Lester said, ‘It’s not entirely without interest. In it you can see Renoir moving away from straightforward Impressionism towards something more classical and sculptural. The woman at the front, for instance. And yet the play of light and shade across the umbrellas themselves is true to the original aims of—’
‘It’s lovely,’ said Mam.
‘The play of light and shade across the umbrellas? Yes, I think we can say he—’
‘The people,’ said Mam. ‘They’re out in the rain, but they’re all smiling or getting on with things. Why are they so happy?’
The man who’d been helping with the box said, ‘Maybe they’re somewhere where it hardly ever rains. Maybe that’s why he painted it? Because rain was a special occasion.’
‘Interesting,’ said Lester, ‘but incorrect. He painted this picture over a long period. He began it in 1881 and didn’t finish until 1886. I’m not saying it poured down continuously for five years, but I do think that we can assume a certain familiarity with rain over that period.’
‘Rain’s OK,’ I said, ‘if you’ve got an umbrella.’
‘Exactly,’ said Mam. ‘It’s umbrellas. You hardly see umbrellas any more, do you? Don’t they look lovely? Like big flowers. And every one of them’s got two people under it. Whispering, chatting, laughing. The umbrellas are like parties on sticks.’
And that was it. On Saturday morning, Mam took us all to the Pen-y-bont Car Boot Carnival (this year’s beneficiary the mid-Snowdonia meals-on-wheels) and told us all to go and look for umbrellas. I got two of those little telescopic black ones that fit in your glove compartment, and a golf umbrella the size of a satellite tracking station with ‘Gordon’s Gin – the Gin That Thinks It’s It’ written all round it. Minnie found a whole bag full of kids’ umbrellas with ducks and frogs on. Marie found a white one with a pearly handle which was more pretty than waterproof. Mam found a whole load too. And when she’d finished at the car boot, she took us to the Oxfam shop in Llanrwst, the Sue Ryder shop in Blaenau, and the Mountain Rescue shop in Manod, still looking for umbrellas. And when we got home, she went up into the loft and found three more there. Fifty umbrellas altogether.
She got Marie to paint some flowers and the words ‘Manod Parapluies – Take One, They’re Free’ on three of the old plastic flower bins from the shop. She put a bin full of umbrellas on the forecourt next to the papers. She put the second one in the bus shelter, and the third one she filled with the frog and duck umbrellas and on Monday she asked Ms Stannard to put it in the playground.
‘Umbrellas,’ said Ms Stannard. ‘There’s a health-and-safety issue there. They could poke each other’s eyes out.’
‘I never thought of that,’ said Mam.
‘Then again, if you can’t poke someone’s eye out in primary school, when can you? Let’s give it a go, Mrs Hughes.’
That lunchtime no one opted for Wet Play. Even though it was raining as hard as usual, everyone took an umbrella and played out. Actually there weren’t enough umbrellas, but that was OK. People just shared, like in the picture. In the playground, it felt like you were inside a great big restless tent. Back in the classroom, the Connect Four and the big draughts stayed in their boxes.
Most people in our school get a lift to school, but the morning after the umbrellas came, everyone took an umbrella and walked. From up where we are, at the top, in the garage, it looked like a cup-final crowd moving down the street.
It looked so good, people would come up to the garage just to look down the street. And they bought coffee! In the end Newspaper Arthur came and wrote about it:
Whatever the Weather
There are many unusual sights in Snowdonia but few as colourful as the so-called Manod March. Every morning at 8.50 and every afternoon at 15.45 the streets are briefly ablaze with colour. And what’s the reason? Umbrellas! Manodians have taken to doing the school run on foot, with umbrellas. ‘There’s no such thing as bad weather,’ says resident Mrs Porty, ‘there’s only inappropriate clothing.’ The massed umbrellas of Manod can be seen snaking up and down the whole length of the Blaenau Road like a psychedelic boa constrictor. When I say briefly, by the way, I mean it. Get there ten minutes too late and Manod is just another rainy, grey mountain town. That’s if you get there at all. There’s no sign for Manod on the A496 and the turn-off itself is difficult to spot, concealed as it is by the advertising billboard for Diggermania (Harlech).
Psychedelic boa constrictor! How hectic is that then? How many towns have a high street like a psychedelic boa constrictor?
And this time he put a picture of Marie in. She was smiling under the massive ‘Gin That Thinks It’s It’ umbrella. The caption said she was ‘singing in the rain’, but she wasn’t singing. She can’t sing.
If you ask her now, Marie says it was her smile, not the umbrellas, that did it. Whatever. The day after the paper came out, Dr Ramanan turned up before school, filled up with petrol and said he wanted to watch the umbrellas. Then came Sergeant Hunter in his Scorpio. ‘Just making sure it doesn’t constitute an obstruction,’ he said. Then another Toyota Prius and a Skoda Octavia with the Ellis brothers in it! Even though they now live in Conwy, their mam still reads the Month, and they’d come back to see the umbrellas. They had their Yu-Gi-Oh! cards with them, so we played that on the bonnet of the Octavia until Dr Ramanan shouted, ‘It’s starting!’ and they all looked down Blaenau Road. The Ellis boys got up on the roof of their Skoda to see better. Me and Minnie should’ve been gone by then, but we wanted to see it too. It was like a dance. One minute the streets were empty, the next minute there was the psycho whatsit boa constrictor. And then it was gone again as they all went round the corner into the school.
‘We’re late,’ said Minnie.
‘Yeah,’ said Mam and she kissed us both goodbye, which is a thing she hadn’t done for a while. ‘I used to hate the rain,’ she said. ‘Imagine how terrible it would be if the rain stopped now. We’d have no umbrellas.’
We walked back towards the shop and – guess what? There was a rainbow! And not an ordinary rainbow like you’d see in a normal town – a double rainbow. One really bright one, with another, fainter one floating just above it. The colours on the fainter one were back to front. It’s something to do with reflections. Sergeant Hunter said, ‘Congratulations, Mrs Hughes’, and it sounded like he thought she’d made the rainbow too.
26 May
Cars today:
CARBON BLACK BMW M5 – Mr Q. Lester
(new tyres and oil change!)
RED NISSAN X-TRAIL – man from the quarry
came by to collect Lester)
Weather – fine persistent rain
Note: WHO REALLY RULES THE WORLD
We could see this day coming a mile off. The first time I saw Lester’s tyres (6 April), I knew they wouldn’t last on the mountain road. I even said so. Go back and look it up if you like.
We were just walking up from school when we saw the BMW coming, heading for the garage. Only it wasn’t gliding along like a top-marque executive saloon. It was bouncing and wandering like a badly ridden quad bike. The tyres had gone.
When we got to the garage, Lester was walking up and down, really tense, like someone waiting for roadside assistance. Tom said, ‘Would you like a macchiato with vanilla?’
‘Thank you, no. I need to catch a train. I’m due in London.’
‘What about with caramel?’
‘No. Thank you.’
‘Butterscotch?’
I could see Lester was getting annoyed, so I said, ‘Marie can fix the tyres. She’ll be home in about ten minutes.’
He looked at his watch. ‘How long does it take her to change a tyre?’
‘Well, I’m no tyre expert,’ I said, ‘but I think you’ve burst two, not one.’
‘What!?!’ He ran outside to check. Front passenger side and rear driver side both as flat as pancakes.
‘And you’ve only got one spare,’ I said. ‘So we’ll have to go into Harlech to Acr
es of Tyres.’
Lester sort of yelped, then he took out his phone and started texting like mad. I explained to him that since he needed two new tyres anyway, he should really consider switching to the Pirelli P7s, which are ideal for rough conditions and that, since it was off the road anyway, he should take the opportunity to have an oil change, which I promised not to do myself.
He wasn’t really listening. He kept looking at his phone, like he was waiting for a reply to his text. Tom came out and said his mam might give him a lift. ‘She’d need directions, though. I don’t think she’s ever been to London.’
‘It’s all right. One of the men’s coming down to collect me. He’ll be here shortly.’
‘So,’ said Tom, ‘how’s the painting?’
‘What?’
‘The painting with the oranges. I liked that painting.’
‘Yes. Good, thank you,’ said Lester and he looked up the mountain road.
I suddenly noticed that this was an ideal opportunity. I said, ‘You know, while you’re waiting, you could come for a walk through Manod and see all the Hidden Beauty.’ I said it like that with capital letters, so he’d know I was still offended about him saying that Manod’s beauty was hidden.
‘Oh yes,’ said Tom. ‘You could start with my still life. That’s what started everything. Come and have a look.’
He took Lester over to see his window display. It wasn’t as colourful as it had been when he first did it. I think we might have mice, and there’d been some trouble between the chickens and the cornflakes.
Lester said, ‘It’s . . .’ but then an incoming text beeped his phone. He said, ‘Thank heavens,’ and went over to the gate.
‘It’s what?’ said Tom.
‘What?’ Lester was opening the gate. You could already see the big Nissan X-Trail powering over the rubble.
‘The still life.’
‘It’s cornflakes, isn’t it? And dried fruit?’
‘Yes. I couldn’t paint them, so I just bought them.’
‘Very ingenious. Very modern,’ said Lester. And the X-Trail rumbled through the gate on a set of Pirelli Scorpion STs.
‘The reason the beauty of Manod is hidden,’ I said to myself, ‘is that you won’t look at it.’
Lester said, ‘Must press on. I may still catch the train at Birmingham.’
‘If you’re going on a train,’ I said, ‘you should take a zebra with you. Always take a zebra with you if you’re going on a train.’
‘Why?’
‘So you don’t get hurt. Zebras almost never get hurt on trains.’
‘I’m sorry?’
It was like the highest-rainfall thing. It didn’t sound any good unless Dad was saying it.
I said, ‘Nothing. Sorry. Safe journey.’
Mind you, you have to be impressed by those Pirelli Scorpion STs. Nothing’s going to puncture them in a hurry.
As soon as Marie came home from school, Tom drove us all to Acres of Tyres in Harlech. Harlech’s by the seaside and it’s got a castle and a cinema and Diggermania, obviously, but the best thing it’s got is definitely Acres of Tyres. The next time we had to do one of those letters-to-Gumbi things, I wrote about Acres of Tyres:
Dear George
Thank you for your letter telling us about the giraffes. We don’t have giraffes in Wales, but we do have Acres of Tyres. Acres of Tyres is exactly what it says it is. It is acres and acres of tyres and you can walk around looking at them. It’s immense. They’ve got massive tyres for trucks and tractors and tiny ones for Smart cars. They’ve even got a section of tyres for pushchairs and wheelchairs. Most people don’t realize there are so many kinds of tyre. Even if you stand on top of something, all you can see is tyres, tyres, tyres. On the wall as you go in is a tyre from the Ferrari in which David Coulthard won the European Grand Prix. It’s huge and it’s got steel ribs sticking out of it. You can see where the rubber melted because the wheel was going so fast. Although it’s only supposed to be a shop, it’s really a whole day out. You need a whole day to appreciate it really.
There was a bit of an incident in the Meadow of Retreads, when a man in a bobble hat stepped out from behind the Tower of Radials and almost stood on my toe. It was Mr Davis, the butcher.
I said, ‘Sorry,’ even though it was his fault, not mine.
And he said, ‘You will be,’ which is exactly the kind of thing he always says. But then he said, ‘We all will be. We’ll all be sorry soon.’ And he looked at Minnie and Marie and Tom.
Tom said, ‘Why’s that then, Mr Davis? And by the way, Mam and me had some of your sausages last night and they were tip-top.’
‘Thank you, Tom,’ said Mr Davis. ‘You know what they’ve got hidden up in that quarry, I suppose.’
‘Paintings,’ said Tom. ‘We’ve seen some of them.’
‘Yes. The ones they want you to see.’
‘Well. Yeah. The one I saw was mostly fruit. You’d’ve liked it, Mr Davis.’
‘But what about the ones they don’t want you to see?’
‘Well,’ said Tom, ‘I didn’t see them, so I can’t say.’ He looked at me.
‘The paintings up there,’ said Mr Davis, and he made his voice even quieter. ‘are not just paintings. They’re information. Information about who really rules the world.’
‘Right,’ said Tom. ‘And who really does rule the world, Mr Davis?’
‘If I knew that,’ said Mr Davis, ‘I wouldn’t have spent my life up to my neck in scrag end somewhere in Snowdonia.’ Then he moved in closer and whispered, ‘Think about it. Paintings. A cave in Wales. What does that remind you of?’
‘Slate?’
‘King Arthur, isn’t it? The Holy Grail.’
We all looked at each other. And then we looked at the tyres. We were lost for words. Except for Tom, who said, ‘What’s the Holy Grail?’
Minnie said, ‘It’s the cup that Jesus used at the Last Supper. It’s got special powers. One of King Arthur’s knights is supposed to have found it. And they’re all supposed to be asleep in a cave.’
‘In Manod?’
‘Why not?’ said Mr Davis.
‘Because it’s not a cave,’ said Minnie. ‘It’s a quarry. It was first excavated in 1805, which is about thirteen hundred years too late for King Arthur, who, by the way, never worked down a quarry.’
Mr Davis looked at her, then he looked around as if he was worried that tyres might have ears. He said, ‘Why would they go to all that trouble to hide a few paintings? And why is there no sign for Manod on the A496? Secrets, see. A quarry full of secrets. That’s not paintings they’ve got up there. That’s power.’
We managed to get a full set of Pirelli P7 retreads (including a spare) for Lester for less than the price of two new tyres. Bargain!
On the way home, Tom said, ‘He’s an amazing man, that Mr Davis. He sees things no one else sees. Like the time he saw the flying saucer outside the dinner dance in Llechwedd. Hundreds of people at that dance, and he was the only one to spot the flying saucer.’
I said, ‘And he saw Elvis. In Harlech Home and Bargain.’
‘He’s barking mad,’ said Marie.
Minnie said, ‘He told me that liver was alive. Mam sent me down to buy liver, and he said he didn’t sell it. He said, liver is alive. He said, if you put it on a plate and come back ten minutes later, it will have moved.’
‘And will it?’ said Tom.
‘I don’t know,’ said Minnie. ‘He wouldn’t sell me any. We had to have meatballs.’
‘He’s right about the paintings, though,’ said Tom. ‘That fruit picture, that wasn’t normal. It made me feel funny. Maybe there is power in it.’
And as we turned up the Blaenau Road (B5565) I thought, Maybe Tom was right. Maybe the paintings weren’t just paintings. Manod had changed a lot since the paintings arrived. Maybe the paintings were like mutagen, changing the town. Maybe we were living in Ninja Manod!!
Back in the workshop, Marie started work on the oil change. I def
initely thought I’d be left on the bench for this job because of the mix-up with Ms Stannard’s Fiesta. But no, Marie needed all hands. Minnie read the instructions out of the manual and kept an eye on Max. Marie did all the technical things and I did all the fetching and carrying. When she sent me for oil, I made sure I read the can. When she asked me to get the car jack out of the boot, I discovered that there was a big wooden box in there, but I didn’t mention it. I didn’t want to distract anyone.
When she’d undone the engine drain, Marie told us that we had to leave it for forty-five minutes to make sure it was really empty. We were starving, but Marie didn’t want to have to get cleaned up and then come back and get dirty again. Minnie suggested making her something she could suck through a straw. Marie wasn’t convinced.
I said, ‘Lester’s left one of his paintings in the boot.’
‘He hasn’t.’
‘He has.’
‘We shouldn’t. Should we?’
‘No. Not with all this oil around.’
‘Maybe we could take it into the house?’
‘Then I’d have to get cleaned up,’ said Marie. ‘Which I don’t want to do.’ Then she put her hand over the box and went, ‘Can you feel the power?’
And we all laughed. And in the end we laughed and talked for forty-five minutes and forgot all about the painting in the box. And we did it! We all worked together and we did it – a new set of tyres and an oil change. That’s another lesson from the Turtles, see: each separate Turtle is good, but put them all together into a team and they are unbeatable. As Splinter says in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, the Movie (they’re mean, green and on the screen): ‘Together, there is nothing your four minds cannot accomplish. Help each other, draw upon one another, and always remember the true force that bonds you.’
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