Mr. Rosenblum's List: Or Friendly Guidance for the Aspiring Englishman

by Natasha Solomons

  Jack cast round in the gloom, half expecting to see an Iron Age savage ready with a skewer for his head. They emerged from the tree tunnel and reached a gate, which Curtis vaulted. He then began to climb the sharp incline as Jack scrambled after him. Jack must have been at least thirty, maybe as many as fifty years younger than Curtis but there was no question as to who was the more agile. The hill was sheer, the slope even steeper than that of Bulbarrow, and into the side were cut deep, circular grooves many yards deep. Jack gasped for breath and he had a stitch. Although it was late, the night was warm and the air he gulped felt humid. He concentrated on where he was putting his feet, carefully trying to avoid the patches of thistles and round brown cowpats in the dark. He felt like he had been climbing for an hour, though it couldn’t have been much more than twenty minutes. Then, eyes still fixed on his feet, he bumped right into Curtis.

  ‘Righty stop ’ere. We is at top.’

  Jack flopped down beside him and closed his eyes. ‘You climb so fast. You’re not even out of breath,’ he gasped, his own coming in rasps. He heard the squeal of a bottle being unscrewed and then a flask was thrust into his hand.

  ‘Drink,’ commanded Curtis.

  Jack took a deep glug; it was like drinking apples set on fire. It made him cough and want more at the same time. Curtis snatched away the bottle.

  ‘That’s enuff. Yoos ent used to it yet,’ he explained, not unkindly.

  ‘What is it?’ Jack’s eyes were watering.

  ‘Erm. Jist a special cider brew. Apples and thingy,’ he answered cryptically.

  Jack lay on his back and felt the stuff warming him all the way down to his toes. He closed his eyes and was suddenly very sleepy.

  ‘Are you ready Mister Rose-in-Bloom?’

  ‘Ready for what? Are we waiting for a woolly-pig?’

  ‘Nope. Not tonight. Tisn’t t’ right time. And yoos isn’t ready.’

  Usually Jack would have objected to this: he was perfectly ready and this was exactly the right time, only he hadn’t brought his camera. And it was dark. But, whether it was the heat, his drowsiness or the effect of the special brew cider, he was happy just to lie here and listen.

  ‘Open yer eyes.’

  Summoning all his energy, Jack opened them. The moon was high and bright and the stars were so clear that he felt he could reach out and touch them. He wasn’t used to skies like these; in London on a cloudless night he could make out the Plough, but there was always light from street lamps and the steady glow from houses and offices. On Hambledon Hill the only light was the stars and, as they shone, they filled up the whole night sky. Jack knew that he was gazing across time to stare at light that had travelled billions of years to reach Dorset. He stared at one hovering star that emitted a pale green glow. It danced in the air, floating above his head before disappearing. Then, he saw that there were scores of them – not in the sky but near to the ground – tiny, pale green lights that flickered and floated as they swayed upon long grass stems. He reached out to touch one and it twinkled just out of reach before drifting away.

  ‘W-what are they?’ he stammered.

  ‘Worms. Glow-worms. Jitterbugs. What we are seein’ is a jitterbug orgy.’

  ‘A what?’

  ‘An orgy. Them is the female ones that glow to attract a mate. Tis jitterbug mating season.’

  Curtis handed him the flask and he took another swig. The green lights began to blur and sway like a miniature firework display. Every blade of grass seemed to hold a glinting emerald light.

  ‘In years gone by, hignorant people thought these is fairies,’ Curtis scoffed.

  Jack could see why. There were no wings on the glow-worms, but he could hear a soft batting, like the whirring of a clock. A single light hovered as though treading air, and then darted in a jabbing pattern above his head. Curtis pointed with a stubby finger. ‘Only males ’as wings an’ they doesn’t usually glow. They is right lazy bastards.’

  Jack stared at another pale light nestled in the prickly palm of a thistle. As he watched, the light dimmed. He blinked and it was dark.

  ‘Ah,’ said Curtis, ‘once she’s mated, she puts out ’er light. She lays her eggs, she fades and then she dies.’

  Through his alcohol haze, Jack wondered whether the male jitterbug was performing a dance of grief for his dying mate.

  Jack and Curtis lay in a large ditch, that formed part of a series of Iron Age trenches designed to defend the fort against other marauding head-hunters. Each dugout had grass walls nearly fifteen feet high and Jack marvelled at their construction.

  ‘How did the head-hunters dig these ditches?’

  Curtis took a swig of cider. ‘Antler horns and wooden pick axes.’

  The place felt ancient; they were lying in a fort nearly two thousand years old. Jack could hear the whispers of the earth and knew that here was deep time. The woolly-pig was part of that world, a remnant from another, older age.

  Curtis heaved himself onto his elbows; his battered hat perched at an odd angle and a clump of burrs were stuck to his shirt.

  ‘’Ave you ’eard the legend of Arthur and the Round Table an’ all that stuff?’

  ‘Yes. Don’t they think it was at Cadbury Castle now and not Glastonbury? I read it in The Times.’

  Curtis spat on the ground in disgust. ‘Those Somerset folks. They nickered our ’istory. Tisn’t Glastonbury nor Cadbury Castle neither. Tis Stourcastle. Dorset. That’s where the Saxon King were – old Wessex. Bloody, thievin’ Somerset folks. Jist cause they hasn’t got enuff stories of their own they goes stealin’ ours.’

  Jack rubbed his eyes and tried to focus. The green lights were a blur and the sky was sinking towards earth – it was a star-sprinkled blanket a few inches from his face.

  ‘King Arthur was in Stourcastle?’

  Curtis nodded. ‘Aye. But ’ee wasn’t called Arthur, mind. ’Ee were Albert.’

  Jack closed his eyes and dreamt of King Albert. He was a mighty woolly-pig with tusks of gold, and when he opened his mouth a stream of green lights poured out and filled the sky with stars.

  ack woke the next morning in his own bed with no memory of getting home. He sat up and immediately lay back down, rubbed his eyes and blinked several times. He felt as if he had been asleep for a hundred years and was now rousing from a magnificent and enchanted slumber. His very soul was rejuvenated, and he had a furious craving for a soft-boiled egg. Putting on his worn leather slippers he wandered downstairs and went outside to check the car. It was parked neatly in the driveway, paintwork unscathed. Then he noticed the driver’s seat: it was pulled all the way forward as though a child had been driving.

  Despite the drinking and the late night, he was filled with more exuberance than he had experienced for over a week. He had the first two members of his Great Golf Course and his stomach tingled when he considered this remarkable turn of events. As he changed out of his pyjamas and into his work clothes, he decided that now it seemed appropriate he hadn’t yet played a hole. It was right and proper that the first hole should be played on the morning of the Coronation. That was to be the greatest British Event since the end of the war and would mark the beginning of a new era: the Illustrious Elizabethan Age.

  He collected his molehill contraption from the barn and wheeled it along the rugged track down to the field. For the first time in nearly a fortnight he was not disheartened by the monumental task before him and was instead flooded with energy. Humming ‘Land of Hope and Glory’, he loaded up the first bucket of water and tugged on the pulley. He hoped the threat of traps would be enough to ward off any would-be saboteurs but, just in case, he had bought several from a gamekeeper on Bulbarrow. They lay bundled in a sack by the pond, since he could not quite bring himself to set them. The bucket of water wavered and the first molehill was hoisted up; he swung the contraption and dumped the heap of earth into a ditch. One down. He turned to the next molehill, but someone was sitting on it. Curtis was perched on the edge, head in his hands. He picked
up a blade of grass and started to peel away the outer layer, while Jack watched him in silence. He didn’t know what Curtis did – he didn’t have a farm, though sometimes he minded other people’s sheep, but Jack didn’t even know where he lived. Triumphant, Curtis held up a thin sliver of white, the inside of the leaf he had been peeling.

  ‘This ’ere is a wick – dip him in pig fat and yer got yerself a candle. Now,’ he said turning to Jack, ‘’ow has the woolly-pig hunt bin farin’?’

  Jack winced; he did not like lying to the old man but could not confess that when confronted with daylight and a clean head, he did not believe in the woolly-pig. Saying nothing, he pointed towards the sack by the dew pond. Curtis picked it up and tipped out the traps so that they lay in the long grass, a heap of glistening metal jaws. He gave a shudder. Jack had to agree – they did look rather evil now he studied them, and one serrated edge was encrusted with dried blood and tufts of fur.

  ‘I was told they were humane,’ he said, sounding unconvinced.

  ‘Aye, very humane,’ said Curtis. He lifted his trouser leg and showed an angry red scar all the way round his ankle, where the skin was mashed up like flesh-coloured marble.

  ‘Zum Kuckuck! That was from a trap?’

  Curtis preened in Jack’s dismay. ‘It is. Got done by a trap on Bulbarrow. Jist mindin’ my own business. Found a pheasant – weren’t poachin’, it jist flew into a sack I ’appened to be ’oldin’ like and then crack.’ He smacked his hands together to show the movement of the trap shutting on his leg. ‘I were lucky them trap didn’t take my leg off.’

  Jack was appalled. ‘I don’t want to kill them. It. The woolly-pig. I don’t even want to hurt it. I want to trap it.’

  ‘Well then, don’t use them things. Evil buggers,’ said Curtis bitterly.

  Jack paused. Much as he did not wish to maim another man, he also did not want his course destroyed. He thought for a moment. ‘I want to see a woolly-pig, but I don’t really need to catch one.’

  To his surprise the old man jumped up and began to shake his hand.

  ‘Spectacular! Tis good news. No noggerhead can never catch one of them nanyhow. Yer might be from forin lands but yer gets the beast and ’is thinkin’.’

  Jack held onto Curtis’s arm, ‘I won’t use any traps. But I am a very private man and I don’t want any of them on my land. Perhaps, you could tell Jack Basset that I am using these things to catch the woolly-pig. Then he will leave me alone.’

  ‘Yer wants me to tell folk that yoos is an evil and nasty bastard not to be buggered with?’

  This was not quite how Jack would have put it. ‘Yes.’

  Curtis frowned and tapped his nose confidentially. He helped himself to one of the shovels and, with a neat thwack, sliced off part of a molehill, lifted it and dumped it into a ditch. Jack watched, amazed at the tiny old man’s strength.

  ‘Righty ho?’

  Jack agreed and turned back to his machine. The ground was hard and cracked – yesterday’s rain had been absorbed like milk into blotting paper and the earth was as dry as before. They could only dig a few inches at a time, scratching away layers of dried dirt. Curtis dug twice as fast, but it was still very slow. The wind was strong and whipped the mud flecks into their faces, so that soon Jack began to tire. He felt a hand on his shoulder.

  ‘Here ’ave a nip,’ said Curtis, drawing the flask from beneath his jacket.

  Too tired to argue, Jack took a small sip. Instantly, he felt fiery strength burn along his veins. He seized the bucket and poured the contents over a patch of cleared green. Then, he filled up another and another, until, in half an hour, he had tipped fifty loads of water over the brown grass.

  ‘With a little sun, it will be back to green in no time. May I show you the rest of the course?’

  They walked slowly to the top of Bulbarrow. Before the war, the area had been wild scrub and yellow heath but it had been converted to grazing during the ‘Dig for Britain Campaign’, yet in the last couple of years the edges were reverting to gorse as the thicket took over once more. The land wasn’t rich enough for crops; only sheep and sturdy Dorset cattle could graze on the spiky grass and thistles that grew there. The fields lay in a neat patchwork, the hedges at the corners like green embroidery holding them together. It was a peopled scene; the land bore the marks of a thousand years of cultivation. The last corn had been harvested, the stubble burnt and the land ploughed, ready to be replanted. From a distance, the brown furrowed fields looked like they had been combed. Groups of whitewashed cottages huddled together in villages, while beyond Hambledon a column of smoke spiralled upward from the orange flames of a bonfire.

  Jack and Curtis climbed up Backhollow, a great crater cut into the hillside during the Middle Ages. Now it looked like a giant, semi-circular amphitheatre with grass seats in the hill; however, they weren’t seats but grass shelves built to create more land for farming at a time when the population was beginning to starve. It had never been used. Instead, the Black Death had come along killing half the peasants and Backhollow became the haunt of deer and ghosts.

  Curtis paused for a moment halfway up the slope and pointed happily at a big, cream ball. ‘Look, a giant puffball.’ He gave the ball a kick and it exploded into dust that flew up into the air. ‘’Ee’s a mushroom. Lovely on toast.’

  Jack looked around and saw half a dozen of the things in the hollow. The largest were nearly a foot in diameter and looked like huge footballs growing up from the earth. He gave one a gentle nudge – it was soft and spongy; he prodded it a bit harder and it disappeared with a puff as billions of tiny dust particles blew into his face. He coughed and brushed them away as Curtis cackled with laughter.

  ‘Them is spores,’ he said, as Jack picked them out of his hair. ‘An’ if ivry spore in a giant puffball grew up to be another puffball, all tigether they ’ud be twice as big as earth ’imself.’

  ‘That would be an awful lot of mushroom.’

  Curtis picked up a small one, the size of a tennis ball, and handed it to him. This one didn’t explode, but was firm and rubbery and smelled of earthy fungus.

  Curtis snatched it back. ‘Aye, well, we doesn’t want to waste ’em.’

  Jack noticed that Curtis appeared to have a duffle bag under his battered jacket. From the top of the bag sprouted a few feathers, which looked suspiciously like pheasant. Observing Jack’s look, hurriedly he dropped the mushroom into the bag.

  ‘It’s a feather duster. I do my dustin’ on a Tuesday. Always use a pheasant duster, gives a lovely sheen.’

  Jack said nothing – after all, it was none of his business. He picked up another small puffball and handed it to Curtis, which the old man cheerfully popped into his bag.

  ‘Nice mushroom supper.’

  Every morning for the next month Jack found the older man waiting for him. Working side by side, they heaved the last of the molehills off the spoilt green and into the ditches, smoothed the hillocks as best they could and carefully watered the withering grass. Whenever he thought Jack wasn’t looking, Curtis poured a precious drop from his hip flask into the water buckets for the green, confident that the grass needed nothing more than a nip of special brew – it was much more powerful than any of the fancy fertilisers his friend insisted on buying from London stores.

  Curtis had the strength of a much younger man and together their progress was swift. Jack enjoyed the companionship; although, he tried to avoid the topic of the woolly-pig, worried that the only reason the old man had bestowed his friendship was in the mistaken belief that Jack shared his faith in the creature. The elderly farmer grumbled continually as he laboured. ‘Why did you choose this effing field, yer ninnywally. Everywin knows that stones grows ’ere. Chuck one away and two grews to take his place. Buggerin’ hell.’

  Jack mounted a large calendar on the wall in his study. Every evening at dusk, he went into the room and crossed off another day from the calendar, shadowed by a sombre Curtis.

  ‘Don’t worry, Mister Ros
e-in-Bloom, we’ll git him done.’

  Jack shook his head – the cider fumes fading and the panic rising – and took the bottle of whisky from the cupboard. He poured himself a stiff drink and squirted a tiny drop of soda into the amber liquid. ‘Whisky?’ he asked Curtis who shook his head, preferring the flask in his pocket. Jack settled into his chair, Curtis choosing a low stool by the grate, stretching out his short legs and warming his bare toes in front of the flames. Jack switched on the wireless – it was time for Betjeman. The two men closed their eyes and listened. The voice described in nostalgic tones the joy of old buildings, thatched roofs, limewashed cottages, and how the strength of England lay in her wild woodlands and mud-caked walls.

  ‘Aye. Aye,’ murmured Curtis in agreement.

  Jack was too exhausted to find his way up to bed and so, for the third time in a week, fell asleep in his chair in the study. He was vaguely aware that he’d not seen his wife for several days. He heard her in the garden and noticed that the larder remained stocked with bread and cheese for him to pillage for meals, but he was too busy with his golf course to worry himself with her. When the course was finally finished, and she could look out of her kitchen window on to the first tee to see players hitting balls in the sunshine, she would feel much better. He felt a little uncomfortable about the neglect of his wife but – as with all things that were unpleasant to him – he tried to think about something else. Whisky. He would have another whisky and then a little sleep.

  A few hours later, Sadie threw the bedcovers off, too hot to sleep and realised she was alone yet again. The night air was sticky and the scent of the night flowers was sickly sweet. She reached for the bedside clock: midnight. With a yawn she climbed out of bed, put on her dressing gown and tiptoed downstairs, unwilling to disturb the darkness. She retrieved her box from the kitchen dresser and sat down at the table. The moon was so strong that she didn’t need any other light in order to see the picture of her brother. Emil smiled up at her from the curled, brown print. His was a face that would never grow old.