A Postillion Struck by Lightning

by Dirk Bogarde

  My sister said: “How much did it cost, your bird? All your two and six?”

  “All,” I said flatly.

  “Throwing balls or rolling?”

  “I got a stick of rock throwing the balls … it’s in my pocket. You can have it if you like.”

  “I would like. Don’t you then?”

  “I don’t mind it. It’s got Ilfracombe all through it.”

  “Wherever’s that?”

  “I don’t know. Cornwall, I think.”

  We were crossing the bridge now, in single file, Lally ahead, swinging the shopping bag; Mrs Jane and her umbrella; my sister holding her camel and myself. The river was low, the lights of the fair rippling faintly on the surface. No sound save our feet clonk clonking over the hollow-sounding boards, and now and then a gurgle gurgle of water round the struts.

  “Struth!” said Lally suddenly. “It’s close though. Ilfracombe’s in Wales by the by. And what that’s got to do with Sussex rock I don’t know. But those Gippos are all cheats.”

  Far away, over Wilmington, was a low grumbling rumble of thunder. We had got to the path now, and our feet crunched over the gravel.

  “Good job you brought that brolly,” Lally’s voice came back from the dark.

  “Always carry a brolly,” said Mrs Jane.

  My sister was scuffing her sandalled feet, swinging her blue camel by its legs.

  “I gave Reg Fluke a shilling for it,” I said in a lowish voice.

  “What?” She spun round and I tripped over her.

  “Get a move on you two,” called Lally, “there’s going to be a storm along any moment.”

  We walked along for a bit in silence. Suddenly there was a flash of white light in the sky, and the great hump of our hill was suddenly pale green in the night. Mrs Jane gave a little cry and hurried on.

  My sister did a sort of jog trot behind her, and I kept up.

  “It’s cheating not to have won it. I rolled for mine, and it cost ten tries,” she said.

  “Buying’s not cheating, and anyway I’ve got it, so there.”

  There was another rumble of thunder over Wilmington and another and another, and we hurried in a zig-zag way along the path, across the main road and through the little iron gate into our field.

  “Don’t touch the gate, children!” cried Mrs Jane. “It’s iron and you might be struck. Lally! Mark what I said to the children here, you’ll be struck if you touch the gate.” We slid through the opening and up into the field: another blinding flash burst down out of the sky, lit up the whole field, grass, nettles, molehills, all suddenly reared into violent light and colour against the sky, and as suddenly faded away into utter darkness, leaving us blinded and staggering, stumbling over tussocks, and blundering into each other. My sister started to whimper and Lally was just about to shout something at her, because I heard her say “Don’t be … when a great roaring crash from the heavens descended upon us, bursting over our heads and splitting the world into a great hurling roaring blast of sound. And with it came the wind whipping through the grass and tearing through the trees in the gully. Staggering and clutching together, the four of us struggled in the dark up the hill, holding each other for some kind of protection and comfort from a world of which we seemed to be no part.

  My sister was crying noisily by now, snivelling along, her beastly china camel banging my knees, while I struggled on, holding the cage tight to my chest, and wondering desperately if the canary would be dead before we reached the shelter of the house. Just as the first great plops of rain started to thud down on us we saw the lamp-lit windows ahead, and bending our heads to the wind and the now pelting rain, we pushed through the wooden gate into the orchard, along the slippery brick path and round to the kitchen door. Another great roaring raging crash tumbled about our ears and made the earth shake, as Lally fumbled with the latch and burst us all into the mellow golden light of the whitewashed flint-walled kitchen. She slammed the door hard behind us, her face wet, and her hair straggling down over her eyes … “Father? We’re home safe and sound and the boy got his canary!”

  Chapter 3

  The float suddenly started to bobble about, red and white with a bit of feather stuck through it, and then it swirled and whirled away under the surface with a grey waggling shape before it. My sister turned a somersault and landed, knees wide apart, in a clump of water mint.

  “A bite! A bite! You’ve got a bite.”

  I was swiftly, nervously, reeling it in … playing it gently, carefully among the weeds and trying to bring it close to the bank. It seemed to be quite a big fish… it was lovely and heavy at the end of my line.

  “Throw it back if it’s too little,” said my sister, peering down into the water, cupping her hands round her eyes in order to see to the bed of the Cuckmere; squinting, and puffing. Her hair fell over her face like an old skirt.

  Gently I began to wind him up to the bank; a little breeze riffled the water and the rushes rasped and clattered like paper swords and in a second I had him flopping and wriggling on the grass. Instantly my sister was upon him, her hand round his fat white belly and the other hand wrestling with the hook—something I never very much liked doing. Taking out the hooks. She never seemed to mind at all.

  “It’s only gristle. That’s all. It’s not like lips or anything. They don’t feel it.” Expertly she yanked the hook away and, grabbing the empty lemonade bottle, she hit him smartly and swiftly on the head. He lay glistening in the sunlight. Cool grey-green, creamy white belly. Red fins, wide glazing yellow eyes. A roach. About seven inches.

  We knelt there in the grass and counted the catch of five of varied sizes. They smelt muddy and cool—and sweet. Like cucumber sandwiches.

  “Will that be enough?” I asked.

  “Well Jesus fed millions with five, didn’t he?”

  “He had bread, too. Anyway it wasn’t Jesus, it was a miracle.”

  “Well, whoever it was.” She got up, and started to button up the flies of her shorts. They used to be mine and were too big for her, but she was having her “being a boy” day. “I think it’ll be enough. We’ll have to FHB if it isn’t, that’s all.” We were collecting our bits and pieces. The fish I wrapped in grasses and reeds and put into my old school satchel, and she picked up our bottle, the bait tin, and a Woodbine packet full of spare hooks, and we walked through the trees to the road.

  “I think we’re jolly nice going fishing specially for her,” said my sister, clambering over the rickety iron fence and opening her flies again. I laughed and hit her with the satchel, and she screamed and wobbled and fell into a bit of a ditch.

  “You silly fool! I’ve lost the hooks now. Serves you jolly well right.” We scrabbled about in the grass and leaves in the ditch and found the Woodbine packet which I shoved into my shirt pocket.

  “It’s silly to push people off fences when they’re climbing them,” she grumbled. “That’s how people get their legs and things broken.” She pushed through the gate and up into our field and we started to climb the hill to the cottage. The sky was high and blue and clear, with little lumpy clouds trailing about and making round black shadows on the grass. Everywhere the grasshoppers were scissoring away, and at the top of the field you could just see our highest chimney shimmering in the sun.

  “But I mean,” said my sister, a bit puffed with the clamber, and holding her shorts round her waist with one hand, “I do think it’s jolly nice of us to go fishing for her just because it’s Friday and she’s Catholic.”

  “Well I like fishing anyway.”

  “I know. But it is nice. Why does she have to have fish because it’s Friday?” She always wanted to know difficult things at difficult times.

  “It’s a rule,” I said shortly.

  “A Bible Sort of Rule?”

  “Yes.”

  “I know.”

  But she didn’t really. We walked along in silence for a bit; well, not really silence because she was doing one of her songs and I was whistling littl
e bits here and there, in case she thought I was puffed. Which I was. At the top of the field the cottage roof stuck up with its chimney, and then the flint walls and the two rather surprised windows in the gable looking down to the farm. Round the cottage was a rickety wooden fence with bits of wire and an old bedstead stuck in it, and some apple trees and the privy with its roof of ivy and honeysuckle and a big elderberry. The privy had no door, so you just sat there and looked into the ivy; no one could see you through it, but you could see them coming along the little path and so you were able to shout out and tell them not to in time. It was really quite useful. And better than a door really, because that made it rather dark and a bit nasty inside. And once a bat got in there after Lally had closed it and she screamed and screamed and had a “turn”. So we left off the door for summer and just sort of propped it up in the winter, to stop the snow drifting and making the seats wet.

  There were three seats, like the Bears’. A little low one, a medium one, and the grown-up one. The wood was white and shining where we used to scrub it, and the knots were all hard and sticking up. No one ever used the smallest one, we had the paper and old comics and catalogues for reading in that; and the medium one just had a new tin bucket in it with matches and candles for the candlestick which stood on a bracket by the paper roll, and a cardboard tin of pink carbolic.

  There were lids to all the seats, with wooden handles, and they had to be scrubbed too—but not as often as the seats; which was every day and a bit boring. Sometimes at night it was rather nice to go there down the path in the dark, with the candle guttering in the candlestick, and shadows leaping and fluttering all around and the ivy glossy where the golden light caught it. Sometimes little beady eyes gleamed in at you and vanished; and you could hear scurrying sounds and the tiny squeaks of voles and mice; and once a hare hopped straight into the doorway and sat up and looked at me for quite a long time, which was fearfully embarrassing, until I threw the carbolic tin at him and he hopped off again.

  We squeezed under the wire and into the garden and down the brick path to the kitchen. My sister was singing very loudly and happily because it felt like tea-time and we’d caught so many fish, and I joined her, because I was looking forward to seeing Angelica Chesterfield eating the fish I’d caught her and thanking me for being so polite and remembering she was a Catholic and that this was Friday.

  We were making a marvellous noise when Lally appeared at the kitchen door wiping her hands in her apron. ‘For the love of dear knows who shut up!” she said, her elbows covered in bubbles. “You’ll have us all arrested with that noise, anyone would think you owned the whole hill the way you carry on and your tea’s on the table.” She said this all in one breath and then turned and marched back into the kitchen. “It’s rhubarb and ginger today.”

  The kitchen was low and cool; white walls, pink brick floor. There was a smell of paraffin and butter and scrubbed wood and washing in the copper. Tea was scattered about the table, a plate of bread, the jam in ajar with a little white label saying Summer 1929, a big brown teapot with a blue band, cups and saucers and Minnehaha, our cat, quietly washing his face.

  “What,” said Lally, after we had washed and were all seated, and she was holding her cup in two hands, her elbows on the table, blowing gently at the steam, “what have you been up to? Nothing good I’ll be bound. I said to your mother and father in my letter today, they’ll be up to no good I’ll be bound.” And she sucked her tea pleasantly down.

  “We caught five roach for Angelica’s supper this evening,” I said, spreading big lumps of ginger and rhubarb over my bread.

  “Because she’s Catholic and today is Friday,” said my sister.

  “Fancy,” said Lally, blowing at her tea and not looking at us at all. “Fancy it being Friday,” and settled the cup into its saucer. “And who is going to have to take out their innards and cut off their heads and that, I’d like to know? Who has to wash them and take off the scales with a sharp knife and do all the cooking of them? Answer me that or tell the Prince of Wales if you won’t tell me.” She buttered herself a piece of bread. “And,” she said, putting on her posh voice, “supposin’ ’er ’ighness Angelica Chesterfield doesn’t like muddy tasting little roach which should have been left alone in the river: supposing that! Then what do we do about ’er Catholic meal?” She took a big bite out of her bread and butter. We watched her chew away for a while. I put some sugar in my tea and said as politely as possible, “Well, she could always have tinned salmon, couldn’t she?” Lally shook her head slowly, “No,” she said, “no tinned salmon in this house, your father says it all comes from Japan and they put ptomaine poison in the odd tin. We don’t want that do we?” She wiped her lips with the back of her hand, hit my sister a blow for swinging her feet at table and started to clatter about with the tea things.

  We washed up in silence, Lally washing up, we drying and putting away. She wiped her hands and lifted my satchel off the dresser and started to take out the roach. “Well, we’ll have to make haste,” she said, breaking a longish silence and handling the fish with a practised hand, “because Miss Angelica Whassername will be here directly. She’ll be on the six o’clock, and I’ve no doubt she’ll want her supper sharpish after that long journey.”

  The five roach didn’t look much after she’d done all the innard thing and cut the heads off. She smelt them deeply, mentioned that they must be fresh, it was just the mud, and washed them under the tap and flipped them on to an old blue plate. The innards and bits we gave to Minnehaha. Lally told us to get out from under her feet.

  We went out and lay on the grass. If you looked straight up you saw the blue sky and one cloud: if you looked a bit to your left you could see the grass stalks as big as bamboos and a nodding scarlet poppy as big as a duster, and if you turned your head to the right you would see my sister wrinkling her eyes and picking her nose. I hit her.

  “My finger was up my nose! I could have poked my eye out.” She lashed a fist at me and I rolled over and we fell into a struggling heap, laughing and howling and trying to sit on each other. In a little while we lay spent, breathless, giggling: our faces pressed into the grass, sniffing its greenness, and feeling the sun on the backs of our legs.

  The Seaford bus was just rumbling into the village as we got to the Market Cross and stood waiting under the chestnut tree. It used to stop for a second outside Bakers to deliver odd packages or papers, and then it would trundle up and start reversing round the Cross so that it was pointing towards Seaford and the way it had just come. It used to arrive every evening at about six and leave again at six-thirty, and in the morning it arrived at nine-thirty and would leave again at ten and that’s all it ever did. As far as we knew anyhow. Sometimes you could change buses at Polegate crossroads and go in a quite different direction, to Eastbourne, which was a very exciting thing to do. But usually we met it… and occasionally caught it in the morning, washed and combed with sixpence in our pockets from our father for shopping in Seaford. Which wasn’t so exciting but was quite decent really because there were one or two good junk shops, and sometimes you could buy bound copies of “Chatterbox 1884” for 2d. We used to take a picnic lunch and eat that on the beach after we had done our shopping and a bit of swimming, and then we’d have tea at the Martello Tower, which was a very curious and dampish place but where we got lovely raspberry jam tarts and sometimes lemon curd ones. Lally used to have bloater paste and toast. But my sister and I just had an American Ice Cream Soda and our tarts. Two each. And a smell of tea from the silver urns hissing on the counter, and hot butter and varnished wood. After tea we’d walk along the front a bit, have a look at the shops in Sea Street, and then back on to the bus for home.

  The first person off the bus was Miss Maude Bentley in a grey wool frock and a black hat with a ribbon, and behind her, clambering down slowly as if she was being lowered on a rope, came Miss Ethel. And baskets and walking sticks which were handed down to her when she was safely on the ground by Fred Brooks t
he conductor. “There you are, my darlings,” he’d call out. “Off you go and don’t get into trouble.” They were the rector’s sisters and they had a little gift shop in the front room of their house. They sold writing pads and pencils and postcard views of the church and painted ones of Jesus and Mary and Mabel Lucie Attwell little girls. In the front hall, in a big china umbrella stand painted with bulrushes and yellow flags they had Lucky Dips for tuppence. You gave Miss Ethel or Miss Maude your money and then, while they watched to see you weren’t cheating by squeezing the packets to tell what was inside, you could bury your two hands in the bran and fumble about for a little paper-wrapped parcel. Blue for a boy and pink for a girl. It was really a bit soppy and the prizes were rotten for tuppence. All I ever got was the three monkeys not seeing, speaking or hearing evil. That’s all that boys ever got—except once I did see a boy get a very small penknife with a picture of “R.M.S. Majestic” on it—but usually it was the monkeys. They must have bought millions and millions of them. We said “Good evening”, and then some more people came off and there was Angelica Chesterfield. Angelica had very, very long black hair, and long legs and long arms and a long nose. She was altogether long, and a year older than us. She wore a black knitted cap with a red pom-pom and a long blue coat and shiny London shoes with ankle straps and white socks and we all smiled stupidly at each other and then I took her suitcase and we started to walk.

  “Was it a boring journey?” I asked. She smoothed her hair, moved it over her shoulders, adjusted her pom-pom and said: “Not fearfully. Mummy put me on the train at Victoria and I had some books to look at and when we got to Seaford a lady said, ‘O! This is Seaford!’ And I got off and said to a very nice man with a dog ‘Where does the bus go from,’ and he said ‘Here,’ and I got on and now I’ve got off.” She tripped over a stone in her shiny black shoes and smiled. We turned down the lane towards the river and my sister said: “We’ve thought of some lovely things to do while you are here. We’ve found a very creepy caravan where a witch lives, and we’ll take you to a sort of cave up by Wilmington we found and we know where there’s a punt and we could go along the river and pick some waterlilies.” Angelica smiled again at us, pushed her hair over her shoulder again and said: “I like to read quite a lot.”