Unspoken: A story of secrets, love and revenge T. Belshaw (good books to read for beginners txt) 📖

berate me about the state of the farmyard. I say began, because he had only got five words into his rant when I let him have my own opinion.

‘It’s our farm, our yard, our dung. We clean it up when we have time. Next time you visit, I suggest you wear rubber boots, like these.’ I lifted my booted foot to show him. ‘Now,’ I said, ‘WHAT THE HELL DO YOU WANT?’

He scaled back his temper and replaced it with an air of boring officialdom.

‘I’m Mr Glasscock,’ he said, looking at both of us, daring us to laugh. ‘Seymore Glasscock, and I’m from the council.’

I bit my cheeks and did my best to control the giggle that was welling up inside. He managed to do that for me by producing a folded-up surveyor’s drawing. ‘It’s about that unkempt, overgrown, unsightly, disgracefully tended strip of land just up the lane there.’ He turned and pointed in its general direction.

‘But the council told my parents that the land wasn’t ours, so I don’t see why we—’

‘Do you think I would come all this way and wade through shi… and waste my precious time for no reason? That land is a disgrace and the ratepayers of the borough want it cleaned up.’

To be honest the grass and bramble mess had grown to an unsightly five-feet but how it impinged on the ratepayer’s sensitivities, I couldn’t work out.

Once again, I asked why we should clean it up if it didn’t belong to the farm. He pointed to a strange looking boundary on his map which, to my eyes at least, seemed to take in the lane and the verge on the far side too. I was puzzled; the lane had been there ever since I was a child.

‘Wait there,’ I said, and waddled into the house.

I found the deeds in the drawer of the tallboy along with some other farm related documents and waddled back out to the yard again.

When I got there, Frank had joined the fray, although he didn’t know a thing about the farm.

I showed Mr Glasscock my drawing and he compared it to his. I showed him where our boundary should lie, alongside the lane. He dismissed it as though it was a forgery, and said he’d have to take it back to the surveyor’s department to have it verified.

Back in the day, another council official had come to see my parents regarding the disputed land and had shown them a different official land registry drawing, with the retracted boundary. It was signed in the bottom right corner by a surveyor called Batley, or as my father had nicknamed him, Blind as a Batley. I mentioned this to Mr Glasscock and advised him to seek it out.

The official wasn’t moved. He had the genuine copy in his hands, and that was it as far as he was concerned. Barney tried to reason with him. He worked on the farm when my grandfather ran it and the land was ours back then. Mr Glasscock folded away his drawing and stuffed it back into his briefcase.

Frank had his say then. He wasn’t a fan of officialdom at the best of times, and he told Mr Glasscock where he could stick his document.

I stepped in, pushed Frank away, and told him in no uncertain terms to get back to work. Barney pointed to the fields and said that the lads needed an extra hand in the middle acre.

If looks could kill, I’d have been lying in the chicken muck breathing my last, but he stomped off muttering to himself anyway.

I told Mr Glasscock that I would bring our drawing to the planning department in the morning, and he left, stepping gingerly across the yard. ‘We open at nine,’ he said, curtly.

The next morning, Frank had recovered his lost dignity and as I was feeling ill, he drove me up to the council offices in our old truck.

To cut a long story short, the surveyor we spoke to initially refused to acknowledge the validity of our claim, so Frank put in a complaint (written out on a sheet of council headed notepaper that he lifted from one of the desks) alleging negligence by the council with regard to the upkeep of the unsightly plot of land that ran parallel to the farm. The official almost fainted when Frank handed the sheet of paper to him. He rushed out of the room clutching it as though the angel of death had handed him his ticket to the afterlife.

The next thing we know, the Borough Surveyor put in an appearance. He looked at all three documents, and then dressed down a shaking Mr Glasscock, pointing out that the date in the bottom right hand corner of the drawing he had brandished the day before, read eighteen thirty-six.

He tore up the newer drawing by the infamous Mr Batley and ordered Mr Glasscock to take the hundred-year-old document to the council archives and file it as an historical map.

Finally, with an air of arrogance and annoyance, he announced to the whole department that the strip of land belonged to us. I almost cheered. I had sorted out a dispute that had gone on for fifteen long years. Me, an eighteen-year-old pregnant girl.

When we got back, I thanked Frank for his quick thinking and rushed through to tell my father. Whether he heard or not I’ll never know. I hope he did, he’d waited long enough for the news.

In bed that night, I thought about my mother’s plans for the freshly returned land. We couldn’t really afford to build one house, let alone twelve, not without a hefty bank loan and I wasn’t about to put the farm into debt before it was mine.

The next morning, I asked for volunteers to clear the reclaimed land. Frank, as usual, was the first to put his hand up. Benny was second and while he went off to get the scythe, shears and rakes, Frank got the keys to the truck and