Turn Right at the Spotted Dog

by Jilly Cooper

  Pleasing people, on the other hand, can be a problem. A girl friend rang up her husband at his office just round the corner, and begged him to rush home because she had an exciting sexual surprise. Five minutes later, there was a vigorous tantivy on the doorbell, and as he was always losing his keys, she tore downstairs and opened the door wearing nothing but a heavy chain belt to find the Mayor of Reading in full regalia paying one of his random visits to see what his people thought about their rate increases.

  Finally, a French princess once wrote that the perfect marriage is a hearth and a horizon. She meant that a couple should not only warm and comfort and cherish each other but also have something to strive for together, whether it’s decorating a new house, advancing their mutual careers, bringing up children and, perhaps most important of all, ever improving their sex lives. For good sex is the language of love, it binds people together, it is gloriously pleasurable. It is also the best sleeping pill and sedative in the world.

  Excuse Me, Your Slips Are Showing

  TWO RAVISHING YOUNG girls came to cricket last Sunday. It was their first visit, they said. As their carefully ironed cotton dresses flapped frantically against their blue frozen legs, and through the blizzard the white distant figures of their boyfriends might easily have been mistaken for polar bears, they looked utterly bewildered.

  Now that spring finally appears to have arrived, many more girls all over the country will be experiencing their first cricket match. As a grizzled campaigner of twenty-four summers, I feel I should give them a few tips.

  For a start, as a cricket groupie, you abandon all lie-ins. Most cricket matches are at least fifty miles from home and go on all day, so it’s up earlier than the lark.

  Secondly, one’s clothes are always wrong. If it’s tropical when you leave home, it’s bound to be arctic or pouring when you arrive. The only answer is layers: a Barbour, over a Puffa, over a Guernsey, over a shirt, over thermal underwear, so you can peel off. Don’t forget the shirt. Zero temperatures at home, by the law of sod, mean heatwaves at the ground, and you’ll be microwaved in a cashmere jersey.

  Not that it matters what you look like, since you abandon all sex appeal the moment you reach the ground. There is something about donning virgin white and playing cricket that temporarily de-sexes the male. Cricket, remember, is the only sport – like a strip in reverse – where the crowd clap a player for putting his jersey on.

  Rather like prep school boys who insist that their mother comes to speech day and then ignore her, a cricketer feels it’s wet to be seen talking to his girl friend, and it’s not cricket to chat up anyone else’s.

  Thus an average day will go rather like this. You arrive at the ground to find that the opposition, which is probably called something daft like the Fleet Street Fairies or the Bisley Buffaloes, is as usual five men short. Joyfully your beloved will scuttle on to the field to make up the numbers. When the rest of the Fairies eventually show up, he’ll promptly put on a white coat.

  This, alas, is not the cue for you to indulge your handsome-vet-and-comely-pet-owner fantasies, he is merely off to umpire. Umpiring will be followed by a stint in the scorebox, only interrupted when he has to bat at number eleven. Whereupon he takes a spirited swipe and is clean bowled. He then spends the rest of the match fielding.

  If a very good looking player gives you a hot, come-hither smile, run like hell. He is not after your body. He is a weekend father, or a father who’s only been allowed out if he takes the children. He will have three little monsters in the boot and will want you to look after them all day. Ditto if he wants you to look after his dogs – unless they’re large and furry, and can double up as a rug.

  Take loads to eat. Some clubs only provide lunch and tea for players, and there is a feeling anyway that because the chaps have been indulging in manly exercise, women ought to hold back. Being outside all day, albeit doing nothing, makes you wildly hungry. Cricket in fact is the antithesis of those fasting, resting Sundays so beloved by women’s magazines, when you lie in bed sipping lemon juice with sliced turnip on your face. Last week, I ate six ham sandwiches, three egg sandwiches, half a Battenburg cake and four scotch eggs, to mop up the alcohol which was keeping out the cold – which leads me on to:

  Take loads to drink. Many pavilions don’t admit women, and most only provide beer. Last Sunday I got through one bottle of vodka, one of whisky, four bottles of Muscadet and six cans of lager, admittedly aided by two dozen other spectators similarly suffering from hypothermia.

  Your survival kit should also include a Jeffrey Archer, or at least two Dick Francis (you have twelve hours to kill), all the Sunday papers (at least players wanting to read them will be forced to come and talk to you) and green foundation to tone down your purple wind-fretted face.

  When your boyfriend is batting, you must watch the game. If you find it confusing, remember batsmen tend to run after they’ve hit the ball. If they hit it a long way, for some reason they don’t. If it strikes you on the ankle it’s a four, on the head it’s a six.

  Do not clap and jump up and down noisily when someone drops a catch, even if it’s clouted by your beloved: it’s considered unsporting. Do not flash. It’s tempting to keep looking in the mirror to check how ghastly you look, but it may flash sun in the batsman’s eyes.

  Do not talk as the bowler is coming up to bowl. If you get really lonely, get up and walk in front of one of those big white screens, just as the bowler is running away from you. Everyone in the ground will then shout and wave at you.

  Never go to the loo: something exciting like a wicket falling or your boyfriend hitting a six always happens. However he gets out, say: ‘That was an absolutely brilliant ball. Even Botham wouldn’t have got near it.’

  When he’s bowling or fielding, put on dark glasses, so he won’t know if you’re watching, and get stuck into J.Archer. Then just before close of play, nip round to the scorer, and find out who your beloved has caught and bowled and congratulate accordingly.

  Keep a fiver for after the game. He’ll be provided with beer from a bottomless, endlessly circulating jug, and will be so engrossed in his own innings, he’ll forget about your drink. If you find yourself stuck for conversation with one of the players, merely ask: ‘What do you think about Boycott?’ The ensuing eulogy/apoplexy will last at least fifteen minutes.

  Never offer to do the teas. It’s very hard work, and you always get the quantities wrong and are forced to divide a Bakewell tart between thousands, or to eat fish paste for the rest of your life.

  Never offer to wash cricket sweaters, they always shrink or run. Never marry the club secretary. Your spare time will be spent typing out fixtures or team lists. One girlfriend said it was only after four years, she realised A.N. Other wasn’t a player.

  Never marry the captain either, or your night’s sleep will be punctuated by players crying off tomorrow’s game on the excuse that they’ve ‘suddenly been laid low – retch – by the most awful – retch – shellfish’. After they’ve finished retching they put down the telephone and say cheerfully to their wives: ‘That’s OK darling, we can lunch with Fiona after all.’

  ‘Unless you are truly hooked avoid Test Matches; they go on too long. I’ve never forgotten hearing a young man at Lords saying heartily to his shell-shocked finacée. ‘Don’t worry Lavinia you’ll get the hang of it by the fifth day.’

  Having said all that, I must concede that cricketers away from the ground are the nicest men in the world. For cricket as a game requires unselfishness, imagination, patience, honour, perseverance, the ability to withstand boredom and to smile at misfortune, never letting it throw you off balance. All crucial qualities in a husband.

  And there are blissful moments – in 1961 at Headingley when two mongrels ran on to the field with a banana skin and held up play for two minutes. In 1964, when my husband made a hundred against the Bank of England after a morning wedding reception. In 1976, when there were endless heat waves, and finally in 1982, at a charity match
in Somerset, when an inebriated middle-aged streaker rushed on to the field, and Lesley Crowther who was fielding was heard to remark: ‘I couldn’t see what she was wearing, but it certainly needed ironing.’

  Please Keep To The Footpath

  FROM THE TOP road, the village of Bisley, with its church spire and ancient blond houses, nestles in a cleavage of green hills like an insurance poster promising a serene and happy retirement.

  The promise is not an illusion. After twenty-five years in London, we moved here four years ago. There have been no regrets, probably because we were incredibly lucky. Some villages are unfriendly and soulless, others hopelessly intrusive. But we have stumbled on a magic one, where the old are cherished, the widowed or divorced comforted, and the newcomer welcomed. When we arrived, a local hostess even gave a big party to introduce us to everyone.

  There is such a strong community spirit, however, that they do prefer new arrivals to settle here, and contribute something to the life of the village. During our first year, I had frightful flak which totally mystified me. Every time I walked up the High Street, someone would come up to me and sourly accuse us of planning to move on.

  This, I eventually discovered, was because everyone in the doctor’s waiting room was flicking through the tattered copy of last year’s Country Life which had originally offered our house for sale. Not checking the date, they automatically assumed it was on the market again.

  The acid test, however, was whether we were going to live here, or just use the house as a weekend retreat. Weekenders who strut around in ginger tweeds, force up the prices of cottages beyond the purse of young local couples, and don’t use the local shops, are not popular. There was great glee last winter in a nearby village, because some arriving weekenders turned their car over a few miles outside. No one was hurt but their Jaguar was irredeemably impregnated with imported curry destined for Saturday’s dinner party.

  Not that anyone needs to import anything here. Besides a marvellous hairdresser, an excellent garden centre and a superb restaurant in the High Street, there is an amazingly sophisticated village shop which sells everything from videos to vine leaves, and attracts custom from miles around.

  And there’s so much to read in their windows: ‘My pet chicken is missing,’ says a current notice. ‘He is four, and has vanished from my garden. He is very frenndly and is cawled Mary.’ [sic] And you only have to pop inside the shop to find out anything – whether your daily or your secretary or even your husband is about to leave you. The gossip is so good, in fact, that a local peer implored the owners to install a chaise-longue so he could lie listening all day.

  Most villages thrive on gossip, but are outwardly unfazed by it. No one betrayed any excitement four years ago, when a handsome Marquess and his beautiful wife moved into the big house, but when the leaves came off the trees, it was noticed how many of the locals had taken up bird-watching.

  Equally in my brother’s village in Northamptonshire, there was wild excitement when a member of Shawaddywaddy moved in and, even better, decided to get married in the village church. On the day, the police put yellow cones along the High Street and gathered in force to hold back the crowds. My brother, intent on weeding the herbaceous border, got very tightlipped when my sister-in-law, my two nieces and my mother, aged eighty, all clambered up a ladder on to the flat roof of the garage and settled down with deck-chairs and several bottles for an afternoon’s viewing. To their disappointment, only six guests and no rock stars showed up.

  Back here in our village, they’ve recently introduced a Neighbourhood Watch Scheme, which gives everyone a splendid excuse to snoop legitimately. Jeff, our Saturday gardener, who, in between bursts of frenzied weeding, sleeps in his car in the drive, was outraged recently to be roused from deep post-elevenses kip by the police who’d been alerted that a suspicious-looking character was parked near the Coopers’ house casing the joint.

  But if you’re not into snooping, there’s still masses to do here: skittle evenings, pony club discos, clay shoots, men-only chocolate cake competitions at the local fête, lectures on glass blowing at the W.I. and wonderful tobogganing and skiing in the winter.

  Indeed it’s a good idea to wait a few months before joining anything when you arrive at a village. A bookseller friend who retired to nearby Oxfordshire, and was worried he might be bored, got himself on to every village committee in the first six months, and spent the next ten years extracting himself.

  Although my husband has joined the British Legion and the Cricket Club, which slightly makes up for my nonparticipation, I still feel guilty that I don’t have time to run up a sponge for the Distressed Gentlefolk. Recently I went along to their Nearly New Sale, and found the usual lack of charity which surrounds charity events prevailing:

  ‘Look, look at that lovely bargain I got for 50p,’ said a fat woman brandishing a tweed skirt.

  ‘You’ll never get into that,’ said her friend, crushingly. ‘That was mine.’

  Living here in Bisley in fact is rather like being in an overseas posting in the army. Not only do most of us wear the khaki uniform of Barbours and green gum boots, but just as you can’t afford to have a screaming match with the Major’s wife over the bridge table, as you’ll meet her at the Colonel’s drinks party that evening, in a village you can’t sack or fight with someone, as you’ll find yourself stuck beside them in the hairdresser’s next morning.

  Nor can you bellow at some dog walker for trespassing on your land, because ten to one, you’ll have to eat humble pie because your own dog has used their guinea pig as a cocktail snack. A friend nearby, whose Jack Russell ambitiously seduced a prize winning Airedale, tried to placate the enraged owner by offering to whizz the Airedale down to the vet and pay for an injection to abort the puppies, only to be told that the Airedale’s owner was Roman Catholic and passionately disapproved of abortion. The row continues.

  People in the country have a slightly different attitude to animals. If a pheasant waddles across the road, they are not above urging you to accelerate; and their dogs tend to sleep outside, and, bored and cold, start wandering round the village. One, howling recently in the High Street at midnight, was pelted with pickled onions by the woman living opposite. Unfortunately, the following day, an old lady slipped on one and broke her leg.

  Village life is happier too if, again like the army, you stick to a few rules. Keep to the footpaths; look after the badgers; don’t cut down trees unless they’re dead and you intend to plant some more; pay all local bills on the nail; say ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ in the village shop or you won’t get bread saved for you when the village gets snowed up. Don’t hide your notice applying for planning permission under the honeysuckle, so no one sees it, then put up some hideous modern house in the middle of the village.

  Attempts to preserve the unspoilt quality of any village, however, can land one in trouble. Recently, an absentee landowner applied for planning permission to build a house and two garages on his field next to us. Egged on by some locals, I wrote a powerful letter to the council, larded with purple phrases about the rape of the Cotswolds, and how the hearts of generations of wayfarers had been gladdened by an unimpeded view of the village, which roughly translated meant I didn’t want a lot of yobboes throwing crisp packets on to our land.

  Planning permission was duly refused. Imagine my horror, at a dinner party a week later, when I discovered the handsome, but rather bootfaced man on my right was the returned and very present landowner.

  Most villages are resistant to change. Our village idiot, much beloved, remains the village idiot and not a seriously disadvantaged rural person. Gays of both sexes are regarded with suspicion.

  ‘I wouldn’t go near ’er, Jilly, she’s basstard quee-eer with another woman.’

  And because the Cotswold lanes tend to be full of black labradors rather then black people, when a policeman from a nearby village took up with a glorious coloured girl, there was much huffing and puffing. Finally a local worthy heade
d the protest saying he had nothing against those kind of people, but why couldn’t she go back to where she’d come from.

  ‘Come off it,’ said the policeman in amusement. ‘She was born in Stroud.’

  Similarly when our revered landlord retired after twenty-five years from the Stirrup Cup (known locally as the Stomach Pump) the new landlord got the job principally because he was the one applicant who said he didn’t intend to change anything until he sussed out what people really wanted.

  The Stirrup in fact is a mini Citizens’ Advice Bureau. Here you can learn how to increase your marrows, decrease your docks, and dispatch your wasp plague. My husband endeared himself to the clientèle early on by trying to grow the first U-turn carrots in a seed box.

  Here you will meet the great local legends, the doctor, so loved that a road was named after him when he retired, a farmer who was so good at imitating the cuckoo that he had local Colonels writing to The Times every January, and Leo Davies, a huge bear of a sheepdog, known as the Dogfather, who has sired most of the puppies in Bisley, and always howls at the church bells.

  Here too the Cotswold Hunt meet, once a year. Four stalwarts have to block the doorway to stop the gaunt, greedy hounds charging the bar counter and wolfing all the plum cake and sausage rolls, and everyone catches up on hunt scandal: how a handsome husband has changed packs from the Beaufort to the Cotswold to ride beside his new, much married mistress; how the village lecher has been banned from the Hunt cocktail party for lurking in some comely lady rider’s garden at dusk.

  But if gossip circulates at Bisley so do presents. Open your front door on a Saturday morning, and often, covered in dead leaves, blown in by the bitter winds, you’ll find pots of chutney, half a dozen Japanese anenomes, or a newly shot pheasant or even a hare. A copse of poplar saplings given us by our next door neighbour when we first arrived is now over twelve feet tall.