by Dirk Bogarde
No one really cared. That was the worst part. They just sat there eating their cold ham and talking about going down to the post office after lunch to see if there were any letters and save the van a journey up the hill. And I just sat on a big flowerpot and looked at the broken cage and thought of all the happy times I’d had with Sat and Sun, just watching them really. When I thought of all the snow and ice in the winter and how terrible it would be for them I felt awful. And what was worst of all, I looked up, and sitting on the top of one of the posts in the fence was Minnehaha, looking all of a mess. Watching me. So I just chucked their food bowl at him. Hard. It didn’t hit him, only the post, and it skipped off into Great Meadow and so did he. And I just sat. It was a really rotten morning.
Then I heard Lally coming down the path. I knew it was her because she was singing ‘Moonlight and Roses’ quite loudly. I knew she was singing loudly so I’d hear and have time to wipe any snot away, but there wasn’t any. I don’t blub so anyone can see. So that was all right.
‘Well, so that’s where you’ve got to!’ she said, as if she didn’t know all the time, because she could have seen me plain as plain from the window over the sink. But I didn’t say anything, and when she said, ‘No lunch then?’ I just shook my head, and she said that perhaps I’d better go and have a look for Minnehaha because he was in rather a state after jumping through the kitchen window and taking the fly-paper with him. We always had fly-papers hanging about the place, like long twisty strips of old apple peeling, and that was why he looked a bit of a mess sitting on the post. But I just shrugged. Lally said she couldn’t stand about all day and that it would take hours to cut all his fur off and she wasn’t about to do it so I’d better start looking for him, and by the by, she’d opened the last jar of our mother’s own piccalilli and if I wanted some I’d better make haste before Miss Fernackerpan took the lot. So I got up. It was easier to do what she wanted than to sit there really. And it was a bit worrying about Minnehaha and the fly-paper. I’d have to cut all his fur off and that would be very difficult.
1 The ‘cottage’, 1930. Rented for 7/6 a week.
2 My father, just after joining The Times, 1912.
3 With my parents at Sainte-Cécile, France, 1922.
4 At Wimereux, with my boat made by my father, 1926.
5 My sister posing for a ‘Drink More Milk’ campaign, about 1927.
6 With Mama on the beach at Deauville, 1926ish.
7 With the new Salmson, a French car which my father loved and drove at Brooklands. Summer, 1926.
8 The only existing ‘snap’ of Lally, with my sister. Cuckmere, 1930.
9 Mama at the annual Astor Garden Party for The Times. Hever Castle, 1927.
10 At Melrose Abbey, 1928.
11 My Parents, in the blue OM. This pre-dated the all-silver one. 1929–30.
12 An aerial view of the cottage and Great Meadow. Taken by my father in 1930.
Walking up slowly through the rows of runner beans and the sprouting broccoli, Lally suddenly said, very nicely, ‘I tell you what. When the parents come back from Germany I shall have a week off to see Mr and Mrs Jane, Friday to the following Monday, and I wonder if you would both like to come with me? You’d have to share the big bed, like always, but I reckon, if you’d like to come, the parents would be delighted to get rid of you and be on their own. Would that cheer you up then?’
Well, she knew it would. After the cottage, Walnut Cottage, Twickenham, was the very best place in the world, so I quickly said yes before she changed her mind.
‘Well, that’s that. I’ll drop Mrs Jane a postcard just to warn her . . .’
‘About the Weekend, it’s all my fault you know,’ I said. ‘Really, I mean. If only I had left them in the lean-to, and made a sort of umbrella-thing for shade, or if I’d made some more air holes, and if I hadn’t put them on the shelf on the stairs, Minnehaha wouldn’t have jumped up on them . . .’
‘If “ifs” and “ands” were pots and pans, there’d be no need for tinkers!’ said Lally. ‘No use fretting. You come and have a bit of Mr Wilde’s home-cured and then, quick sharp, go and find that dratted cat.’
But no sign. I called and called and called. Nothing. I went to all the places I knew he might have been, lying rolled up in fly-paper, at the back of the privy, in the nettlebed by the rubbish heap, even up in the churchyard behind the Well Beloved and Departed This Life stones, but no. Not a sign anywhere. Not a meow, not a whimper. It was very worrying. But Lally told me to get-a-move-on-do, and while she was adjusting her white halo-hat (only used for Best or Hampstead – there was a black one for funerals or the theatre) she said he’d very likely come back in the cool of the evening, when he got a bit hungry. And not to forget to wear our ‘hates’, awful cotton things we had to wear because of sunstroke (I ask you), and that she was only wearing her white because her beret was red, and she didn’t want all those heifers, or cows, to come calumping up to her and giving her a terrible turn in all this heat, which would do for her.
‘I’ve never forgotten those terrible great eyes, rolling about in those huge heads, and all that spittle dribbling down from their frothy mouths! A terrible turn that was. Don’t tell me they aren’t mad. Stark staring mad, and I attract them. Anything red and I’m done for, anything. Come along now, do . . . we’ll keep to the lane side of the hedge down to the Court. Got the basket?’
It was lovely and cool and shadowy in Wilde’s the grocer’s, and quite peaceful except for all the wasps zooming about the Demerara sugar drawer and the South African sultanas like angry swallows. A lot of them got stuck on the spirals of fly-paper all over the shop, and that was a bit rotten because it reminded me of Minnehaha, but Mr Wilde said he’d be stung to death if he didn’t deal with the ‘wapsies’ (that was his name for them). Miss Maltravers, who was sitting in her little cage-thing up at the end of the shop (and serve her right, she was such a Nosey Parker), kept fanning herself with a pad of postal orders, and the draft jiggled all the fly-papers round her scales, and fluttered the papers on her counter so she had to put tins of pineapple chunks on them to keep them from blowing about the shop.
‘Well, I do declare! Miss Jane! And you don’t often grace our premises, more is the pity for us here.’
‘Too much to do up the top. These children would run wild given half a blink. The cat’s got caught in the fly-paper. He’s lost his white mice. And I don’t know what next. I’ll have a three-ha’penny stamp please, Miss Maltravers.’
‘It’s for Great Britain I take it?’ She was tearing a little stamp very delicately out of her big stamp-book. ‘No one abroad? Because, as you know, Miss Jane, that comes extra.’
‘I don’t know anyone abroad except a cousin in Hayling Island, and I believe that is still in Great Britain even though it’s an island. Am I correct?’
‘You certainly are! It all belongs to King George, and that’s a comfort even if they do say he’s really a German. But, you see, a diluted German. That takes the fizz out of them, if you follow.’
Then, after thanking us, she began fanning herself again and Lally read out her list of things for tomorrow and we posted the letter in the box in the wall just outside the shop. So that was that. Tomorrow Mrs Jane would get the good news that she’d have to get the big bed ready and aired in the little room looking over the back garden and the old pear, and very likely, if we were really lucky, we’d have Gravesend shrimps and whelks and winkles for tea. And that would be the very best thing of all, with bread and butter and a homemade raspberry sponge after.
Going down Sloop Lane to the river and the bridge, Lally told me to carry the basket while she counted the change in her purse. ‘There it lies!’ she said. ‘I was wondering about that spare ha’penny. Never can be sure, they sweep them up before your very eyes. A penny ha’penny for a postcard . . . I ask you!’
‘You put it in an envelope, so it went like a letter,’ I said.
‘I know I did. Postcards are for everyone to read, and Miss Malt
ravers has gimlet eyes, as we all know, and I am not about to have her spreading it all over the village that I have my week off soon, and please to make me an appointment at the barber’s, and that you’ll both be coming with me. That’s our affair. Anyway, I had to let Mother know: can’t give her a Scarborough warning, can I, not with three of us and the big bed to air. She’s not a girl any longer. Oh no . . .’
‘What’s a Scarborough warning?’
‘I don’t know, so don’t ask, but I don’t want to give her one. All I know is they can give you a regular fright. Ask no questions, you’ll hear no lies . . .’
So I shut up, and we all crossed the white bridge over the Cuckmere.
Chapter 7
The long shed at Walnut Cottage went all down the brick garden wall. The roof was just ripply tin, and one side, looking on to Mrs Jane’s drying-lawn and the big pear tree, was all windows. Different sorts of windows, joined together, which Mr Jane had collected from places where he had worked. Inside, it was dusty and dim, because the windows were cobwebby. There was a long work-bench nicked and scarred with saw marks, and rusty tins of paint and creosote. It smelled of winter onions and corn for the hens, wrinkled apples and boxes of shallots. Up on the brick wall there was a snarling fox mask, which terrified my sister, who said that it watched her wherever she went, and sneered at her. It couldn’t possibly because it was just a mask, just an old head, stuck on a wooden shield. There was a stuffed pike and some perch, with orange fins, which I rather liked, and a big set of wooden drawers, but quite small ones, with printed labels on them saying ‘Hinges’ or ‘1/2 in. Screws’ or ‘Tacks’ and that sort of thing. Mr Jane was very tidy when he wasn’t being forgetful, which Mrs Jane said was getting more and more ‘frequent’. I think she meant more often.
He was setting a lot of things down on the work-bench and I had to say what they were. It was a bit boring, but he was very nice really and he said I had to know how to ‘handle things’. I didn’t much want to, but I was a guest after all. So.
‘What‘s this then? This thing?’
‘A spoke-shave.’
‘Yers. And this?’
‘A hammer.’
‘Ar . . . but what kind of hammer? Got to be clear.’
‘A claw-head hammer?’
‘Is right. This yere . . .?’
‘I don’t know. Yes I do. A kind of saw . . .’
‘If you know, what saw is it?’
‘Jig.’
‘Got ‘im. And this yere? Different saw, you know it?’
‘Yes. For keyholes.’
‘And this then, what about this?’
And it was a small box-thing, with spotty brown paper on its back, and a lot of dust, and when I turned it round it was the most marvellous thing I’d ever seen. Well, for a very long time. Since we’d arrived anyway. It had two stuffed voles in it. Real, but dead. Little water voles, and they were sitting on a piece of paper riverbank stuff, with tufts of dried grasses and a bit of fern, and one vole was poking its head out of a hole, and the other was eating a nut or something. It was really terrifically exciting. I mean, they looked so real and everything.
‘What’s them then?’
‘They are voles. Water voles. Stuffed.’
‘Yers. See the date, down the bottom? Fallen off, has it?’
He sounded anxious, but it was all right because it hadn’t fallen off, it was just a bit squinty, and it said, in gold letters, ‘Pair of common voles. May ‘88’. Mr Jane said a friend of his did a bit of stuffing in the old days and this pair had been taken down at Strawberry Hill before all the building had started. But then it was just fields and only the park when he was a lad. He said he was sorry to hear that my pets had ‘gorn’, and would I like to have the voles because he didn’t want them and Mrs Jane wouldn’t have them in the house because of fleas or bugs. I thought it was very decent of him to think of Sat and Sun and to give me the voles, and I shook his hand and thanked him. He smelled of cough-drops, even though it was summer, and then blew the dust off the glass case and said it was mine. So I took it and went off to the house to show everyone and just when I got into the yard the yard door opened and someone came in pushing a bike and holding the door into the front garden wide open. Then it slammed shut and Mr Jane said who was that young chap banging around? And it wasn’t a young chap at all. It was Lally. With no hair. Well, anyway, not much. We just stood staring down the yard, and she waved, and leant her bike against the walnut tree. She smoothed down her skirt and then, of course, you could see it was not a ‘young chap’ at all.
I asked what had she done, and she said, ‘To what, pray?’
Mr Jane said, ‘Your ‘ead is what. Wait till Mother sees what you gone and done.’
And Lally said she was over twenty-one and she liked it and where was the mirror in this house?
So it was a bit boring really. I mean, now no one was interested at all in my voles and my sister made a sort of gasping sound and said, ‘Oh! What’s happened? What did you do?’ to Lally, who was poking bits of hair round her ears and she said she’d ‘merely had my hair cut’.
Then Mrs Jane came into the scullery where we all were and gave a terrible screech, and it was just one word, ‘Nelly!’, very loud indeed. That was pretty terrible because ‘Nelly’ was really Lally’s family name, only, no one ever called her that unless it was truthfully serious. So this was.
‘What have you done, girl?’ said Mrs Jane standing at the kitchen door with a colander of runner beans.
‘I’ve had my hair cut, Mother. You knew I was going to the Salon Elite, I asked you to make the appointment. Over at the Green.’
‘I can’t believe it! Bless my sister’s cats! You look just like a boy!’
And Lally just looked at herself in the mirror over the sink and smiled and smiled and said she knew that, it was all The Thing. You could see Mrs Jane was vexed, or worried, or something, because she just pushed Lally aside and set the colander in the sink and turned on the tap very fast, and you could see she was angry. And Lally said that everyone is doing their hair this way now, it was cooler and easier to manage. And Mrs Jane said, ‘Manage! I’ll give you manage, my girl – with the back of my hand if you weren’t over age!’
Lally said that she was over age so leave it be. Mrs Jane grumbled and rinsed the beans, and my sister and Mr Jane went out into the yard together. I was just hoping and hoping that there would be a quiet time when I could show the voles to someone. But no one was interested, so I didn’t. Mrs Jane turned off the tap and asked whoever looked like that in Twickenham, she’d like to know. And Lally said, ‘Oh! Mother, do give over. Gooze next door looks like this.’
Mrs Jane said that Gooze-Next-Door was soft in the head, and had been all her life, and if that’s how Lally wanted to look, that’s just how she did.
So I just took my voles and went back to the long shed, where I could hear them all talking away like anything. It was pretty mouldy really: no one cared about my present or how kind it was of Mr Jane to think of Sat and Sun and that sort of thing. So I found a piece of rag and cleaned the glass front, and polished it up a bit, and I heard my sister shouting away at Mr Jane as they came down the path from the greenhouse.
‘I bet you will never guess what!’ she said, and her face was all smiley and secret-looking, so I said I was busy cleaning the vole box so I could take it into the house and then she said (quite nicely actually), ‘Mr Jane has given me a whole bunch of grapes. He put a piece of red string round a bunch and said that it was mine. When they are ripe. My bunch is the red one. Wasn’t that very sweet of him?’
So I said yes, and found a hole in the spotty brown paper on the back of the stuffed voles. Which was quite interesting, because if I could find a mothball I could drop one in, and then there would be no fleas or bugs and I’d be allowed to take it up to our room. So that cheered me up, and I was quite curious watching Mr Jane, who was opening some of his little wooden drawers full of screws and tacks and three-inch nails. L
ooking for something. I wondered if he had any mothballs. I mean, you never know.
My sister suddenly said, ‘I told Mr Jane that you would like a bunch of grapes too. From Hampton Court. So he’s looking for the string to tie on your bunch. I told him you’d be very happy if you had one.’ So, you see, she was pretty decent really. I mean, if you ever found out. It was quite difficult sometimes, but she did make me feel I really and truly liked her. So I said, ‘Thank you,’ and then asked Mr Jane if he had any mothballs. But he was a bit deaf and didn’t hear so I shouted. My sister said, ‘Don’t shout he’s not deaf, you are rude.’
But he was staring at me, with a ball of raffia in his hand. ‘What say?’ he called across the shed, so I said it again, and he shook his head and said to ask Mother. Then he said best go and have another look at the Hampton Court vine down at the greenhouse, and with a pair of scissors and the ball of raffia he wandered into the yard. We followed, only, I left the voles behind so they’d be safe. In the greenhouse he told me to choose my own bunch. I saw my sister’s hanging up among the leaves with a long red wriggle of tape, so I chose one almost as big as hers, and Mr Jane tied a bit of the raffia round it. He was whistling under his breath and grunting a bit, but then it was done, and we looked at our bunches.