Thunder and Lightnings

by Jan Mark

  ‘Perhaps he’s fishing in a grave,’ said Victor.

  ‘Perhaps he’s mad, he must be mad if he’s fishing in a grave,’ said Andrew.

  ‘I wonder what he think he’ll catch,’ said Victor. ‘Let’s go and have a look.’ They propped the bicycles against the iron railings and went up the path from the main gate.

  ‘He’s behind that big stone that looks like a table,’ said Andrew. ‘Let’s pretend we’re just walking through and have a look as we go by.’

  He tried to take in a quick glance as he sauntered past but Victor propped himself against the tombstone and stared.

  The man under the umbrella was drawing a picture. It seemed not to be a very good picture. Andrew thought this might be because the man was drawing mainly with the side of his thumb. He had a little camp stool, a holdall and a folder with the name J. F. Coates stencilled on the side of it.

  ‘Is that you?’ asked Victor, pointing to the name. Andrew realized that he had been reading it, not staring.

  ‘That’s right,’ said the man. ‘John Coates.’

  ‘Are you an artist?’ said Victor.

  The man looked out from under his umbrella.

  ‘Not what you’d call an artist,’ he said. ‘I draw pictures for books.’

  Seeing that Mr Coates didn’t seem to mind being disturbed, Andrew went back and had a look at the drawing. All he could see was a cloud of thumb smudges with a white space in the middle that was about the same shape as the church.

  Mr Coates looked at him.

  ‘I suppose you think I can’t draw,’ he said.

  ‘Yes,’ said Victor.

  ‘I can, actually,’ said Mr Coates. ‘It’s meant to look like that. And now I suppose you think I’m boasting and making excuses.’

  ‘Oh, no,’ said Andrew.

  ‘Well, I’m not,’ said Mr Coates. ‘Anybody can learn to draw. There’s nothing very clever about that.’ Victor looked at Mr Coates, then at his drawing, and then ran back down the path.

  ‘Has he gone off in disgust?’ asked Mr Coates.

  ‘I don’t think so. He can’t draw at all,’ said Andrew. Victor fetched the folder from the saddle bag and returned with it. He took out his drawing of a Lightning and held it out under the umbrella.

  ‘What do you think of that?’

  Mr Coates was an honest man. ‘I think it’s terrible,’ he said.

  ‘It’s easy to see you’re not a teacher,’ said Victor. ‘If you were a teacher you’d say, “That’s awfully good, what is it?”’

  ‘I know what it is,’ said Mr Coates. ‘It’s an aeroplane, or rather, it has been at some time in its career.’

  ‘A Lightning,’ said Victor.

  ‘I was beginning to guess as much,’ said Mr Coates. ‘It looks as though you tried to draw it from both sides at once. It isn’t made of Perspex, you know.’

  ‘Aluminium,’ said Victor. ‘I should think aluminium. My dad said, in the war they used to collect aluminium saucepans and melt them down to make aeroplanes.’

  ‘They collected them, all right,’ said Mr Coates. ‘But as far as I remember they didn’t make them into aircraft. It was the wrong kind of metal.’

  ‘What did they do with them, then?’ asked Andrew.

  ‘Probably melted them down and made more saucepans,’ said Mr Coates. ‘Look here, this beast wouldn’t fly. It might float, it wouldn’t fly.’ He turned the picture on its side and drew three little drogues on the end of it. ‘What does that remind you of?’

  ‘A space capsule,’ said Victor. ‘Re-entry. Splashdown.’

  ‘Different requirements entirely,’ said Mr Coates, drawing a row of spiky waves underneath. ‘If a cone was the best shape for an aircraft, aircraft would be conical.’

  While he was speaking he made a little picture in the corner of the paper. It was tiny, an inch long, but when he lifted his hand they could see that it was a Lightning.

  ‘You’ve drawn Lightnings before,’ said Victor.

  ‘I have,’ said Mr Coates, ‘so I know what ought to be there. You draw what you think should be there. I would suggest that, in future, before you draw a line you decide where it’s going to end. Don’t keep going until it looks as though it’s time to stop. You’ll always be too late.’

  All the time his pen was making marks on the paper. One after the other he drew a Spitfire, a Harrier and a Phantom, all tiny, but there was no mistaking them.

  ‘You like aeroplanes, don’t you?’ said Victor. ‘I thought artists drew ladies with no clothes on.’

  ‘Not all the time,’ said Mr Coates. ‘When I’m in Norfolk I like to draw aircraft. Haven’t you heard it said that Norfolk is the world’s largest aircraft carrier? Now, you can see what all these planes are, can’t you? They’ve all got something that makes them absolutely distinct from the others. How do you know this is a Harrier, for instance?’

  ‘It’s got big lugs,’ said Andrew.

  ‘What’s lugs?’ said Victor.

  ‘Ears,’ said Andrew, pleased to trip Victor with a word he didn’t know.

  ‘Oh, ears,’ said Victor. ‘Like me. I should have been called Harrier, not Victor. Victors have their engines in the wings. Harrier Skelton, that’s me.’

  ‘Exactly,’ said Mr Coates. ‘No one could mistake you for your friend here. You are quite a different shape. That’s just chance, though. Aircraft are different shapes because they need to be. That’s what you must look out for.’

  ‘Like fish,’ said Andrew. Victor made a fist at him.

  Mr Coates was drawing a Victor just above the Lightning. He joined them together with a line of ink.

  ‘That’s refuelling,’ said Victor.

  ‘Is your book going to be about planes?’ asked Andrew.

  ‘It’s not my book,’ said Mr Coates. ‘I’m doing half a dozen pictures for it. It’s about priory churches in East Anglia.’

  ‘What’s priory?’ asked Victor. ‘Is that what they’re built of? I thought churches were built of stone. This one is.’

  ‘A priory was a kind of monastery; you know what that is, don’t you? A priory church is one that was originally built as part of a priory. Very often, the church is the only part left.’ Mr Coates rubbed his thumb against a piece of charcoal and went back to making marks on his own drawing.

  ‘I think we’d better go now,’ said Andrew. He was tired of standing in the rain and thought that Mr Coates was tired of talking to them. ‘Thank you very much for telling us how to draw.’

  ‘I haven’t told you how to draw,’ said Mr Coates, putting his head out from beneath the umbrella again. ‘I’ve just warned you off guessing,’ and he went back under the umbrella like a tortoise into its shell.

  Andrew and Victor collected the bicycles, Victor examining his page of miniature aeroplanes.

  ‘I’ll have another go at drawing that Lightning when we get back,’ said Victor. ‘Now I know how that’s done.’

  ‘I thought you didn’t like learning things,’ said Andrew.

  ‘That wasn’t learning, that was just finding out,’ said Victor. ‘We found out quite a lot, didn’t we? About drawing and aircraft and priories, though I’ve forgotten that bit. What a good thing the library was shut.’

  ‘I liked that bit about Norfolk being the world’s largest aircraft carrier,’ said Andrew.

  ‘I knew that already,’ said Victor. ‘But I didn’t want to spoil it for him by saying so.’

  10. A Fine and Private Place

  Next day they went through Polthorpe churchyard again, in the hope that Mr Coates would still be there, sheltering from the rain under his fishing umbrella. There was no sign of him at all except for a little patch of flattened grass where his stool had been. Without the umbrella there was nowhere to shelter but in the lee of the big tombstone that looked like a table.

  ‘I like graveyards,’ said Victor, crouching behind it. ‘When I was a littl’un I used to play in Pallingham churchyard. I used to pretend the gravestones were little hou
ses. The one I liked best was round the back where we go over the wall. That’s a big one, with an iron fence round it, up to your knee, about, and there’s five graves inside. I used to think that looked just like a bed with people tucked up in it.’

  ‘I wish we could get into this one,’ said Andrew, wiping rain off his neck.

  Victor shrugged his collars higher round his ears. ‘I reckon there’s someone in there already,’ he said, and stood up to read the names on the top. It took him some time. ‘Thomas Sutton, also his wife Catherine also his wife Elizabeth. I wonder if he was married to them both at once.’

  ‘Perhaps they’re all in there,’ said Andrew.

  ‘There wouldn’t be room,’ said Victor. ‘This bit’s just the front hall, like. They must be underneath. I expect he’s in the middle with one each side, catching it in both ears.’

  Andrew tried to make out the dates but the stone was flaking and scabby with lichen.

  ‘His son’s under the next one,’ said Victor. ‘I think that must be his son. William Sutton, son of Thomas and Catherine.’

  Andrew moved round him to the next stone.

  ‘This one is William’s son, Thomas again. I think they’ve got the whole row to themselves.’

  They followed the Suttons, alternately Thomas and William as far as the church door. The last of the line broke with tradition. He was Albert, in a dry corner against the stonework of the porch.

  ‘Right out of the rain, lucky old Albert,’ said Victor. ‘Let’s go in for a bit. That’s not going to stop yet.’

  The floor of the church was paved with gravestones, from west door to altar. Up by the pulpit they found the oldest Sutton of all but they couldn’t read his name. All the words except Sutton, which was writ large, had been worn away by passing feet.

  ‘I shouldn’t fancy to have people walking about over me when I’m dead,’ said Victor.

  ‘You wouldn’t know anything about it,’ said Andrew.

  ‘Yes, I would. I’d come up and bite their feet as they went by. I’ll be the famous ghost of Pallingham. People will come and photograph the grave and there’ll be a little smudge down near the bottom of the picture and that’ll be me, whipping back inside,’ said Victor.

  ‘I don’t believe in ghosts,’ said Andrew, looking over his shoulder at a dark corner behind the organ. ‘Dead people can’t do anything.’

  ‘They can, though. Didn’t you ever see The Beast from the Pyramid?’ said Victor. ‘That was on the television one night. My mum and dad went out and I came downstairs and watched that with my sister. She got scared and put all the lights on, even in the bathroom.’ Victor sat down in a pew and stretched out his legs. ‘There was this man, see, he was the Beast, who died millions of years ago and when this explorer came and opened up the pyramid, this man, the Beast, that was, came out of his box all wrapped in bandages.’

  ‘But that’s not true,’ said Andrew, who thought that Victor should not be telling ghost stories in church. ‘It never really happened.’

  ‘I’ve seen pictures, at school,’ said Victor. ‘These people, they used to wrap up dead bodies to stop them going bad.’

  ‘I know,’ said Andrew. ‘It was the Ancient Egyptians, but it wasn’t millions of years ago. And it wasn’t winding them up that stopped them going bad. They used to take the inside out and put something else in, instead.’

  ‘Sage and onion?’ said Victor.

  ‘Don’t be daft,’ said Andrew. ‘Spices and that.’

  ‘Sage and onion isn’t any more daft than spice,’ said Victor. ‘They weren’t going to cook them, were they? Anyway, all the explorers had gone back to their tent and this lady come out in her nightie and go flapping about all over the pyramid.’

  ‘Why did she do that?’

  ‘I don’t know. Not for any reason, I don’t suppose. There wouldn’t have been any more story if she hadn’t. Ladies,’ said Victor, ‘always wear nighties in that sort of film. Anyway, just as she get to the end of this passage the Beast come out in his bandages, round the corner, and all the lights went out.’

  ‘In the pyramid?’

  ‘No, our meter ran out of money and the television went off as well and we couldn’t find any more money in the dark. That was because of my sister having all the lights on. She wouldn’t get off the settee in the dark. I had to go looking for ten pence to put in. She was too scared to move. I reckon she thought the Beast was in the kitchen waiting for her. By the time I found her purse the film was over and the adverts were on. I never found out what happened.’

  ‘I’ve seen mummies in a museum,’ said Andrew. ‘Some of them were unwrapped. They were ever so little, not like real people at all.’

  ‘Let’s do a project on mummies,’ said Victor. ‘We could make one ourselves.’

  ‘Who are you going to use?’ asked Andrew.

  ‘I didn’t mean a real one,’ said Victor. ‘Though I can think of a few people I wouldn’t mind seeing wrapped up. Jeannette Butler, for one.’

  ‘I’d rather stick to aeroplanes now we’ve started,’ said Andrew. ‘The library’s open today, isn’t it? Let’s go across and see if they’ve got any books.’

  ‘They should have,’ said Victor. ‘Seeing as that’s a library.’

  The library was a clanging tin shed behind the church. The lady librarian gave them each an application card and told them to have it filled in by their parents.

  ‘My mum’s out,’ said Victor. ‘You’ll be shut before I can get back again. I don’t want to wait till Tuesday. Can’t we take some books with us now?’

  ‘What’s the hurry?’ asked the librarian. ‘I know you, Victor Skelton. You’ve lived here for twelve years and this is the first time you’ve set foot in the library. It won’t hurt you to wait a few more days.’

  ‘My mother used to work in a library,’ said Andrew. ‘Couldn’t you trust us?’

  ‘It’s not a matter of trust,’ said the librarian. ‘The rule is that you must have that card signed by your parents. There’s nothing to stop you looking at the books while you’re here.’

  ‘All right, then,’ said Victor. ‘Where do you keep the aeroplanes?’

  The librarian thought he was trying to be funny and asked him if he was sure it was a book he wanted.

  ‘We want to look at some books about aircraft,’ said Andrew and wondered if Mum was as tiresome as this when she got behind a counter.

  ‘Aircraft are under “Transport”,’ said the librarian, pointing over her shoulder with a pen.

  In Polthorpe Library transport included antique bicycles, skiing and whitewater canoeing. There were only two books on aviation. Victor went back to the desk.

  ‘Could you reserve these for us until Tuesday?’ he said.

  ‘I can’t reserve books until you are a member,’ said the librarian. ‘However, I have to close the library now so no one will want them today. If you come early on Tuesday they’ll still be here, won’t they? Now put them back tidily.’

  Victor replaced the books and followed Andrew to the door. The librarian watched them all the way. When Victor reached the door he turned round, balled his hand into a fist and stuck out the first and last fingers, like horns, pointing straight at the librarian.

  ‘Don’t do that,’ said Andrew, hauling him out.

  ‘That’s the sign against the evil eye,’ said Victor.

  11. Mother and Son

  Andrew hoped that Victor would come round and see him on Friday but instead he saw Victor’s mother turning in at the gateway. Andrew ran into the kitchen to warn Mum.

  ‘Mrs Skelton’s coming up the path,’ he said. ‘She’s coming to see us.’

  Mum was leaning over the side of the playpen, handing Edward a piece of bread and butter. He took it in both hands and twisted it in opposite directions like a man tearing up phone directories.

  ‘Coming to see us?’ said Mum. ‘Or coming to inspect us? Do we get a certificate when she’s been?’ Mum had heard about Mrs Skelton’s housekeepin
g.

  Andrew could hear feet crunching on the gravel at the side of the house. He looked round the kitchen for something to put away and decided to fold up the ironing board. As he propped it against the wall he noticed that Ginger had been walking along it with muddy paws, leaving a trail of pussy footprints from one end to the other.

  Mrs Skelton was at the back door. Mum was still wrestling with Edward. As she backed away from the playpen he reached up with buttery fingers and grabbed the knot of hair at the back of her neck.

  ‘Buttered bun,’ said Andrew. Hairpins dropped out and it unrolled into a long skein with Edward swinging on the end. Mrs Skelton knocked.

  Mum rolled up her hair again and drove a skewer through it to keep it in position.

  ‘That’s not funny,’ said Andrew, seeing the skewer. Mum opened the door and looked down, suddenly. Victor’s mother only reached her shoulder.

  ‘Come in, Mrs Skelton,’ said Mum. Andrew dodged into the living room, leaving the door open so that he could hear what was going on.

  ‘I’m looking for Victor,’ said Mrs Skelton. ‘I thought he might have dropped in here.’

  ‘I haven’t seen him today,’ said Mum. ‘Do sit down. Won’t you have some coffee?’

  There was a thump as Victor’s mother sat down.

  ‘I won’t stay for coffee, thank you,’ she said.

  I bet she’s afraid of catching something from our cups, thought Andrew.

  ‘Victor seem to come here rather a lot,’ said Mrs Skelton. ‘I hope he’s no trouble to you.’

  ‘No trouble at all,’ said Mum. ‘No trouble to me, anyway. We like to see him. Besides, he’s only been here two or three times.’

  ‘I should think that seem a lot,’ said Mrs Skelton. ‘It do him good to go about with your Andrew. He don’t have many friends. He’s a bit backward.’

  You old boot, thought Andrew.

  ‘I wouldn’t call Victor backward,’ said Mum. ‘He doesn’t seem backward to me. From what Andrew tells me he’s very knowledgeable about aircraft. And gorillas. He’s very well up on gorillas.’

  ‘What good will that do him?’ said Victor’s mother, peevishly. ‘I think you’ve got something caught in your hair, at the back, Mrs Mitchell.’