Leila wanted to know if there was a crypt as she’d always wanted to spend the night in one of them. The vicar was terribly sorry about that too, as there wasn’t one. So finally the vicar swanned off to the vicarage while we got out our sleeping bags. In spite of the vicar’s assurance that the pews were comfortable, they weren’t, so we bedded down for the night on the floor. Geoff went to sleep right away. He snored quite loudly. Bobby snuggled up to Geoff and he snored even more loudly. Listening to the stereophonic snoring of a teenager and a dog in a church at midnight is a memorable experience but not, on the whole, one I wish to repeat.
We put out all the candles except for one in an elaborate brass candlestick, which Leila placed alongside her sleeping bag. She had found some church magazines which gave long and uplifting accounts of the missionary work being done by nuns in the Congo and she lay there, reading them by candlelight, thoroughly engrossed.
I was just dozing off when Leila said, “There’s something not quite right about that vicar?”
I’d been thinking the same thing. “All the boozing?”
“No. He’s a vicar. Boozing comes with the job. There are other things though. I mean, what vicar doesn’t know his chasuble from his sacristy?”
“After a few hefty slugs of Johnnie Walker, I can understand how he might get a bit confused on the finer details.”
“Then there’s the Welsh accent, if that’s what it is. And – the real clincher – he can’t tell his Deuteronomy from his Leviticus.”
“What? What are you talking about?”
“The verse he quoted. ‘Cursed shalt thou be in the city, and cursed shalt thou be in the field,’ and so on and so forth. He said it was Leviticus 24:16. It isn’t. It’s Deuteronomy 28:16.”
“You sure?”
“Of course I’m sure.”
“How do you know that?”
“Because Leviticus 24:16 is ‘And he that blasphemeth the name of the Lord, he shall surely be put to death, and all the congregation shall certainly stone him: as well the stranger, as he that is born in the land, when he blasphemeth the name of the Lord, shall be put to death.’”
“That doesn’t answer my question.”
“What?”
“What I meant was, how do you know the number of any verse in Deuteronomy? Or Leviticus, for that matter?”
She looked at me as though I was mad. “I went to a Catholic girls’ school.”
I told her that I’d noticed that the verse that the vicar had recited had been embroidered and framed on the wall. He hadn’t been quoting it from memory. He’d read it from the embroidery.
“And then there’s the name,” Leila said.
“The name?”
“Pat O’Brien. Doesn’t it sound too twee somehow? The perfect name for an Irish Catholic priest.”
“You can’t blame him for his name.”
“Except this is an Anglican church.”
“I don’t think Irish vicars are banned, as far as I am aware.”
“It’s like an actor’s name, don’t you think? In fact, it was an actor’s name. Pat O’Brien. He played the priest in old Hollywood films. Did you ever see ‘Angels With Dirty Faces’ with James Cagney?”
“Don’t think so.”
“Well, if you had seen it, you’d know that the priest had been played by Pat O’Brien.”
“I’m sure it’s a common enough name in Ireland. Like John Smith in England. Or Tom Jones in Wales.”
“There’s another Pat O’Brien too. Musician. Heavy metal guitarist.”
“There you are, then,” I said. I didn’t mind Leila showing off with her knowledge of the Bible. I was a bit miffed that she knew of a guitarist that I didn’t. I am, or was, a guitar teacher, after all. If things had gone a bit differently in my life, I might even have become a rock guitarist myself.
“Pat O’Brien is obviously a very common name,” I said, “Which group does the guitarist Pat O’Brien play with out of interest?”
“Cannibal Corpse,” she said, “One of my favourites. Oh well, nighty-night then.”
And she blew out the candle.
11
The next day, we ate pineapple for breakfast. Well, actually, we had coffee (proper freshly-ground coffee), bread, butter and marmalade and finally – the pièce de résistance – an actual fresh pineapple. Not tinned. Not dried. The real thing! If the vicar had turned water into wine I could hardly have been more amazed.
We ate in the sacristy. He had thrown a white table cloth over a big wooden chest which, I think, is where his vestments were kept. When we went in, places had been set for us, with white china plates, knives, forks, spoons and coffee cups. The first thing that hit us was the smell of the coffee. The second thing that hit us was the pineapple. I mean, it didn’t literally hit us but I wouldn’t have been much more shocked even if it had done. The sight of that incredible, impossible, exotic fruit standing with its spiky leaves in the air, like a showgirl at the Moulin Rouge, stopped us in our tracks. It was just so incongruous. So unbelievable. Nobody was importing pineapples. Not these days. It just didn’t happen.
The effect on us must have been obvious but Pat, the vicar, pretended he hadn’t noticed. He told us to sit down, help ourselves to bread and marmalade, apologised that he couldn’t quite run to bacon and eggs at the moment. And then, casually, he added: “Oh, and if you’d like a slice of pineapple, help yourselves.”
We didn’t need to be told twice. There was a big serrated knife lying on the tablecloth and Leila used it to slice the pineapple into neat rounds from which she cut the knobbly skin before handing pieces to each of us, the vicar included. Even Bobby had some which, surprisingly, he appeared to enjoy greatly.
“Where the Hell…” I said – the vicar’s eyebrows shot half way up his forehead, so I started again, “Where the heck did you get this pineapple?”
“Oh, one of my…”
“One of your parishioners?”
He smiled.
“Not, by any chance, the same parishioner who made the bread?”
He said that it was.
“And are you going to tell us who this parishioner is? And how exactly he got hold of a pineapple?” Leila said.
“There are certain things… I, er, must be discreet about. A vicar has responsibilities, you see. Like a doctor.”
“The secrets of the confessional?” said Leila.
“You are perhaps mistaking me for a Catholic priest?” said Pat O’Brien.
The vicar scored a few points there, I thought. Leila was convinced that there was something not ‘quite right’ about Pat O’Brien and she had been deliberately trying to catch him out.
“In fact,” O’Brien continued, “It is a common misapprehension that confessions are the exclusive preserve of the Roman Catholic Church. We may not indulge in the same formalities, but it is not at all uncommon for an Anglican priest to hear a confession.”
“Yeah, yeah, OK…” – Leila was being politely told off and she didn’t like the experience, “You still haven’t told us where you got the bloody pineapple!”
“More coffee?” said the vicar, smiling beatifically.
The next day we met our benefactors. They attended Sunday Evensong. They seemed suspiciously pleased to see us. At least, their pleasure struck me as suspicious at the time. I think they were simply pleased to see anyone who wasn’t sick, mad or trying to kill them. They invited us back to their manor. It was a real manor. A rambling, stone-built, turreted and moated house which, Lady Degris informed us, dated from the 14th Century “so this isn’t the first plague it’s lived through.” Lord and Lady Degris proved to be charming in the old-school way. I found myself liking them a great deal. But I found myself liking Mrs Clompton a great deal more.
12
Mrs Clompton reigned over the kitchen like a monarch. She remembered a time when the house, and in particular the kitchen, would have been filled with teams of servants: the cook, a first and second kitchen maid, a scullery maid, n
ot to mention the housekeeper, butler, valet and parlour maid. “And even then, her Ladyship was forever complaining about the lack of help about the house. By her Ladyship, I don’t mean Lady Degris as is here now but Lord Degris’s mother who was of a much grander and forbidding sort. Of course, in her mother’s day, all these grand old houses would have had a couple of dozen servants.”
We were sitting in her kitchen, a vast cave of a room with two huge ceramic sinks beneath the only window and two walls lined with work benches, cupboards and shelves. Dominating one side of the kitchen was a big old cast-iron Aga cooker, squat, solid and gleaming. Before the catastrophe, Mrs Clompton had been the only servant to ‘live in’ (she had rooms on the top floor of the house) but there had also been a maid who came in every day, plus a gardener and a chauffeur. I didn’t ask what had become of them all. If she had wanted to tell me she would have done so.
It was Mrs Clompton who explained the mystery of Pat O’Brien, the vicar who had only a tenuous grasp of the ways of the Anglican Church. Until quite recently, he had been the verger which, as far as I could make out, was not much more than a fancy name for a handyman and general dogsbody with the added benefit of robes and vestments.
“Oh, he was never much on the religion, though,” Mrs Clompton laughed so hard that her bosom quaked, “I’m not sure if he even believes in God. Oh, we used to have a very godly vicar before. Not that his God did him much good. Though, by rights, I shouldn’t be questioning His works,” she crossed herself, “But when the vicar died there was no one else so we asked Pat if he would take it on. He’s not too hot on the finer points of doctrine but his heart’s in the right place.”
In spite of Leila’s doubts, it turned out that his name really was Pat O’Brien. His father came from Donegal. His mother came from Betws y Coed. Which also explained the lilting Welsh accent.
During our time in London, our life in the Elephant and Castle flat had been moderately comfortable. By comparison, however, life in Degris Manor was like paradise regained. We each had our own room (Bobby shared mine) and we ate regular meals. Mrs Clompton was a fabulous cook. She made cooked breakfasts whenever possible (the Degris’s kept a few pigs and sheep so bacon and lamb chops were often on the menu). She baked bread every other day in the oil-powered Aga. And when I told her that Pat O’Brien had claimed that Eccles Cakes couldn’t be had for love or money, she baked some of those too – and jolly good they were!
She cooked gargantuan dinners that ranged from roast beef and Yorkshire Pud to Indian curries (of which Lord Degris was inordinately fond) not to mention a superb Lasagna and an unparalleled Paella. The manor had two petrol-powered generators and there was a big walk-in cold-room where most of the larger cuts of meat were kept.
The walls were covered with innumerable oil paintings of stern-looking bewigged gentlemen and bonneted ladies with tight-lipped expressions that suggested they suffered simultaneously from piles and constipation. One day, I asked Lady Degris who they all were – “Oh,” she said, “ancestors”. In my family, we had relatives. The Degris family had ancestors.
There was also a very striking photograph of a young man which stood prominently upon the grand piano in the Morning Room. The young man had dark, curly hair and what I think is called a ‘brooding’ expression. In the photograph, he was sitting at the same piano upon which the photograph now stood. I asked Lady Degris who it was. “My son,” she said, “Percival.”
“A musician?” I said.
She smiled. “Yes. A very fine musician.”
“That’s interesting,” I said, “So am I.”
She gave me a suspicious look as though she thought I was lying. “I play the guitar,” I explained, “I’m a guitar teacher.”
“Ah? My son Percival was a composer.”
Oh well, I thought, that puts me in my place!
“Though he did play the guitar. Very well.”
I noticed the past tense – “he was, he did…”
I wasn’t sure if it was the right thing to ask what had become of him. So many people had died recently. I assumed he may have been among them. Perhaps it would have been better if I had asked. But I didn’t. I just said, “He was a handsome chap.”
“Oh , yes,” she said, “He was.”
When Lord Degris asked us if we’d like to “stay on for a while,” we didn’t hesitate. Of course, we would like to! It wasn’t a purely charitable offer of accommodation, however. Maintaining the manor and its gardens required a great deal of labour and, before our arrival, that labour had been notably thin on the ground. Lord and Lady Degris (who insisted that we call them Tommy and Gladys but somehow they seemed far too grand for such commonplace names) did their best to “muck in” as His Lordship put it. But they were both quite old and not really up to the task of maintaining a property on that scale. Lord Degris enjoyed pottering around in the glasshouse and I found that I enjoyed that too. The two of us would spend hours in there, sowing seeds, pruning back the passionflowers, digging, spraying and mulching.
It was in the glasshouse that the pineapples were grown. It would have seemed remarkable to me to have seen a pineapple growing anywhere in England. But to see a row of plants thriving in early March and in the middle of the greatest chaos to have hit Britain since the last War, was nothing short of gobsmacking.
For some reason, I’d always assumed that pineapples grew on trees. They don’t. They are more like a low-growing cactus or succulent with a big spikey crown of leaves like an agave, from the centre of which protrudes a thick stalk. Sitting right at the top of this stalk is the big, knobbly pineapple fruit.
The atmosphere inside the glasshouse was warm and humid. Although there were a couple of old, cast-iron radiators in there (powered by a generator), it turned out that much of the heat was provided by a much more unusual source: horse dung. This had been placed in huge quantities into a trough running the length of the glasshouse where it steamed gently as it decomposed.
A side product of its decomposition (apart from the smell!) was heat. Apparently, pineapples were a passion of the Victorians and horse-dung heating was one of the more improbable methods that was used to cultivate them.
“It is my belief that we have the only privately-owned pineapple pit in Britain,” his Lordship boasted, “Though it takes so much damn’ horse shit, I doubt if it will serve us another season.” Lord Degris is the only person I’ve ever heard say “horse shit” and make it sound posh. That’s breeding for you!
13
Early one morning I was awakened by a loud bang. At first I wasn’t sure if I’d dreamed it. I lay in bed, with Bobby curled up on the eiderdown next to me and I listened but all I could hear was an owl hooting and, in the far distance, some sheep bleating. I looked at the clock next to my bed whose luminous dial faintly claimed that it was 6:45, but I only had its word for that. Time had ceased to have much meaning; most of the clocks I looked at had different opinions on the matter.
I got out of bed, stretched, and walked blearily over to the curtains. I pulled them back and glanced outside. There wasn’t much to see as it was dark apart from the slightest glimmer of approaching dawn. So I went back to bed and forgot all about it.
Then a few days later, I heard it again. I was awake immediately this time. Right away there was another bang. And another. It was a gun. It sounded like a powerful gun. It made one heck of a noise. It scared me. I thought that maybe we were under attack. Maybe an armed posse had arrived, determined to seize the manor by force and ransack it for the treasures it contained. And do what with its occupants? Torture? Rape? Kill? The most lurid scenes of violence and death played themselves out in my mind before I finally drifted back to sleep.
Geoff told me later that he’d heard the gunshots too. Leila, however, had slept through it all, oblivious.
Pat O’Brien came along later, to help around the house (I wasn’t sure what he was supposed to be doing, precisely; his idea of help tended to involve standing around chatting and drinking cups
of tea). I asked him about the gunfire.
“Gunfire?” he said, as though the word was unfamiliar to him.
“Yes, gunfire. Bangs. In the night.”
“You sure it was gunfire?”
“What else could it be?”
“Foxes,” he said.
My first thought was that Pat had been on the whisky again.
“Foxes don’t go bang,” I said.
“No, but people shooting them do.”
“What people? I haven’t seen any other people around here.”
“They can be a damn’ nuisance, foxes can,” Pat persisted, “They creep into the chicken sheds at night and eat the chickens.”
“What chickens? Whose got any chickens around here?”
“And ducks. A fox will take a duck as well as a chicken.”
I supposed it might be possible that there were still some working farms in the area. I asked Mrs Clompton if she ever managed to get any chickens, thinking that she might know someone who kept them. But she just smiled and said wistfully, “If only I could get a chicken, lad! If only I could…”
Sometimes, late at night, Leila and Geoff would come to my room. We used candles after dark because the generator was turned off and, in any case, it wasn’t powerful enough to keep all the lights in the entire manor running. We’d sit on the bed or sometimes we’d sit cross-legged on the floor. And we’d talk. Geoff said he’d heard another gunshot during the night. Geoff thought it might be the Army. But I didn’t think the Army would send in a lone soldier. They’d come in force with armoured trucks and tanks as they had in London. Leila said it was probably someone out hunting, which sounded more likely.
Sometimes we listened to the radio. We couldn’t get shortwave reception, not in my room at any rate, without the benefit of the long-wire antenna. But medium and longwave reception was OK. The BBC was still broadcasting repeats punctuated with occasional ‘news bulletins’ which always said more or less the same thing which could be paraphrased as “Don’t worry. Everything is OK.”
The Exodus Plague | Book 1 | The Snow Page 17