What If I Fall?

By Sarah L Morgan

Michael Fall has given up. Having lost everything apart from his daughter, Marsha, who battles on, single-handedly, to keep their farm going, he has surrendered all that he once held dear.

When Marsha discovers their home is to be destroyed to make way for the new leisure complex that is to be built just a few miles away, she is resigned to accept defeat.

Until she meets Leonard, who helps her see that some things are worth fighting for.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Sarah Morgan
• Release date: Dec 8, 2019
• ISBN: 9781393072164

Sarah L Morgan

What If I Fall? is Sarah L Morgan's debut novel. She was born in 1972, in rural North Yorkshire, and after a number of years living in London with her husband, working in the magazine industry, she returned to the North of England where she lives with her husband and two children.  She is currently working on her second novel, The Circle.

Book preview

Chapter One

There was nothing unusual about the day per se. As he looked out of his window, he saw a thin plume of smoke coming from the chimney pot spiralling up into what his mother would have called a mackerel sky. Reaching across to the passenger seat he picked up a bundle of letters and pulled the top one out from under the elastic band he used to keep them together. He calculated that he would be finished his round by eleven and would be back in time to take Fred out for his morning walk before the lunch-time rush. That way he hoped he’d be able to avoid an encounter with Mr Wilkinson and his two little dogs that had taken against Fred for some reason. Other than that, everything was normal. Apart from the threat of a light drizzle, maybe.

Kevin Granger climbed out of his van, shrugging off the threat of rain, walked to the back door of Greenacre Farm and dropped the single letter through the letterbox. As he turned, he noted the pair of large, steel toe wellington boots at the back door which meant that Marsha was probably already down with the pigs for the morning feed. Michael, her father, would be having his breakfast and would hear the spring of the letter box, he thought, as he walked back to his van. It was a kind of game he played: imagining people sitting in their houses, listening to the post arrive and interrupting their daily routine. Sometimes he might be delivering good news, most often it was bills and occasionally it could be the kind of news that changed everything. He thought of the Marsha he knew back at school who used to sit in front of him in class. He’d spent more days than he cared to remember staring at the back of her head wishing she would turn around and notice him.

As he started the engine, he wondered how it was that things had happened to lead him to this single point in the present where he was now sitting in his Royal Mail van, pulling away from Marsha Fall’s house with little more than a passing, nodding acquaintance between them, unaware that he’d just delivered the correspondence that would change everything.

Down the farm lane, Marsha, oblivious to the fact that she was the subject of another’s contemplations, wiped a bead of sweat away from her forehead. She swilled the pig troughs out in the side pens with a bucket of water, allowing her to distribute the fresh meal for them. The animals screeched and snuffled with excitement round her feet as she emptied the bag of food into the trough; she reached down to stroke the back of the closest one, making a clicking noise with her tongue. It’s just the way things are, she said to herself, as she gave it a final pat and closed the gate to the pen after her, before heading back up to the house.

Michael was watching the local news in the kitchen. Marsha would probably complain about the volume, he thought, picking up the remote and nudging it down a couple of bars. A young man with a precisely groomed beard was reading the weather, waving his arms on the screen and, despite concentrating on his every word, Michael realised at the end of the forecast he couldn’t have said if it would rain or shine that day. He jabbed at the volume buttons until the sound was barely audible then, tutting out loud to the empty room, turned the television off altogether. Looking round the room he wondered what he should do next. He realised his leg was shaking. Restless leg syndrome they called it. It was worse this morning. There was no point making himself anything to eat. Marsha would be back soon. He heard the spring of the letter box as it snapped shut. Getting up, he walked through the utility room to the back door and saw a large brown envelope, with a typed address label on the doormat, face up. He pursed his lips and, with a groan, bent down to pick it up. When did I start doing that, he thought? There was a time I used to think I was invincible. He shook his head, feeling old, as he turned the envelope over in his hand and slid his thumb under the corner of the stuck-down flap.

***

Michael walked with a stoop to his shoulders, caused, according to some of the locals, by the burden of his own belligerence. His once jet-black hair was now flecked with grey and he had a touch of the wild-eye about him that made people reluctant to get into a disagreement with him. Despite Marsha’s attempts to maintain an air of respectability among the local community, he had taken to using bright-red Charlie band tied around the waist of his jeans, to keep them from falling down. She knew there was little point in asking him to reconsider his attitude towards his appearance, because he would only tell her that he didn’t give two hoots about the opinions of others. She found herself grateful that he kept himself to himself because it required less explaining when she bumped into people who asked after him. On the occasions they encountered people who knew nothing of his history, no comment was made about the scars to his face, Marsha noticed. Instead people generally maintained a bright and breezy tone, looking around as if distracted, so as to avoid being caught staring at him, and soon found reason to move on.

As a young man, he’d been considered shrewd, with a sharp eye for an opportunity and an ambition that was guaranteed to take him far beyond the limits of the county. As a child, he’d listened to the stories of his Uncle George who’d flown in the war. His mother had explained to Michael when George was found, once again, wandering the streets without his trousers on, that he’d struggled to settle when he came back: the war had changed him. Michael tried to imagine what he must have seen. He understood; it was hard for heroes to settle. They were not meant for a life made up of ordinary things.

It was around that time, when he was seven years old, that he first saw a picture of the aurora borealis in a copy of the National Geographic magazine. He picked it up while he was sitting with his mother and three of his younger siblings in the dentist’s waiting room. Dabbing his finger on his tongue he flicked through the pages and stopped when he saw the image; it was the colours that got him. He was so enraptured he didn’t hear the receptionist when she called out his name for his appointment. I’m going to fly like Uncle George, he said to himself as he stared up at the ceiling while Mr Graham poked about in his mouth, checking his teeth with his needle-sharp hook, prodding them in turn until he winced. He imagined he was looking up at the clouds rather than the swirling Artex ceiling, picturing himself flying high above them, the wings of his machine stretched out as he lifted and looped in the air. He resolved to learn from his uncle’s mistake and avoid the inevitable stagnation of settling. When people put down roots, they ended up either dying or going stir-crazy, he thought. First, he would head north and see the Northern Lights for himself. He would fly into the very lights themselves, as if diving into the photograph of the magazine. Then, he would make a living as a pilot, moving from place to place. There was crop spraying, tourist trips, teaching others to fly, commercial flying; the possibilities were endless. He had it all worked out by the time Mr Graham was done. When the elderly dentist held his hand out to his young patient at the end of the appointment, Michael was imagining he was holding his hand out to take control of the joystick, shifting it forward as he pulled his plane out of a steep climb.

He left school at sixteen with just the uniform he was standing up in and a couple of certificates and was put to work on the farm. He should have known when he walked through the door, on his eighteenth birthday, to break the news, that the matter would not be well-received.

‘Dad, I’ve enrolled in flying school. I’m going to learn how to fly. I’m going to make a career out of it.’

He had convinced himself, by rehearsing it over and over in his mind, that they would be able to see it was the right thing for him to do. He laid the letter on the table in front of his father, who peered over the tops of his glasses as if he’d noticed a bluebottle crawling across the table and was considering whether to swat it or not before he returned to his newspaper. When his father spoke, his tone was set hard like concrete.

‘You can’t feed a family on wishful thinking.’

As Michael turned and marched out of the house, Wolf, the family’s black Labrador, scrambled to his feet to follow him out, as was their routine, only to be left looking confused as the door slammed shut in his face.

In the months that followed, Michael managed to gain his licence in spite of his father, but he struggled to maintain his hours with the demands of the farm. In time, his license expired, along with his long-held ambition to be a pilot.

Michael worked from dawn to dusk, tending the pigs for his father while he grieved for the future he’d planned. At first, he wasn’t sure, but he knew he was working for something. And the harder he worked the less time he had to think about what he’d had to give up. He lost touch with the people he’d known, the friends he’d had at school. He ignored their invitations to meet up, their plans to go out on the town and he developed a plan. By the time he was twenty years old, he’d managed to scrape enough money together to buy a plot of land, borrowing the rest from his father, pointing out that he owed him that at least.

Land was going cheap and he found a plot he thought was perfect, a couple of miles from the intersection of the new motorway to the north, on a junction halfway between a tucked-away village and the motorway services. The services consisted, in the early days, of a six-pump station and a shop with a double-width sliding door that often stuck in its runner. The locals knew the knack of it, but infrequent visitors were often caught out, only to walk smack bang into the glass door and having to walk back to their cars rubbing their foreheads, much to the amusement of any locals who happened to witness it. The shop was staffed by a selection of the most enterprising teenagers from the village until the time came for them to leave, inevitably, for fresh pastures and opportunities in the city. Travellers from the south commented on its quaintness as a stopover, meaning they were glad they lived in a more civilised locale where doors opened smoothly, and the climate was more sympathetic. The locals from the village knew it as The Carriage Stop, since that was the name of the pub that was demolished to make room for the first service station to be built on the site. Despite the various incarnations that followed, as the site was developed over the years, the name stuck, as often happens in places where people are resistant to change. At the time that Michael was looking for a place to buy, there was much talk of a bypass to the village, which would have to go through planning. It would take a couple of years of to-ing and fro-ing for the consultation, but if Michael judged it right, he thought he would be able to cash in after a few years and sell the place back to the authorities at an increased value.

When he purchased Greenacre Farm, it consisted of a square parcel of land, around forty acres in total. The land agent, a friend of his father’s; a coincidence which did not escape Michael’s attention, tried to warn him off during their first visit to the plot.

‘You’ll never make a silk purse of this lot; you mark my words. The soil’s as dry as the desert and it’s so exposed that you’ll spend all your time fighting the cross wind,’ he’d said, sucking the air through his teeth.

Standing next to him, Michael looked out across the land towards the distant horizon and calculated that if he built the house himself, he would keep the costs down and a few farm buildings and a reasonable set of accounts would ensure he could demonstrate that the place was a going-concern. A clever accountant could make it look more than it was. The value would skyrocket, Michael thought. The transport department or local council would have no choice but to pay the price, if they wanted the most direct route for the bypass.

When Michael walked out of the council offices after his meeting with the representatives from the local planning department, the tedious Harold Lawson and his sidekick, Gerald Lomas, his heart was full of optimism. His path was set. His application for the building work had been agreed, in spite of the duo’s apparent efforts to derail his plans. They’d decided against Michael the minute he walked into the room with his rough swagger and his sullen look and they argued everything from the impact of farm traffic to the protection of the natural habitat. The vote had gone his way thanks to a pre-emptive strike he’d had the foresight to consider: the week before he’d decided on a large donation to the parish fund for the new church roof, just in case. He was looking up in the air, admiring the clear blue sky that promised a fine day to follow, when he literally ran slap bang into Myra Henderson. The papers he’d brought with him for his meeting and rolled up plans, which had been tucked under his arm, fluttered from his grasp. As he looked at his plans, scattered all over the pavement, he realised he’d managed to knock over the most beautiful girl he’d ever set eyes on.

Myra was small and delicate-looking with platinum barrel curls: a hairstyle that she’d copied from one of her favourite fashion magazines. The round curls framed her face, her red lips revealed brilliant white teeth and her nipped-in dress emphasised her tiny waist.

She looked up at him, surrounded by papers, her eyes as green as the fields at Greenacre Farm and he knew.

‘Well, if you were trying to get my attention, you’ve certainly done that’ she said, laughing.

He was bewitched before he could blink.

He discovered that she lived in the better part of town with her widowed mother, having just returned home for a spell after finishing a foundation course in office management.

The soon-to-be Mrs Fall discovered she was pregnant a few months later and they celebrated their nuptials at the altar of St Benedict’s Church in October later that year, just as the groundworks for the main house were being completed. They walked her mother back to her house after the service, before Michael drove his new wife out to Greenacre. He held out his hand to help her out of the car and sweeping her into his huge arms, carried her across the muddy verge to a table all laid out, among the foundations, with a crisp, white tablecloth and a dinner for two. When Michael raised his glass to toast his new wife and looked into Myra’s eyes, he was afraid, for a moment, that if his heart lifted any higher in the sky it might just float away.

Myra gave birth in a static caravan in the back field with some last-minute assistance from the local midwife, who arrived just in the nick of time as Marsha entered the world with an indignant yelp. As the midwife wrapped Marsha up in a towel and handed her over to her exhausted mother, Michael was still busy concreting, unable to stop the mixer until he was done. He had promised Myra that the internal floors would be laid in time to set before the cold weather was due to close in.

The caravan was their first home. Myra was grateful that it was only for the duration of the build and just the one winter. In all, the build took a year, including the main house, a Dutch barn, a farrowing house and a series of pens for the pigs that Michael intended to breed until the time came when he was ready to sell.

‘I didn’t sign up for this,’ Myra exclaimed, when the pipes to the caravan froze over and she was forced to bathe Marsha in the sink once again. What she had signed up for, whether Michael knew it or not at the beginning, was a large family. She’d decided she would marry Michael the moment she heard he was one of seven. She’d always dreamed of a bunch of kids running around her legs. Being an only child was lonely. And he’d promised to look after her.

When Tom arrived a year after Marsha, three weeks after they’d moved into the finished house with its six bedrooms, decorated and ready for filling, Myra was delighted. Circumstances, however, did not prevail, and Myra was forced to settle with a perfectly formed, nuclear brood of two.

***

Greenacre Farm was located next to a junction on a quiet country lane, on an area of high ground, with views which were far-reaching on a clear day: all the way across to the Pennines to the west and the North Yorkshire Moors to the east. For four months of the year, the distant peaks were capped in snow and an icy wind swept across the basin, which made Myra shiver to her bones, and during which time she found it impossible to dry the laundry: she was forced to hang it over the back of a chair in front of the three-bar fire, the only source of heat in the house in the early days. The children were quite used to finding black scorch marks on their bedsheets as a result. It wasn’t until Marsha was in the final year of primary school that Michael relented and installed an oil-fired heating system, which filled the ground floor of the house with warmth. He refused to install radiators in the upstairs rooms insisting it was a luxury they couldn’t afford. Marsha and Tom grew to learn one of the first signs of spring was when they couldn’t see their breath in the mornings, when they woke. As a result, by the time Marsha was four years old, when most children were still playing with building bricks, she had mastered the art of getting dressed into her school uniform, including her shoes, while remaining safe and warm under the covers.

The winters seemed to last an eternity; their icy fingers reaching into every corner of the house. Before they had the luxury of heating, Marsha and Tom would fight to sit in front of the electric fire, the orange bars burning the fronts of their legs if they got too close. Power cuts were frequent when the cold northerly winds hit the farm. During the outages, Marsha and Tom would have to come home from school and wash in a trough that Michael brought in from the barn. After a cold wash, they huddled under blankets to keep warm. Meanwhile Myra tutted and sighed as she banged about in the kitchen, saucepans and cupboard doors crashing about as she made beans, which she warmed through, and toast from bread that she grilled, in uneven patches, over a candle flame, creating a giraffe print on the surface that delighted them both. The flickering light from the rest of the candles, positioned around the room, cast eerie shadows on the walls which Marsha and Tom used to imagine were predatory animals, hunting down their giraffe toast as they ate.

In the beginning Michael kept a tally of the winters they had to endure until he could agree a deal with the transport department. But as time went on, talk about the bypass died down. The farmers that Michael spoke to seemed more bothered about how much they were getting in subsidies from Europe or whether they qualified for the Single Farm Payment. Talk in the village pub, on the rare occasion Michael went in, tended to revolve around them complaining about a fairer deal for farmers ­­– so much that Michael wondered they ever got anything done for their mithering. He was aware of the admiring looks whenever he walked into a room with Myra and found himself looking at her, curious that she might have chosen him. After a while he forgot his youthful whims and resigned himself to staying put: his plans, once again, set aside to gather dust.

***

He had known the letter was coming, even wished for it. Perhaps he should have warned Marsha. He could have got her, at least, to try the idea on for size for a bit. Things would have been so much easier. He caught himself wondering for a moment why it might have been that he didn’t mention it to her. When he first read it, his stomach turned over. He’d forgotten all about the plans he’d made. And then he read it, again. This is it, he thought, my chance to start over; maybe I could fly again. A part of the old Michael came nudging back to the present: a glimpse of the child sitting in the dentist’s waiting room staring at the photograph in smooth, glossy print, entranced – the colours and the magic. She might have understood if she’d known the child.

***

Michael was sitting at the breakfast table with a fresh pot of tea. It was the one thing he insisted on doing himself.

‘You have to warm the pot first,’ he told Marsha countless times. ‘No one ever does it right.’

Who else could he be talking about but me? she used to think, when he said it.

He was holding the latest issue of Farmers Weekly, chewing the inside of his cheek behind the pages as he re-read the same line, over and over. He checked the kitchen clock for the third time in as many minutes. How long does it take, for Goodness sake? Looking around the room, he thought