CONTENTS
Cover
About the Book
About the Author
Also by Louis De Bernières
Dedication
Title Page
Wilderness
Archie and the Birds
Obadiah Oak, Mrs Griffiths and the Carol Singers
Archie and the Woman
The Girt Pike
Mrs Griffiths’s Part-Time Job
The Auspicious Meeting of the First Two Members of the Famous Notwithstanding Wind Quartet
Mrs Mac
Colonel Barkwell, Troodos and the Fish
All My Everlasting Love
The Devil and Bessie Maunderfield
The Auspicious Meeting of the Third Member of the Famous Notwithstanding Wind Quartet with the First Two
Footprint in the Snow
The Happy Death of the General
Rabbit
This Beautiful House
Talking to George
The Auspicious Meeting of the First Member of the Famous Notwithstanding Wind Quartet with the Fourth
Silly Bugger (1)
Silly Bugger (2)
Horatio and All That
The Broken Heart
The Death of Miss Agatha Feakes
Afterword
Copyright
About the Book
Welcome to the village of Notwithstanding where a lady dresses in plus fours and shoots squirrels, a retired general gives up wearing clothes altogether, a spiritualist lives in a cottage with the ghost of her husband, and people think it quite natural to confide in a spider that lives in a potting shed. Based on de Bernières’ recollections of the village he grew up in, Notwithstanding is a funny and moving depiction of a charming vanished England.
About the Author
Louis de Bernières’ works include seven novels, a short story collection and a radio play. His 2008 novel, The Partisan’s Daughter was shortlisted for the Costa Novel Award, and his most recent work, Notwithstanding: English Village Stories, was published in 2009. An international best-seller, Captain Corelli’s Mandolin won the Commonwealth Writer’s Prize for Best Novel in 2004.
Also by Louis De Bernières
The War of Don Emmanuel’s Nether Parts
Señor Vivo and the Coca Lord
The Troublesome Offspring of Cardinal Guzman
Captain Corelli’s Mandolin
Sunday Morning at the Centre of the World
Birds Without Wings
Red Dog
A Partisan’s Daughter
This book is dedicated to my children, Robin and Sophie. May they take their village with them wherever they go.
Stories from an English Village
Wilderness
There is a wilderness where once I lived
Whose every inch I knew and loved.
I roamed there as a dreaming boy
Before reality began;
I walked there still, remembering,
As I grew up beyond a man.
Sweet little in that wilderness I knew
Of God’s indifference and of lovers’ pain.
Too young to suffer, I remember
Longer summers, deeper slumbers,
Better laughter, warmer rain.
ARCHIE AND THE BIRDS
‘I’M NOT IN. Over,’ I told my mother, sighing as I held the walkie-talkie in my right hand and with my left continued painstakingly to stick small seeds to the outside of my living-room window.
‘When will you be back? Over,’ she asked.
‘Oh, I don’t know. Over,’ I replied.
‘Well, I hope you’re back soon,’ she said, reprovingly. ‘This is the third time I’ve walkie-talked and you haven’t been there. How am I supposed to talk with my own son if he’s never there? Over.’
‘But, Mother, I was here. I was busy. And now we are talking. Over.’
‘What’s keeping you so occupied, anyway? Over.’
‘I’m sticking seeds to the living-room window, Mother. Over.’
There was a pause for thought, and then my mother said, ‘Well, at least you’re keeping out of mischief. I’ll buzz you later. Over.’
‘Roger, wilco, over and out,’ I said.
I placed the walkie-talkie on the window ledge, and continued to stick the seeds to the window. It was extremely tedious, and, as I had been at it since breakfast time, I was beginning to find the whole task irksome. I should have been out painting and decorating and bringing in some cash. I even wondered whether this palaver was worth it. Some of the seeds were exceedingly small, and I kept dropping them into the flower bed. I had heard that a lot of the ones in bird food are actually hemp, and I worried that perhaps in the spring these would germinate. If the village bobby happened to pass by, I might get into serious trouble and cause a scandal in the village. So I was spending an undue amount of time on my knees on the damp lawn, looking for the seeds that I had dropped. No doubt many would be found by mice, but then the cat would probably jump on them and I would feel guilty about having lured them to their deaths.
That was the least of my worries. In fact, my whole life was turning into a series of irritating little problems, each of which required altogether too much time to deal with. In this instance it ultimately occurred to me that the sensible thing would be to cover the window with glue, and then just fling the seeds at it in the hope that most of them would stick. I tried this plan out, and it worked quite admirably. I stood back and contemplated my good work, whereupon the walkie-talkie crackled again.
‘Mother to Archie-master. Are you back yet? Over,’ demanded my mother. ‘Only I just heard from the priest that you were late at Mass last Sunday, and caused a stir when you came in. Over.’
‘I am back, Mother, obviously, and I would have been on time if I hadn’t been late. I had to take Archie out before he did his business on the carpet. Over.’
‘Well, that’s all right then. Only it’s a bad thing to get a reputation for lateness. It reflects badly. Over.’
‘So it does,’ I said. ‘But let me point out that you didn’t go to Mass at all. You were in bed with a magazine and your head full of curlers. Over.’
I went back indoors and into the living room. The smears on the glass looked horrible from the inside, and the seeds somehow didn’t look right. I realised that I should have arranged them in some kind of artistic pattern. I could have made them into a portrait of a cockerel, or even a nice parsnip, but now it was too late. The walkie-talkie buzzed again. ‘Mother to Archie-master. So why would you be sticking seeds on the windows? Over.’
‘Mother,’ I said, a little wearily, ‘why can’t you just come out of the kitchen and talk to me without using the walkie-talkie? I’m only in the living room. Have you lost the use of your legs? Over.’
‘I’m making a cake and getting lunch. Bangers and mash and baked beans. It’ll be ten minutes. I’ll give you a buzz. Over and out.’
I sat in my armchair and waited to see what the response to the seeds would be. I realised that I could not expect results right away, but nonetheless I was extremely curious. While I waited for lunch I reflected upon the chain of events that had led me to adopt this desperate measure.
It had begun with the dog, a black retriever. The gypsy who sold it to us took advantage of our ignorance, saying that it was a golden retriever, and that it would turn gold later. All golden retriever puppies were black at first. He was obviously expecting us to fall in love with the dog, so that by the time we found out we’d been sold a pup, we wouldn’t be wanting a refund. He was right, that was exactly what happened, only we got revenge by giving him a rotten rooster and telling him it was pheasant, well hung.
My mother wanted to call the dog Sooty, but the cat had already laid claim to that name, and we didn’t fancy the confusion, so we called him Archibald Scott-Moncrieff instead, or Archie for short.
Archie was a lollopy friendly dog, and when he was very small he developed a predilection for shoelaces. You couldn’t take a step without finding him fastened to your foot. We took to wearing slip-ons, and he just transferred his attentions to the kitchen trolley, biting at the wheels whenever my mother moved it about the house, and yipping at it incessantly when it wasn’t being wheeled anywhere. We realised that we had acquired a dog with a terrible flair for obsession, and we decided to take his mind off the trolley. I brought him out in the fields with a walking stick and taught him to retrieve.
He was altogether the natural retrieving dog, and soon I was out there with a nine-iron and a golf ball, practising day and night for the pitch-and-putt competition, with Archie flying back and forth between the legs of the cows, my Penfold Commando in his jaws. I tried to train him to put the ball back on the tee, but his nose got in the way of his eyes, and he missed. He had a soft mouth and never put a single mark on the ball, and I had such good practice that soon enough I could hit the ball high and straight, and land it on any cow I chose. I could have given Christie O’Connor a match, and I would have won the competition but for a run of bad luck in the putting.
The trouble was that Archie wouldn’t stop retrieving, and in his spare time he filled the house with junk. We’d be watching the goggle-box in the evening, as Archie rushed in and out with his tennis ball. We’d leave the front door open and throw the ball out of the living-room window, whereupon Archie would fly into the hallway, out of the front door and into the darkness. Through the window would come wafting the sound of Archie galumphing and crashing and snuffling in the shrubs, and soon enough he’d be back with his ball drenched in saliva, dropping it at our feet, looking up at us with liquid brown eyes full of pleading, and then one of us would go soft and throw the ball out again, saying ‘Bloody dog’ as we did so.
When we couldn’t take any more, Archie just went out and fetched things that hadn’t even been thrown. That’s how my mother found her gardening gloves again, and that’s how one evening we were presented with a frog, a log, a baby rabbit and a marrow that needed picking. One day Archie shattered the rake by trying to charge through the front door with the handle horizontal in his mouth. The only thing that Archie didn’t retrieve was the cat, because Sooty wouldn’t cooperate, and fluffed herself up into a chimney brush if ever he tried. Just as we were Catholics, in fact the only other Catholic family in Notwithstanding (everyone else being Anglican except for the brothers at the garage who didn’t drink), retrieving was the nearest that Archie got to having a religion, and since we’d always practised toleration, we felt that we had to put up with his chosen way of life.
When Archie was about two years old he came in with a blackbird, but we paid no attention. The bird was dead, and we thought that he must have found it somewhere. But then the next day he came in with a song thrush and a starling, and we became suspicious.
In our village strange things happen from time to time. To this day we still talk about the time when Mrs Mac’s sister went round telling us she’d heard on the radio that from now on the rain was going to fall upward, and sure enough it did. We sat watching it out of our windows, and it looked to us as if the drops in the puddles were actually little bursts of water heading skyward. We became anxious about the village pond emptying out, but it never did, and eventually Mrs Mac’s sister confessed that she’d heard the radio item on 1 April. Even so, most of us were convinced by lengthy observation that in fact the rain had been falling upward, and we had some good arguments about it, for and against, until Sir Edward explained that it was a perceptual illusion caused by the well-known effects of intellectual confusion upon the eyesight under conditions of simple Galilean relativity, whatever that is. After that, the rain fell downward once more, and normality was restored.
Anyway, after Archie had brought in a pigeon, a linnet, a greenfinch, and a woodcock, we began to realise that his retrieving had gone too far, and it wasn’t until I took to sitting in the living room after lunch that I discovered the cause of his success in retrieving dead birds that no one had shot. I was reading the Sporting Times one afternoon, when there was a fierce thump on the window. I looked up, startled, to see a robin sliding down it, leaving a thick trail of blood behind on the glass. A few minutes later Archie brought the little bird in, and, as usual, because it would be a shame to see it go to waste, I put it in Sooty’s bowl. Two more birds committed suicide by crashing into the window that very same evening.
My mother and I discussed the possibility that the local birds were suffering from depression. We knew that sometimes in the human population a kind of self-destructive hysteria can sweep through – the last time it happened in Notwithstanding was in the eighteenth century when the calendar was adjusted and everyone thought they’d been deprived of several days of life. Somehow this didn’t make sense with respect to birds, so we were forced to conclude that it must be a spontaneous collective amnesia about windows.
That’s why I stuck birdseed to the glass, to teach them all about windows again, and, though I say it myself, it did work wonderfully. We had dozens of birds of all kinds flapping against the window, picking off the seeds, and the sparrows and tits learned to hover like hummingbirds while they pecked. My mother and I were quite chuffed to have contributed to bird evolution, especially when they also realised by experience to keep out of Sooty’s reach. She only got two or three before they learned.
Nonetheless, it drove us barmy to see Sooty trying to get at the birds, leaping up and down with a mad expression on her face as though she were on an invisible and uncontrollable pogo stick. On top of that, the repeated sound of her claws dragging down the windows was worse than the scritch of a teacher’s fingernail on the blackboard, so we moved the television into the other room, and Archie went back to fetching everything except birds.
OBADIAH OAK, MRS GRIFFITHS AND THE CAROL SINGERS
MRS GRIFFITHS GOES to the shop and stands next to Obadiah Oak, her nose wrinkled in distaste. Obadiah, known to all as Jack, lives with his daughter by the cricket green, in a cottage that has been handed down in his family for seven generations. Jack is the village’s last peasant, and he and his house smell of two hundred years of peasant life; he exudes the aromas of wet leather and horse manure, costive dogs, turnips, rainwater and cabbage water, sausages, verdigris, woollen socks, Leicester cheese, fish guts, fraying curtains, mice under the stairs, mud on the carpet and woodlice behind the pipes, but most of all he reeks of six decades of neglected hygiene. Jack is considered a ‘character’, with his teeth like tombstones, his stubble like a filecard, his lips like kippers, his rolling Surrey accent and his eyes as round as plates, but newcomers avoid him if they can. They moved here in search of picture-postcard England, and are uncomfortable with a real countryman who knows how to wring the neck of a chicken and has no compunction about drowning kittens in a bucket. Jack is an anachronism, but he does not know it, and he is standing in the village shop because he has nothing to do, and not many to talk with. Every day he comes in and buys cigarette papers, so that by now he must have a roomful of them, and he engages the shop assistant in a dilatory conversation about the weather, punctuating his remarks with hawking. He used to spit it out, but nowadays he swallows it, having been roundly told off one afternoon by the squirrel-shooting Polly Wantage.
‘Artnoon,’ he says to Mrs Griffiths. ‘Turned out nice again. Looks like rain though.’
‘Getting chilly,’ replies Mrs Griffiths crisply, hoping to avoid a prolonged conversation.
‘Time o’ year,’ says Jack, ‘what wi’ Christmas on the doorstep. Going away?’
‘Staying at home. I usually do.’
‘Come and eat wi’ us?’ says Jack, knowing that she will refuse, because everyone always does. He does not in truth want to have Mrs Griffiths round for Christmas dinner, but he has always been the kind of man who tries to do his bit, the sort of fellow who will offer his sturdy back to a child who wants to climb a tree to fetch down conkers.
‘Oh, I couldn’t possibly,’ says Mrs Griffiths shortly, without even thanking him. But Jack is not offended; he has a sense of his place in the world, and a sensible man expects snooty people to be snooty.
‘Happy Christmas, then,’ he says, and he touches the rim of his sagging hat. He leaves the shop and strolls home, directly across the middle of the cricket pitch. He has been asked not to, but cannot see the point of being tender in the winter about a pitch that is mangled every weekend of the summer.
Mrs Griffiths exchanges resigned glances with Mrs Davidson, whose turn it is to man the shop. It makes no profit any more; no one would buy it from the previous owner, and now it is run on a cooperative and voluntary basis by those ladies who have time on their hands.
‘I don’t know why someone doesn’t tell that man to wash,’ says Mrs Griffiths, crossly. ‘It’s a disgrace.’
‘Oh, I know,’ says Mrs Davidson. ‘Polly Wantage told him once, you know, after she stopped him from spitting, and what he said to her was unrepeatable.’
Mrs Griffiths’ eyes widen with a kind of horrified delight. Strong language is so far outside her world that when she overhears it, it is as exotic as Bengal tigers.
Mrs Griffiths buys a big box of Christmas cards because she wants Mrs Davidson to think that she has lots of friends and relations. She will send a card to the vicar and the doctor, and she will drop one through the letter boxes of the more respectable people in the village, so that they will send one back, and then, should anyone call round and glance at her cards, it will be clear that she is well connected and respected. She also buys mincemeat and ready-made frozen shortcrust pastry, because tonight she is going to make mince pies for the carol singers.
Mrs Griffiths has always hated the carol singers, even though they are the children of the better families. They arrive with their guitars and their recorders, and every year they sing the same two songs, ‘Silent Night’ and ‘O Come All Ye Faithful’. They collect for the NSPCC, and Mrs Griffiths would really rather give money to the RSPCA; at least animals cannot be blamed for anything, and do not grow up to be thieves and yobs. Mrs Griffiths secretly resents the way in which the carol singers are so young and bright-eyed, so full of high laughter, so full of the future, and previously she has always turned out the lights when she heard them coming, so that she does not have to go out and listen to them, or give them money, or make mince pies and hot punch as everyone else does. The carol singers have always sung to her closed door and doused lights, and have then departed.
But things have changed. Mrs Griffiths lost her husband in the spring, and is slowly realising that at last the time has come when she has to make an effort to get on with people. She did not love her husband, he was boring and inconsequential, and she had not even loved him when they married. After he died, she felt merely a sense of relief, conjoined with the bitterness of a freedom that has come too late. Sometimes she wonders whether she has ever loved anyone at all, and certainly she has never loved anyone as they do on the television late at night, with all those heaving backsides. But, even though her husband was a cipher, nowadays Mrs Griffiths feels a certain emptiness, a certain need to reach out, a certain need to be reborn. Tonight she will make mince pies and punch, she will leave the lights on, she will come out and listen, and she will tell the children that their music is wonderful. She will ignore the fact that they know only one verse of ‘Silent Night’, their guitars are out of tune and their recorders too shrill, and she will wish them a happy Christmas even though they are beautiful and still have a chance in life.
Mrs Griffiths covers herself and her kitchen in dusting sugar, she deals with the frustration of pastry that sticks to the table and the rolling pin, she conquers the meanness that nearly prevents her from pouring a whole bottle of red wine into the punch, and then she waits, sitting on the wooden chair in the kitchen, warmed by the rich smells of baking pastry and hot wine, and lemon, and rum. ‘After they’ve been,’ she thinks, ‘I will write all my cards, and then I’ll draw a hot bath and read.’ Since her husband died, Mrs Griffiths has taken to reading true-life romances that one can order six at a time from a special club. She has read so many that she thinks she could probably write one herself.
It grows very dark, and three hours pass. Mrs Griffiths goes often to her door, and opens it, to see if she can hear the carol singers coming. The night is very cold; there is a frosty wind, but she does not think that it is going to rain. They will be here before long.
Mrs Griffiths sits in her wooden chair and thinks about what she should say to the children; does ‘Merry Christmas’ sound better than ‘Happy Christmas’? Does ‘Thank you so much for coming’ sound too formal? The young are not very formal these days. During the time when everyone was going on about the Beatles, the youngsters kept saying ‘groovy’, but that was probably not very ‘with it’ any more. She is not even sure if ‘with it’ is ‘with it’ these days. She experiments with ‘Groovy Christmas’, but decides against it.
Mrs Griffiths hears ‘Silent Night’ in the distance. The children are singing to the gypsies in their scrapyard, causing the Alsatians to howl. Now they are singing to the Davidsons, and now they are singing to the baroque musicologist, and now they are singing to smelly Jack Oak. Mrs Griffiths listens very hard for the squeak of her garden gate and the experimental chords of the guitarists. She knows that, in between the houses, the children bray out songs from pop groups with silly names and working-class accents.
The children arrive at the garden gate, and the tall, lanky one says, ‘What about this one?’
‘Not worth it,’ says the other guitarist, who is proud of the fact that he is going to get a shaving kit for Christmas. He strokes his invisible moustache with a nail-bitten forefinger.
‘She’s an old skinflint,’ says the blonde girl who will be beautiful when she loses her puppy fat.
‘Her husband died,’ says the dark, sensitive girl with the brown eyes.
‘It won’t do any harm, will it?’ asks the blonde girl.
‘There’s no point,’ says the lanky boy, ‘she just turns off the lights as soon as she hears us coming. Every year it’s the same, don’t you remember? She’s an old ratbag.’
‘Mum told us not to leave her out,’ says the blonde.
‘Who’s going to tell Mum?’ demands her brother. ‘Let’s go and do the Armstrongs.’
Mrs Griffiths sits on her wooden chair and hears ‘Silent Night’ coming from next door. At first she feels a livid pang of anger, and one or two of those vehement forbidden words spring to her mind, but not to her lips. She is indignant, and thinks, ‘How dare they miss me out. They always come here. Why am I the one to miss out?’ She looks at her inviting heap of mince pies and her steaming bowl of punch, and thinks, ‘I did all this for them.’ She wants to go outside and shout insults at them, but she cannot think of anything that would not sound ridiculous and undignified.
Alongside her anger and frustration, Mrs Griffiths abruptly feels more tired and forlorn than she has ever felt in her life, and she begins to cry for the first time since she was a child. She is surprised by large tears that well up in her eyes and slide down the sides of her nose, rolling down her hands and wrists, and into her sleeves. She had not remembered that tears could be so warm. She tastes one, in order to be reminded of their saltiness, and finds it comforting. She thinks, ‘Perhaps I should get a cat,’ and fetches some kitchen roll so that she can blow her nose.
Mrs Griffiths begins to write her cards. One for the vicar, one for the doctor, one for the people in the mansion, one for the Conservative councillor. She gets up from her chair and, without really thinking about it, eats a mince pie and takes a glass of punch. She had forgotten how good they can be, and she feels the punch igniting her insides. The sensuality of it shocks and seduces her, and she takes another glass.
Mrs Griffiths cries some more, but this time it is partly for pleasure, for the pleasure of the hot briny water, and the sheer self-indulgence. A rebellious whim creeps up on her. She glances around as if to check that she is truly alone in the house, and then she stands up and shouts, ‘Bloody bloody bloody bloody bloody.’ She adds, ‘Bloody children, bloody bloody.’ She attempts ‘bollocks’ but merely embarrasses herself and tries ‘bugger’ instead. She drinks more punch and says, ‘Bloody bugger.’ She writes a card to the gypsies who own the scrapyard, and to the water-board man who had an illegitimate child by a Swedish barmaid, and to the people who own the pub and vote Labour. She eats two mince pies at once, cramming them into her mouth, one on top of the other, and the crumbs and the sugar settle on to the front of her cardigan. She fetches a biscuit tin, and puts into it six of the remaining pies. She presses down the lid and ventures out into the night.
When she returns she finishes off the punch, and then heaves herself upstairs with the aid of the banisters.
She is beginning to feel distinctly ill, and heads for her bed with the unconscious but unswerving instinct of a homing pigeon. She reminds herself to draw the curtains so that no one will be able to pry and spy, and then she undresses with difficulty, and throws her clothes on to the floor with all the perverse but justified devilment of one who has been brought up not to, and has never tried it before. She extinguishes the light and crawls into bed, but every time that she closes her eyes she begins to feel seasick. Her eyes glitter in the dark like those of a small girl, the years are briefly annulled, and she remembers how to feel frightened when an owl hoots outside.
At eleven thirty, fetid Jack Oak opens his front door to put the cat out and spots a biscuit tin by the door scraper. He picks it up, curious, and takes it back inside. ‘Look what some’un left,’ he says to his daughter, who is just as unkempt as he is, but smells more sweetly.
‘Well, open it,’ she says.
Jack prises off the lid with his thick yellow nails, and inside he finds six mince pies, and an envelope. Jack almost never gets Christmas cards. He feels a leap of excitement and pleasure in his belly, and hands the card to his daughter to read. It says: ‘To dear Mr Obadiah Oak and daughter, a very Happy Christmas and New Year, from Marjorie Griffiths.’
‘Well, bugger me,’ says Jack, and his daughter says, ‘Now there’s a turn-up for the books.’ Jack puts the card on the mantelpiece, crams a whole mince pie into his mouth, and delves among the clutter for a pencil and the box of yellowing cards that he bought from the village shop fifteen years ago.
ARCHIE AND THE WOMAN
‘MOTHER TO ARCHIE-MASTER, come in please. Over.’
‘I’m digging potatoes,’ I said to my mother, sighing as I held the walkie-talkie to my ear with my right hand, and gave up turning the heavy ochre clay. I thrust the spade into the ground. ‘What do you want now? Can’t it wait ’til lunchtime? Over.’
‘I wanted to talk to you urgently,’ she replied, ‘while I remembered. Over.’
‘Well, what is it? Over.’
There was a long pause, and then she said, ‘Bless me, I’ve forgotten what it was. Over.’
‘Tell me at lunchtime then, when you’ve remembered. What’s for lunch? Over.’
‘Steak and kidney pie with mashed neeps with a fried egg on top. It’ll be half an hour. I’ll be ringing you when it’s ready. Over and out.’
I looked at the walkie-talkie. ‘Bloody thing,’ I said to myself, and hooked it on to the trellis. It had been a curse ever since my mother gave it to me for Christmas, because it meant that she could get hold of me wherever I was. Nowadays she did not even see fit to come the fifty yards to the vegetable patch, and I could clearly see her through the kitchen window, putting the walkie-talkie down and wiping the steam from her spectacles. If I left the gadget in the house, then she would roundly accuse me of ingratitude, and of a lack of respect for her poor old legs. Sometimes I just switched it off, and pretended that the batteries had run out.
‘What was it then?’ I asked her, as I pierced the yolk of my egg and watched the thick yellow goo trickle down the sides of a pyramid of mashed turnip.
She put down her knife and fork, and looked into her notebook, a small black one, with ruled lines and a red spine. In it she kept remarks and reminders that were to be addressed specifically to me. I used to call it ‘Mother’s Book of Complaints’.
‘Oh yes,’ she said, ‘I’ve decided that it’s about time you got married.’
I was aghast. I was so stricken by aghastness, or aghastitude, that my mind went quite blank, like a balloon that had suddenly popped on a briar. I paused with a forkful of mash in mid-delivery, and my mouth agape. ‘What on earth for?’ I demanded eventually. ‘I’m only forty-two.’
‘Even so,’ she said.
‘Oh, come off it. What would I want with being married?’
‘It’s not you I’m thinking of,’ she replied, ‘it’s me. I need some company about the place. You’re always out and about. When you’re not painting and decorating or gardening, you’re out playing golf. And I can’t imagine you looking after me in my old age, so you’ll have to get a wife.’
‘You’re only seventy-five,’ I said, ‘it’ll be donkey’s years before you’ll be going gaga.’
Naturally I didn’t take my mother seriously. When my dear father was dying in his bed, he had called me in to give me his final blessing, and, as I knelt beside him with the palm of his hand on the crown of my head, he had said, ‘Now, son, you’ve got to promise me something.’
‘Father, of course I will,’ I had said. He closed his eyes, as if to marshal his final strength, and he said, ‘Son, promise me faithfully that you’ll never take your mother seriously. I never have. And try not to get married.’
‘I swear it,’ I spluttered (for the tears were making speech difficult), and with that his breathing stopped. There was a horrible rattling from his throat, and my mother, who had been standing there all the while, said fondly, ‘The poor old sod.’
As the years have succeeded one another, I have increasingly appreciated my father’s wisdom. The fact is that Mother gets curious fancies that fly into her brain one day, and fly out of it the next, such as the time when she started to make cabbage wine because she had conceived the notion that it was good for the pancreas. Of course, it was undrinkable, and so she gave it away at Christmas time as presents for folk in the village that she didn’t think highly of. She sold some at the WI fete, and most people poured it straight on the compost after a single sip.
However, this idea that I should be getting married rankled in my mind like a bur in a woolly sock. It seemed a fine idea to have someone to share a bed with. I hadn’t had a decent pillow fight for twenty years. And apart from that, a man needs a female, other than his mother, to rub along with.
The problem was, of course, that I had to find some women to meet with, so that I would have an idea of what there was in the offing.
I ruled out an advertisement in the lonely hearts; I hated to tell lies, and an honest description of myself would have put off all but the desperate. I wasn’t so desperate that I would have taken someone else who was.
I thought about how one meets people in my village, and very soon realised that of course it was because of the dogs. Almost everyone had one, and most took their animals out every day, to stretch their legs and take a gander at what Mother Nature was doing to the common land or the Hurst. There was a regular ritual about all this, for if one met another dog, it was obligatory to pat it on the head, ruffle its ears, unclamp it from one’s leg, and discuss its virtues with the owner while the latter performed the same ritual with one’s own dog. First came the enquiry as to the dog’s breed, which was usually a matter of some doubt, then followed anecdotes intended to illustrate its irresistible appeal, its great intelligence and its extraordinary powers of intuition. Then came news of its health problems, and the fact that garlic pearls in its food had been working miracles. Naturally, one could while away many hours in doggy conversations in the process of taking a long walk, and one could come back at dusk and say, ‘I’m sorry I took so long, I got caught by Mrs John the Gardener, and she just wouldn’t stop going on about that bloody mutt of hers. I’ll dig the new potatoes and bring in the coal tomorrow,’ and my mother would tut, and say something like, ‘It was that woman’s dog that put Sir Edward’s Labrador bitch in the family way.’
I think I might have told you about our dog. He was a great big fool of a hound. We called him Archibald Scott-Moncrieff, which soon got shortened to Archie. He was a black retriever who took his vocation seriously. At one time Archie got delusions of grandeur, and came back from walks with fifteen-foot branches of oak in his maw. Then he would get stuck at the gate.
All this retrieving gave me a humorous notion, and so it was that one day at lunch I said to my mother, ‘Mother, do you think it would be a fine idea to train Archie to retrieve eligible spinsters?’
My mother looked up from slurping her soup, and eyed me. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘I have my doubts.’
‘Why’s that, then?’
‘Because a dog’s “eligible” might be a funny thing, and not to your satisfaction, I should think. He’d want her to smell of lady dogs.’
‘Nonetheless,’ I said.
‘No harm in having a try, then,’ she observed, ‘but don’t hang any washing on it.’
Of course, the difficulty wasn’t with the idea, but with the execution. How does one train a dog to retrieve women who are specifically good-looking, intelligent, amenable, amusing, playful but faithful, fond of housework, and prepared to put up with my mother? The only way to do this would have been to identify such women myself, and work out a system of rewards for Archie whenever he got hold of one by the sleeve and dragged her in my direction. Clearly, if I had to find such women in order to train the dog, then I might as well just do the finding myself, and leave Archie out of it.
I decided to train him to find golf balls instead, and that’s why I have five carrier bags of them in the cupboard under the stairs. I took him to the local nine-holer, which was a rough-hewn business designed by an aristocrat who used to own the big house. The course was like a First World War battlefield, in that it was sloppy with mud, and cratered with water-filled holes, there were rabbit scrapes all over the greens, and sheep browsing the rough. One par three was so constructed that you had to play your tee shot over the roof of the great house. The windows had to have steel shutters over them on playing days. If you muffed your shot, it might ricochet back over your head, and plop into the pond behind the tee, or you might have to go and chip your way round the house, avoiding the peacocks and the statues of naked girls with no arms. The best I ever did that hole was a birdie two, and the worst was forty-eight, if you don’t count the ball that got stuck in the gob of the gargoyle on the west wing.
I soon found that no amount of training could get Archie to distinguish between a lost ball and one that was still in play. It was very embarrassing when he raced away on to another fairway, and came back with someone’s perfectly placed drive, or their ball that was just about to roll into the hole for an eagle. Eventually I had to tie Archie to my golf bag, so that I could catch up with him when he tried to hare away after another illegitimate target. Sometimes he would fly off into the woods on the trail of a wild shot, and then get lost altogether, when his attention was distracted by a roe deer. Once he chased a deer all the way to Chiddingfold, and was spotted by one of the teetotalling brothers from the garage, who brought him back to Mother in the cab of his tow truck.
One day, as I was hacking up the first and someone else was coming down the third, Archie slipped his leash and scampered away with his ears flapping behind him. Off he lolloped, and before I knew it, he was back with a nice Dunlop 65, American size, all covered with slobber, which he deposited at my feet. ‘Good boy,’ I said, since he was so pleased with himself, and I didn’t therefore have the heart to tell him off. I picked the ball up, wiped the dribble off on to my trousers, and began to walk towards its owner, who was striding towards me.
I was preparing my apologies, when I noticed that the golfer was a woman, and so I ran back and hid in a holly bush. Male golfers are usually quite jolly and placid, but female golfers can be terrifying in a variety of ways, and it is best to avoid them at all costs, just in case they turn out to be someone with a degree in Art and an amazing collection of conspiracy theories.
I didn’t escape, though, and before I knew it she was poking at me through the prickly leaves with a four-iron. ‘I know you’re in there,’ she said firmly, ‘I can see your shoes.’ Her voice sounded quite pleasant and mellifluous, with a happy burbling in it rather like a brook running over pebbles.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said, from the depths of the bush, ‘but my dog can’t help retrieving things. It’s his hobby, and I can’t stop him. I’ll give your ball back.’ And with that I tossed the ball through the branches, in the hope that she would be satisfied and go away.
‘You’re being very silly,’ she said. ‘It’s your dog I want to talk to you about. I’ve got a bitch just the same, and I’ve been meaning to breed from her. Your dog looks just right. A very fine specimen. I’ll pay you a stud fee and twenty pounds per pup. How about that?’
‘Archie would enjoy that,’ I said, disentangling myself from the bushes and coming face to face with a woman of about thirty years of age. She had blue eyes, and a mouth that curled up at the corners, as though she was always smiling and her mouth had to be ready on the blocks. For a lady golfer she seemed surprisingly on the level.
That’s how it all started with Evie and me. All that hoo-ha and palaver about ovulation and being on heat, and making sure that there was penetration and fertilisation, gave us something in common, a good excuse to meet up and get to know each other. I think that talking frequently about mating must have got us all worked up subconsciously, and I can’t imagine how many pots of tea we drank while we eyed each other up across the kitchen table, with Mother hovering outside in the corridor.
On the big day, Archie did his stuff pretty amateurishly, I’d say. He started at the wrong end, Evie’s bitch got muddled, and we had to rearrange them. All the same, Evie was thrilled, and later that afternoon we went to the shop and bought a bottle of Spanish champagne. She made a shepherd’s pie with caramel-flavoured Instant Whip to follow, and, well, you know how it is, how one thing leads to another.
THE GIRT PIKE
THE GIRT PIKE was caught in the days before the village pond had been sanitised. Once upon a time it was quite accepted that the village boys should spend their summers angling for rudd, squeezing pellets of dough on to size-twelve hooks, and casting out among the lilies. In the evenings the brassy rudd would skip for flies at the time of the hatch, and it seemed unbelievable that one small pond could hold so many fish. It was permissible in those days for people to throw sticks into the pond so that their dogs could fetch them, and the ragtaggle of semi-domesticated ducks would have to shift for themselves, paddling away in comical alarm. In later years the pond would be stocked with ornamental golden tench, little boys would be forbidden to fish, dogs would be forbidden to scare the ducks, and a fence would be erected around the banks to prevent erosion, and to prevent children from falling in. The pond became prettier, but in its prissified state it did not become better loved, and thenceforth it no longer played any part in cementing the friendships of the very young, or filling their holidays with sunshine and clean air.
Before it was sanitised, there was nearly always a party of little boys there in the summer months, usually on the bank nearest the road that led to the village green and the shop. There would be little girls there, too, making daisy chains or squinting against the sunlight as they cried ‘Ugh, oh yuk!’ every time a boy laid hands on a fish to unhook it. The girls never did understand why anyone could bear to get their hands slimy and smelly, and so they watched the boys with appropriate disdain and uncomprehending disgust. If any boy was using maggots or worms, there would of necessity arise a moment when one or more of the girls would be chased squealing round and round the pond by one or more of the boys, who would be threatening to put the worm or the maggot down their necks, or even down their knickers. These episodes would normally end with somebody falling over and hurting their knee or sliding down the muddy bank into the water.
On the morning that concerns us, however, one small boy was fishing on his own, his keepnet flashing at his feet with golden tiddlers. His name was Robert, and he lived in the small row of council houses on Cherryhurst, the road to the Institute of Oceanography, just past the house of Mr Hadgecock the spy, and the lane that led up to the house where Mrs Mac lived with her sister and the ghost of her husband. Many of the boys who fished were much posher than he was, but fortunately the brotherhood of the line counted for far more than deeply inculcated divisions of class and education, and he and they regarded each other with the kind of mutual awe tinged with fear which only a class-conscious Briton would appreciate. Robert used a small rod made of two sections of an ancient Avon rod that his grandfather had adapted for him. It had chrome-plated rings whipped carefully on to it in red button thread, and it had been craftsmanly rubbed down and varnished so that it gleamed. Many of the posher boys were envious of it, and once he had even refused an offer for it of as much as thirty shillings and a Goliath catapult, and a Milbro catapult that needed new rubber. Robert used a small brass centre-pin reel that his grandfather had also passed on, and which was the very same reel with which he had fished in the pond when he had been a little boy. Robert longed for a spinning reel, the kind where you could just open the bail arm and cast as far as you liked, but he was nonetheless adept at pulling out loops of line from the centre pin and placing his bait exactly where he wanted to. One day collectors would be paying implausible money for old brass centre pins such as his, but just now Robert wanted, more than anything, an Intrepid Prince Regent, which was even better than an Intrepid Black Prince, because it had a proper roller on the bail arm. Robert wanted an Intrepid Prince Regent just as much as other people wanted a Colston dishwasher or an E-Type Jaguar. The Prince Regent cost exactly thirty shillings, and so he was in the paradoxical and self-defeating position of being able to buy one only if he sold his rod to one of the rich boys.
Robert was reeling in another small rudd, hoping it would be bigger than it was, when a voice behind him said, ‘Oh, you are clever. Do tell me what it is.’
‘It’s a rudd, missus,’ said Robert, turning round and dangling the unfortunate creature in front of the lady’s face.
The lady concerned was Mrs Rendall, blonde and pretty and vivacious, who, one day soon, would be carried away by cancer before she was forty. All the boys experienced a sensation of longing in the throat when they saw her or thought of her, and none of them could ever imagine growing up to be loved by someone as lovely as she. They thought of her husband as especially blessed, as if he were like God, his status much enhanced by the devotion of angels.
‘How do you know it’s a rudd?’ she asked, with genuine interest.
‘The mouth turns up, missus, ’cause it feeds on the top, and it’s all golden. If it were a roach its mouth would turn down, and if it were a bream it’d be silver, and anyway, I just know it’s a rudd.’
‘You are clever,’ repeated Mrs Rendall, genuinely impressed. She watched as the little boy unhooked it and put it into his keepnet. ‘What do you do with them?’ she asked.
‘At the end of the day I count them up, and then I put them back.’
‘Can’t you eat them?’
‘Don’t know, missus. Haven’t tried.’
‘What’s the most you’ve ever caught? In one day?’
‘Twenty, missus,’ Robert told her, exaggerating by five.
‘Twenty! That’s an awful lot!’ She watched him as, very self-consciously, he cast his line back out. He was determined to do it beautifully, because Mrs Rendall was very nice and very pretty, and her niceness and prettiness made him want to do everything perfectly when she was near him.
‘Have you ever caught a pike?’
‘No, missus. I never even seen one.’
‘Do you think that you could? Would you like to?’
Robert’s eyes gleamed. There was nothing in the whole world more marvellous than the prospect of catching a pike. It was probably more marvellous even than catching a shark. Robert knew someone who had been dangling his toes in the water when they had been savaged by a pike. He had heard of an Alsatian dog that had been bitten on the paw by one.
‘I don’t know if I could,’ admitted Robert. ‘I may not yet be old enough. If I was older, I reckon I could.’
‘How old are you, then?’
‘I’m eleven, missus.’
‘I think that’s old enough. In fact, I’m sure it is. Would you come and catch my pike?’
‘What? The Girt Pike?’ asked Robert incredulously.
Mrs Rendall lived in the Glebe House, opposite the cattle pound, and it had behind it a rectangular pond that must originally, perhaps a century before, have been a swimming pool. It was quite large, overhung with branches and it was absolutely full of starving tiddlers, as Robert had found out when poaching there from the shelter of a laurel. Robert had always kept an eye out for the Girt Pike, but he had never seen it. Everyone said it was there, and lots of people had claimed to have spotted it, or thought that maybe they might have done, but Robert never had, and he had become sceptical.
‘The Girt Pike? Is that what you call it? Why “Girt”?’
‘Don’t know, missus. That’s what it’s called, dunno why. It’s there, then, is it? I heard about it, but I wasn’t so sure.’
‘It’s there all right. Every year the ducks and the moorhens and the coots hatch out all these gorgeous little fluffy chicks, and that pike just gobbles them up one after the other.’
Robert’s eyes widened. ‘You seen it, missus?’
‘Yes. One after the other! It’s awful! He just opens his mouth and his head comes out of the water, and that’s one more chick, just gone! Every year! He eats all the chicks and there’s never one left to grow up. I do wish you’d come and catch it.’
‘You’d let me, then?’ asked Robert, in disbelief.
‘Let you? I’d be so grateful that you’d have to run away to stop me kissing you!’