A Likely Tale, Lad

by Mike Pannett

  It was hot down there, stifling, but I didn’t dare come out in case … After a few minutes my need for air became desperate. I popped my head out. Maybe my night vision would have kicked in. But after three or four attempts I still couldn’t see a thing. Maybe I should’ve eaten my carrots, I thought, like Mum told me. Or was it the greens? One of them made you see in the dark. And one made your hair curl – but which one was it? Maybe I’d have to eat both, to be sure. Even though I hated them.

  I must have got to sleep in the end, because I remember waking up, twice, and on each occasion I heard the floorboards creak, right outside the door. Once I was certain I heard a door opening. I lay there rigid, trying to still the thumping of my heart, sure that it would alert the ghostly intruder to my presence. I called for Phil, but he was miles away, deep in slumber.

  And then, as the cocoa worked its way through my system and got to work with the anxiety and fear, I realised I wanted the toilet. But that was all the way downstairs, and nothing would induce me to venture on that journey. I lay there for what seemed like hours. I heard a cockerel crow somewhere in the village. I heard a vehicle making its way up the main street, stopping and starting. Then the clinking of milk bottles. Surely it would be light soon, and it would be safe to go down to the toilet? Just as I thought I would burst, just as the faintest light started to show around the edge of the curtains, I heard Mum and Dad’s door open, and the pad-pad-pad of footsteps as one of them went down to put a kettle on.

  I got out of bed and hurried out onto the landing, then down the stairs.

  ‘What’s up? Couldn’t you sleep?’

  It was Dad, putting a lighted match to the camping stove. As he’d explained to us before the move, the house had old-fashioned wiring that required round-pin plugs. He’d been collecting them in the months leading up to the move, but he still had to change them all over. Until then, the electric kettle was out of action.

  I scuttled out to the privy – and immediately wished I’d stopped to put my slippers on. It was icy cold out there, and the floor was bare concrete.

  ‘Yes,’ Dad said when I returned, ‘there’s a lot needs doing.’

  I was making my way to the door, my teeth chattering. I wanted to hurry back to bed where it was warm.

  ‘Always the same with an old house. Full of cobwebs.’ He sighed as he dipped his finger in the pan of water he’d set on the Primus. ‘Cobwebs,’ he repeated. ‘And the ghosts of previous occupants.’

  I stopped in my tracks. ‘Ghosts?’ I said. ‘You mean this place is haunted?’

  Dad laughed. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I just mean that the people who lived here in the past – well, they all leave their mark. And now it’s our turn to leave ours. New wiring, a heating system, new plumbing.’ Then he added, ‘But if this place is peopled by ghosts – well, I’m afraid they’re not going to be happy when they see what I’ve got in store.’

  With that he went outside himself, leaving me to dash upstairs and dive under the covers.

  Some time later, after we’d got properly settled in, somebody told us the story that everybody in the village knew. It seemed that our new home was built on the site of an older house that had burned down, killing the two occupants. When Gillian heard this she surprised us all by telling all her friends that her room was haunted, that she could hear it breathing at night. Her new friends were soon queuing up to stay overnight with her. As for me, I tried hard to forget what I’d heard. It made me very nervous at night.

  I’m Freezing

  Midwinter, that first year, conjures up memories of the weekly wash hanging over a clothes-horse in front of an open fire; of a white frost painting pictures all over the bedroom windows; of a queue of children waiting for the kettle to boil so that they could fill their nightly hot-water bottles; of coming downstairs in the morning to find the dishcloth frozen fast to the draining board. It makes me shiver just to think of it, and of course it’s more or less unimaginable today.

  But when we moved into Beech House Farm the very idea of having a radiator in your bedroom or a heated towel-rail in the bathroom – well, it was a fantasy. You might have seen something like it on the telly – along with glamorous housewives traipsing across a bathroom carpeted with what looked like a polar bear’s coat – but you dismissed it out of hand. It was what posh people had, or Americans.

  We never imagined that we might live in such luxury. Flying cars, time machines, inter-stellar travel: we could envisage all that, no problem. It was there in our weekly comics. But a North Yorkshire winter without chilblains and frozen milk? Don’t be daft.

  Dad, however, was different. As ever.

  Dad, you see, was a brain-box. No two ways about that. He used long words, he read books, and he studied all kinds of technology. He carried out strange experiments in his workshop and did calculations on the back of his newspaper at the breakfast table while tut-tutting at us lot for arguing over the last piece of toast.

  His forehead was broad and high. He was nicknamed Christopher Lee, because he really did look ever so slightly like that master of the macabre. I suppose a later generation would’ve called him Max Headroom. He was a thinker. And, like most thinkers, he demanded peace and quiet. Fat chance of finding any of that in our house, with four children, various pets, and half the kids in the neighbourhood swarming around the place. No wonder he spent so much time in the workshops and outbuildings.

  We’d moved up to Crayke in the springtime. Life was easy. When summer came we ate picnic lunches outside, played cricket in the fields until it got dark, then slumped into our beds, hot and exhausted, threw the blankets off and flung the windows wide open. Winter was the last thing on our minds.

  But all through those carefree weeks before we went back to school, Dad was plotting. He knew that winter would come, and he knew very well what might be in store. And so he devised a plan – a plan which, just like the rest of his projects, would take months to evolve, many more months to become a reality.

  His grand plan to install a central heating system of his own design and built by his own endeavours would come to pass – but not before we’d suffered a long, snowy winter in a huge, draughty house – made all the more draughty by the holes he started knocking in the walls, floors and ceilings.

  After the initial excitement, we kids didn’t pay a lot of attention to what was going on. We got used to seeing him tap at the old lead pipes that ran up through the kitchen, or crouch down under the sink to examine the rising main, or stand like a statue, staring up at the outside brickwork, jotting occasionally in a little black notebook. We became accustomed to looking up from the kitchen and seeing the underside of Christine’s bed. We thought nothing of Dad suddenly leaving the tea-table and prising up a floorboard to probe the dark space beneath with an old screwdriver in one hand and a flickering torch in the other. We accepted his frequent disappearances, up the rickety ladder and through the little hatch that led to the attic.

  At first I was curious. Despite being told not to, I followed him up one time and stuck my head into the dark, dusty, cobwebby roof-space to see what was up there. I was hoping for long-lost cabin-trunks full of treasure. There was little to see but darkness, dust and cobwebs, as well as a few sagging rafters.

  But the sight that sticks in my kind is of Dad’s rear end as he went from beam to beam on his hands and knees, coughing through the handkerchief he wore around his nose and mouth, his torch illuminating the underside of the slates and, on one occasion, a huge old wasps’ nest.

  Yes, we were roused to interest the time his foot came through the ceiling and into our bedroom on an August night, but by and large we ignored him. We let him get on with it. He was just being Dad, and we were used to that.

  The much-discussed heating project seemed about as realistic as his plans for growing tomatoes by hydroponics in the greenhouse he had yet to build, as remote to us as the work he did at Vickers, developing a new laser sighting system for the next generation of tanks for the British Army.
Once or twice he brought home a laser device from work and showed us how powerful it was. He’d hand me his binoculars so that I could focus on some far-distant tree and watch the little red light dart about as he tried to hold the torch steady in his hand.

  When winter came it came with a bang. The north wind blew, the top of the chimney collapsed, knocking a couple of slates off the roof, and – to our delight and amazement – allowing snow to cascade into the corner of our bedroom through the hole Dad had cut there in order to accommodate the flue for the boiler he would install ‘when time and money permitted’. The fact that the snow didn’t melt, that Phil and I shaped it into a miniature snowman that lasted three full days, tells you all you need to know about the temperature inside our room. It was f-f-freezing.

  Mum, bless her, did her best to see that we kept dry and warm. She piled extra blankets on the beds and even loaned us an ancient fur coat which she’d dragged out of a trunk. It had belonged to her own grandmother and would one day, she assured us, come back into fashion. Trying to get to sleep under the unblinking gaze of the dead fox that formed the coat’s collar, I asked myself why anyone would want such a thing. But we didn’t complain. In that bitter winter every little helped.

  Of course we had hot-water-bottles too, and that was where the trouble started. Every night we took it in turns to fill the kettle, heat it up on the old gas stove and pour the contents carefully into our rubber bottles. Every night Mum would remind us not to boil the water. ‘It’ll perish the rubber,’ she said. I’m sure she was also worried about our own safety, but she never mentioned that. Just the rubber. Of course, being about nine or ten by this the time I didn’t need telling. I knew better. My feet had been so cold in bed during the freeze-up that night after night I’d raised the temperature. Sure, it made the bottle too hot to handle, but this is where I’d been clever. Far too clever for my own good, in the end. Every night when I brought it down and emptied out the previous night’s water, I also brought down an old blanket that I’d found in a drawer in the landing. Wrapping the hottie in that, I could fill it with water hot enough to brew tea, and it kept my feet cosy right through the night.

  Then came the evening when Phil was away, sleeping over at his mate’s house. The weather still had an icy grip on North Yorkshire, and the bedroom was as cold as ever. I know, I thought, I’ll use Phil’s bottle too. Phil’s was different from mine. It had a different type of stopper. But I didn’t know that. Why would I? And how would I know that I’d not got it in place securely? When I got into bed and kicked it to one side is the answer.

  The yelp I let out as the scalding water hit my foot brought everybody – Mum, Dad, the girls and Petra – to my door. They found me hopping about on one leg, tears streaming down my cheeks, and my foot a livid red.

  ‘What on earth have you done?’ Mum’s face was contorted with worry and perplexity.

  Dad had pulled the blankets back to reveal the now empty hottie. A cloud of steam was rising from the soaked mattress.

  ‘It broke,’ I gasped.

  Dad reached out and scooped me into his arms. We all but flew down the stairs with Petra at our heels and the rest of the family thumping along behind. In the kitchen he stood me in the ancient pot sink, put the plug in and turned on the cold tap. Then he turned to Mum. ‘I’ll take him, love. I’ll get the car out. He needs to be down to casualty, fast as we can.’

  I remember very little about that ride to town, which is a pity, because Dad told me afterwards that it was one of the hairiest he’d every taken. The snow was flying, the wind howling, and he had all on to keep the faithful Traveller on the road – which was covered in ice and more or less indistinguishable from the fields around us. But he got us there in one piece, and there to greet me was the nurse I’d fallen in love with on my last visit.

  ‘Don’t I know you?’ she asked as she inspected my red and blistered foot.

  ‘Yes,’ I whispered.

  ‘Ah, I remember now.’ She’d spotted my big toe, where the new nail was still not fully grown. ‘Tinned rice pudding, right?’

  They smothered my foot with some kind of soothing cream, gave me something for the pain and put a light dressing over it. Then they let Dad carry me back to the car. By this time the snow had eased off, a snow-plough seemed to have been through, and the ride home was relatively uneventful.

  I got two weeks off school, two weeks punctuated by a couple of return visits to casualty. Each time I asked the same question: ‘Can I play outside yet?’ I was missing out on sledging down the hill by the church, snowball fights and a monster slide my mates had created on the school playground. The answer was always the same. No.

  By the time I got the green light, well, you can guess what. The weather had changed, the sun had returned and all that magical world of snow and ice had melted away.

  Honk

  When Dad and Mum decided that I could have a pet they had no idea what they were letting themselves in for. Come to think of it, neither did I.

  As soon as we moved into Beech Farm House, animals were at the top of the agenda. Gillian and Christine, of course, wanted a horse. Make that horses. And they got them. There was Justine and Snap, Pippa and Shandy; and Solitaire; and Snap the Shetland pony. So my sisters were in seventh heaven – and, to be fair, I had my share of pleasure from them too. In return for mucking them out I could get a ride every so often – just so long as the girls weren’t preparing for some event or other.

  The thing was, they never let me forget that these were their horses, that the paddock and stables and the little exercise yard were their domain. They had all the gear – the riding breeches, the jackets, the hard hats. And I had … well, I had my jeans and wellies and a flat cap. Step out of line and I’d get a sharp reminder as to what Christine’s riding-crop was for.

  Not unnaturally, I wanted an animal of my own, and Mum and Dad both agreed it would only be fair. It wouldn’t be a rabbit, or a guinea-pig, because the girls had got one of those each, as well the horses. Would it be another dog? A friend for Petra? A Jack Russell perhaps, always handy if there were rats around – which there were. Every autumn they’d start to wander in off the fields, looking for a cosy spot to see out the winter.

  Mum suggested another cat, a friend for Purdy. She could certainly do with some help in the pest control department. Night after night we could hear scampering noises from under the floorboards. Purdy did her best, but she was getting on in years – unlike the mice, who seemed to be breeding like flies.

  We did indeed get a pal for her, Rosie, a black cat with a strange habit. Of all the places available to her she decided that her favourite spot for a nap was behind the wheels of the car. How she escaped being squashed remained a mystery. Somehow she always seemed to slip away just as the car moved.

  Rosie was all right, but she wasn’t mine. She was another family pet. What I wanted was an animal I could call my own, preferably something exotic. There was a lad at school, for instance, who had an iguana. It looked fantastic – like a small dragon – but it wasn’t exactly a thrill a minute: when I went to his house to look at it it just sat there waiting to be fed grasshoppers, which he bought by mail order. There was another youth who had a tarantula. That had a certain appeal: the girls hated spiders and it would be a handy weapon in the war that was constantly breaking out between us. But what else could you do with it? Not a lot, was my conclusion.

  But when I saw one of the presenters on Blue Peter with a pet python I decided that that was just the thing for me. I went to the library and took out a book about reptiles. And another one. And then a few more. I pored over the pictures and read them cover to cover, then came down for breakfast one Saturday morning and announced to the family that that was what I was going to have. And before they could protest I started to list the python’s many attributes.

  ‘I mean, it doesn’t eat much,’ I said. ‘It says in this book it can eat one small animal and it won’t need anything else all week. And they hardly make any me
ss.’

  ‘What sort of small animal are you talking about?’ Mum asked, her cup of tea halfway to her mouth.

  ‘Watch out girls, he’ll be after your guinea-pigs.’ Phil was choking on his Shredded Wheat.

  Gillian shrieked, and Christine declared that the minute a snake appeared in the house she’d pack a bag and go to live with her friend in Easingwold. ‘Or your rabbit,’ Phil added, grinning at me as Christine aimed a kick at him under the table.

  ‘Calm down, girls,’ Mum said, before turning to me with her sternest face on. ‘You will not be having a snake, Michael, and that’s final.’

  ‘But they’re really useful,’ I protested. ‘I mean, crooks and so on – it said in this book that people who have pythons never get burgled. And if a burglar does get in, then the snake slithers around him and – you know, squeezes him to death. I could get a medal.’

  ‘You’re thinking of a boa constrictor,’ Phil said. ‘They’re the ones that crush their victims. Like this.’ And he put his hands around my neck and tightened his grip.

  ‘Let your brother go,’ Dad said, from behind his Daily Mail. ‘Now.’

  ‘I don’t think we need discuss this any further,’ Mum said. ‘I’d no more think of leaving a snake on guard than – than a wolf.’ She shuddered as she buttered her toast, ‘And even if they are good guards it wouldn’t be much consolation for you if I ended up in York District Hospital with a heart attack, would it? So let’s just forget about it, Michael. If you want a pet you find something sensible. Something with four legs and a tail. Do you hear?’

  ‘It’s not fair,’ I said, scowling at them all.

  ‘Do you hear?’

  ‘The girls have got horses. Why can’t I have what I want?’

  ‘Four legs and a tail,’ Dad repeated. ‘You heard what your mother said.’

  I left the table and stormed out of the house, raging at the injustice of it all. The girls always got their way. Why wouldn’t anyone listen to reason?