Disputed Land (Part 1)

A Willerby Story

Sally sighed. It was getting late and she was tired and confused.

The kitchen table was layered in folders, books, photos and treasury-tagged clusters of paper.

She sat back and took a mug of tea from David, who was passing them round.

“So, none of them are boggarts? Or all of them are?”

“It’s just not a nice word when it’s used like that,” said Mauve, “like saying your next-door neighbour is a foreigner. It might be technically true, but it isn’t polite.”

“Then a goblin is a boggart?”, asked Dan, “but we shouldn’t call them that?”

“That’s right,” said David, sitting down and opening his laptop. “Same was as if someone in the village was called Pierre and came from Paris. You’d say their name first, then if somebody asked where they were from, you’d say France. You wouldn’t just say they were a foreigner. That would be rude.”

Sally squinted at the screen of her own computer, and then up David again. “I still can’t get this straight in my head,” she said. “There are goblins, pixies, gnomes, brownies, elves and dwarfs and they all live here in Willerby?”

“Sort of, but it isn’t as complicated as you’re making it sound,” said Mauve. “Brownies and goblins are different branches of the same family – I still get mixed up and it don’t seem to matter that much. Dwarves live beneath us. They keep their own business, and we hardly ever see them – one or two pop into the Green Man sometimes but they don’t stay long – got their own pubs. Elves visit occasionally but never for long thank goodness – they aint bad but they are reckless. They’re lots of fun but I’m glad they don’t live here.”

“But,” said David, “for now it’s just goblins, gnomes and pixies you need to learn about. Their clans, families, borders, festivals and disputes. All the usual sort of stuff.”

“And fairies and trolls” Mauve said.

“Let’s not bother them with all of it now, love.” David said. “They aren’t anything to do with this.”

“Any hobbits?” Dan said.

David and Mauve fixed him with stern looks. “Don’t be silly, Dan,” said Mauve, “we’ve got a lot to get through to unpick this mess, and there ain’t time for you to piss about. Take this serious, please.”

“Sorry, Mauve,” Dan said, glancing over at Sally. She frowned at him too, but when Mauve and David weren’t looking, smiled and winked at him.

“Well then,” said David, peering at a letter through his half-moon reading glasses. “This is a right old mess. That allotment has been goblin land for around twenty years but only by custom, precedent and regular use. They got no paper to say it’s theirs.”

“And,” said Mauve, a photocopy of a handwritten document in her hand, “Bal is right – this does say her cottage comes with the use of that allotment – and has since it was first built because the garden is so small. Written down and recorded proper clear as day.”

“Have the goblins ever paid rent on it?” David asked.

“I got nothing saying they have,” said Mauve. “Legally speaking they’re squatting.”

David sighed. “This is going to be hard to sort,” he said. “The goblins have made good use of that land for years and it don’t matter what Bal’s piece of paper says – they think it’s theirs.”

“No way round it,” Mauve said. “We’ll have to tell the Over-Queen it’s human land and they’ll have to move out.”

She went silent for a moment then, all in rush carried on; “Bal! She hasn’t had the faintest interest in gardening in the ten years she’s lived here. She’ll probably have lost interest next year, but by then it’ll all be too late. Soon as we tell the goblins, they’ll move out right enough, but they’ll set their clerks to work, looking back through all the records and disputing every tree in every field. We’ll be here all hours checking and cross-checking and picking at the wording of something someone wrote in 1631, arguing rights of way, privileges and access arrangements until we can’t remember a time we ever did anything else.”

“No way of keeping it quiet either,” said David, “the gnomes and pixies are bound to get wind of this, and they’ll get involved to see what they can get. There’ll be no peace.”

“Maybe someone should speak to Bal?” Said Dan. “Try and change her mind?”

There was another pregnant silence.

“Now isn’t that a good idea, David?” Mauve asked. “I wonder why we didn’t think of that?”

They burst out laughing as they began tidying up the table and shutting their computers down. “Excellent idea, Dan,” said Mauve, clapping him on the back. “We’ll leave that to you two – here to help if you need us. Time for a quick drink of something stronger before you get back to Sammy? I got Islay.”

“That was a set up,” Dan said to Sally as they left half an hour later. “We were ambushed.”

“Yes, we were,” said Sally. “And you’ll have to talk to Bal her first – she’s still annoyed with me about the bins.”

…

Bal was from Birmingham and part of a large family in which there had never been quite enough to go round. She’d worked hard at school, secured a junior clerical job in a local accountancy firm and was regularly promoted until her mid-forties when she was put in charge of the whole office.

Around then she bought her cottage in Willerby, from which she commuted Monday-Thursday.

Dan went to see her the next Friday - her regular work from home day.

Her two-bedroom cottage – set in a terrace close to the turn off to Beckworth and the allotments – was immaculate and tastefully decorated but to Dan, used to a joyful mess of toys and a just-in-time approach to the washing up, cold and impersonal.

The décor did a good impersonation of country shabby chic, but it felt all for show; there was a rack of neatly arranged Wellington boots in the porch, but none had so much of a smear of mud on them and when Bal let him in to her kitchen, he saw the expensive Aga was electric and brand new.

She offered him tea, which he accepted, and they went through to her living room, to sit in armchairs angled towards bay window that looked out on grazing sheep in the green fields that surrounded Willerby on three sides.

“It’s about the allotment, Bal,” he said.

“It’s mine,” she replied, putting down her cup and looking him straight in the eye. “The council records in Beckworth make that very clear – that allotment has been attached to this cottage since it was built and since there’s nobody using it this should be very straightforward and easy.”

Dan began with what he thought most likely to work. “It’s bad land, Bal,” he said. “There’s no water and in the summer getting what you need up there will be awful, hot work on your own. It’s also so overgrown just getting to the soil is years of work. Why not put your name down on the list? A better one is bound to come up within a year or so – there’s people in their eighties who barely use them and they’re reasonable. If they see, there’s a list they won’t block for long.”

Bal shook her head. “I want this one,” she said. “It’s mine – I can cart the water up I need in a wheelbarrow or pay one of the teenagers to help with that sort of thing. I can hire people to plough it all back to earth if it’s too much for me.”

Dan could tell her mind was made up, but more out of interest and for his own amusement he changed tack.

“Goblins use it,” Dan said, “and they have been for years – it’ll cause a big ruckus if we take it off them. Arguments with them, the pixies and the gnomes.”

Bal’s eyelids flickered.

She looked away and then back. “It’s mine and nobody uses it,” she said, “so I don’t see why this is difficult. I just need the Allotment Committee to put my name to it and I can get started.”

“Goblins,” Dan said, “goblins, goblins, goblins. Dwarves under your feet. Elves on the river. Pixies coming out of your ears. Saint Nick in your chimney.”

This time Bal’s eyes didn’t move at all. “Nobody uses it,” she repeated, in the same tone, “so I don’t get why this is difficult. I just need the Allotment Committee to put my name to it and I can get started.”

…

“I got nowhere,” said Dan to Sally as she walked in after work. “She just did that thing does when anyone mentions anything that sits out of her paradigm – the weird reset she did when we tried to talk to her about Gregory. Remember? How she said she didn’t have a clue what we were talking about even though she was there in the meeting when Lisa first said she’d seen him?”

Sally put her briefcase in the cupboard by the door and arched her back to stretch out the kinks the drive had put in her spine. “Yeah,” she said, “I thought it would probably go like that. Look, sorry but can you lead on this? Tell David and Mauve and get their advice on the next move? My head’s full of nightmare clients and pain-in-the-arse interns and I know I’d do more harm than good if I tried talking to her.”

…

“Nothing for it then,” said David, gloomily, “we’re going to have to call an extraordinary chamber meeting. I’ll send a summons to the queen – we’ll keep it as quiet and bilateral as we can for as long as we can. What date’s work best for you? It’s always a bit of a pain because goblins won’t meet before nine at night, but we’ll try to keep this one to just an hour. You should be there to see it, even if it is Mauve and I who do the talking.”

…

The meeting was held in the Green Man’s upstairs function room, large and open plan with scuffed wooden floors, plain whitewashed walls hung with old photos of the village beneath a vaulted ceiling. When not in use – which was most of the time – the long wooden trestle tables and plastic chairs were kept neatly stacked against the walls, leaving a big empty space in the middle.

That night the room was arranged differently.

In the centre, two rows of tables and chairs faced each other with a gap of about ten feet between them. One row was covered in a green tablecloth, the other in a red one. Four standard lamps placed at the corners of each row of tables framed the furniture and puddled the gloom in soft low-wattage light.

“Ah,” said David with satisfaction. “It’s all ready. Let’s go sit down – we’re the red table facing the door. Get your laptop out – you’ll want to take notes and the Queen will be more careful if she sees you doing that too.”

Dan’s first goblins were five, four-foot-high young, sinewy adolescents who swaggered bandy-legged to behind the green table where they stood in a row, grinning and winking at the three waiting humans.

There were features he expected from illustrations he’d seen in books and characters in films and computer games – they had long, swept back ears that swivelled and twitched as they picked up sounds too quiet for a human to hear. They had long hooked noses beneath deep-set dark eyes. The goblins were recognisable to him, but at the same time looked nothing at all like the representations he was used to, which he suddenly saw to be caricatures as offensive as 19^th cartoons of non-white people.

They also weren’t really green – or at least only green as much as a white person was white or a black person black.

Later when Dan tried to describe them to Sally, he found their frame of shared reference so small he could only do so by saying what they were not. “They were small, but not short. They had long ears, but their ears weren’t long on them. They were kind of green, but that feels like the least important thing about them.”

What stuck with him most was how they moved – even the most sympathetic and perfectly captured image could never express the powerful sense of them – the way their heads turned, the way their perfectly fitted woollen and leather clothes moved with them and the intense crow-like curiosity their sharp-cut faces projected everywhere they looked.

In the years to come Dan was to see many things but none ever made him forget the oxymoronic sense of similarity and difference he felt the first time he brushed up against the other worlds folded inside the village- the sudden realisation humanity was not alone, but part of a cosmos of beings just as real and vital as they were -  a secret commonwealth that in Willerby wasn’t secret at all.

The Over-Queen entered the room a few seconds after the younger goblins took their places.  She was the same height but stouter and slower. She was wearing a voluminous leather dress and her neck, ears and fingers dripping intricately worked gold and silver that twinkled and sparkled in the soft glow of the lamps.

“Good evening, it is good to see you,” said the queen, settling into the chair behind the centre of the green table. Her English was perfect – only the way she very slightly extended the first syllables of each word suggested she might not be speaking her first language. “Who is this man?”

“He’s learning the ways,” Mauve said. “You can speak open. He and his wife have already done good work in keeping people safe the last time Jack was about. They both got sensible heads.”

The queen nodded. “It is good you have begun plans for succession,” she said. “It has been worrying us there was nobody ready to take your place when you die.”

“Thank you for coming, Moggie” said Mauve. “We have a dispute that could harm the peace and make unrest. It is a land matter – land your people have used for a long time – a human has made a claim on it and her claim is true. She plans to farm it.”

“Where is this land?”

“We marked it on this map,” David said, holding it up.

Moggie turned and nodded at the young goblin closest to her, who quickly and silently moved round the table, took the map from David and handed it to her queen, who reached into a pocket in the front of her dress to take out pair of silver pince-nez. She clipped them to her nose and peered carefully at the paper.

“This is heavily farmed land,” she said. Important land,” she said. “Land many of my people depend upon.”

“We got the paper proving it’s the human’s here too,” said David.

Moggie shook her head. “We have known each other a long time,” she said. “I do not need to see that. What can be done?”

“Dan here has already spoken with her, and it will be hard to persuade her not to go forward,” said Mauve. “Her sight is strong, but she only sees the one world she lives in.”

“And persuading people to give up what is theirs by right is a dangerous path to take,” said Moggie. She shook her head sadly. “I will tell the families they must leave if there is no other way, but this will cause much anger and upset. And suffering. And there will be.. repercussions.”

“I don’t really get this,” said Dan. “The allotment is tiny. I don’t understand why losing the use of it is that big a deal.”

At this, Moggie gave him a surprised look. She ignored his question and spoke to David and Mauve. “This is a strange thing for him to ask,” she said.

“He is no fool but he’s new and there is a lot he don’t know yet,” said Mauve. “But he learns fast. Can you spare one of your guard to show him why this is serious now?”

Moggie shrugged. “If that will help. Tamif take the human to Gryh’s Field and show him the farms there. Take the back way.”

Tamif looked younger than the other five guards. Her skin was a darker green and she had straight black hair, parted in the middle and tucked behind her ears. She stood and beckoned Dan to follow her to the door, down the stairs and then out into the early July evening.

“Speak only little bit English,” she said over her shoulder as she led him across the street to the hedge opposite the pub. “You follow.”

Dan followed Tamif along the line of the hedge until they reached the gate and wrought-iron arch that led to the church graveyard. “Come,” said Tamif. She walked through the gate, but instead of taking the path she turned sharply left into a gap in a bush and vanished.

He peered after her for an instant. Then, seeing nothing but dark leaves he followed her in and was on a path between two hedges that rose straight up on both sides like the walls of fortress.

Looking up, he saw a line of crimson and gold sky hundreds of feet above him.

“Come fast,” Tamif said, beckoning again. “Dark soon – not good here when dark.”

They did not have far to go.

After only a couple of minutes of brisk walking Tamif turned into another vague suggestion of a gap and disappeared again. Dan pushed through the thin branches to after her and found himself just behind Tamif on the road close to the Beckworth turn-off opposite the village allotments.

“Now you see,” said Tamif, pointing at the disputed land.

The hinges of the gate to the allotment had rusted away and it only stood up because it was propped against rotting posts, themselves half lost in the overgrown hedges. The fence was only a couple of feet high. He could have easily stepped over it, but mindful Tamif couldn’t do that and not wanting to appear rude he carefully picked it up and laid it flat on the verge at the side of the road before going in.

At first there was nothing remarkable to see.

The allotment was rectangular and neither particularly small nor particularly large – perhaps a hundred feet long and thirty or so wide. At one end a jumble of pots and larger compost bins sat in a riot of brambles and other tall weeds. At the other a faded plastic child’s play kitchen stood under a gypsy-willow tree. Next to it was a grassy mound which might once have been a bonfire.

The rest of the allotment was so overgrown it was impossible to tell what else might be hidden under the decades of growth and decay.

Tamif waved at it expansively. “See?”

“I just see plants and stuff,” said Dan.

Tamif shook her head in frustration. “No,” she said. “Look again.” She put her hands on her hips and tilted her head to the side. “Look again from corner. Try look without look.”

Dan wasn’t sure what she wanted him to do exactly, but he did think he might know what she meant.

There was more to this – so he needed to find a new way to see.

He remembered the magic eye pictures popular in his teens and wondered if the trick might be something like that – not to look for anything in particular, and instead let his eyes drift until what was abstract and meaningless became a dragon, kitten or whatever else.

The trick with these was not to try, because the harder you looked for something the more stubbornly the secret image would hide.

His first couple of tries did nothing, but on his third there was just the faintest shaking and blurring of edges, and on his third attempt he got it.

It was a bit like a magic eye - but also like finding the end of a roll of Sellotape – the raised line under a fingernail, then peeling away the tape carefully because it was easy to lose the end, and if you did you’d be right back where you started.  

And there in the plot was a goblin in miniature. He was carrying a hoe on his shoulder as he strode through the tangled growth.

Dan focused on just him and the rough grass and weeds winked out of existence.

Now the goblin was walking between neatly planted rows of green wheat in a field far larger than the allotment could contain. As Dan got the hang of working the angles the goblin shrunk further as his perspective zoomed out to take in more of the plot.

The allotment opened beneath him like an unfolding jewellery box to reveal more and more fields – many times over than would fit within Willerby’s familiar human dimensions.

The fields blossomed with life – in every one there were goblin men and women, old and young, children too. Few were working – in the red and orange flow of the setting sun most were making their way to the edges of the fields and disappearing down paths into the dark woods that framed the agricultural landscape. There was sound too – happy, satisfied calls and from somewhere Dan could not see, the comforting buzz of a tractor.

Tamif tapped him on the shoulder. “You see now?”, she said. “Many goblins here.”

Dan nodded, understanding. “What will happen if they have to go?” He asked.

Tamif shrugged, and then looked very sad and very worried. “Hungry,” she said. “Big hungry.”