The Harvest Hob

The Harvest Hob Place Post 8

The Harvest Hob was a pub in Adelaide. Tab Merriweather and his

girlfriend Josefa happened upon it during their road trip to pass on a message for a friend.

They found a small pub tucked away in an alley of old buildings. The sign proclaimed it as The Harvest Hob. Tab stopped Josefa with a hand on her arm. “Want to meet some more green tomatoes?”

“What? Where?”

   “In there, more than likely.”

Josefa looked at him suspiciously. “Do you know this place? Did you know it was here?”

“I promise you, I had no idea.”

Inside, the atmosphere was warm and smelled gently of apples. The place had dark panelling and paintings of haystacks, corn fields and people harvesting crops hung around the wall.

Having ascertained that the pub is indeed run by a hob: one Nathaniel Applebee, and that his barmaid, Sheelagh Chalk, is a leprechaun colleen, Tab and Josefa decided to ditch their plans for a caravan park and spent the night in the Harvest Hob. As they discovered, the publican wasn't the only unusual feature of the place. The door of Room 1, to which they had the key, turned out to be invisible to Josefa. Once Tab opened it, they saw...

The room had a large double bed with brass rails and a patchwork quilt, a fireplace, laid and ready, a stand with a china bowl and ewer and two generous bedside tables with a lantern on each. There were no chairs, and the window was shuttered, making it a dimly lit prospect.

Josefa’s eyebrows were raised in amused surprise. “What is this place?”

“It’s a replica of a room in a cottage over there,” Tab explained.

Josefa picked up a folder and took out a sheet of handmade paper. “The Harvest Hob, est. 1839. Licensee Nathaniel Applebee,” she read. She sniffed. “I can smell lavender.”

“That’ll be the sheets,” Tab said. He looked about with more attention. This replica was so close he’d almost swear they were over there. Even the lanterns, and wouldn’t Health and Safety have something to say about that? A sudden idea struck him, and he stepped over the braided rug on the floor to fumble with the stiff shutters. He got them folded back and looked out into the mellow afternoon sunshine. Grinning, he beckoned Josefa over to enjoy the view.

Her gasp of astonishment rewarded him, and he put an arm around her.

“Where’s that? Where’s the city? What—”

“We’re looking down on the chalk cliffs. That’s hob country.”

“But we’re in Adelaide.”

“We are, and we’re not. We’ve found the Adelaide gateway. Well, one of them. I’m betting there’s a staircase or doorway somewhere around here that takes you directly onto the chalk.”

Tab's surmise proved right and the Harvest Hob played an important role in the next stage of their adventure... and the next one after that.

The Harvest Hob  appears in  Sunshower. It gets a mention in Man Overboard and one of these days it might take centre stage as the major setting for Nathaniel's story. 

ABOUT THE BLOG

Sally is Sally Odgers; author, anthologist and reader. You can find you way into her maze of websites and blogs via the portal here.(Sally is me, by the way.)

The goal for 2017 was to write a post a day profiling the background behind one of my books; how it came to be written, what it's about, and any things of note that happened along the way. 2017 is well behind us, but I ran out of year before running out of books. As of May 2018 I STILL hadn't run out of books, but many of those still to come are MIA by which I mean I don't have copies and remember little about them. There are more new books in the pipeline, and I'm certainly showcasing those, but in between times, I'm profiling some of my characters, places and objects. Thank you so much to everyone who's come along on this journey so far!