The Midden

by Tom Sharpe

  The Major wasn’t so sure. His experience of military life might be largely imaginary and second-hand but he knew enough to realize that the direction of the gunfire and its intensity suggested that Buffalo Midden, far from showing the Mission children what a Lee Enfield could do to a charging rhino or something of that sort, was engaged in shooting at them. And while this was understandable – the Major had once been surprised by a number of the little brutes while practising self-abuse overlooking their tents and he didn’t like them any more than those guests whose rooms had been burgled – but shooting at the little bastards was carrying things too far. He’d been particularly alarmed by the sight of Rascombe’s armed column. It hadn’t consisted of the armoured half-tracks of the Inspector’s imagination, but there had been an urgency about its passing that gave it an altogether different authenticity. Major MacPhee recognized police vans when he saw them. He’d been in enough of them in his time. And he had been particularly alarmed by the presence of a singularly large van with ‘Police Dog Section’ painted on the side.

  The notion that whatever was going on down at the Middenhall required the attention of quite so many dogs as that damned great van seemed to suggest was not a reassuring one. Major MacPhee was afraid of dogs. He had once been bitten on the ankle by a Jack Russell and that had been bad enough. To be savaged by an entire squad of police dogs filled him with the most appalling apprehension. The prospect never entered Miss Midden’s mind, and it wouldn’t have bothered her if it had. Rather more disturbing was the sound of agonized screams that wafted up from the Middenhall on the occasional breeze. Miss Midden opened the back door and listened. The firing had started again. And the screaming. She shut the door and thought very carefully.

  ‘Oh, what are we going to do, dear?’ asked Major MacPhee ‘Something terrible is happening. It’s too, too dreadful. People shooting and the police –’

  ‘You are going to make some very strong tea,’ Miss Midden ordered, ‘and pull yourself together. I am going to make a phone call.’

  ‘But the police are already here . . .’ the Major began but Miss Midden was already at the phone and dialling her cousin, Lennox, the family solicitor.

  ‘I don’t give a damn if you were about to go for a round of golf, Lennox,’ she told him when he complained that he couldn’t possibly come out now, it was the Annual Competition at Urnmouth, ‘and tomorrow won’t do . . . No, I can’t tell you what is happening but a police convoy has gone down there with dogs and there is a great deal of firing going on . . . Yes, I did say “firing” and yes, I did mean gunfire. I’ll open the front door and you can hear it for yourself.’ She held the phone to the open door and looked out in time to see the first of the Child Abuse Trauma Specialists’ minibuses pass. The grimly caring faces of the women inside it shook her to the core. ‘Fuck me,’ she said.

  ‘What?’ said the deeply shocked Lennox. ‘What did you say? No, don’t repeat it. I heard that very distinctly.’

  ‘And the gunfire, the screams?’

  Lennox Midden said he had heard them pretty distinctly too. He’d be over as soon as he could. Miss Midden put the phone down and thought again. She had to do something about Timothy Bright – get him out of the house, for one thing, before an investigation by the CID into whatever was going on at the Middenhall began in earnest. She picked up the phone and this time called Carryclogs House.

  ‘I’d like to speak to Miss Phoebe,’ she told the serving wench, as old Turnbird had insisted on calling the housekeeper, Dora.

  ‘Miss Phoebe’s gone to Church,’ the wench told her. ‘She should be back any time now.’

  Miss Midden thanked her and went upstairs to persuade Timothy Bright that he must go at once to Carryclogs. He didn’t need any persuading. What he had heard and then seen from his window in the old nursery had convinced him that the people with razors had arrived to give him piggy-chops. He couldn’t think what else could be happening. And the Major was happy to take him over. He hadn’t liked the look of those women in the minibuses, and now the stream of cars backing up at the bottom of the farm track, any more than Miss Midden had.

  ‘But I’ll never get the car out onto the road,’ he pointed out.

  Miss Midden had to agree. ‘Then you’ll just have to walk. The exercise will do you both good,’ she said. ‘I’ll stay and hold the fort here.’

  The metaphor was apt. As the Major and Timothy Bright set out across the fell, the sounds of battle increased. Buffalo Midden had drawn fire from a bedroom window and had then retreated to the other end of the building where he might get that bastard hiding behind the lead truck. Failing that, he meant to hit that walkie-talkie thing lying on the ground in front of it. From the arrow slit in the east turret he took aim and fired. The walkie-talkie exploded. Bits of it hit Inspector Cecil Rascombe and smashed his glasses. Out of touch with the rest of the AQRT and with reality, the erstwhile Standartenführer SS played dead. It was just as well. Something even more catastrophic was about to occur.

  It was a little thing but its consequences were to be immense. Only the cook, cowering with the rest of the indoor staff in the cool safety of the cellar, was aware that in her flight she had left two very large frying-pans containing a great many slices of bacon on the gas stove. As it was a Sunday, when some of the residents insisted on bacon and eggs at least once a week with fried bread and mushrooms and damn the cholesterol, she had been getting breakfast ready for them when Buffalo started shooting. But even she, a perceptive cook if not a very good one, had no idea what two pounds of fatty bacon (the late Leonard Midden, now lying with the late Mrs Midden over the window-sill of their bedroom, had always maintained on the most dubious medical grounds that fatty bacon was good for the uterus and had insisted on the most fatty bacon for his wife) would do when heated beyond endurance on a propane gas stove in the way of smoke. And flame. It was singularly delinquent of the girl who had come in from Stagstead to help to have put the kettle containing the potato chip oil next to the frying pans. As bacon smoke filled the kitchen the oil joined in. There was an explosion of flame and the first roar of what was to become known as the Middenhall holocaust.

  Even then the situation might have been saved. That it wasn’t was due to the well-meaning intervention of Mrs Laura Midden Rayter, who fought her way through the smoke with extraordinary fortitude but no understanding of what a bucket of water thrown into a chip-oil fire would do. She soon found out. This time there was no misunderstanding the roar as two gallons of flaming cooking oil went into orbit. The great scrubbed deal kitchen table joined the conflagration, within a minute the cupboards and shelves were blazing, and Mrs Laura Midden Rayter, having left the door into the hall open in her attempt to escape, had a brief glimpse of the arras Black Midden had used to decorate the panelled walls of the dining-room beginning to burn with all the rapidity its motif deserved. Upstairs various panic-stricken colonial Middens pinned down by the shots of the police marksmen, some of whom had managed to escape from behind the rockery to reach the safety of the trees on either side of the great house, tried to get to the huge oak staircase before it went up in smoke. And flames. They failed. The staircarpet was already ablaze and the heat in the hall was too intense. The great oil painting of Black Midden by Sargent over the marble fireplace presented a foretaste of hell. Never a lovely or even vaguely handsome man, even after Sargent had exercised all his cosmetic artistry, the portrait now had a truly infernal look about it. Not that any of the guests stayed around long enough to examine it at all carefully. There was an urgency about their desire to escape the Middenhall that even exceeded the insistence they had shown in getting rooms there when they had arrived. Nobody had stopped them then. Getting out was an entirely different matter. As the flames engulfed the entire ground floor and even the billiard table began to burn, they found the stairs to the second floor and went up them. It was an unwise move. Only Frank Midden, a retired and rather lame ostrich farmer from the Cape, had the good sense to hurl himself onto the
roof of the verandah and roll down it. He didn’t care if he was shot. It was better than being burnt alive in that awful house.

  Above him in one of the roof turrets even Buffalo was coming to a similar conclusion. A ball of flame, a positive fireball, issuing with a terrible whoosh, alerted him, in so far as anything was capable of alerting the idiotic old man, that his enemies were employing a new and dreadful method to flush him out. It was hardly the method he had anticipated but it showed how ruthless terrorists were. They were deliberately burning the Middenhall to the ground, presumably as some sort of propaganda victory like blowing up that Pan-Am Jumbo. Since Buffalo had blown up any number of jumbos – he had once driven a herd of elephants across a minefield he had constructed from mines collected in Mozambique to see what would happen – he knew what blowing up jumbos meant. Or thought he did. Well, two could play that game and he intended to go, if go he must – and it was beginning to look like it – with a bang. Bugger the whimpers. And he had just seen two men in those sinister black overalls make a dash under cover of smoke from the kitchen window to take up positions behind the huge propane tank that supplied the heating and cooking gas to the Middenhall. Snatching a Very pistol from the satchel that held his ammunition, he aimed it at the propane tank.

  Then he hesitated. He wasn’t sure about a Very pistol’s penetrating power. He’d seen what it did to a warthog, and he’d once brought down a circling vulture with the thing by pretending to be dead and waiting for it to come down and have a snack, but even to Buffalo’s simple and murderous mind there was a very great difference between warthogs (ugly bastards, they were) and vultures and propane gas tanks. It might be wiser to hole the tank with the rifle first, and then fire the Very pistol’s flare at the escaping gas. Much better. Bigger bang and damn-all whimper.

  The resulting bang, which was heard as far away as Tween, had all the characteristics of a blended thunderclap and an exploding oil refinery. Something like the Oklahoma City bomb went off at the back of the Middenhall. Even Phoebe Turnbird, dragging the unresisting Detective Markin with an arm-lock that occasionally lifted him off the ground, was struck by the explosion. Other people were less fortunate. They were struck by pieces of the Middenhall itself. Two vast ornamental Corinthian columns on the façade broke loose and crashed onto some of the trucks and police cars on the drive (it was at this point that Inspector Rascombe realized that his top priorities had fuck-all to do with rescuing kiddies from having their throats cut on altars, and made a dash for the lake); a mock Tudor chimney of unnatural proportions toppled onto and through the leaded roof (which hadn’t been strengthened by the fireball from the kitchen); several Child Abuse Trauma Specialists had reason for genuine concern, but weren’t cared for by their comrades-in-arms who went screaming hysterically up the drive pursued by maddened German Shepherd police dogs sensibly released by their handlers from the overheated van; only the prostitutes stood their ground and did anything useful. They had seen police dogs in action and, being uneducated and high on heroin, they were also unconcerned. But they did care. They helped those earnest caring women who despised them, those who could stand up on their feet, and led them away and bandaged their wounds as best they could, as a result of which some of the wounded CATS contracted AIDS.

  The police marksmen previously behind the propane tank neither cared nor were concerned. Ashes to ashes and dust to dust just about summed up their condition. They were part of the mushroom cloud that rose over the remains of Black Midden’s architectural gravestone. Buffalo Midden rose with them but, remarkably, in one piece. He landed in a huge pile of manure that had been fermenting nicely on the far side of the kitchen garden and emerged half an hour later uncertain what had happened and wondering why it was he seemed to smell so strongly of pig and singed hair.

  He wandered away from the inferno unsteadily and stopped to ask one of the Armed Quick Response Team, one he had shot and killed, the way to Piccadilly Circus. ‘Rude bastard. Can’t get a civil word out of anyone in this accursed country,’ he muttered as he stumbled away.

  Behind him the Middenhall blazed and slowly folded in on itself. And on the other unfortunate Middens who had seen it as their home from home with free board and lodging and all the trimmings, like being as rude to domestic servants as they had been accustomed to be in the tropics. There were few servants left for them to be rude to if they had lived. The cook and her daughter and the other helpers in the kitchen were saved by the water tank above them, which burst and flooded the cellar. Even so they were almost boiled alive. The arrival of a fleet of fire engines did nothing to assist. They couldn’t get past the cars blocking the drive and the lodge gates. In any case there was nothing they could have done. The Middenhall, that brick, stone, and mortar construction of abysmal taste, that monument to Imperial vanity and stupidity and greed, had become the mausoleum Black Midden had intended, though not in the way he had hoped. It would go down in the history of Twixt and Tween. It had already gone down in just about every other respect. The great billiard table – a massive piece of slate was all that remained – had crashed into the wine cellar destroying the last vestiges of a fine collection of port, claret and sweet dessert wines he and his successors had laid down there and the colonial Middens had not been able to find and drink.

  And through it all, through the mayhem and the maelstrom of disaster that had engulfed the Middenhall and its inhabitants, Miss Midden sat impassively by the phone in the hall of the old Midden farmhouse and talked insistently and incessantly to an old school friend in Devon about things that were not happening around her, about happy memories of other days when she and Hilda had hitch-hiked to Land’s End. She was establishing an unbreakable alibi. No one would ever be able to say she had been responsible for the destruction of the loathsome house that had broken her father.

  28

  The scene that greeted Lennox Midden – though greeted was hardly the most appropriate word – on his arrival at the Middenhall (there was so much traffic he’d had to walk over half a mile) was not one to reassure a decent suburban solicitor who had woken only a few hours earlier expecting to play in the Urnmouth Golf Club’s Annual Competition. There was nothing of the smooth greens, the broad fairways, and the bantering camaraderie in the clubhouse afterwards of men who believe that hitting a small white ball into the distance gives life meaning. A great gulf was fixed, an abyss, between that comfortable world and what was happening at the Middenhall. There were snatches of green through the smoke where the lawns ran down to the lake, but they were not smooth. Lumps of concrete blown from the crenellations and the ornate turrets of the roof lay embedded in the turf, with the occasional dead or wounded police marksman lying poignantly among them. Smashed trucks and police cars burnt vigorously on the drive. The vast verandah burnt too, while the shell of the great building steamed and smoked hideously, flames suddenly erupting from its depths like some volcano on heat. A German survivor of the final Russian assault at Stalingrad, or an American soldier surveying the devastation unnecessarily and barbarously inflicted on the Iraqi convoy north of Kuwait City, would have found the sights and smells familiar.

  Lennox Midden in his plus-fours didn’t. He had never been in the presence of death and destruction on this scale before, and with each dread step he took along the road and down the drive, past stragglers of the Child Abuse Trauma Specialists, past wounded policemen, past hideous but stalwart prostitutes with smoke-blackened faces, past maddened German Shepherds with smouldering tails and burnt whiskers, even past Buffalo Midden, unrecognizable beneath his coating of pig manure but still wanting to know the way to Piccadilly Circus, Lennox Midden’s faith in the suburban values faltered. By the time he reached the bottom of the drive, where firemen had gathered to watch in awe what they had come to extinguish, the solicitor’s hopes had vanished. There was nothing to be saved from the Middenhall. Chunks of the upper storeys were still crashing at intervals into the inferno below, sending up clouds of dust and smoke. The smell was appalling.
Even to Lennox it was obvious that more than his great grandfather’s fantastic mansion had been burnt. The stench of barbecued relatives, those Middens from Africa and India and faraway turbulent places who had sought safety and comfort for their retirement in the house, hung nauseatingly on the summer air.

  Lennox Midden couldn’t understand it at all, but being a lawyer he looked round for someone to blame. And to sue. He learnt what he needed from Frank Midden, the ostrich farmer who had sensibly leapt from his bedroom window and rolled down the verandah roof to land on the top of a police van.

  ‘Those bastards started it,’ Frank moaned (he was lame in his other leg now and didn’t care) and pointed at the body of a police marksman in his black overalls. ‘They drove down the drive in those vans like madmen and started shooting at anyone they could see. I saw them kill Mrs Devizes at the window of her room and all she was asking was what they were doing. Don’t suppose she’ll ever know now.’

  ‘But they’re policemen,’ said Lennox, who had seen the markings on the vans, ‘they must have had some reason for starting to shoot.’

  Frank Midden wasn’t having it. ‘Reason? Policemen? If they’re British policemen, I’m going back to South Africa. Our lot are bad enough but these bastards are . . .’ He couldn’t find words to describe what he thought of them. Lennox Midden didn’t need to hear any more. If the Twixt and Tween Constabulary had been responsible for this murderous attack on people and property, they were going to pay for it. He was more concerned about the property which, while it could never have found a buyer, had cost a fortune to build. Now, in its smouldering state, it was of incalculable value. The dead Middens had their uses too. His legal mind, honed to perfection by years of litigation in matters of compensation and damages, couldn’t begin to imagine what this little lot was going to bring in. Or, as he put it, with more accurate irony than he dreamt, to Miss Midden when he found her still on the phone at the farmhouse, ‘Talk about bringing home the bacon.’