by Hatch, Ben
‘That was Princes Di.’
‘Pretend it was him. He’s liked you since then. He can’t believe he’s seen you again after all this time. You chat to him at the cheese counter in Di’s Pantry. You like him, he still likes you. He buys his Stinking Bishop. Then he presses himself against you. You wouldn’t be able to resist.’
‘OK, firstly it’s a ridiculous scenario because why would I be on my own in Di’s Pantry? Where are you lot?’
‘We’ve gone to Stein’s Fish and Chips. You didn’t fancy it. And it’s before he knew Kate. Before his hair started receding as well. He kept the picture Richard Duggan took of you for the Herald story. He has it on him, in fact.’
‘Even though it was actually Princess Di.’
‘We’re pretending it’s him.’
‘OK, why didn’t I go for fish and chips with you lot?’
‘It doesn’t matter.’
‘I’d go for Rick Stein’s fish and chips with you lot.’
‘Even if Prince William was pressing against you?’
‘What’s all this pressing?’
‘He’s pressing against you, love.’
‘Are you getting some pervy thrill out of this?’
I laugh.
‘OK, what bits is he pressing?’
‘He’s pressing everything, his torso, his royal groin.’
‘I’d still go for fish and chips.’
‘You wouldn’t.’
‘Rick Stein’s fish and chips? I would.’
‘OK, you’ve got a stomach ache. You didn’t want fish and chips because you had a stomach ache. You’re in Di’s Pantry and Prince William tells you he’s got an hour to live. One hour, that’s all he’s got and all he wants to do in that time is be with you physically.’
‘But I don’t fancy him.’
‘He’s the future king of England, love.’
‘If he’s got an hour to live, he’d be riddled with disease. I might catch it.’
‘It’s not contagious. It’s a non-contagious disease. Actually, that’s not the reason he’s got an hour to live. He’s going to blow up in an hour. It’s not a disease. The CIA has implanted some device inside him, some anti-monarch device, that’s going to go off in an hour. It doesn’t detract from his attractiveness, and he wants you, and we’re having fish and chips and you’ve got a stomach ache.’
‘No, I’d be looking at my watch the whole time.’
‘For fuck’s sake, you know for sure that the CIA is going to take him away after an hour. They’re taking him off somewhere. They’re flying him to the North Sea, dropping him in the ocean by helicopter. They’ve given you assurances about this. You won’t be there when he blows up. Come on, you’d go for it?’
‘I think I’m starting to get a stomach ache, actually.’
‘OK, I give up. If you can’t be honest with yourself…’
‘Are you actually cross with me?’
‘You’re not imagining it.’
‘You are cross with me!’
I laugh.
‘Would it make it better if I said I’d shag him?’
‘Yes.’
‘OK, I’d shag him. Happy?’
‘I knew it!’
She laughs.
‘Come on, let me show you what I got for Phoebe.’
Inside the apartment Dinah lays pieces of Phoebe’s school uniform out on the floor of the living room and across the sofa and armchair.
‘I think I did really well. Three back-to-school long-sleeve shirts for six pounds. That’s good, isn’t it?’
‘It’s very good.’
‘Three gingham blouses for the autumn term. Aren’t they cute? Imagine her in those.’
I hold my heart and sigh.
‘I know. Me too,’ she says.
‘What are those ones?’
‘Pinafore dresses for the winter. Hopefully they’ll still fit her then. They were so cheap I thought I might as well get them. And look!’
She opens another bag.
‘Socks, knickers, a few blue skirts and a gym kit. I even got a yellow and black tie.’ She holds it up. ‘Guess how much?’
‘Altogether? A hundred pounds.’
‘Fifty!’
‘That is good.’
‘And in Padstow as well. I thought it would be a lot more.’
She stands back to survey the clothes. I do the same. I imagine Phoebe in her uniform. I picture myself waving her goodbye at the school gate. Dinah does the same and sighs deeply. I put my arm around her and she says, ‘I can’t believe she’s going to…’ An index finger shoots up to her eye.
‘I know.’
‘She’s still so tiny.’ She folds into me. ‘I know.’
Later that night, curled up on the sofa, listening to Radio 4, hoping to find a bit of comedy, it comes on. A tribute piece to Dad presented by Gloria Hunniford. It starts with a clip from I’m Sorry, I’ll Read That Again, the radio series Dad starred in back in the 1960s. It’s always quite strange to suddenly hear Dad’s voice on air, but what’s truly shocking this time is what Gloria Hunniford says afterwards: ‘Sir David Hatch, who died at home two weeks ago after a short illness.’ Even though I know he’s dead it’s still like a slap in the face. It’s so startling a bald and naked fact that I have to catch my breath. Dad’s just not contactable. That’s how I’ve been coping. My dad isn’t dead. I just haven’t rung him in a while. There are tributes from BBC colleagues, clips from Just a Minute and The News Quiz. John Cleese tells the story about the Going Underground T-shirt. And it’s a confusing feeling sat here in this random Cornish hotel, arranging scatter cushions across my bare feet because it’s cold with the balcony door open, feeling a massive swelling of pride for my dad, who I want desperately to ring, but a fraction of a second later realise I can’t because he’s dead.
CHAPTER 29
Every August we visited my gran and my mum’s sister Aunty Romey in Sidmouth, Devon. They lived in a two-bedroomed seaman’s cottage on Newtown Road, a short walk from the seafront. Granny Martin was our favourite granny, and Aunty Romey, my favourite aunty and also the most consistent present giver at Christmas, even if she often selected wholly inappropriate gifts (for my eighth birthday I received a video history of Tapton Colliery; Buster, six, was given National Trust Homes in Derbyshire). Gran, my mum’s mum, always wore a blue twinset. She had a picture of the Queen on her kitchen wall and the worst thing I ever heard her say about anybody was, ‘That man!’ And that was about Adolf Hitler. Aunty Romey, who’d never left home, completed the Telegraph crossword and painted watercolours of bluebell woods and Jacob’s Ladder beach, which she exhibited and sold at the Sidmouth Festival. It was the highlight of our summer, the two weeks we spent with them. The house was so small, Buster and I slept in bunk beds in the potting shed next to the lawnmower and the bags of John Innis Number 3 compost. It smelt of creosote and soil but we woke to the sound of seagulls.
Every morning we went to Jacob’s Ladder beach. Dad marched us miles along the stones beneath the red cliffs to find a secluded spot where we could ‘spread out’, and here we’d spend all day, the tartan picnic rug spread across the chalky stones, eating corned beef sandwiches, drinking Corona Cherryade, swimming, playing catch, boules and French cricket. The tingling sensation of putting a T-shirt over a salty, sunburnt back. The crunch of sand in a corned beef sandwich. The suck and ebb of the tide sounding brighter on cold mornings. Pen and Buster swam, Mum sunbathed in her yellow bikini and I listened to Radio 4’s test match commentary, shouting out to Dad important developments from the ledge of stones that led down to the water: if somebody was out, when Boycott reached his 100.
The last weekend of the holiday we always went on day trips. To Paignton Zoo, Pecorama, Bicton Gardens, or we’d fly kites on Branscombe cliffs. The outings were memorable because Dad always incorporated competition into everything. It was never enough to fly a kite, or visit a zoo, we’d all be ranked on how well we’d flown our kite or be tested on what we’d s
een. ‘Not bad Benjy, but Pen was better when it got really windy. Buster-boy, I put you third. Now who can tell me how long the average male baboon lives for? It was on the sign.’ One of our day trips was the donkey sanctuary. We always went to the donkey sanctuary.
‘It is not just the number of donkeys,’ I tell Dinah. ‘Although there are more donkeys here than anywhere else in the world. It’s the presentation. You wait. You’re going to love this.’
The sanctuary, a couple of miles past Sidford, the next town along from Sidmouth, is home to all manner of donkeys. In the fields surrounding the main block there are donkeys with eye patches, limping donkeys, moulting donkeys. There are donkeys that are perfectly all right. There are donkeys who look all right but aren’t all right. There are mentally scarred donkeys, happy donkeys, sad donkeys, worried donkeys. There are donkeys that don’t give a damn, donkeys that do. Donkeys with damaged tails, donkeys with poorly ears. There are donkeys that have seen too much. Donkeys that have not seen enough.
I lead us through the fields of donkeys into a barn that has on its inside wall pictures of each resident donkey. The wall is like the galleries you get in reception areas of small businesses showing photos of their employees. Except, as well as their picture and name, there’s also a brief biography of each donkey listing salient facts about their lives and, for instance, their ability to smell polo mints through coat pockets. Also, entertainingly, you’re told who they hang out with at the sanctuary (‘Nelly is big mates with Daisy and Teddy – they are quite a little clique.’). Dinah starts to chuckle. Phoebe stands on the bottom rung of a fence to stroke the wiry back of Clara T.
‘See what I mean. You get to know the donkeys. To understand the donkeys.’
She moves on to Fred Morgan. Fred Morgan has settled in nicely with the other donkeys since his arrival in 2005, although he still doesn’t like his ears being touched. Jenny Collins, meanwhile, came in 2007 and ‘always enjoys a mince pie on Christmas Day’.
In the Haycroft restaurant afterwards, while the kids eat flapjacks, a debate ensues about the mindset of benefactors who leave everything to donkeys. It’s inspired by the board outside the restaurant listing their names. There are dozens catalogued in the sorts of columns you get dedicated to the fallen on war memorials: Enids, Bettys and Maudes are honoured for leaving their life savings to donkeys they’ve often never seen. It’s a sad fact more people donate to the donkey sanctuary than to the local RNLI.
‘Do you think they’re mad?’ I ask Dinah.
‘Of course they are.’
‘All the Maudes and Bettys. All of them are mad.’
‘You wouldn’t do that,’ says Dinah.
‘No, I wouldn’t.’
‘And nor would I because it’s verging on criminal.’
‘I agree.’
‘They’ve got more money than sense. I mean, how many people are employed here? Look around you, Ben.’
She swivels around, staring into the courtyard.
‘They’re painting doors that don’t need painting, they’re cleaning up the donkey shit before it hits the ground. It’s bonkers.’
‘It is and it isn’t.’
‘OK, explain, Mr Enigmatic.’
‘You just don’t understand the donkey.’
‘What?’
‘I understand the donkey.’
‘You understand donkeys?’
‘I do.’
‘And what don’t I understand about donkeys?’
‘Their nature.’
‘And that explains your point how?’
‘There is something poignant about a donkey.’
‘Poignant?’
‘Something hangdog that appeals to our sympathy.’
‘Give me an example.’
‘Donkeys barely lift their heads. Unlike horses. Horses are cocky. Donkeys always look meekly at the ground. Have you ever been looked in the eye by a donkey? No. Because they wouldn’t dare. A donkey is what Mary rode to Bethlehem on. They’re so meek, they’ve become symbols of meekness. When a footballer is considered unskilled you call him a donkey. And when they bray the noise seems to come less from aggression like the mule and more from a deep pit of self-pity.’
‘You should work on the sales team. The Maudes would love you.’
‘Old people recognise this feeling from being overlooked themselves in post office queues. They have communality with donkeys.’
‘And this is why old people disinherit relatives and leave their cash to Eeyores?’
‘Exactly.’
‘What a load of shit!’
‘Have you got a better explanation?’
‘They’re bonkers.’
We leave the restaurant and wander around a few fields before popping into the visitor centre, a glorified gift shop, where you can buy almost everything you’d need to conduct a dinner party with donkey sanctuary merchandise including place mats, plates, bowls, candles, mugs, tea towels and salt and pepper pots. We buy Phoebe a story by Elisabeth D. Svendsen called The Story of Eeyore, The Naughtiest Donkey in the Sanctuary that Dinah reads to the kids in the car. Based on a true story, it’s about a naughty donkey that came to the sanctuary and upset a fire bucket and nipped a farrier before escaping into a paddock it wasn’t supposed to be in. It isn’t exactly The Shawshank Redemption but it keeps the peace on the drive back to Sidmouth.
An hour later we’re on Jacob’s Ladder beach. The sky’s overcast and the beach is half empty. But then the summer’s nearly over. It’s September tomorrow. We change the kids out of their clothes, which no longer fit them, we’ve been away so long. Charlie’s trousers all look like pedal pushers and Phoebe’s tops all stop at least an inch short of her wrist. They’re in their swimming things, the tide’s out and I muck about with them on the same sand I played on as a kid. I draw a circle round Charlie in the sand and tell him, ‘You’re trapped.’ ‘Trap me,’ he keeps saying, and then every time I do, Phoebe frees him, by rubbing out a segment of the ring with her foot. ‘It’s all right Charlie – you can get out now.’ Later Phoebe wades out to her waist sucking her tummy in against the cold. Charlie chases the tide in and out. When Phoebe’s eczema hurts in the sea salt she sits on Dinah’s lap and Dinah rubs cream on her while Charlie and I make a dam. Rivulets of water at the foot of the stones make veins in the sand. We build a semi-circular wall here that I reinforce with the stones that Phoebe reaches round for from Dinah’s lap. Occasionally there’s a leak.
‘Dad! Quick. Dad! There!’ Phoebe shouts, as Charlie and I furiously staunch the breach.
Sometime later I hear Dinah’s voice.
‘Love,’ she’s shouting.
I look up.
Her eyes are shielded from the sun. She’s smiling ‘You can just sit here and do nothing, you know.’
I look round. The kids have lost interest in the dam. They’re a few yards away drawing circles round each other with their feet in the sand.
‘Got carried away there, didn’t you?’ says Dinah, as I sit down beside her. The blankness of the cloudy sky blends with the still sea making it almost impossible to tell where the horizon begins. We watch Phoebe marshal Charlie about.
‘They’ve become best friends on this trip,’ says Dinah.
‘It’s lovely.’
‘Look, Daddy!’ shouts Phoebe, showing off an elephant she’s drawn in the sand.
‘Very good, Phoebe.’
‘Mummy!’
‘It’s brilliant,’ says Dinah. ‘I love his trunk.’
‘And mine,’ says Charlie.
‘Yours is lovely too, Charlie.’
‘Tell me then,’ I say to Dinah, back in the car.
‘Guess.’
‘Five.’
She closes the map.
‘Less. Four!’
That’s the number of pages left to drive across before we reach Brighton.
CHAPTER 30
Draft Copy for Guidebook: Separated from the mainland by the Solent, the diamond-shaped Isle of Wight is the
smallest county in England and known for being three things: a) the best place to find dinosaur fossils in Europe; b) the worst place to go if you don’t like sailing (the international sailing centre of Cowes is here); and c) perhaps the most insular area of England – tourists are known as grockles here and our car was referred to, within our earshot, by a man from Newport we had disagreed with at a junction on the A3020, as a ‘grockle can’ (as in ‘Go on, piss off in your grockle can’). That said, there are many family-orientated places for grockles to visit in their cans including the Isle of Wight Zoo, where our normally timid daughter demonstrated on the penultimate day of this trip round England just how blasé she’s become about the daily presence of exotic animals in her life by ordering me with a bored yawn as we approached Tammy the Bengal tiger, ‘Make him roar, Daddy.’ It was also here on a keeper talk we learnt about a tiger’s flehmen response, which enables them, through drawing air across their Jacobson’s organ in the roof of their mouths, to physically
taste a scent, something our son, we feel sure, utilises when we try to secretly open packets of cheese and onion crisps.
Yesterday we visited the Tank Museum in Wareham as well as the Teddy Bear Museum in Dorchester, the fictitious home of a human-sized teddy bear by the name of Mr Edward Bear. Inside Mr Bear’s mocked-up home Charlie and Phoebe met, hugged and attempted to knock over several of Mr Edward Bear’s life-sized bear relatives. There was a toy room, while downstairs there was a separate exhibition complementing the teddy bear museum. And what would be the ultimate bedfellow for a teddy bear museum? Why a museum, of course, dedicated to the famous terracotta warriors entombed with the ruthless Chinese megalomaniac first emperor, Qin Shi Huang Di, responsible for the deaths of more than a million people. Here we watched a film about the emperor, though we never saw the end of it because the hilariously rude reception woman returned it to the beginning for another couple who’d just entered, even though we were in the middle of watching it, ‘because you should have done your research beforehand.’ She was right, of course, we agreed back in the car – it was unprofessional of us to just roll up at an important teddy bear museum dedicated to a make-believe Mr Bear without having first thoroughly researched the attraction.