Slowly the front curtain rose rapidly, stuck and crashed down again. It rose rapidly. Got stuck and stayed stuck rapidly. It revealed a forest of anonymous legs.
Two embarrassed Scoutmasters with overcoats hastily donned over togas, shuffled on the stage. With sticks and whispered orders, the obstinate curtain was raised. Fronting four and twenty Roman spearsmen were three steps covered in army blankets; flanking this stood two canvas and lath Doric columns painted on brown paper. The programme note: Rome. The steps of the Imperial Palace. How the old place had changed. Standing on this noble pile, the figure of an eight-year-old Cassius was speaking; proud and erect he stood in his white bed-sheet and cardboard laurel leaves, in his pocket a complete set of great footballer cigarette cards. To the refined ear, trained for euphony, Shakespeare rings most comforting; to a Roman spearsman named Shamus Ford it brought a mental remark, ' What the hell's this all about ?' To his left Lenny was thinking that he didn't look too bad as a Roman soldier. Cassius raised his hands to silence the mob. The great curtain crashed to the stage. This time the Patrick Furg trio were ready.
'Emergency One,' said Patrick to his trio. Off they went, reducing in three minutes a reputation Rossini had taken one hundred years to establish. After further sticks, pushes and shouts the curtain rose again. The same scene plus, at no additional cost, happily smoking Centurion. Shamus snatched the cigarette from Lenny's mouth.
From back stage there was a metallic clang.... The silencer had fallen from the generator car and the ensuing noise of the open exhaust forced the young actors to shout, causing one Roman's nose to bleed.
A change of wind was now blowing smoke from the long carbonized car engine, up through the cracks in the stage; the cast were now reduced to shouting and coughing. 'Beware the Ides of March,' said the soothsayer, losing his beard in a fit of coughing. The smoke obscured the players who all moved forward to the footlights. Unaffected, the Furg trio were playing the Hall of the Mountain Kings, with a difference; the rising warmth of the thermal waters below them was gradually lowering the pitch of their instruments; gradually the Hall of the Mountain Kings slid chromatically from C Major down to B Flat Minor.
' Crazy, man,' whispered Patrick.
The smoke had caused a disturbed deaf member of the audience to phone the fire brigade.' Come quick, Brent Lodge is in flames, thousands are trapped!' was the simple message.
In the front row was guest of honour, Inspector Tomelty. For ten minutes he had been wrestling with the face of a certain Roman soldier. Suddenly he clicked his fingers. 'Shamus Ford! Excuse me,' he said, pushing along a row of creaking arthritic legs. Soon two Black Marias thundered in the night, during which time the audience were treated to the spectacle of six men in brass helmets dashing on a smoke-filled stage with hoses; they immediately set about the floor with hatchets and with the first stroke three toes came off. Smoke now obscured the cast from the audience. Groping forward, a fat Julius Caesar tripped and fell on to the piano; eighteen stone of Julian flesh was all it needed to send the instrument crashing through the floor beneath; with a splintering groan the Patrick Furg Trio, all playing valiantly, slid majestically into the warm waters of the hydro pool below. A chain reaction followed as the temporary floor broke into sections, everywhere were floating rafts bearing the trapped, shouting, aged audience. The De Dion had fallen off its blocks and ripped the backcloth away, revealing twenty scouts in various stages of undress. Hoses were starting to douse the last remaining actors. Police whistles announced new arrivals.
Shouts of help came from the marooned audience.
'Let's beat it,' said Shamus pulling Lenny with him.
They reached the first floor with the police at their heels. The lift!
A gift from above! Slamming the gates, Shamus gave the ancient rope the pull of its rotting life. It snapped. The ancient lift hurtled down the shaft, hit the rubber buffers in the basement and hurtled up again. It hovered at the third floor 'twixt momentum and gravity, just long enough for an unsuspecting chambermaid to step in and hurtle down again.
'Have we got the electric on?' she smiled at the terrified occupants.
Patrick Balls not wanting to spend his remaining years yo-yoing in a lift, grabbed at the end of the frayed rope as it came within reach and was left hanging as the lift hurtled down again.
Rocketing up, Shamus and Lenny judged the pause and leaped out at the second floor.
Cries of ' Send help!' came from the plummeting gentlefolk.
Colonel Carrington-Thurk r.a., Retd., awoke from his slumbers, heard the cacophony, and leapt from his bed; sabre in hand he opened the door and fell over a fire hose.
'Take that, you Indian swine!' he yelled, slicing through the pulsating canvas; a deluge of water from the hose jack-knifed him back into the dumb waiter which descended at speed to the kitchen.
On the end of the ruptured hose, Fireman Mortimer Wreggs suddenly held a lifeless bronze nozzle in his hand. 'Bugger!' he said, 'Oh bugger, bugger, bugger!' and lay face down on the floor threshing his legs in temperamental spasms. This emotional outburst was of deep Freudian significance; had not Adler, Freud and Jung all agreed that the seeds of hereditary ambition are passed on through successive generations until fulfilment? So was it with young Fireman Wreggs. His great-great-grandfather had almost extinguished the greatest and most expensive fire in the history of Ireland, but alas, in the best traditions of British services had arrived too late!
That fearful conflagration was a mighty story in the annals of the family Wreggs. The disintegration of the Austro-Hungarian Empire hit many people, especially those who had disintegrated with it. The Count Nuker-Frit-Kraphauser was one such notable.
In the hiatus that followed the assassination of the Archduke Ferdinand, and the collapse of the Empire, he had fled his native Hungary in the jade of a revolutionary night with nothing save a small suitcase with three million pounds and some silly old crown jewels, but this fortune meant nothing; his greatest loss was having to leave the great and majestic family Easence. The greatest toilet in the western world and the only consecrated one in the Holy Roman Empire.
The Count Fritz Von Krappenhauser had fled to Northern Ireland, bought Callarry Castle, ten thousand acres, and a small packet of figs. For years he brooded over the loss of the ancestral abort.
Finally worn out by indifferent, and severe wood-seated Victorian commodes, he decided to build a replica of the family's lost masterpiece here in the heart of Ulster's rolling countryside. He employed the greatest baroque and Rococo architects and craftsmen of the day, and every day after; seven years of intense labour, and there it now stood, a great octagonal Easence. No ordinary palace was this; from the early stone Easence of Bodiam Castle to the low silent suite at the Dorchester is a long strain, but nothing equalled this, its gold leaf and lapis lazuli settings gleaming in the morning sun, on the eight-sided walls great ikons of straining ancestors, a warning to the unfit. Through a Moorish arch of latticed stone, one entered the 'Throne Room'; above it, in Gothic capitals the family motto, 'Abort in Luxus'.
From the centre rose a delicate gilded metal and pink alabaster commode.
Six steps cut in black Cararra marble engraved with royal mottoes led up to the mighty Easence; it was a riot of carefully engraved figurines in the voluptuous Alexandrian style, depicting the history of the family with myriad complex designs and sectionalized stomachs in various stages of compression. The seat was covered in heavy wine damask velvet, the family coat of arms sewn petit-point around the rim in fine gold thread. Inside the pan were low relief sculptures of the family enemies, staring white-faced in expectation. Towering at the four corners, holding a silk tasselled replica of the Bernini canopy, were four royal beasts, their snarling jaws containing ashtrays and matches.
Bolted to the throne were ivory straining bars carved with monkeys and cunningly set at convenient angles; around the base ran a small bubbling perfumed brook whose water welled from an ice-cool underground stream. Gushes of warm
air passed up the trouser legs of the sitter, the pressure controlled by a gilt handle. By pedalling hard with two foot-levers the whole throne could be raised ten feet to allow the sitter a long drop; and even greater delight, the whole Easence was mounted on ball-bearings. A control valve shaped like the crown of Hungary would release steam power that would revolve the commode.
There had been a time when the Count had aborted revolving at sixty miles an hour and been given a medal by the Pope.
White leather straps enabled him to secure himself firmly during the body-shaking horrors of constipation. Close at hand were three burnished hunting horns of varying lengths. Each one had a deep significant meaning. The small one when blown told the waiting household all was well, and the morning mission accomplished. The middle one of silver and brass was blown to signify that there might be a delay. The third one, a great Tibetan Hill Horn, was blown in dire emergency; it meant a failure and waiting retainers would rush to the relief of the Count, with trays of steaming fresh enemas ready to be plunged into action on their mission of mercy and relief. With the coming of the jet age the noble Count had added to the abort throne an ejector mechanism.
Should there ever be need he could, whilst still in throes, pull a lever and be shot three hundred feet up to float gently down on a parachute. The stained glass windows when open looked out on to 500 acres of the finest grouse shooting moor in Ulster. He had once invited Winston Churchill to come and shoot from the sitting position. In reply Churchill sent a brief note, 'Sorry, I have business elsewhere that day.'
From his commode, the Count could select any one of a number of fine fowling pieces and bring down his dinner. Alas, this caused his undoing. The boxes of 12-bore cartridges, though bought at the best shops in London, had sprung a powder leak.
Carelessly flicking an early morning cigar, the hot ash had perforated the wad of a cartridge.
But to the day of the calamitous fire. It had been a fine morning that day in 1873. The Count had just received his early morning enema of soap suds and spice at body heat; crying 'Nitchevo!' he leapt from his couch. Colonic irrigation and enemas had made his exile one internal holiday. Clutching a month-old copy of Der Tag, and contracting his abdomen, he trod majestically towards his famed Imperial outdoor abort bar. A few moments later the waiting retainers heard a shattering roar and were deluged, among other things, with rubble.
' Himmel ? Hermann ? What did you put in the last enema?' queried the family doctor of the retainers.
Flames and debris showered the grounds and there, floating down on the parachute, came the Count. ' People will look to me when I die,' he had once said. His wish had come true.
In that fire had perished Fireman Wreggs.
Now his great-grandson lay there crying on the floor of Brent Lodge House. The pandemonium had snowballed and perfectly good friends were hitting each other.
'There is no fire!' a very angry Scoutmaster was saying, his paper columns flattened with water. ' There is no fire!' he repeated as three firemen poured eighty gallons a minute over him. 'You're ruining our costumes!' he shouted. They silenced him by increased water pressure, at a hundred gallons a minute he was sluiced backwards into a choked lily pond.
' Three troop to the rescue!' he shouted through his umbrella of water lilies.
Solitary and floating alone in her row 'D8' chair, its planks awash, was stone-deaf Miss Penelope Dingley-Smythe, her hearing aid turned to zero. She snored oblivious of the hydro waters that lapped at the soles of her little Victorian high-button boots.
The Brigade were being severely hampered by two things, a lack of water, and a lack of fire. Of the thirteen hoses only six were at full pressure. Frantically lighting fires as he went, Fire Chief Muldoon discovered a rusty verdigris board covered in turncocks. 'Hallelujah !' he exalted as he turned the lot on. There was a rumbling sound under the earth. Long forgotten fountains lived again, eroded pipes burst in all directions, streams of water shot from under many an unsuspecting victim.
Thirty great jets hurled a screaming scoutmaster twenty feet in the air, ripping his boots and socks from his feet. Once gentle bidets suddenly gushed up unsuspecting old females, giving a mixed feeling of fear and joy.
The delightful Juno-esque fountain Naiad, her innards clogged this many a year, suddenly burst. Old Admiral Munroe under his shower was flattened by the increase in water power. The ancient brass geyser was trying to consume the new rate of intake and remain intact; with steam everywhere, it started to boil and fall apart. As the Admiral took to his heels, it exploded and hurled him naked into the corridor right on to the teatray outside the door; seated on it like an aged Puck, he slid powerless down the steps shouting 'Foreeeeeee!' Tightly holding the edge of his slender craft it hurtled down the wet stairs into the hall, and finally shot out the front doors on to the lawn at the feet of Mrs Grimblenack.
'Madame!' roared the quick-witted Admiral, ' Get out of my bathroom!' But she would have none of his finesse. 'If you don't go to my bedroom at once I'll scream!' she said.
He fled into the countryside and later was found dead from indecent exposure.
Chapter Eleven
Repulsed by gunfire, his hat full of bullet holes, Foggerty retreated deeper and deeper into Ulster. In the dark he had seen two men running, swearing and carrying a coffin on their heads.
'Hello fellas,' he had said, 'it's me, Foggerty.' In reply a fist had cudgeoned on his forehead. It was daylight when he regained consciousness. ' I musta' been tired!' he yawned. It was two days since he had last eaten. He was hungry. I could eat a horse, he thought. He walked several paces, when a horse strayed across his path. 'Mmmm, it's too big to eat,' he thought. 'I know, I'll ride it till it gets slimmer.' The animal bolted with him.
It took him a-galloping and screaming into the grounds of Brent Lodge, at the very moment when a Roman soldier dashed from the main entrance pursued hotly by the police. In one rough move the son of Rome took Foggerty's ankle, flung him from the horse, bounded on to the animal and galloped like the wind from the grounds, followed by the police. Stunned and mudspattered, Foggerty lay white and still on the ground.
But help was coming a' running. Down the steps came a black chiffon-swathed harpy-like female; it was Madame Elaine Grinns, spiritualist, mystique, laundress and amateur necrophile. Twenty years she had forecast the return of her dead, sex-mad husband Nugent Grinns on the back of a wild stallion; agreed, the horse had turned out to be an old farm hack, but then he always was a modest man. Now there he lay, white faced and grinning, the feathers of a chieftain in his crown. Gently she raised his head.
'Nugent, you have returned!'
' Hello, little darlin,' said Foggerty, grateful for any attention.
Slowly she led him up the great steps into the smoking interior of the laundry room. 'You must rest,' she said, 'You have been dead a long time.'
'Oh?' said Mr Foggerty. 'Dead, eh? Well I suppose it happens to der best of us. What's for lunch ?'
' Food later, dear,' she said starting to remove his clothes.
'Here, here, here,' said the startled Foggerty, 'I'm not eatin' naked.'
'Nugent dear, you know very well I mu st rub you with oil and spices, as was our custom,' she reminded him.
'But I'm hungry,' he insisted, holding on to his trousers.
' Come, come, dear,' she said rolling up her sleeves, ' I don't want to have to kill you again, you know how unpleasant it was last time.'
' Eh ?' said Foggerty.
The Customs camp and its attendant soldiers were returning to normal after the night's ructions. ' They must have been i.r.a. I suppose, Sergeant ?' said Lt Walker.
'Oh yes sur,' was the confident reply. 'No one else fires so many rounds and misses.'
A clatter of hooves. What appeared to be a Roman soldier galloped up to the sentry.' Halt!' he called. ' Have you seen a circus go this way ?' said Shamus. 'Er, no.'
'Say sir when you speak to Julius Caesar!' rapped Shamus. 'Sir!'
T
he Roman lashed his mount and galloped over the frontier towards the back of the church.
'Who the blazes was that?' said Lt Walker doubling across.
'Julius Caesar,' said the sentry, and wondered why he was demoted on the spot.
The sky was stone black with the promise of snow. The glass was falling. The Atlantic tossed its cold white curls into the wind.
Sitting by an oil stove in the vestry, Mr Pills the verger polished the altar silver and sang. 'La de de de, de da de de,' he hummed softly stopping occasionally to blow his cold wet nose. The vestry was draughty and large and the only thing warm was the stove itself. Occasionally he stopped to run one hand over the top vents, catching the streams of warm air between his fingers. This weather was terrible on his feet, the circulation seemed only to go as far as his insteps. From the welts of his boots he left a trail of yellow powder. An old Australian lady called Miss Blewitt had told him of the trick when he was a seaman on board the old P. & O. liner the Kaiser H ind. ' Put plenty of sulphur in your socks and you'll never suffer from tuberculosis.' And true as true, touch wood, for forty-eight years since he put sulphur in his socks, he had never had the disease; he hadn't had it before mark you, but he definitely hadn't had it since.
Old remedies were sometimes the best. Had not the leeks sewn in the waist band of his long underwear staved off leprosy? And where would he be without the dried onion skins in a bag around his neck ? Dead from malaria for sure! One thing he hadn't got a cure for was bad circulation, strange that, the one thing he did suffer from, no one had a cure for. He had invoked the saints and had burned many candles asking for 'Help for me poor cold feet'.
The saints had ignored him - he did however notice that the candles had a better effect when they were held under his feet.'
La la la de de de,' he went. He watched the satisfying glint of old silver as it shone through the plate powder.
Puckoon Page 10