Hens Dancing

by Raffaella Barker

  August 24th

  Home again. House seems vast after Donegal cottage, but garden a minuscule doll’s house version of a jungle, now that I am used to having the serene sea as my lawn. Make shepherd’s pie in triumphant non-fashion statement. Shaking Worcester sauce into it and enjoying nursery-kitchen aroma, I know that I am a pedestrian housewife at heart rather than chic free spirit with a need for everything perfect about me. The Beauty is overjoyed to be home, and dashes from room to room shouting, ‘Ha ha,’ and patting cushions. Rags returns in the sidecar of Smalls’s motorbike, and The Beauty squats on the doorstep and hugs her. Have terrible anticipatory butterflies by the time Felix and Giles are dropped off.

  ‘Mummy, we’re back.’

  ‘Hello-oo, where are you?’

  They burst through the front door ahead of Charles and are so different. Brown and freckled faces which have cheekbones I had never noticed before are smiling at me. Felix nearly as tall as Giles, and both surely six inches taller than a week ago. The Beauty jumps up and down wrinkling her nose and shouting, “Allo, ‘allo,’ at anyone listening. Charles is international man of mystery in appearance, with suntan and his usual smirk. Practically push him out of the door before the boys can say thank you, so desperate am I to have them to myself again.

  August 25th

  Club Med was not a success. ‘It was like a prison with a huge fence and we never saw Mount Etna,’ is Felix’s verdict on the holiday, and, in mitigation: ‘There were loads of really cool lizards, and I saw a snake in the swimming pool.’

  Giles is hardly less surreal. ‘They had a thing called the Black and White Minstrel Show at night, and we did circus stunts every morning and it was so hot that one boy passed out and fell off the trapeze and had to go to hospital in a helicopter.’ He pauses, looks at me measuringly and adds, ‘Helena liked the entertainment. She wanted to do belly dancing, but Dad wouldn’t let her.’

  Mind boggles. Cannot wait to see holiday snaps.

  August 26th

  Mistakenly saw garden as jungle on my return from Ireland. Closer inspection reveals it to be arid parched zone with yellowing bindweed, vast sunflowers and strident fuchsias. Must do something about it. Good intentions are set back when putting on wellingtons. Sidney has been using them as a game larder. Unearth a dried shrew in one red ankle-length boot, and the tail feathers of a blackbird in the high-heeled aubergines. Discouraged, I opt for my oldest pair, green with holes in heels and soles, and stomp out leaving Felix, The Beauty and Giles watching Dirty Dancing, our latest bargain from the Spar shop, and at £2.99 for two hours, cheaper than a babysitter.

  Satisfying session with wheelbarrow and spade getting rid of all but the sunflowers in readiness for autumn planting. Am wiping brow and enjoying dark chocolate brownie texture of the soil I have turned, when gravel-crunching and vehicle-groaning interrupts. A small blue van with Heath Robinson trailer is inching up the drive, terrible squeals suggesting a need for oil. Waving from the front seat and beaming are Vivienne and Simon. I chuck my tools down and rush to bang on the playroom window, interrupting Patrick Swayze at a particularly suggestive moment.

  ‘Quick, boys, the piglets are here.’

  This visit was arranged months ago when Simon’s sow, Portia, gave birth to fourteen piglets, some spotty like fruitcake, some ginger and some plain pink. All very clean and reminiscent of old-fashioned sweetshops and Sam Pig stories. Had powerful desire to knot red spotted handkerchiefs around their necks. Simon offered us six of them. ‘You can have them to stay and they’ll clear some of your rough ground,’ he said, flicking cigarette ash into his jacket pocket, his face smothered in generous smiles at the thought of his clever plan for getting someone else to bring them up for him.

  Six piglets in June, when they fitted into the palm of a hand or the crown of a hat, had seemed scarcely adequate for the rough ground, but now six large snouts sniff the air. Hairy faces and guttural grunts greet the boys, reaching towards the bars of the trailer to stroke them. They are warned off by Simon.

  ‘No, wait. Let them get used to you. Their teeth are very sharp. Come on, let’s put up the fence,’ he says, and wreathing the boys in electric fencing tape, marches off with them to the wood.

  Vivienne is still sitting in the car, with The Beauty beside her, standing at the wheel as if she is Boadicea, making vrooming noises and waggling all the levers. Keen to sit down after my digging, I climb into the back seat for a rest. Next to me is the watering-can handbag, no longer an object for derision, but somehow amusing and chic, and coordinating with Vivienne’s sea-green cashmere cardigan and little lavender skirt. Am amazed at her choice of outfit for pig husbandry.

  ‘How can you keep clean?’ I ask in wonder, glancing down at my formerly white jeans, now skewbald with mud patches and speckled like an egg where I spilt tea on myself at breakfast time.

  Vivienne strokes The Beauty’s hair. ‘I’m not clean, these clothes are filthy, that’s why I’m wearing them.’

  Evidently, we have different standards of hygiene.

  Felix runs up from the wood.

  ‘Simon says can you bring them down now, and he says you’d better drive across the lawn.’ He gives Vivienne his most pleading look.

  ‘Vivienne, please, please could I drive?’

  She is no match for him.

  ‘All right then, at least you can see over the steering wheel, unlike your sister.’

  The Beauty is passed back to me, rigid with fury, howling into my ear. I elect to walk with her, and we stand well back as Felix crunches the gears and bounces van, Vivienne and piglets across the lawn. Simon and Giles are putting the finishing touches to the corral, and with an old door propped up on bales for a house, and a big sink as a water trough, it is very inviting and Three Little Pigs-ish. Blood-curdling screams and trumpetings herald the piglets as the ramp of the trailer comes down, but no movement follows. Two fruitcake ones are prone across the doorway, the rest milling about behind them unable to work out the route. Simon shakes a bucket of food and the fruitcakes leap to attention, trotting out and into their field like veterans. Vivienne has reclaimed The Beauty, and takes her into the corral to sit on the largest piglet. An early morning oversight prevented The Beauty from dressing today, and sitting on the rusty brown piglet in her white embroidered nightie she looks like a painting, maybe ‘Baby Circe and the Swine’. Must ask my mother if Circe knew any pigs as a baby.

  ‘They love having their backs rubbed with a stick,’ says Vivienne, and Giles and Felix set to work at once, scrubbing away.

  ‘Mummy, look,’ Felix shrieks, and his piglet succumbs and collapses, front legs buckling first, until it is flat on its side and grunting blissfully, Felix still scratching away at the back of its neck.

  August 28th

  We love the piglets so much that Giles and Felix are moving in with them. They have cooked supper, sausages unfortunately, on a little fire just outside the electric fence, and are now snuggled down in a row with the ginger piglet and two pinks in the pig shack. Giles and Felix have sleeping bags, but are sprawled on top of them, sound asleep. Dusk is giving way to a hot, still night, and I hover with Rags between the house where The Beauty slumbers and the pig shack, unsure as to whether I should sleep out with the boys. Golden harvest moonlight glimmers on the pond, and, inhaling deep calm, I smell the nicotianas I planted rather late on and hear distant squawk of a tawny owl. Wonder if I might be nervous with just a few pigs and a tiny terrier to protect me and my children from spooks and worse. Distant squawk comes closer and up the drive, apparently preceded by Salvation Army tambourine. Out of the shadows cast by trees at the gate steps David, rattling a biscuit tin and followed closely by three piglets.

  ‘I found this lot on the green, and I thought I’d better get them back to you before anyone saw them. They aren’t allowed to go anywhere without a licence, you know.’

  The three piglets are grinding their teeth and salivating expectantly at our feet. I chuck the biscuits into their cor
ral and they spring over the fence in pursuit. This must be how they escaped, but cannot imagine how I failed to notice their absence; anyway, am delighted to see David.

  ‘Thank God you saw them. Would you like to stay the night now you’re here?’

  David’s face is black and white like an old movie in the moonlight; he laughs.

  ‘Why?’

  I point to snoring boys and piglets.

  ‘I wondered if you might sleep out here with them because I can’t make up my mind whether I should be here or inside with The Beauty.’ As the words leave me I realise that the request is ambiguous and that I may have propositioned him. Blush scarlet, but probably appear grey in moonlit night. David does not seem enthusiastic or eager. I make it all worse.

  ‘If you stayed, I wouldn’t have to sleep outside.’

  ‘No, you wouldn’t.’ He glowers through the dusk at me, then capitulates. ‘Oh, all right then. Have you got another sleeping bag and a tent, or do I have to go in the pigsty as well?’

  Fall over biscuit tin in hopping excitement and grovel happily. ‘No, no, I’ll get you some stuff. Would you like a camp bed and a pillow as well?’

  Withering glare, and David mutters, ‘Don’t push it, Venetia, just give me the pillow and forget the bloody camp bed.’ I run to the scullery to unearth the tent, congratulating myself on my good fortune. Now that I do not have to do it, can acknowledge sensation of utter terror at prospect of spending night outside and in charge. Pimple tent is erected in moments and I crawl around inside making it cosy by laying out a pillow and lime-green sleeping bag in which David will look like a glow-worm.

  ‘What would you have done if I hadn’t come?’ David is sitting on the steps by the pond smoking a cigarette. Sit down next to him and am instantly bitten by three midges, so start scratching.

  ‘I don’t know, I think I’d have had to drag the boys back inside, or else spend the whole night patrolling between here and the house.’

  ‘Don’t, you’ll make it worse.’ His hand is warm over mine on my leg, stopping my absent-minded scratching. My heart is hammering away and we look at each other for half a second which feels like several hundred years. Leap up, unable to cope with suspense and anything more significant, and scuttle off to the house shouting, ‘Ni-ight, sleep well,’ very casually over shoulder.

  August 29th

  Breadcrumb-head and peeled-eye sensation caused by night listening to the hall clock ticking and wondering how to face David in the morning. Needn’t have bothered as he is not here. The Beauty makes straight for the pig zone before I can even get her bottle from the kitchen, and peeps into the tent in the hope of action. Finding none, she crawls into the sleeping bag to make sure, but all is empty. The boys crawl out from their shack, shaking off straw and yawning. The Beauty is diverted and heads off to be a piglet in a dust-bath just vacated by one of the fruitcakes. Giles clambers carefully over the electric fence.

  ‘Did you see David, Mum? He’s gone to look for a frying pan. What’s he doing here anyway?’

  David arrives back brandishing the pan and crouches to light the fire.

  ‘I rounded up your pigs in the village last night and when I got here and saw you two looking so comfortable, I decided to join in.’ He turns to me.

  ‘Good morning, house dweller, will you join us for breakfast?’

  No time for embarrassment as we try to consume bacon and marshmallows without the piglets finding out and becoming cannibals.

  August 31st

  Truly hideous day spent buying trainers, pants and socks for Giles and Felix in Norwich. Purchasing the stuff is bad enough, worse is the fact that I will have to sew name tapes onto it all. Must remember to write to school governors with my brilliant idea. Have long believed that all school uniform should be pooled. Each parent could pay a set amount at the beginning of their child’s school career and that amount could pay for another set of clothes to go in the pool. With no name tapes and no ownership of items, there would be no lost property and no ghastly clothing list to upset mothers at the end of each holiday. It is all part of Utopian dream, like free bicycles in Cambridge, and just needs setting up to become a huge success.

  Dawdle in the Games Workshop, mystic temple to Warhammer, and am forced to sit in corner while Giles is given a demonstration in painting the Blood Thirster by the whey-faced, black-clad shop assistant. Felix, a box of Dwarves in one hand and another of Boar Men in the other, is in a trance of indecision at the counter. Hope he chooses the cheapest ones, as his Warhammer collection spends much time scattered across his bedroom carpet and then in the Hoover bag waiting to be rescued, and so is not good value for him. Giles on the other hand has gone bigtime with his. The Blood Thirster is a hefty purchase. He has been saving up for it since the beginning of the holidays. Curious to see this object of desire, I get him to show me one in the shop. It does not look, as I had imagined, like an orange squeezer, but is a lump of moulded metal in the shape of the ghoul in Munch’s Scream but with skeletons and sundry corpses dangling.

  Wish my children would spend their pocket money on something more wholesome, but am comforted a little by the thought that it could be worse. Charles is bringing out a line called Heavenly Pets, a range of plastic toys inspired by too many visits to McDonald’s with his children. Preying upon susceptibility of small, grief-stricken owners, he plans to sell tiny take-home wind-up coffins with pet of your choice within, ready to pop out when wound up. Only discovered this atrocity when Felix finally unpacked his bag this morning. Charles had given him a prototype hamster coffin.

  ‘Look, Daddy’s going to sell these and I helped him decide what colour they should be.’ The purple coffin, playing ‘Merrily merrily merrily, life is but a dream’ opens slowly to reveal an orange nylon blob, presumably the hamster, reclining on cushion-effect plastic bed. As the tune finishes, the blob levitates, hovers and flops back and the coffin closes again. Utterly repulsive and tasteless. Felix loves it. I send a postcard in complaint, and only notice as I am posting it that I have used the one of the mummified cat from the British Museum.

  Autumn

  September 1st

  Greatly looking forward to term-time and also to wearing jerseys again and lighting fires. Summer still lingers, though, and combine harvesters bumble through the last cornfields creating herringbone tweed patterns as they cut. Out for the evening and the road is a neat centre parting between smooth golden stubble. Dust and heat follow me down it on my way to have dinner, or rather ‘kitchen supper’, at the Sampsons. Zoom along with windows down, hair flying and the plangent twang of Deborah Allen on the tape machine. She gets to my current favourite song and up goes the volume. I sing along with gusto, especially when we reach the chorus to which I have learnt all the words and all the instrumental flurries. Tap the steering wheel and shriek ‘Yeehah’ a few times. Excellent stuff.

  Vast copper beach trees around the Sampsons’ lawn increase autumnal mood, their shadows long and inky across springy grass. Getting out of the car, am covered in goose pimples within seconds, having chosen to wear tiny lime-green and lemon-yellow sundress, purchased today from a market stall on impulse because it was so cheap. It is made of nylon and causes me to leap with static whenever I touch anything. It is most unsuitable, and, worst of all, I am convinced it would look better on a fourteen-year-old.

  Sir Nicholas is passionate about his lawns and employs a man full-time to roll them, mow them, pull dandelions out of them and water them. Passing the pool, I glimpse a hunched figure on all fours behind a wiggle of box hedging: it is Sir Nicholas, sent out by Hilary to find mint, and overcome by a desire to be at one with his sward. I wave and call a greeting.

  ‘The grass here is wonderful, Sir Nicholas, mine has become a tundra now, so it’s lovely to remember what grass is supposed to look like.’

  He bounces up, ‘Venetia, come through, my dear, how splendid to see you.’

  He leads me in through a French window to the drawing room, where a handful of peop
le are sipping tiny drinks from eggcup-sized glasses and trying to look relaxed. Hilary introduces me to the others, but not one of the names sinks into my head as I am crackling with static and embarrassment, both caused by my unsuitable dress. On top of the dress is fashionable boiled-wool shrunken cardigan. As an advance treat to myself for doing the name tapes, I persuaded Jenny the babysitter to sew puce ribbon around the edge of this cardigan last week and have been longing to try it out on an audience ever since. This audience is not appreciative.

  ‘Dear me, it is so irritating when the daily shrinks one’s clothes,’ says a well-meaning middle-aged woman in a piecrust frill and pleated skirt, watching me fumble to do up a button on my cardigan in an attempt to hide as much of the silly dress as I can. She has a daughter at Giles’s school, and she shows off about having bought and name-taped all her uniform at the beginning of the holidays.

  Can think of nothing at all to say except, ‘Oh.’

  Kitchen supper is pretty fancy, and delicious. I dispose of my goat’s cheese log in two mouthfuls and eat three pieces of bread while my neighbour prods his first course unenthusiastically. Having not listened to any introductions, I plunge in.

  ‘Which is your wife?’

  He looks baffled. ‘Oh, I’m not married,’ and then, as if it follows, ‘I’m in the army.’