Peters The Secret Hen House Theatre

Hannah's Farm Series
eBook
ISBN: 978-0-85763-066-7
Verlag: Nosy Crow Ltd
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, Band 6, 320 Seiten

Reihe: Hannah's Farm

Since the death of her mother, Hannah's family life has been somewhat chaotic. Her father is absorbed by running their dilapidated farm, and the four children are increasingly left to their own devices. These include 'farming' each room of the house, looking after an enormous pet sheep called Jasper, and writing and directing plays in a disused hen house. But when the farm is threatened with demolition, Hannah determines to save it and realise her dreams at the same time... Shortlisted for the Waterstones Prize, this is a brilliant story of eccentric family life where the children's imaginations run as free as the farmyard animals. From the award-winning author of Evie's Ghost, Anna at War, The Farm Beneath the Water and the Jasmine Green series for younger readers, this is perfect for fans of Iva Ibbotson and Philippa Pearce.

Helen Peters grew up on an old-fashioned farm in Sussex, surrounded by family, animals and mud. She spent most of her childhood reading stories and putting on plays in a tumbledown shed that she and her friends turned into a theatre. After university, she became an English and Drama teacher. Helen lives in London with her family and a very assertive cat.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Peters, Helen

Leseproben

Once the others were a safe distance away, Hannah pulled Lottie into the yard. She could see her dad’s back as he strode across North Meadow with the others behind him, Martha swaying precariously in her squashed-down wellies.

“OK,” said Hannah. “Tractor-shed loft.”

Halfway across the yard, she looked back. Lottie was still at the garden gate. She looked as panic-stricken as a person stranded on a sandbank with the tide coming in all around them.

“Come on, they’ve gone now,” said Hannah.

“Can’t we just go in the house?”

“Don’t be stupid. That’s the first place he’ll look for me. Come on.”

“I can’t. I’ve got my new trainers on. I promised I’d keep them clean. If they get ruined my mum will kill me.”

Hannah let out an exasperated sigh. They were wasting precious minutes. She could go and get her trainers for Lottie but they had holes in the bottom and they’d be miles too small. Lottie was tall for eleven, and Hannah was little.

Little but strong.

She squelched back through the mud. “All right, hop up.”

“What?”

“I’ll give you a piggyback.”

Lottie giggled. “You’re mad. You’ll break your back.”

“I’ve carried heavier things than you. Get up, quick. They’ll be here with the pig in a minute.”

Hannah staggered across the yard, her thick straw-coloured hair falling into her eyes. Lottie clung on to her neck, half laughing, half screaming.

“Lottie, you’re strangling me!”

“Aargh, you’re going to drop me!”

“Stop squealing; you sound like a stuck piglet. Right, get off.”

She dumped Lottie on the floor of the tractor shed and sank down into the dirt, rubbing her shoulders and pushing the hair out of her face. Lottie’s smooth dark bob was as sleek as ever. She always looked as though she’d just stepped out of the hairdresser’s.

Lottie brushed the dust off her new coat. “Oh, guess what? You know the Linford Arts Festival’s coming up? They’ve got a youth drama competition – I saw a poster round the shops. We could do our play there.”

Hannah dragged the rickety ladder out from behind the Field Marshall. “We can’t,” she said as she propped it up against the trapdoor.

“Why not? You’re a brilliant actress. And then we could win, and that would serve Miranda Hathaway right for going on and on about how her drama group has won it for the last fifty million years.”

“But we can’t enter,” said Hannah as she stepped on the ladder. “It’s for proper youth drama groups. You have to have an actual theatre. Don’t you remember Miranda saying how the judges come out to your theatre and watch your play?”

“Oh. I forgot. Shame. It looked really good.” Lottie climbed up into the loft. “So have you finished the radio play?”

“I’ll show you.”

The loft was dark except for the far corner, where a narrow slit let in a shaft of grey February light. They groped their way across, ducking the beams and the cobwebs. Nobody ever came up here.

They clambered over mounds of rusty tractor parts and empty calf-medicine bottles to a pile of old feed sacks next to the window slit. Hannah’s muscles tensed at the thought of what might be lurking under those sacks. She bit her bottom lip, screwed her eyes shut and stamped her foot down on them. She held her breath, listening for the horrible sound of scuttling rodents.

Nothing.

Phew.

She plonked herself down on the sacks.

Lottie settled herself beside Hannah. “So?”

“OK.” Hannah reached into her pocket, pulled out the folded sheets of paper and flattened them on her lap. “Ta da!”

On the first page was written, in large flourishing letters: “By Her Majesty’s Appointment. A play for radio by Hannah Roberts and Lottie Perfect.”

“You didn’t have to put my name on it,” said Lottie. “I didn’t do anything.”

Hannah had struggled with this herself, but eventually her more generous side had won. “Well, you had some really good ideas. And you are going to do all the typing up. And then we can send it off tomorrow.”

Lottie clapped her hands in excitement. “Come on, let’s read it now.”

“We’re going to win, I know we are,” said Hannah. “Mum loved Radio 4. It’s a sign.”

Lottie reached for the script but her arm froze in mid-stretch as a cacophony of squeals and grunts blasted their ears.

“What’s that?”

The squealing got louder and more piercing as it was joined by the sound of running boots and thunderous swearing.

They looked down through the narrow slit.

Hannah’s father, holding a muddy board in front of him, was herding an enormous pink pig into the farmyard. As they watched, it shifted its huge weight on its tiny trotters, flicked around so quickly that no one could stop it and bolted back up the track.

Martha shrieked and jumped out of the way.

“Martha, you useless tool!” shouted Dad. “Joanne, get round behind her. Move!”

Jo ducked under the electric fence and raced through the field, trying to outrun the speeding sow.

“Sam, stand on the path there. Don’t let her past you, whatever you do. Martha, get down there and open the pigsty door. Move it!”

“Hadn’t you better go?” asked Lottie. “He’ll go mad at you later.”

“He’d go mad anyway. I’d only knock something over or get trampled by the pig. He’s moodier than ever at the moment.”

“Here she comes!” yelled Dad. “Sam, hold that board out! Martha, get her in the sty. Where the blazes is Hannah?”

“She’s in the tractor-shed loft with Lottie,” called Martha. “They’ve been there all the time.”

Hannah’s heart stopped. She stuffed the script back into her pocket. “Hide!” she hissed to Lottie. “Quick!”

But there was no time. She heard him shout, “Hold that!” and in three bounds he was up the ladder and in the loft. He glared through the gloom at the girls trying to disappear into the pile of empty sacks.

“What the hell do you think you’re playing at?” he shouted at Hannah. “Get down in that yard this instant!”

“Should I—” Lottie started to say.

“No, no, you stay here,” Hannah muttered. Clumsy with embarrassment, she heaved herself off the sacks and followed her father down the splintered ladder. The sow was racing up the track again, and Jo was trying to turn her round, leaping from side to side like a goalkeeper defending a penalty.

“Get over there!” Dad barked at Hannah, pointing at the entrance to the horse paddock. “Keep your wits about you and don’t let her past.”

Head down, Hannah trudged across the yard. A thin layer of mud, patterned all over with the spiky footprints of chickens, coated the concrete. Tractor tyres had churned the gateway into a mass of brown puddles. It was impossible to tell how deep they were until you stepped in them and the water slopped over the tops of your wellies.

Half a gate hung jaggedly off the one remaining hinge. If Dad ever got anything mended, Hannah thought, he wouldn’t have to use his children as fences.

Standing up to her shins in a pool of water, Hannah let her imagination take over.

“It is a great pleasure,” the radio interviewer would say, “to have with us the youngest ever winner of our playwriting competition, who also, of course, starred in the wonderful performance of her play which you have just heard. Hannah Roberts, you clearly have a great future ahead of you. What inspired you to write a play?”

“Well,” Hannah would say, “my mum loved acting, so maybe I get it from her. And in Year Six I was in the school play…”

How could she describe the joy of it? The fun of rehearsals. The excitement as the play starts to come together. The magic of creating a world from wood and words and fabric and sound effects. The buzz backstage, the butterflies in your stomach, the dazzle of the lights—

“Hannah, look sharp!”

Hannah looked up.

The sow was charging straight towards her. Its muddy snout and huge yellow teeth loomed closer. And closer.

She knew exactly what to do, and if she had been Dad, or Jo, or even Sam, she would have done it: leapt right into its path and stood her ground, confident that it would sense her dominance and change direction at the last moment.

If she had been Martha, she would have jumped out of the way.

Hannah did neither. She turned and ran. Lurched across the sodden ground, the pig sploshing and squealing behind her. Thick wet clay, heavy as concrete, clung to her boots.

Dad crashed through the hedge just ahead and ran full tilt towards the enormous sow at her heels.

And Hannah tripped over his boot and fell flat on her face into a gigantic puddle.

She staggered to her feet, soaked to the skin. Freezing water cascaded down her back and legs. The world had gone dark. Her eyes were stuck together with mud. She tried to wipe them but her hands and sleeves were coated with mud too. She could feel her hair plastered to her face. Through the muddy water in her ears she heard Martha’s laughter.

“Hannah, are you OK?” It was Jo’s voice.

“Yeah, great, thanks, how are you?” Hannah tried to say, but the mud got into her mouth and she had to stop to spit it out.

Jo wiped at Hannah’s cheeks with what felt like her coat sleeve.

“Eyes!” spluttered Hannah. “Wipe my eyes.”

Jo wiped her eyes. Hannah...