Wild Stories

by Colin Thompson

  ‘Look, look, look,’ shouted the little girl to her brother. They reached out and tickled Ethel in exactly the right place. She shut her eyes and felt all her loneliness slip away.

  The little girl tucked Ethel under her arm and carried her up to the house. The little boy ran beside her smiling and laughing.

  Later on, the man gave Ethel a smart new box with a label on the side that said ‘BEST APPLES’.

  ‘I am a chicken,’ said Ethel to herself as she settled down into her wonderful new straw.

  ‘And I shall call you Doris,’ said the little girl as she poured her out a mug of corn.

  Waking Up

  At the end of a quiet street at the edge of a large town, between tidy houses and tidy gardens, was a wild place. Once it had been a garden like those on either side with a neat lawn and straight rows of flowers, but some years before, the old lady who had lived there had moved away and since then the garden had become a dark and mysterious jungle. In the middle of this wild place was an empty house, called fourteen, that was slowly disappearing behind crawling bushes and overgrown trees.

  As time passed, the grass grew taller burying the path from the front gate, the ivy crawled up the walls and slipped in through the broken windows. The trees wove new branches together and the garden became a closed and secret place.

  In the jungle the honeysuckle filled the air with heavy dreams, and animals that had nowhere else to go made their homes in its welcoming branches and secret places. Moles and rats that had been driven from the tidy gardens all around took refuge there. Beyond the edge of the abandoned lawn under a thick bramble bush a chicken lived in an orange box, and up on the roof of the house crows had filled the chimneys with years of nests. Rabbits that could never find enough to eat anywhere else lived in a wild warren at the bottom of the garden beneath a crowded hedge. Beyond the hedge through brambles and giant hogweed taller than men a dusty towpath ran beside an old canal and across the canal was a desperate place of crumbling factories and fractured concrete.

  The years passed and then one day as spring began to push the winter aside the old lady’s nephew lifted away the broken gate and took his family to live in the neglected house.

  Windows stiff with age were forced open and given new panes of glass and a coat of paint. The branches that had grown across them were chopped down and sunshine crept into the house for the first time in years. As the rooms grew warm again the dampness that had reached up to the highest ceilings was driven back into the earth.

  In three quick weeks, the cobwebs were swept away, the holes that had let the rats in were filled up and the crows’ nests were pushed out of the chimneys with stiff brushes.

  When the chimneys were clear they lit fires in every room. The chopped down branches cracked as the flames ate through them and filled the air with sweet smelling smoke. The thin shoots of plants that had crept into the house behind the plaster shrivelled away and in a few days it was as if they had never been there. Once again the house was back in human hands.

  Out in the garden the air was filled with nervous talk as the animals sat and waited. The homeless crows huddled in the tall trees and made everyone else miserable. Eventually they made new nests in the high branches but for months afterwards they complained to anyone who would listen.

  ‘Just wait,’ they said. ‘When they’ve finished with the house, they’ll come out here and kill the garden.’

  The other animals said nothing because they were all frightened that what the crows were saying might be true.

  ‘Of course, they’ll wait until we’ve built new nests,’ said the crows. ‘They’ll wait till we’re all nicely settled in with fresh eggs ready to hatch, then they’ll come out and chop everything down until it’s as flat and dead as all the other gardens.’

  It looked as though the crows were right, for as

  spring turned into early summer the man bought a bright red lawnmower and attacked the back garden. The machine flew over the grass like an eagle, tearing it to pieces as it passed. The green tunnels that the mice had made over the years vanished in a minute, leaving a wide open yellow space that was unsafe to cross. From her box under the bush Ethel the chicken sat very still and watched him go by. From the tops of the trees the crows looked down, too scared of the man to go and pick up the worms he had disturbed. All the terrible things they had predicted were coming true.

  Every weekend the family pulled out the weeds that had grown around the house and swept up the dead leaves. They cut back the ivy until it was no taller than a dog and piled everything up into a huge bonfire in the old vegetable garden.

  In the evenings as the days grew longer the man sat in an armchair by the French windows, gazed out across the tidy lawn at the dense undergrowth beyond and fell asleep. Sometimes he would wake up just as the light was fading away and see the rabbits and hedgehogs moving softly in the shadows. Sometimes he would see the blackbirds hopping across the grass and other birds flying in from all around to roost in the tall trees. Maybe something told him that if he cut everything down they would all go away, or maybe he was just lazy, but as the summer grew warmer his enthusiasm for gardening grew less and less.

  The animals grew more and more restless. They knew the people would chop everything down. That’s what people did, they only had to look at every other garden to see that. But the family finished playing with their bonfire and then left everything alone. Some of the smaller more nervous animals like the voles and the shrews moved out into the narrow strip of wasteland by the canal, but for most of them there was nowhere else to go and they just had to watch and wait.

  ‘They’re just biding their time,’ said the crows.

  ‘What for?’ asked Ethel the chicken, but no one knew.

  And then something happened that made the family make up its mind once and for all.

  In the next house there were two miserable people who complained all day long. As she complained about the sunshine, he complained about the cold. When he complained about the noise, she said it was too quiet. They complained to each other about everything and when they could no longer stand to listen to their own voices, they wrote and complained to the newspapers. They hated everything and everyone but most of all they hated the overgrown garden next door that dropped leaves onto their tidy lawn and cut out the daylight and threatened them with its untamed life.

  ‘My wife wants you to cut down the trees by our fence,’ said the nervous man. He stood shuffling from foot to foot on the doorstep while his wife hid behind her plastic curtains.

  ‘Why?’ said the man.

  ‘She says they drop leaves on her flower beds,’ said the nervous man.

  ‘That’s all right,’ said the woman. ‘You can keep them, we’ve got loads more.’ In the next room their two children laughed and the miserable man went away. His miserable wife came to the door and she complained about the squirrels and the hedgehogs and the rabbits and the mice.

  ‘I didn’t even know we had squirrels,’ said the man. The miserable woman went away and wrote a letter to the town hall who lost it in a wastepaper basket with the eighty-six others she had sent them. Seven times they went back to fourteen to complain and the last time they said they’d get the police. The family laughed and thanked them for saving them so much work, because whatever they had been planning to do in the garden they certainly weren’t going to now.

  ‘Anyone can have a rotary clothes dryer in their garden,’ said the woman after the miserable couple had gone back to their net curtains and pampered cat, ‘but only special people get squirrels and hedgehogs.’

  And they built a bird table and put out nesting boxes for the bluetits.

  The family’s two children tunnelled down the garden, crawling like voles through the undergrowth and above a clearing of soft grass in the branches of a wide oak tree they built a tree house. They lay flat on their stomachs and looked down into the o
vergrown pond as the moorhens led their chicks away through the ferns to the canal.

  Albert the Bat

  In the dark loft at the top of the house, in the darkest corner where the slates met the wall, lived a family of bats. They had lived there for as long as anyone could remember. Long before the old lady had left the house and even before she had been born, there had been bats under the roof. They were there even when Queen Victoria had been on the throne. They were an old and noble family treated with great respect by all the other animals apart from the moths who had been their supper for over a hundred years.

  At one time there had been bats in every attic down the street but now they had all gone except for this one family. One by one they had been driven out by loft conversions or killed by woodworm spray. Only under this roof, untouched and quiet like the garden below, was there any safety.

  The last few winters had been long and cold. With no fires in the empty house the air in the loft was cold and damp and the bats had hibernated right up to the end of spring. Now there were people in the house and warmth rising from the rooms below soaked through the chimneys next to the bats’ roost. It was March outside but under the roof it felt like the beginning of summer. One by one the sleeping bats woke up. The crumbling plaster between the rafters was full of drowsy butterflies who had also woken up too early and the bats lived on them until the evenings grew warm enough to go outside.

  The young bats who had never hibernated before woke up feeling very strange and unable to understand how they had got so much older in their sleep. They fluttered around in confusion, falling on to the tops of the ceilings and crawling around in the dust. Their mothers swooped and dived above them coaxing them back into the air.

  ‘If you stay like that with your feet on the ground,’ they said, ‘the blood will rush to your feet and you’ll get dizzy.’

  Of all the bats in the attic the oldest was Albert. He was twenty-three years old and he was having trouble with his radar.

  ‘I keep hearing voices in my head,’ he said. ‘Far away voices that sound like men.’

  ‘What are they saying?’ asked the others.

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Albert. ‘They’re too far away to tell.’

  ‘Perhaps they’re voices from the other side,’ said Flossie who believed in that sort of thing.

  ‘The other side of what?’ asked a young bat called Ryan.

  ‘You know,’ said Flossie, going all mysterious, ‘voices from beyond.’

  ‘Beyond what?’ said Ryan, trying to keep a straight face which can be difficult for a bat.

  ‘Ryan,’ called his mother, ‘stop being cheeky to your Auntie Flossie.’

  ‘I don’t care where they’re coming from,’ said Albert. ‘I want them to stop.’

  ‘You’re probably tired,’ said Ryan’s mother. ‘You probably just need a rest.’

  ‘A rest, a rest?’ said Albert. ‘We’ve been hibernating all winter, how could I need a rest?’

  The trouble was that the voices in his head were interfering with his radar and it’s radar that bats use to find their food. Every time Albert flew out into the garden to catch moths all he could hear was blurred noises like a ventriloquist’s dummy shut in a suitcase.

  The voices weren’t always there. As the night moved on they grew less and less and in the early hours before dawn they usually went away altogether. By then of course the other bats had caught the biggest moths and Albert had to make do with the stragglers that were still throwing themselves at the streetlight outside the house. They flung themselves at the brightly lit glass and as they fell unconscious to the ground Albert swooped and caught them before the old cat waiting at the bottom of the lamppost could get them.

  ‘I’m fed up always getting my food broken,’ he said. ‘They crash into the light and get all dented.’

  ‘It could be worse,’ said Ryan’s mother. ‘You could be a vampire bat and have to suck blood out of people’s necks.’

  ‘Or cow’s bu–’ Ryan started to say, but his mother stopped him.

  The nights grew shorter and warmer and the voices in Albert’s head grew louder. He still couldn’t make out what they were saying but they were definitely getting stronger. All the other male bats had gone off to spend the summer in hollow trees and the deserted factories across the canal. The canal itself was a wonderful place for food. At dusk it was alive with insects that drove men away and drew bats in.

  The loft was full of new born babies now and everyone was too busy looking after them to bother with Albert’s problems. Twice a night all the mothers flew off to feed leaving him alone with hundreds of tiny twittering creatures. He couldn’t decide which was worse, the noise they made or the noise in his head.

  And then one night one of the voices grew so loud that he understood what it was saying.

  ‘Are you there?’ it said. It was a man and he sounded in a bad mood.

  ‘Err, yes, I’m here,’ said Albert nervously.

  ‘You’ll have to speak louder than that,’ said Flossie, ‘They’ll never hear you on the other side.’ And they hadn’t, for a few seconds later they called again. ‘Oi mate, are you there?’ it said.

  ‘Oi mate?’ said Albert. ‘They’re not very cultured, these spirits of yours, are they?’

  ‘Answer it, quickly,’ said Flossie, ‘and shout this time.’

  ‘HELLO?’ shouted Albert, but they still couldn’t hear him, because a few seconds later the voice called out again and filled Albert’s head up with a lot of very rude words, most of which he had never heard before. He repeated them to Flossie who looked shocked and then said in a low whisper: ‘I think they must be from down there.’

  ‘Down where?’ said Ryan.

  ‘Down there,’ repeated Flossie. ‘You know, H-E-L-L.’

  ‘Ooerr,’ said Ryan.

  Albert thought that all this talk about spirits and ghosts was a load of rubbish but he went very quiet and put his wings over his head. He tried to sleep but the voices wouldn’t go away. All night they shouted at him and all night he ignored them. And then, just before dawn, the man stopped calling him and a woman’s voice came into his head and she spoke to him by name.

  ‘Bert,’ she said, ‘can you go to the Golf Club?’

  ‘They want me to go to the Golf Club,’ he said to Flossie.

  ‘Well then, we’d better go, hadn’t we,’ Flossie replied and together they flew off into the sunrise. As they coasted over the tall trees and out of the garden the voice said: ‘You better fly, you should’ve been there hours ago.’

  ‘Well, we’re hardly going to walk, are we?’ said Albert.

  When they reached the Golf Club, the two bats slipped up under the eaves of the clubhouse and slept. That night when they woke up Albert could hear nothing but wonderful clear silence and the soft noises of moths fluttering in the dark. Nor did he ever hear the voices in his head again except on Saturday nights when the radio taxis came to collect the golfers at closing time.

  Four Bluetits

  Two bluetits were sitting on a branch looking across the garden at a wooden nesting box nailed to the back of the house. Two other bluetits were hopping in and out of the box.

  ‘Look at it,’ said Max. ‘I ask you. Modern homes.’

  ‘I know,’ agreed Jim. ‘Plywood rubbish.’

  ‘I mean, that’s not a home, not a proper home you’d want to bring kids into, is it?’ said Max. ‘I mean, where are the nice knot holes and the rough bark crawling with all those tasty insects? Where are the body lice hiding in the cracks?’

  ‘Yeah, it’s just a bloomin’ box,’ said Jim.

  ‘I tell you what,’ Max continued, ‘you put a load of grass and fluff in there, six eggs and the wife, and the bottom’ll fall out of it. You’ll see.’

  ‘I know,’ agreed Jim, ‘but you can’t tell them, can you?’

 
‘Tell them, tell them? I should think not. I’ve not had a minute’s peace since those boxes were put up.’

  ‘The man’s put a couple of big ones up over there, see?’ said Jim. ‘And a pair of starlings were straight in there before he’d even put his hammer away.’

  ‘Well, what do you expect with starlings,’ laughed Max. ‘Thick as two short planks.’

  The two birds laughed so much they almost fell off their twig. Max hung upside down and said, ‘Here, how many starlings does it take to change a light bulb?’

  ‘Dunno?’

  ‘None, because they’re all too thick.’

  The two birds began laughing so much that this time they did fall out of the tree.

  ‘Well, you won’t get me into one of them,’ said Jim as they flew over to a new bird feeder. ‘Not in a million years.’

  ‘Isn’t it wonderful?’ said Trixie, hopping out of the nesting box. ‘A home of our own.’

  ‘Gorgeous,’ said Katie.

  ‘Every modern convenience you could wish for,’ said Trixie. ‘Just look at that entrance hole, a perfect circle.’

  ‘I envy you, I really do,’ agreed Katie.

  ‘And would you look at that perch. Go on, have a hop on it.’

  ‘Ooh, isn’t it fabulous,’ said Katie, ‘just the right size for your feet.’

  ‘I know. And look at that lovely bit of felt on the top and those shiny little nails. That’s quality that is.’

  ‘And what about Jim?’ asked Katie. ‘What does he think?’

  ‘Think, think? He doesn’t think,’ said Trixie. ‘He’s too busy hanging round that new bird feeder all day showing off to the sparrows to think.’

  ‘My Max won’t have one,’ said Katie. ‘He says they’ll fall to bits.’

  ‘They’ll outlast the pair of them,’ laughed Trixie. ‘My Jim’s so fat from eating peanuts I shouldn’t think he could even get in the door.’