by Tom Sharpe
It was in the guise of such a one that Walden Yapp moved towards the town. Wearing a pair of shorts which reached below his knees and which had been bequeathed him by a Fabian uncle, he strode across the moors carrying a slumped rucksack. Every now and again he stopped and surveyed the landscape with appreciation. Heather, bog, outcrop and the occasional coppice all fitted into his imagination most precisely. This was the approach to Buscott he had foreseen. Even the few tumbledown cottages he passed afforded him satisfaction and spoke nostalgically of rural depopulation in the eighteenth century. That they had never been more than shepherds’ huts and sheepfolds escaped him. His sense of demotic history prevailed. This was Petrefact land and honest yeomen had been driven from these moors to provide fodder for the mill and space for grouse.
By the time he reached the Vale of Bushampton Yapp was a happy man. The memory of his stay at Fawcett had faded, his cheque had been deposited and he had received several handwritten letters from Lord Petrefact setting out the names of his various relatives who might prove mines of information. But Yapp was less interested in the personal reminiscences of plutocrats than in the objective socio-economic conditions of the working class, and with each stride forward he felt more certain that Buscott would provide in microcosm the definitive data he sought to validate the research he had already done in the University Library.
Over the weeks he had fed Doris with his findings; that the census records showed that the population had remained constant, more or less, since 1801; that the New Mill had until recent times produced cotton products of such excellent quality and low price that they had been able to stand competition from foreign mills far longer than factories elsewhere in Britain; that over half the working population were employees of the Petrefacts; and that ninety per cent of the households, far from holding their houses with anything approaching permanency, rented them from the damnably ubiquitous family. Even the shops in the town were Petrefact possessions and as far as Yapp could make out it seemed probable that he was going to find some form of truck system still in existence. Nothing would have surprised him, he confided to the computer in a preliminary draft of his findings; as usual Doris had obliged by agreeing.
But as in so many things Yapp’s theories proved at some variance to the facts. As he breasted the last rise and looked down into the Vale he was disappointed not to see the obvious signs of squalor and opulence which marked the division between the town and its owners. From a distance Buscott looked disturbingly bright and cheerful. True, the mill cottages of his imagination were there, as was the New House on the hill. But the cottages were brightly painted, their gardens filled with flowers, while the New House had a gentle elegance about it that suggested a greater degree of good taste in the Petrefact who had built it than Yapp would have expected. It was a refined Regency house with delicately wrought iron balconies and a sloping canopy along its front. A gravelled drive ran up one side of a curved lawn and down the other and behind it there was an herbaceous border and a flowering shrubbery. Finally, a large conservatory gleamed along one side of the house. Even Yapp couldn’t claim that the New House dominated Buscott in the gloomy way he had expected. He turned his attention to the Mill and again was disappointed. The factory might loom over the river, but from where he sat it had a prosperous and positively cheerful air about it. As he watched, a brightly coloured van drove through the gates and stopped in the cobbled yard. The driver got out and opened the back doors and presently the van was being loaded with a speed and efficiency Yapp had never seen in any of the many factories he had studied. Worse still, the workers appeared to be laughing, and laughing workers were definitely outside his range of experience.
All in all his first impressions of Buscott were so different from his hopes that he unhitched his knapsack, seated himself on the bank and fumbled for his sandwiches. As he munched them he sifted through the statistics he had gathered about Buscott, the low wages, the high unemployment, the absence of proper medical facilities, the total lack of trade-union representation, the number of houses without bathrooms, the infant mortality rate, the refusal of the local and undoubtedly Petrefact-dominated council to provide a comprehensive school on the suspicious grounds that since Buscott didn’t have a grammar school to begin with, the Secondary Modern was sufficiently comprehensive already. None of these grim facts squared with his first impressions of the place, and certainly they didn’t explain the laughter that had reached him from the Mill.
And so with the thought that he had been sensible to come alone to make a preliminary study of the town before sending for the team of sociologists and economic historians he had assembled at the University, he got to his feet and set off down through the woods towards the river.
*
In his office at the Mill Frederick Petrefact finished finding faults with the proof of the latest catalogue, made a few comments about the false register of the colour photographs, and decided it was time for lunch. Lunch on Thursday meant Aunt Emmelia, inconsequential conversation, cats and cold mutton. Of the four Frederick could never make up his mind which he disliked most. The cold mutton had at least the merit of being dead, and from the inertia of several cats he had sat on in the past he judged that not all Aunt Emmelia’s menagerie were living. No, on the whole it was the combination of Aunt Emmelia and her conversation that made Thursday a black day for him. It was made worse by the knowledge that without her favour he wouldn’t be where he was, a circumstance that made it impossible for him to be downright rude to her. Not that he liked being in Buscott or running the Mill, but it did give him the chance to make another fortune to take the place of the one his father had denied him. And Aunt Emmelia shared one thing with him: she loathed his father.
‘Ronald is a bounder and a cad,’ she had said when he first came down to explain his problem. ‘He should never have sullied the family name by taking a peerage from that vile little man and I have the gravest doubts about what he had done to deserve it. It wouldn’t surprise me to hear that he had fled to Brazil. One can hardly see him following the proper example of that other creature who had the decency to shoot himself.’
It was an odd attitude to find in such an apparently homely woman, but Frederick was soon to learn that Aunt Emmelia had at least one absolute principle to which she clung. She had elevated social obscurity to a point of honour and was always quoting the seventeenth-century Petrefact who was supposed to have said that if God had been prepared to answer Moses by conceding only ‘I am that I am’ it behoved the family to be as modest. Petrefacts were Petrefacts and the name was title enough. In Aunt Emmelia’s eyes her brother had defiled the family by adding ‘Lord’ to the name. It was this rather than his treatment of his son which had won Frederick a place in her peculiar affections and the sole management of the Mill.
‘You can do what you like down there,’ she had told him. ‘It is the business of a business to make money and if you are a true Petrefact you will succeed. I make only one condition. You will not communicate with your father. I will have nothing more to do with him.’
Frederick had agreed without hesitation. His last interview with his father had been so unpleasant he had no wish to repeat it. On the other hand, Aunt Emmelia’s character was too subtle for his liking. He never knew what she was thinking except on the subject of his father and beneath a façade of absent-minded kindness he suspected she was no nicer than the other members of the family.
Certainly her charities were so conspicuously arrogant or downright contradictory – she had once handed a pound to a very wealthy farmer who had celebrated the purchase of some more acres by getting so drunk that he had fallen into the gutter, and had compounded this insult by expressing the hope that he would find gainful employment as a road sweeper for the Council – that Frederick never knew where he stood with her. And as far as he could tell the rest of Buscott felt as uncertain. She refused to go to church and had rebuffed the arguments of several vicars by pointing to the loving achievements of Christians in
Ireland, Mexico and Reformation Britain.
‘I mind my own business and I expect others to do likewise,’ she said, ‘and why God should find merit in groups of people who gather in a building and sing ridiculous hymns rather badly is quite beyond my comprehension. He doesn’t sound right in the head to me.’
On the other hand, it was suspected that she sometimes slipped out at night and put money through the letter-boxes of pensioners, and the New House was a safe depository for unwanted kittens. Finally, there was some doubt as to why she had never married. At sixty she was still a handsome woman and it was generally considered that her objection to marriage lay in having to change her name. All in all, Aunt Emmelia was a human conundrum to everyone.
But duty called and Frederick drove up to the New House as usual. For once Aunt Emmelia was not on her knees tending the herbaceous border, and the conservatory was empty.
‘She’s in a frightful huff ever since the letter came,’ Annie told him. ‘She’s been in the library I don’t know how long.’ Frederick went across the hall to the library rather uncertainly. There were various personal reasons he could think of that might make him the cause of his aunt’s foul mood, but he pushed them to the back of his mind.
He found Aunt Emmelia sitting at her writing-table staring lividly out of the window.
‘I’ve just had the most preposterous letter from your Uncle Pirkin,’ she said and thrust the thing at him. ‘Of course your father’s entirely to blame but that Pirkin shouldn’t find it outrageous suggests to me that he is going senile.’
Frederick read the letter through. ‘Delusions of grandeur again,’ he said lightly, ‘though why Father should hire a man like Yapp to write the family history is beyond me.’
‘He’s doing it because he knows it will infuriate me.’
‘But Uncle Pirkin seems to think . . .’
‘Pirkin is incapable of thought,’ said Emmelia. ‘He is a collector and a hobbyist. First it was birds’ eggs and then when he grew too arthritic to climb proper trees he started on the family one.’
‘I was going to say that Pirkin seems to be considering some form of collaboration with this Professor Yapp.’
‘Which is precisely what irritates me. Pirkin can hardly string two words together comprehensibly, let alone write a book.’
‘Well at least he could prevent the Yapp man getting very far. A month trying to collaborate with Uncle Pirkin would undermine the most determined historian. And where have I heard the name Walden Yapp?’
‘Possibly in a book about ponds?’ suggested Aunt Emmelia.
‘No, rather more recently. I have an idea he’s some sort of personal Quango.’
‘How very helpful. A Quango indeed. I suppose it would be too much to hope that you are suggesting a comparison with an extinct species of Australian duck?’ said Aunt Emmelia with a vagueness that concealed a very considerable knowledge of current affairs.
‘A Quasi Autonomous Non-Governmental Organization, as you very well know.’
‘I would prefer not to. So we must assume your father has some political motive as well.’
‘Almost certainly,’ said Frederick. ‘If I’m right Professor Yapp has been employed in the past to give strikers what they’ve demanded without seeming to.’
‘It all sounds very unpleasant to me,’ said Aunt Emmelia, ‘and if the creature imagines he will receive any help from me he will soon be disillusioned. I shall do everything in my power to see that this project comes to a speedy end.’
And on this note she led the way towards the cold mutton and the latest family gossip. An hour later Frederick drove back to the Mill with relief. On the way he passed a tall angular man wearing unfashionably long shorts, but Frederick hardly noticed him. Hikers occasionally found Buscott, and he had no idea that the deadly virus of his father’s invention had already arrived in the town.
*
Nor was Yapp aware of his role. His first impressions of Buscott had been confirmed by his second and third. Far from being the bleak, grim early industrial town of his preconceived imagining, the place looked remarkably prosperous. The town hall, which proclaimed itself to have been built in 1653, was in the process of being restored; the Scientific and Philosophical Society’s building maintained at least a portion of its original purpose by combining Adult Evening Classes with Bingo in the old reading-room. But there was far worse to come. Several supermarkets competed in the main street, a shopping precinct had been converted all too tastefully from Barrack Square, the cattle market teemed with farmers gossiping over the fatstock sale, a second-hand bookshop accommodated almost as many rather fine antiques as it did books, and a glimpse through the wrought-iron gates of The Petrefact Cotton Spinning Manufactory suggested that if cotton was no longer profitable, something else was. All in all Buscott might be isolated but could hardly be described as run down.
But if Yapp’s impressions were disappointing he had more practical problems to deal with. Accommodation came first. Yapp avoided the two hotels on principle. Only the rich or reps stayed in hotels and Yapp wanted neither.
‘I’m looking for a boarding-house. Bed and Breakfast will do,’ he told the several ladies who manned The Buscott Bakery & Creamery where he had found a little tearoom and had ordered a coffee. A muttered discussion took place behind the counter. Yapp caught as much of the argument as he could.
‘There’s Mrs Mooker used to but she’s given up I hear.’
‘And Kathie . . .’
Nobody thought Kathie suitable. ‘Home cooking I don’t think. Half the reason Joe walked out on her had to do with what she fed him, never minding the other half.’
The women glanced at Yapp and shook their heads.
‘The only place I can think of,’ said the ringleader finally, ‘is Mr and Mrs Coppett up on Rabbitry Road. They do take in visitors sometimes to help out with Social Security. Willy Coppett being what he is. But I wouldn’t recommend it, not with her being the way she is.’
‘I’m not really concerned about my meals,’ said Yapp.
‘It isn’t so much her meals as her . . .’ said another but Yapp was not to hear Mrs Coppett’s faults. A customer had come into the Bakery and the conversation turned to her husband’s accident. Yapp paid for his coffee and went out in search of Rabbitry Road. He found it eventually thanks to an Ordnance Survey map he bought in a stationers and no thanks at all to two people he asked in the street who directed him in several and opposite directions on the off-chance that since it wasn’t in any part of Buscott they knew it must be somewhere else. By then Yapp had walked twelve miles since leaving the train at Briskerton and was beginning to wish he hadn’t. Buscott might be a small town but it was also a statistically low-density one and Rabbitry Road seemed about as far from the centre as it could possibly be without actually being part of the countryside.
Yapp asked for the bus centre, learned that there were no buses, and ended up in what looked like a wrecked-car dump but which claimed it was a Car Hire Service.
‘I shall only want a car for a few days,’ he told a fat bald man who emerged from beneath an ancient van and announced himself as Mr Parmiter ‘at your service’.
‘Only rent by the month,’ he said. ‘You’d be better off buying this fine van. Going cheap at £120.’
‘I don’t want a van,’ said Yapp.
‘Let you have it for eighty without M.O.T. Can’t say fairer than that.’
‘I still want to hire a car.’
Mr Parmiter sighed and led the way over to a large Vauxhall. ‘Five quid a day. Thirty days minimum,’ he said.
‘But that’s £150.’
Mr Parmiter nodded. ‘Couldn’t put it better myself. The van’s a bargain at a hundred and twenty with M.O.T. Let you have it on Monday. At eighty you can take it off now.’
Yapp stood unhappily and felt his feet. They were exceedingly sore. ‘I’ll hire the car,’ he said and consoled himself with the thought that Lord Petrefact was paying his expenses. He took ou
t his cheque book.
Mr Parmiter looked at it doubtfully. ‘You wouldn’t by any chance have cash?’ he asked. ‘I mean I can wait till the banks open tomorrow. And there’s discount with cash, you know.’
‘No,’ said Yapp, whose feet reinforced his principles. ‘And I don’t approve of tax-dodging.’
Mr Parmiter was offended. ‘Discount isn’t tax-dodging. It’s just that I don’t trust cheques. They’ve been known to bounce.’
‘I can assure you that mine don’t.’
All the same Mr Parmiter made him write his name and address on the back and then demanded to see his driving licence.
‘I’ve never been treated like this anywhere else,’ Yapp complained.
‘Then you should have bought the van. Stands to reason. A bloke walks in here and turns his nose up at a van for a hundred quid and hires a car . . .’
But eventually Yapp drove away in the Vauxhall and made his way up to Rabbitry Road.
Here at last he found the sort of poverty his statistics had led him to expect. A row of squalid houses backed onto what appeared to be an abandoned quarry and the road had presumably got its name from the remarkable number of holes in its surface. The Vauxhall bounced to a halt and Yapp got out. Yes, this was exactly the sort of social environment he had hoped to find. With the cheerful thought that he’d get the lowdown on Buscott and the Petrefacts from the genuinely deprived, he went down an untended garden and knocked on the door.