A Postillion Struck by Lightning

by Dirk Bogarde

  “To get the money for the canary.”

  “Oh! The canary … well … odd jobs do you mean?”

  “Yes … anything.”

  “You could I suppose …” She sounded vague and looked at Mrs Jane. “He could do odd jobs about the place to earn a bit for his canary, couldn’t he, Mother?”

  “There’s quite a lot to get on with here,” said Mrs Jane. “The shed needs a good clean out, there’s weeding to be done in the vegetable garden… I daresay we could keep you busy for threepence an hour if that’s what you want?” She folded up some shirts and put the iron on a little brass stand by the range. “Next Door said they wanted someone to whitewash the chicken shed…. He’s a bit stiff with his back, and Gooze can’t hardly hold her head up let alone a whitewash brush … I reckon if you offered they’d be pleased to pay you for your canary.”

  It was settled quite easily. I started work the next morning in our shed, carting all the boxes and sacks and bits and pieces out into the yard and getting down to a good sweep. My sister helped a bit too: she had a feeling that if she didn’t she wouldn’t be able to claim any of the canary when it finally came, and she hated the idea of that. But after I had made her carry down the fox’s head, and some old fly papers, and lug a big bag full of rotten windfalls she pretty soon gave up, and I got on with things on my own. It was much easier, and I could still think about the play while I worked.

  After the shed, which took quite a long time actually, there was the vegetable garden and all the weeds, and after that I washed up eighty flower pots, and cleaned them carefully ready for Mr Jane’s seedlings and cuttings for the winter. And then I went over to the Poulters and they said I could whitewash the chicken shed; which took so long to do that I managed to earn a shilling, and Gooze gave me two pennies which she said were really for the Collection on Sunday but she thought that the Africans wouldn’t miss two pennies just for one week. Which was very kind of her. She was very shy, and kept twisting the belt of her long droopy woolly cardigan, and scuffing a little hole in the grass where we were standing. But she pushed the two warm pennies into my hand and scurried off to her back door so that I couldn’t really thank her.

  On the Friday we all set off to Mr Batt’s house across the Green. Lally in her summer frock-for-Town, which was different to the one she wore in Sussex because it had red squares all over it and she wore white ankle strap shoes and carried a purse. But she didn’t wear her hat. Because Mr Batt was a “neighbour” and she didn’t want him to think she was just putting on airs when she came to visit.

  No. 14 Sumatra Road was not as pretty as Walnut Cottage. It was all red brick with a pointed roof, a bay window, and a thick laurel hedge all round. Over the green front door there was a stone lady’s face, staring down with wide eyes, surrounded by yellow brick. We didn’t go into the house, but through a side gate into the yard and then down the long garden path to the sheds at the bottom. It really wasn’t much of a garden. Not like ours at Walnut. There were lots of old boxes and tins, a broken pram, and some washing hanging on a line. No flowers, or trees, just some rather dead looking Michaelmas daisies and a few rows of yellow cabbages.

  Mr Batt was thin and friendly and didn’t wear a collar. He took us into the sheds through a little door—and then the magic started! The sheds were full of cages, row upon row of them, filled with birds of all kinds. It was all very clean and tidy, not a bit like his back garden, and he had to talk quite loudly because of the tweeting of all the birds who were hopping about on their perches and twittering and feeding away.

  I selected a canary, bright yellow, with pink legs, who seemed to be very cheerful and singing a lot.

  “Good choice,” said Mr Batt. “He’s a bright little feller, sings like a clockwork dickie bird. You’d think all you had to do was wind him up and let him be. But no! Oh no! You got to look after ’im … feed him proper, twice a day you fill up his seed bowl, clean water, lots of grit and a nice bit of lettuce, some chickweed, a piece of prime apple, and a nice bit of old cuttlefish … then he’ll sing for you to show his thanks … but he ain’t no clockwork dickie.… You sure you’ll take care of him, otherwise I’d have to say No?”

  Walking back down Sumatra Road, holding the little travelling cage, with my real canary, after all this time, was almost more than I could bear. I daren’t speak I was so happy, and when my sister pointed out how big the conkers all were, coming across the Green, I didn’t even look. Just went walking straight on longing to get to Walnut so that I could take him up to my room and just gaze at him in silence. But first we had to get a packet of seed and some grit and a bit of cuttlefish from Mrs Hicks at the Corner Shop, and then when I had paid for all that I had only the two pence which Gooze had given me. But it was worth it.

  Mrs Jane sighed a bit and said she couldn’t abide birds in cages. “It isn’t natural,” she said sadly. “He ought to be out there flying about free.”

  “Wouldn’t last a minute out there, Mother. Cats ’ud get him in no time, and anyway he comes from a foreign country, he couldn’t get the proper food in the garden … and think of the winter.”

  “Makes no difference. Shouldn’t be in a cage. Where does it come from then?”

  “Madeira,” said Lally, finally as if she knew.

  “That’s where the cake comes from,” said my sister, showing off.

  “Well, it’s a long way off… and very hot there. So you keep him warm and don’t take him up to your bedroom. He stays here in the kitchen. Where it’s warm. And you can put him in the window as long as you don’t knock Mrs Jane’s geraniums about.”

  “You mind my geraniums … very brittle they are … it’s a good thing Father is deaf, though I shouldn’t say it, for that twittering would drive him out of his wits … and me out of mine I shouldn’t wonder, though I’m a patient woman, God knows … and don’t go scattering seed about or we shall have mice.”

  But really, in spite of them all being a bit difficult, people were really very nice about him, and after tea we all had a talk about what to call him, and finally decided on Madeira because that’s where he came from, and Lally said it would help me with my geography if I went and looked it up on a map. Which I did: but it was very hard to find, and very small indeed when we saw it in a big bit of blue sea, just about as big as a fly-blow. And it can’t have been important because it wasn’t red, like India and Africa and Great Britain. But we called him that, anyway, to please Lally.

  Mrs Jane didn’t say much about the name. I could see she didn’t think it very good for a bird.

  “It’s too cumbersome,” she said. “You ought to give it a nice name like Joey or Bobby or something pretty.” She closed up the big Atlas and stuck it back on the shelf beside the Bible and three bound volumes of The Family Circle. Lally came back from the scullery with the tray of tea things and started setting them up on the shelves by the range.

  “Bobby is a dog’s name, and Joey is for a parrot, Mother. Madeira is very nice I think. Unusual.”

  “Doesn’t trip off the tongue,” said Mrs Jane, setting up her folding red and blue carpet chair by the fire opposite Mr Jane, who was reading his paper by the light of the gas lamp above.

  “What do you think, Father?” she shouted at him, sitting into her chair and sorting through a pile of clean socks in her lap. He looked up vaguely from the paper.

  “Eh?” he said.

  Mrs Jane leaned towards him and shouted again. “About Madeira. They’re going to call the bird Madeira!” He looked at her in surprise and then slowly round us all.

  “I don’t think so, Mother,” he said eventually. “Perhaps at Christmas. I’d rather have a nice jug of ale,” and he went back to his paper. Mrs Jane looked perplexed.

  “He didn’t understand me, oh dear! I wonder what he thought I’d said?” She went on sorting the socks, rolling them into neat little bundles when they hadn’t got a hole or something. “And we never got to see your play did we?” she asked. “I expect the bird quite put
it out of your mind, that’s it.”

  Lally said that that was it and that anyway the cottage was really too small to make a stage in, and we couldn’t hang a curtain up, and anyway I hadn’t written the words so we couldn’t learn them but perhaps next time, and in the meanwhile we had all better start thinking about packing tomorrow for the day after we had to leave. Which filled me with sadness because we hated leaving Walnut even though it only meant going back to The Cottage and our father and mother.

  “I wanted to do the play just as a sort of Thank You … I did forget because of the bird!” I said.

  “And you would have liked it too,” said my sister sadly. “It was all about this Lady who goes to a haunted house and gets scared out of her wits by a huge big bat and …” Lally cut her short:

  “Don’t give the story away, silly! Fancy spoiling the surprise. We’ll all do it next time and that’ll be fine.”

  Mrs Jane sat back in her chair and started to thread a needle:

  “We don’t need no thanking, bless you. It’s a pleasure to have you here. Oh dear! That reminds me … we’ve got Brother Harold and Ruby coming down next Sunday for tea with that child.” She heaved a great sigh, and Lally put an arm on her shoulder and laughed:

  “Cheer up, Mother, do … it’s only for tea and they are your flesh and blood after all.”

  Mrs Jane was cross looking: “It’s just the way that Baby Dennis will break all my eggs so that I have to hide them in a cupboard and then he starts kicking your father! It’s not natural in a child of three … kicks your father on the shins who has done him no harm in all the world! I don’t know why Ruby doesn’t take the back of her hand to him I’m sure. And my eggs…” She was really quite vexed and, pushing her wooden mushroom into the heel of a sock, she started darning very fast.

  Mr Jane suddenly folded his paper, gave a big yawn, scratched his head and looked for a few moments at his wife in front of him, stitching away.

  “Mother!” he said, searching for his handkerchief in a trouser pocket. “Since you’re on your feet, hand me down the tin of humbugs will yer … I just fancy one this evening.” Mrs Jane gave him a look and asked me to get the tin off the mantelpiece where it always stood under the picture of the people praying in the fields, and I handed it to him for him to choose one which always took him quite a long time although they were all exactly the same size and colour; when he found the one he wanted he sniffed it, held it to the light, and then, very carefully, put it in his mouth as if it was the first humbug he had ever tasted. Sucking at it, he offered me the tin and my sister and I had one each and then I put it up on the shelf again.

  “I don’t know, really I don’t,” said Mrs Jane. “He really lives in a world of his own does Father. It comes of working in the silence and winding too many clocks. He doesn’t pay no heed to anyone else.”

  But just as I was about to get the old piece of sheet which she had given me to put over Madeira’s cage at nights, I heard Mr Jane say with a mouth full of humbug: “I think there’s some old wire fronts hanging up in the shed you know. Give the boy one so he can make a cage for his bird when he gets back, be better’n that silly little box from Bert Batt.”

  I was very happy and shouted, “Thank You!” to him but he only smiled and waved his hand in the air.

  “Nice little bird,” he said. “He don’t worry me because I can’t hear him … that twittering would drive me out of my wits all day long, wouldn’t it, Mother?” But he didn’t wait for an answer, just closed his eyes and rolled his humbug comfortably round his mouth. Mrs Jane bit off the thread and started to roll the socks into a ball.

  “He likes you two but he can’t abide Baby Dennis… and no more can I, God forgive me. If only he wouldn’t kick so! You go and look for that cage front tomorrow, young man, don’t do it tonight with all the dust and that lying about out there. And you …” she said, pointing at my sister, “when you have to leave on Sunday, don’t go hiding behind his chair … we know you don’t want to leave, and it’s very kind of you, but it does upset him so. He feels sorry for a week of Sundays…”

  But she smiled very kindly when she said it, and closed her basket.

  Chapter 7

  In the train from Calais to Wimereux we had the whole compartment to ourselves, which was very nice indeed. There really wasn’t much room for anybody else anyway. On one side sat Lally and myself and my sister … that was three; and opposite, sitting in a gloomy row and looking very white and rotten, were the three Chesterfield children, Angelica, Beth and Paul, and their nanny who was called Amy O’Shea and who was older than Lally and wore a grey two-piece suit and a white straw hat with a black ribbon like a man’s. She was pretty ugly too. And skinny. And sat there clutching her huge handbag as if it had all their money in it. Which it didn’t. Our fathers and mothers had all that. And they were coming by motor-car to Wimereux because it was more comfortable and in any case there wasn’t room for us all in the O.M.

  They were all looking so white and gloomy because they had all been terribly sick on the boat, which was really a bit funny because none of us were. And that made us feel very good. We had been to Wimereux quite often for holidays so we knew what to expect. Every time we got on the boat Lally would make us sit up on the deck and eat lemons. It wasn’t a very nice thing to do but we did it because she said it stopped you being seasick, and the air was good for us.

  So we did that. And we were never sick although Lally once said she felt queasy and hoped no one would speak to us because she’d have a terrible turn and what would we do then?

  But this day everything had been lovely. Sunny, with a wind and the sea all glossy and pale and foamy like ginger beer; and gulls swinging over the funnels, and the flags streaming in the breeze. The Chesterfields all went down below to a cabin, which Lally told Amy was a Silly Thing To Do. And it was. Almost as soon as we left Folkestone Paul Chesterfield came up on deck with a white face and said that Amy had fallen down in a heap and had knocked her hat off.

  When we got to the cabin she was sitting on the edge of a bunk holding her head, her hat all squint, and her pince-nez, hanging from her lapel by a little gold chain, were glinting in the sun. “I’m taken bad!” she moaned. “If only it would keep still for a minute f d be all right, I’m sure. It’s the floor swaying about so. Oh! What will become of us all if I’m taken queer?” Lally was very brisk indeed and ordered Angelica and Paul and Beth up on the deck, and told Amy to put her feet up and cover her eyes with a handkerchief.

  Amy moaned and rolled from side to side and said No. No! Nothing would make her move and the children were to stay within her sight for she was Responsible. Angelica was sitting bolt upright like a white rabbit, and Beth just crouched in a corner holding on to the handle of the little door which led to the lavatory.

  “Oh! Make it stop, dear God!” cried Amy, which made my sister and me giggle. Lally hit us sharply and said, “What a silly thing to say, Miss O’Shea! If the good Lord stopped the boat now for you, we’d all be swinging about here for dear knows how long … soon as we get on the sooner we’ll be on dry land.”

  “I’ll never see the land again. God help us all,” moaned Amy O’Shea and gave a dreadful gasp and covered her face with her handkerchief which smelled of lavender water. Suddenly Beth made a strangling sort of noise and Lally spun us both round and sent us up the stairs. We heard a splashing noise and then the door slammed shut.

  We had a very nice time looking at all the people lying on the deck with big white enamel bowls beside them. They all looked very green and sad, only the sailors looked cheerful, and they were dashing about the sloping decks laughing and eating big ham rolls and sloshing water everywhere. We called out “Bonjour !” to them all, and they all waved back and said “Bonjour” also. It was a very nice feeling, as if we had always been travelling which was very good for you because, as Lally said, it broadened your mind.

  In a little while we could see the long flat line of land ahead… and the sunshine
sparkling on white sailing boats and the windows of houses in France where we were going to spend four weeks at the Hotel d’Angleterre. Lally joined us by the rail pulling on her gloves and snapping her handbag shut, she tucked a bit of hair under her hat with the ivy leaves on it, and said: “Miss O’Shea’s in a poor way, I’m afraid. They’ve all been sick. But what can you expect all cooped up in that little room with no air and no lemons?”

  We felt sorry for them in a vague way, but quite glad about Angelica who was really so prim that a bit of seasick would do her good. Beth, who was two years younger than Angelica, was rather a nice girl and we quite liked her. She had a freckly face and gaps in her teeth but she liked doing nearly all the things we liked doing, so she wasn’t a Drawback. Paul was the youngest and Not Very Well because he had something wrong with his chest which made him very pale and quiet and he spent most of his time reading. So we didn’t pay any attention to him much except to say “Good morning, Paul,” or “Hello, Paul,” or “Are you having a nice day?” just things like that which he only had to say “Yes” or “No” to, which is what he did. And nothing more.

  We watched France get nearer and nearer, and heard the boat make slowing-down noises, and the water thrashing and churning about under the propellers … and then we could see the great clock at Calais swing into view, and all the crooked houses; and cranes striking up into the sky, like schoolteachers’ fingers. The gulls wheeled and screeched and scattered over the ginger-beery water like handfuls of rice at a wedding. And the sun glinted on the slimy green seaweedy walls of the piers while men in blue rushed all alongside throwing ropes at us, shouting and whistling. It was very exciting to feel the big ship slide slowly into her place, nudging and bumping gently at the high stone walls, and watching all the ropes growing taut to stretching point as they made us fast.

  Then in a flash the gangplanks were up and we all wobbled down to stand on the cobbled road of the docks. We stood there among piles of wooden boxes smelling of fish, and still felt the land swaying a little after the movement of the ship. Lally went off into the crowd of people, looking for Amy and the Chesterfields who wouldn’t leave their cabin until the ship had really stopped and everything was quite still. And then they had a terrible job getting down the gangplank because it was steep and Amy’s bag, Angelica’s books, and the travelling rugs seemed to all get mixed up. But eventually, pale and exhausted, they were all among the fish, and we started to make our way over to the station. It took quite a while to sort out all our luggage, find the tickets, and say “merci” to everyone in sight: Lally said we had to because you never knew who was driving the train.