A Postillion Struck by Lightning

by Dirk Bogarde

  Over the range there was a stuffed pike and a very brown picture of two people praying in a sunset, and above our table there was a much bigger picture of ladies in night dresses lying all over a staircase with bowls of fruit and flowers scattered everywhere. The one I liked best was next to the scullery door. It was very sad. A man in a kilt with a bandaged arm was crying on a lady’s shoulder, and she looked awfully pale. Or glad. Or something. But my sister and I both thought it was dreadfully sad except that there was a rather silly looking baby in it too, and we felt that rather spoiled it all. But the room, with the gas lamps flickering and the range glowing all red, was very cosy indeed and if there had to be a winter it was better to have it in the kitchen at Walnut than anywhere else.

  Lally was setting the table, laying out the plates and the white cups with the gold clover leaf on them. Not Best today, because we were Family. I took down our plates; my sister had a picture of a bunch of roses on hers, and mine had a view of the pier at Worthing. We always had these special plates and washed them up ourselves afterwards.

  “Your favourites today!” said Lally, bringing in a china bowl filled with freshly boiled winkles, which she placed on the table with a brown loaf of bread, butter and a scatter of hat-pins to eat the winkles with. Mrs Jane was busy filling the big blue teapot.

  “I can’t abide those silly little things,” she said, indicating the winkles with a nod of her head, “too fiddly and nothing on them to fill a person. Give me a nice fat bloater any day.” She swung the kettle back over the fire and stood the teapot in the hearth to “draw” as she called it, and set a large plate of bloaters before Mr Jane. He looked up from his paper slowly.

  “What’s that then?” he asked.

  “It’s your tea, what else,” shouted Mrs Jane kindly.

  “Bloater is it?”

  “That’s what it is. You know you like them so don’t make a fuss.”

  “It’s the bones,” he mumbled.

  “You trim your moustache and you wouldn’t have trouble with bones,” said Mrs Jane, cutting him three large slices of bread. “Now, you be a dear soul and get them behind you and never you mind the bones. The children wanted winkles and you can’t manage them with the pins and all. A bloater’s filling and good,” she finished briskly. “Won’t go to the barber and won’t let me use the scissors on him,” she said to Lally, “… and now he complains about the bones because his whiskers are too long. He’s a stubborn man. Always was, and always will be, please God.”

  After the winkles, which took quite a long time to eat because you had to pull them out of their shells with the hat-pins and sprinkle them with vinegar, we had home-made raspberry jam and a large piece of seedcake, and that was tea. Afterwards we all helped with the washing up in the scullery and set the crockery back on its shelves again and Lally cleared the table so that she could do some mending while Mr Jane snored quietly in his big chair, his paper over his face to keep out the light.

  “When he wakes up after his nap,” said Mrs Jane, “you can ask him to show you his bit of Zeppelin if you like. He may not feel up to it, on the other hand he may, there’s no telling. But keep a sharp eye open for when he starts to stir and if he doesn’t start to read his paper, you can ask him.”

  A little while later the paper slid off his face, he rubbed his eyes, shook his head a bit, and folded his arms on his rather large stomach.

  “Dropped off,” he said.

  “Yes, dear soul, you did. Snoring like a grampus you were.”

  “Snoring was I?” He looked vaguely curious.

  “Like a grampus,” cried Mrs Jane, folding up the newspaper and putting it under a cushion. “Now why don’t you take the children out to see your bit of Zeppelin? Do you good to get a breath of fresh air … it isn’t dark yet and it’s not that far to the shed.” She was being very bossy and almost pulled him out of his chair which he clearly didn’t want to leave. Muttering under his breath he took his keys off the mantelshelf, pulled his red and white spotted handkerchief tight round his neck and, pulling me gently by the hair, he went to the scullery door. He smelled nicely of cough-drops, as he always did.

  “Not far to the shed!” he said grumpily.

  “No it’s not! You need a bit of exercise,” called Mrs Jane, stacking up his cup and saucer and plate.

  “Not far to the Palace either,” he said, “and I been there twice today on my bike. Once there and once back. I have had all the exercise I need for one day.”

  “You haven’t been twice to the Palace, Father, you’ve been there once. The next time you were coming from the Palace home. So it stands to reason you only went once. Unless you forgot something and had to go back?”

  “Whether I went twice or not doesn’t matter. It’s the same journey whichever way. You try it, my girl,” he grumbled out of the door and I followed him out into the yard. “Women,” he mumbled, fiddling with his keys and finding the right one he opened the shed door and the familiar smell of dust and varnish and winter onions filled the air.

  The shed was long and low and dark. It was stacked with old boxes, piles of sacking, fishing nets, fishing rods, ropes of onions and shallots and sacks of corn for the hens. On one side ran a long wooden work bench with shelves above cluttered with boxes marked in white painted letters “Screws”, “Nails”, “Washers”, “Tin Tacks” and so on, and all with their sizes after them. He was very methodical. Above the shelves hung a fox’s head with its mouth open, and glassy eyes staring. He had shot it many years ago near Richmond which was where he used to do all his shooting when he was a young man. He fumbled about with some matches and lit the hanging lamp above the bench and suddenly the shed was filled with leaping shadows which came and went with the swinging of the lamp while he searched for the biscuit tin of Treasures. I knew where it was, but was much too polite to say, and anyway he liked to make it all a bit more exciting before finding it, which he did presently, and set before me on the rough wooden top of the bench. It was a fairly large tin with a scratched picture of Windsor Castle on one side and the King’s mother and father on the lid.

  Carefully he opened it and gently shook everything out. Brass buttons, cigarette cards in neat little bundles, a tusk from a wild pig, a tooth from a shark, a set of dominoes, a bullet, some old coins, and best of all these, the bit of the Zeppelin. A small ragged cross of aluminium, with bolts stuck on it. I took it in my hand reverently. Although I had done this many times with him, I knew he liked me to be pleased each time.

  “Potters Bar, that was. I’ll never forget the night that came down.”

  “All in flames?”

  “Yers. Burning like a beacon … like a great big burning fish in the sky.” He put his fingers to his moustache to find, I thought, a lost bone from the bloater.

  “Young Bert Taylor and me got pretty near to it after it was cool, and pulled this bit off as a sort of memento. It gave them Jerries a bit of a fright, that did, and they’d been dropping their bombs all over just anywhere and it served them right. Zeppelin they called it… a great big thing it was. You never saw such a blaze.” And then he lost interest and started pottering about in the shed. I asked him if I could take it and show my sister and he said I could but to bring it back as soon as she had seen it, he said otherwise he’d catch his death because the shed was damp, but he didn’t seem to be in much of a hurry.

  My sister had stayed in the kitchen because the shed gave her the creeps and once she had seen the fox snap its jaws at her, so she said, and its eyes followed her everywhere she moved. Which was silly seeing that they were glass eyes and it was only a head anyway, not a whole fox. Anyway she wasn’t interested in the bit of Zeppelin.

  “It’s only a silly bit of twisty tin,” she said. “How can you tell it’s from a whatever it’s called? It might just be a bit off an old cart or something.”

  “It’s from a Zeppelin and it got shot down at Potters Bar all on fire. Everyone was burned up too. It’s famous,” I said.

  “Well
, it served them right, getting burned up, if they were Germans, and it’s not the sort of thing girls like anyway. Wars and things like that. Now if it had been a dear little mouse, or a baby rabbit … or something sweet like that, well, it would be different. But it’s just a soppy old bit of tin that’s all and there’s nothing interesting in that.” She was helping Lally to sort out some eggs to go in the bowls in the parlour next door. “Todays” and “Yesterdays”. Lally was marking some with a “T” and others with a “Y” and there was a separate little bowl with six Bantam eggs in it. These were for my sister and me. We had two each for breakfast every morning if we were lucky, with fried bread and bacon. Mrs Jane collected them all up and took them into the parlour.

  “You’d better take it back to Father,” she called. “He’ll catch his death in that old shed, it’s full of dust and rubbish, it’ll bring on his cough again. Be a good boy and take it back, do. And tell him to come in while you’re at it. Tell him I said so.”

  Together, he and I shovelled all the bits and pieces back in the tin box, the buttons and the dominoes and the bit of Zeppelin. He doused the lamp, and we made our way back to the glowing kitchen and the little scullery lit by one wavering candle where we had to, both, wash our hands before we were allowed into the house again.

  “There’s no knowing what you have handled in that old shed,” said Mrs Jane, “… full of rats and mice and the dear knows what else. And Father must be tired if he was twice to the Palace today, although I very much doubt that, I’m sure. I’ll ask him in bed later.”

  “Did he go to see the King and Queen?” said my sister in a silly way, not really meaning it but just being irritating.

  Lally gave a sort of sniff of laughter. “I’ll give you King and Queen, my girl. Father’s been to Hampton Court … not the one in London … he goes there every day of his life and you know it, Madam. He tends the clocks and sees that they all tell the same time as each other. It’s a very responsible job, you know. One day the Prince of Wales will pop in, and ask him the time and he’ll be able to say, right out, ‘Half-past eleven’, or whatever it will be, ‘Your Highness, and its exactly right’!” She poked away at the fire in the range, stuck on another lump of coal, fixed the slide in her hair, and took down the box of Games which sat on top of the green wooden cupboard.

  “Come along now … we have time for one good game of Snakes and Ladders before cocoa.” And spread the board out on the table.

  It was lovely and peaceful lying on the grass under the great pear tree. If you looked up through the hundreds of leaves you could just see little specks of blue sky and sometimes bits of white cloud drifting far above. It was just like being in the country and not at all in a town like Twickenham. Just across the grass was the hen run, and on the other side the place where the ducks lived, which was muddy and sploshy with water that they spilled out of the old tin bath which Mr Jane had sunk into the the ground to make a little pond for them. And past, quite a long way past, them was the greenhouse with the vine. All over one wall, great glossy leaves and bunches and bunches of fat blue grapes in October. It really was like the country; and even seeing old Mrs Poulter hanging out her washing over the fence didn’t spoil anything, because she was so quiet she hardly got noticed. But Mrs Jane said that it was all changing:

  “Not like it was, mark my words. I remember, not so long ago, walking all the way to the Village through the fields … from here to Church Street … and now they’re building rows and rows of houses all round Pope’s Grove, and The Lodge is sold and they do say it’s going to be a hotel or something. I never thought I’d see the day. I hope Father and I don’t live to see the time when all this has to go, as go it will, mark my words, everything goes too fast nowadays … much too fast.” She jabbed her knitting needles into a ball of wool and started to tidy up her old straw work basket.

  Lally was sewing buttons on one of my shirts when she suddenly said: “Mother, the boy here wants a canary bird. He won one at the fair, remember, but it was a wild bird so we let it go. I promised him a real canary.” My heart leapt. She had remembered ! I looked at her with such delight that she scowled at me and said: “Don’t you get too uppity, Sir … nothing settled yet. I’m only asking, that’s all.” I rolled back on to the grass and closed my eyes. My heart thumping. Listening to the talking, crossing my fingers. Mrs Jane sounded a bit distant, I think she had started to walk up to the house but I heard her say: “You better have a talk to Father… he knows what’s what in this place. Bert Batt had some a while ago, but I don’t know now, ask your Father.” I opened my eyes and stared up into the pear tree … she had remembered after all. Now all I had to do was pray.

  When we were washing our hands for lunch I whispered the news to my sister who was so impressed that she wiped her hands on her shorts instead of the towel.

  “I wonder if we can have two! One for me and one for you like I said and we can have babies and sell them and all that sort of thing? Wouldn’t it be marvellous if we could?”

  I said I didn’t care about two as long as there was one for me because it was, after all, my canary; I had let the wild one go free so it was my reward.

  “You don’t get rewarded for doing kind things,” said my sister. “Everyone knows that. But I’d help you to look after it, I promise. Oh! wouldn’t it be lovely to have babies and nests and all that sort of thing? But wouldn’t it?”

  The next evening when Mr Jane came back from the Palace on his bike, had had his tea, read his paper and slept a little, Lally shouted at him about the canary and Mr Batt, and he said, yes, Mr Batt had some… this year’s hatchings and five shillings each.

  My sister covered her face with her hands and cried, “Oh! Oh! He’s only got one shilling and four coppers left.” She looked, when she took her hands away from her poky face, quite pleased. I wanted to hit her but I was too shocked by the price. I only got sixpence a week pocket money and this I had saved up for three weeks to come to Twickenham. The canary seemed a long way beyond my reach now. But I didn’t let anyone see, I just went on writing in my little red note-book. I was busy writing a new play and I had to put my thoughts together so that no one could really guess what I was thinking. And the play had to be finished before we all left at the end of the week, because we were going to “do” it on our last night as a Thank You to Mrs Jane for having us there.

  “I don’t think he really wants a canary now, do you?” said Lally, cheerfully cutting up a long green bean. “I think he’s got it out of his system, Mother/’ I hadn’t but she couldn’t know that. My sister sat staring at me, Lally went on with her beans, and Mrs Jane was busy ironing. There was a nice smell of damp linen and starch, and only the clock ticking and Mr Jane snoring gently. I went on writing busily. It was all rubbish because I was only really thinking of five shillings, so I just wrote boggly boggly boggly all the time and hoped that none of them would notice.

  “Got it out of your system,” said Lally, brushing all the tops and tails off the beans into a paper bag and taking the full bowl into the scullery. “It’s nice to see you with your books for a change is all I can say.” I heard the pump going and the water running in the sink and my sister calling out,

  “He’s writing his play for Sunday night, you see.”

  “A play?” said Mrs Jane, smoothing away. “That’s nice.”

  “Not this one,” said my sister, “this one is all about bats and ghosts and things.”

  “It isn’t at all,” I said. She didn’t know.

  “I like a nice play,” said Mrs Jane. “I haven’t been to a theatre since before the Flood. Well, since a very long time ago. And I do like a nice play, especially if it’s got a tune or two.”

  Lally came bumbling back in with a saucepan of water and the beans and started to set them on the range with a clonk. “Last play you went to my dear was a couple of years back when we all went up to see ‘Bitter Sweet’, the time when Brother Harold and Ruby got married.”

  Mrs Jane put down he
r iron and folded her arms across her pinafore. “Of course we did,” she said. “I’d quite forgot. Harold and Ruby got married that Thursday and then we went to His Majesty’s and saw that pretty play when Mrs Williams dropped her bag of plums all over the Dress Circle! I laughed fit to burst my stays, I must say … what a thing to do! Still, it was a pretty play … and very sad too … wasn’t it sad then, Lally? As far as I can remember it was very sad … but we were all so taken with Mrs Williams’ plums I can’t recall very much I do admit.”

  “There were some lovely tunes in that,” said Lally, “really pretty. But what Mrs Williams was doing with plums in the Dress Circle I never shall know. A box of Cadburys yes: plums no. I was really cross, wasn’t I, Mother? Remember? Cross.”

  Mrs Jane sighed deeply and went on smoothing away. “Yes, you were, very cross as I recall, but I had to laugh … it was just like your father playing skittles down at the Flagstaff, the noise they made clattering everywhere.”

  For a little while there was silence and then I suddenly said: “I suppose I could go and work or something, couldn’t I?”

  “What for?” said Lally sharply.