlling waste from that many birds.’
‘And you trust him to comply, do you? This is the man who conned your mother out of the farm,’ said Ivy.
‘What’s this?’ asked Anna sharply.
‘Another time,’ muttered Clare. Her instinct was to help, but this time it was impossible. It wasn’t just that she didn’t understand planning law. Planning battles took months, sometimes years, and she wasn’t staying in Brambleton that long. She was flattered they’d turned to her, but she wasn’t getting tangled up in village politics. And she wasn’t interrupting her adventure to dispense advice from a sunbed. They would have to sort this drama without her.
From the door came a frantic scratching noise, followed by a long, low whine. Stop-it could smell guests.
‘Shall I let him in?’ asked Ivy. ‘He’s quite partial to lemon drizzle.’
‘He’s quite partial to anything unless its kibble. Leave him where he is,’ said Clare.
‘Please help us,’ said Fred again.
Clare looked from Ivy to Fred. They’d both devoted their lives to the village, and in return, Richard was going to ruin their retirement.
‘We need someone to spearhead the fight,’ said Ivy.
Fred pointed a finger at her in mock Lord Kitchener style: ‘This village needs you .’
The scratching started again. The door shook, banging against the architrave. Clare gave a half-hearted shrug and opened the door. Like the dog, Richard’s motive was greed – and she didn’t trust him to follow the rules either.
Promising to think about it, Clare said goodbye and strode to the pigpen, trailing a bag of straw. Ivy and Fred assumed that she was a miracle worker. Often, in her clients’ eyes she was, but like every magician, the secret was in the preparation. Clare knew every piece of legislation, every tribunal decision and, from experience, understood how employers would react to being accused of breaking the law. That combination explained her success. Clare knew nothing about planning law, nor anyone who specialized in that field. She’d never accepted a case unless she’d been confident she could win, and she had an inkling that people’s trust in her ability to solve this problem was unfounded.
Rounding the corner, Clare heard snuffling noises. Two hairy black pigs with white snouts, feet and tail tips rested their front trotters on the top rung of their fence, their snouts twitching. Cindy’s Berkshires: a rare, hardy, outdoor breed that, unlike pink pigs, weren’t prone to sunburn. She opened the gate, and shooed them towards an oak tree, then leaned into the pig ark and scraped out the soiled bedding. She thought about the impact an intensive chicken farm would have on Orchard Farm. If the run-off from 40,000 birds seeped into the Shire river, it would contaminate her borehole. Would it affect her mother’s apple trees? She still hadn’t been into that orchard; the grass would definitely need mowing: she must get in there. One of the pigs snorted, reminding her of her task list, and she went to fetch a length of wood to shore up the fence, wishing there was a simple way of fixing the planning problem.
By the time the fence was repaired, she had decided to investigate. Armed with a slice of Ivy’s cake, a mug of tea and her laptop, Clare settled on the patio. Surfing the net and reading about intensive farming, she began feeling light-headed. Run-off often contained pathogens, antibiotics and hormones, which would devastate the orchard, deterring bees and affecting the soil’s pH levels, inhibiting nutrient take-up and damaging root structure. She couldn’t let this happen. The orchard was her mother’s legacy. Maybe she could appeal to his better nature, like she’d done with Ivy’s lease? To do so, she would need to prepare thoroughly.
In the early evening, she discarded her third mug of cold, undrunk tea and switched to white wine. She had finished researching the background law to a planning application and pulled up the North Devon Council’s website, found Richard’s planning application and downloaded the site plan. A shiver ran through her; it would be enormous. The documents referred to a ‘shed’, but that innocuous term masked the scale of a building which dwarfed the almshouses, looming above them like a cat over a cornered mouse. Stepping into their back gardens would be like walking onto an industrial estate.
The application sought permission to erect a shed to house poultry, up to 40,000 birds. According to Ivy, when Cindy’s rescue hens had first arrived, they were skittish and wary of human interaction. Some had no feathers, others displayed blotchy red patches of skin from parasitic infections. One had arrived with a broken wing, and they were all skeletal, their muscles weakened from an inability to exercise in their cramped living space. Clare wasn’t a nimble mathematician, but it wasn’t difficult to work out that Richard’s birds would have roughly the size of an A4 piece of paper to themselves. The hens would lead an entirely unnatural life. There wouldn’t even be a cockerel.
She trawled through the documents and discovered that Hastings had considered, but rejected, several potential sites closer to Brambleton Hall. What a surprise , thought Clare. She read something called an Environmental Impact Assessment, which reassuringly concluded there was nothing to worry about. The report claimed there would be no unpleasant smell. No increased noise. No impact on the surrounding soil or watercourse from waste. Surely adding 40,000 birds that close to a river and a village would do all those things? The stench of ammonia would be horrid, the noise disruptive and the river contaminated.
She refilled her glass and took a sip of the chilled wine. The report reminded her of the slick responses she would get to her letters alleging corporates had breached their employment responsibilities – it was a bit too reassuring. Her instincts told her she’d stumbled on something, and she returned to the Hastings’ site plan.
There was a second area with hatch marks on it. Clare recognized it as the field next to the village hall where the villagers parked. But that was earmarked as the site for another shed for storage and parking for lorries. Where were the villagers supposed to park? She suddenly thought of the annual Brambleton Agricultural Show, held every August – the chicken factory would be precisely where the main show ring normally stood.
The site plan stopped at the road in front of the almshouses, but Clare mentally sketched in the surrounding landscape. Below the lane was the River Shire, then the harbour and the beach. A sense of foreboding fell over her. No one would want to drive past that eyesore to reach the little beach or eat their picnics with the stench of chicken waste filling the air. Could the Smugglers Inn survive? What about Prosecco and Prose? The villagers supported both businesses in the lean winter months, but they made most of their money from tourists. She massaged the back of her neck. It was stiff and unyielding. And who was going to buy Orchard Farm with this threat hanging over it? Cursing, she closed the website. Hastings must be stopped.
She tossed back the remnants of her glass. The wine was warm and tasted sharp. Clare checked her itinerary. Today she should have been on a day trip to Tuscany, probably rounded off with a crisp glass of Pinot Grigio. She groaned. To fund her travels, she needed to sell the farm. If she wanted to salvage her adventure, she must solve the planning problem. Getting away from Brambleton was like extricating herself from quicksand and she was sinking further into its depths. She sighed, got up, found her to do list and reluctantly added ‘fight planning application’.
On Sunday evening Clare stopped outside the Smugglers’ Inn, staring at the harbour wall jutting out in its protective arc. If only it could defend the village against Richard’s onslaught. It was low tide, exposing dank streaks of seaweed on the sandy beach. A gust of wind whipped up the scent of samphire, an earthy, sweet smell, which evoked a powerful memory of laughing with her mother as they nibbled on the sweet tendrils of bright green seaweed they had gathered earlier that day. She wondered how Cindy would have reacted to Richard’s plans if she was still alive.
Inside, the pub was busy. She recognized most of the people at the bar, including the couple she’d met a few weeks earlier. The man with the frizzy ginger hair offered to buy her a drink.
‘Thank you, but I’m meeting some friends.’
‘Another time,’ he said.
Rose was behind the bar, pulling a pint. She plopped it on the bar and waved. Clare was itching to know how Richard had responded to her suggestion of not raising the rent, but in front of the landlady, his bar stool angled to one side, was Sam. Opposite him, looking slightly less comfortable on a stool, sat Fred. Clare took a deep breath. If they were going to take on Tricky Ricky, she must warn Fred to be careful around Sam.
She found Anna and Roger in a cosy nook, kissed her friend on both cheeks then sat.
‘When I walked past Ivy’s house I could feel the onshore breeze,’ Clare started. ‘It’s going to blow the stench of those birds directly at her, but with 40,000 birds, won’t it drift back down to the rest of the village?’
Roger ran a hand over his face and groaned. Anna shot him a swift look then said, ‘Of course it will.’
‘It’s not just the smell,’ said Clare. ‘It’s the run-off. Lots of us rely on boreholes. I was looking through Mum’s records and last year she spent ￡25,000 installing a new soakaway system because the old one was too close to a tributary of the Shire. Her sewage wasn’t allowed to leak into the water system, but who’s going to make sure his poultry don’t contaminate it?’
‘Good point,’ said Anna. ‘We can’t let that happen.’
‘Don’t be so dramatic,’ said Roger, ‘No one’s going to let him pipe untreated poo into the river.’
‘No,’ snipped Anna. ‘Only water companies are allowed to do that.’
The couple were looking in opposite directions.
‘Did you read the EIA?’ asked Anna.
Clare glanced at Roger, but he was still staring at the bar. She shook her head. ‘I tried.’
Roger’s head swivelled back. He huffed. ‘It’s just a few chickens. It’s his land. Let him do what he wants with it.’
‘Pfft!’ said Anna. ‘You were saying, Clare?’
‘The report says adding 40,000 birds will have no impact.’
Anna snorted. ‘Go figure.’
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ asked Clare.
‘The expert was hired to reach that conclusion. So, they have,’ said Anna.
‘Are you saying they lied?’
‘They didn’t lie,’ snapped Roger.
Anna rounded on her husband, glaring at him and said, ‘I’ve read the report, which is more than you’ve done, Roger.’
Clare held up her hands. ‘Enough.’ She turned towards Roger. ‘I’m getting the vibe you’re in Richard’s camp.’
He cupped his hands round his pint glass. ‘Wrong. I’m not in anyone’s camp. I just don’t want to see this village split between Richard’s supporters – and don’t kid yourselves,’ he said, his eyes darting between the two women, ‘he will have his supporters – and the anti-camp, which I would prefer Anna not to be a fully paid-up member of.’ He lifted his glass, took several gulps, and then banged it back down on the table like a full stop.
For a few moments Clare let the charged atmosphere cool. Roger was right. Richard was the biggest local employer and the next largest was his brother. Not everyone would be against Hastings’ plans. Roger topped up the women’s glasses, then excused himself to fetch a fresh pint.
Anna spoke rapidly. ‘What I meant about the EIA is that the report points out North Devon is agricultural. Farmers spread muck to fertilize fields, which smells pretty rank if you’re not used to it. But the life blood of this village is tourists, and they won’t come if it stinks of ammonia.’
Roger had bent over, sipping his drink to a safe level to carry before he started walking back to the table. Anna spoke rapidly: ‘I’m just saying the assessment only paints part of the picture.’
Roger put his drink down, then pulled a couple of packets of crisps from his pockets. Clare picked one up. ‘I’m starving. I haven’t eaten yet.’
Anna laughed. ‘That’s because there aren’t twenty restaurants within walking distance of you. Once you run out of Cindy’s pies, you’ll have to learn to cook. I hear what you’re saying ...’
Clare spotted Sam heading their way. ‘Shh,’ she said. But Anna was in her stride: ‘You’re right to be sceptical about the EIA.’
‘Evening, Roger. Ladies,’ said Sam, nodding to each in turn. ‘Are you talking about my brother’s new business venture by any chance?’
‘None of your business.’ said Clare archly, earning her a sharp look from Roger.
‘Evening, Sam,’ said Roger. ‘How’s the holiday season going?’
‘Pretty good thanks.’
‘Your cottages are upwind, so you won’t be affected by his new model farm, will you?’ said Clare sarcastically.
‘But my brother’s two holiday lets will though.’ said Sam, crossing his arms. ‘He’s a smart businessman, so he must think the impact is minimal. Have you looked at the EIA?’
‘I think the Council is staffed by sensible Devonians, who’ll see through Richard’s report, commission their own and learn the truth,’ said Clare.
A thoughtful expression crossed Sam’s face. ‘If they dare,’ he said. ‘The Council know Richard. They won’t risk a legal fight; they haven’t the funds.’
Clare clutched at her wineglass. ‘That’s outrageous! Your brother shouldn’t be able to threaten his way into getting planning permission.’
‘He’s not threatening. He’s just in a powerful position.’
Roger stood up, scraping his chair legs across the floor. He pointed a finger at Anna. ‘This is what I warned you would happen. It will destroy this village, pull us apart.’ He tossed back his pint, banged it on the table, glared at his wife, Clare and finally Sam, before stomping out of the pub.
Sam rolled his eyes at the women and followed him. Clare waited until she couldn’t see Sam anymore, then said, ‘Hateful man, interrupting our evening to come and gloat. Upsetting Roger.’
‘I think Roger is responsible for upsetting himself. He wants this to go away.’
‘Hopefully, it will,’ Clare added. ‘I checked, and if that field isn’t agricultural land, the Council will refuse permission.’
Anna rolled her eyes. ‘He’s not a farmer.’
An image of her mother’s orchard filled Clare’s mind. She couldn’t let Hastings ruin those trees. ‘Then we can see this off. We must stop him.’
‘Glad you’re onside,’ said Anna. ‘What’s the plan?’
‘It’s quite simple,’ said Clare, ‘I’ll call the Planning Officer and tell them they can’t grant permission because the site isn’t agricultural land.’
Clare could shoehorn that into her schedule before she left Brambleton.