The High House

An exclusive extract from Jessie Greengrass's new novel, a finalist for The Orwell Prize for Political Fiction

“Perched on a hill above a village by the sea, the high house has a mill, a vegetable garden and a barn full of supplies. Caro and her younger half-brother, Pauly, arrive there one day to find it cared for by Grandy and his granddaughter, Sally. Not quite a family, they learn to live together, and care for one another. But there are limits even to what the ailing Grandy knows about how to survive, and, if the storm comes, it might not be enough.”

Throughout the Orwell Festival we’ve been sharing new writing and exclusive extracts from this year’s Orwell Prize finalists. The Orwell Prizes for Political Writing and Political Fiction 2022 shortlists, released last month, highlight the finest politically engaged books published in 2021. To see the lists, visit our website here.

This weekend we’re delighted to share an extract from The High House by Jessie Greengrass, a finalist for The Orwell Prize for Political Fiction 2022. A novel which is both a family drama, and an exploration of a fundamentally changed world, The High House is about the effects of the climate crisis on the global and personal scale.

Jessie Greengrass will be in conversation with fellow finalist Audrey Magee and Orwell Prize judge Monique Roffey at Waterstones Gower Street, Monday 11th July 2022, as part of this year’s Orwell Festival. Tickets here.

Sally

When I was six years old, I ran away, setting off alone along the lane which lead from Grandy’s cottage to the heath, carrying my old brown suitcase. I went against the flow of people who filed down the hill into the village, trippers on their way to wander past the church, to pick flowers from front gardens and drop ice cream wrappers round the swings, to lean over the harbour wall and lie in rows along the beach. My suitcase was unwieldy, and heavy because I had packed it with everything I had thought I might need – a jumble of toys, my best pink frock, my towel with the hood made to look like a rabbit’s face – and its edges banged against my leg as I walked. I reached the old school house and turned onto the footpath which skirted the top of the marshes, carrying on until I broke out of the woody scrub and into the open. The sun shone. Rabbits cropped the turf. I was wearing my party shoes because I hadn’t wanted to leave them behind and couldn’t fit them in the suitcase, but they were hard, with stiff soles, and rubbed the skin to blisters on my toes and the backs of my heels.
   When I reached the place where Grandy and I went for picnics on sunny days, a sort of bowl in the turf where an oak tree grew, its branches long and low to dapple shade across the ground, I sat down and ate the two chocolate biscuits which I had stolen from the pantry shelf. Chocolate smeared itself across my face and fingers. I hadn’t brought anything to drink and the biscuits and the walk had made me thirsty. The air was hot. I was tired. My feeling of defiance had evaporated. I took my grubby blanket, remnant of babyhood, out of my suitcase and lay down on the grass, rubbing its soft fabric against my cheek. There was the sound of insects, the smell of gorse. I fell asleep. 
   I had woken up by the time that Grandy came and was sitting next to my suitcase, waiting for him. It was half way through the afternoon and I was crying because I was hungry. 
   -Here you are,
he said, and picked me up, carrying me home in his arms, my suitcase held in two crooked fingers, my head resting on his shoulder, swaying with each stride. 
   -Grandy,
I said,
   -I was running away.
   -Yes, Sal, love. I know.
   At home, Grandy put me in the bath and then to bed, dressed in a fresh nightie and tucked under a clean sheet, as though I were unwell, and I lay quiet in the peculiar underwater light of a shaded room on a bright day, and listened to him move about downstairs. The window was open. I smelled the summer garden. I heard the bees, the hooting of wood pigeons. A car started up. Grandy closed a door. I slept again.

(i)
Grandy was a caretaker of sorts. He looked after the village, which, in the fifty years or so since he had sat on the green and listened, he told me, to the men outside the pub argue about whether the fishermen had it worse than the farm labourers or the other way about, had altered until, by the time I started school, it was made up almost entirely of second homes or holiday lets, cottages you could spend a fortnight in, nine straight miles from the supermarket, longer on the winding road. Grandy kept things going when the people who owned the houses were elsewhere. He did the gardens. He put out the bins. He cleared the gutters and watched the roofs for missed slates. He painted the frames of the sash windows to keep the rot at bay and swept up the fallen leaves in autumn so that they didn’t turn to sludge, storing them in bags, carefully marked with their year of collection, until they rotted down to a fine, black mold, which he spread back on the earth each spring. After the storms which blew up from the sea in autumn and winter he went out collecting firewood, taking a chainsaw to fallen branches, loading them up on the trailer of the quad bike he rode until he said he was too old for it.
   -Waste not want not, Sal
he said, giving me a bag to put the smaller twigs in for kindling.
   -Make sure you leave some where they are, mind. Woodlice need homes as do the rest of us, and we’re not so desperate these days that we must take it all. 
   At weekends and in the holidays I went with him, wherever he was going, and I helped, or got in the way, or lay on soft lawns and read while he worked. The village was his. It was he who looked after it. The apples which ripened in September in all the trees in all the gardens were Grandy’s, and the pears, and he stored them in whichever sheds had room for them, laying them side by side in rows, not touching, so that he could go back for them as he wanted through the winter – and he made cider, plastic bins of pulp fermenting in his own shed to be strained, later, through old pillow cases hung from a hook in the kitchen roof. The results were poured into demijohns and kept in the airing cupboard for the winter. If you stood outside the cupboard, even with the door shut, you could hear them, bubbling softly away to themselves. It was always a comforting sound. 
   In the evenings, after tea, we sat together on the bench in the garden which looked down across the lawn to the herb patch, or in winter by the stove, and he listened to me do my reading.
   -Bath time, then,
he said when I was done, and fetched a towel and my pyjamas while I splashed about, pretending that my knees were islands. I went to bed.
   -My turn to read,
he said, and did the voices, even when I told him not to.

(ii)
Once a fortnight in summer Grandy mowed the grass in the churchyard. I lay beside the yew tree, watching clouds scud across the sky above the church spire. 
   -Hi ho, Sally!
Grandy called, as he puttered past on his ride-on lawn mower, pretending that it was a horse.

(iii)
Standing among the graves when he had finished mowing, Grandy pointed out a few which had our name on them, or corruptions of our name, and I read the inscriptions – those sad, small indications of lives lost: died aged 77, devoted father and husband; my beloved wife, aged 42, may the angels commend you; a daughter, born 4th April, died 6th June; on the 22nd October he passed beyond us, taken by the sea –  
   -Pity the poor buggers,
Grandy said, and then, as though by way of an apology,
   -Precarity and continuity, Sal. We all end up dead, but the land we leave goes on, we hope.

(iv)
In summer, people came to wander through the churchyard or swing on the lych gate. They sat down to do up their laces in the porch, or to eat their sandwiches, leaving crumbs between the flagstones and wrappers slotted into the collection box.
   -A bit of common respect wouldn’t cost them anything,
said Grandy to the vicar, who was his friend.
   -Ah well,
the vicar responded,
   -Who are we to judge.
   -Well you’re the vicar, for one thing,
Grandy said,
   -And then again, it’s me who has to sweep up the crumbs,
and they both laughed at their joke.

---

Jessie Greengrass spent her childhood in London and Devon. She studied philosophy in Cambridge and London and now lives in Berwick-upon Tweed with her partner and children. Her collection of short stories, An Account of the Decline of the Great Auk, According to One Who Saw It, won the Edge Hill Prize 2016 and a Somerset Maugham Award. Her critically acclaimed debut novel, Sight, was shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction 2018. The High House is currently shortlisted for the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction 2022.