Whip it out!
It’s not like pulling out a splinter, you camouflaged idiot! If there’s a bomb under the house, things will need to be ripped up to get at it! Torn apart! All our hard work will be destroyed!
Okay, I know I’m going a bit overboard here, but I’ve just been told that my lovely new renovated farmhouse could be hiding several unexploded Nazi bombs, so I’m understandably a little fraught.
‘What should we do now?’ Fred asks Corporal Smith.
‘Oh, we’ll have the police escort you all off the property,’ he tells him.
‘What about Pat The Cow?’ Danny asks.
‘She’ll be fine down the bottom of the garden,’ I reply. ‘That cow is more than smart enough to stay away from an unexploded bomb.’
‘We’ll get to work on the sweep tomorrow,’ Smith says.
I’m speechless. This is a disaster.
Not only are we going to lose days of work while this man and his mates poke around our house for bombs, but if they find one, there’s every chance that they’ll have to destroy some of our renovation work to extract the thing. That’s provided they don’t set the sodding thing off! How much damage will be done to my lovely new house then?
I gasp out loud. What the hell have I become?
If a bomb does go off, Corporal Smith and chums will be blown into tiny smithereens, and all I care about is what happens to my massive financial investment. How crushingly awful is that?
Daley Farmhouse is turning me into something I don’t like very much – an obsessive sociopath.
I need to get away from this place as quickly as possible before it turns me completely to the Dark Side.
‘Okay, we’ll get out of your hair,’ I tell Corporal Smith. I then look around at everyone else. ‘We could all do with a few days off, couldn’t we?’ I spout in a tremulous, sing-song voice.
‘Er, we’ve only just got here?’ Sally Willingham points out. I choose to ignore her, as this is no time for level-headedness.
‘Yes! A nice week off will do us all the world of good!’ I repeat, my voice as brittle as eggshells.
‘Are you alright, sis?’ Danny asks.
‘Fine! I’m fine!’ I reply. How can I explain that a vast irrational fear has suddenly come over me that this house has corrupted my mortal soul in ways I daren’t speak of? Best to just get the fuck out of here as quickly as possible, preferably in the direction of the nearest bar.
‘Right, you heard the lady,’ Fred says to Kev the mini-copper, who has been stood at the back of our small crowd, trying to stop Pat The Cow from nibbling on his baton. ‘Lead us away, sport!’
Kev pushes Pat’s head away from his waist. ‘Thank God for that. I think this cow is about to commit a common assault on me.’
It is with some relief that I drive away from the farmhouse that evening, leaving the police and bomb squad to their risky search. While I would prefer not to have to delay work on the house any longer than necessary, it has become quite apparent to me that I need some time away from the place. It’s all I’ve thought about for months, and having one thing fill your thoughts twenty-four hours a day for so long is not healthy in the slightest.
I will use this bizarre and strange series of events to get away from the renovation completely, and give my brain a bit of a rest.
I might read some books, catch up on some Netflix, and go for a few nice walks in the countryside. It’ll be lovely. A whole week without thinking about Daley Farmhouse once!
At 7.30 a.m. the next day I’m standing at the police tape strung across the road leading to the house with an anxious look on my face. What the hell are they doing down there?
My much-needed break from Daley Farmhouse lasted about an hour and a half, until I remembered that the gas man was supposed to be coming out on Wednesday to run a safety check. This threw me into a panic that ensured I got about three hours’ sleep. By six in the morning I was wide awake and picturing the bomb squad ripping up the entire basement because they’d found a five-hundred-pound bomb down there, with Hitler’s corpse draped over it.
You can imagine how delighted poor old Corporal Smith was when he saw my anxious face coming towards him as he stood by his army truck having a nice cup of tea poured directly from one of Her Majesty’s thermos flasks.
I fired twenty questions at him about what they were planning to do in their search today, none of which he gave me any particularly useful answers to.
I ended up standing forlornly at the police tape for a good two hours before deciding that I was being very silly, and should go home and try to forget about it.
I’m very pleased to say I successfully managed to do this!
Until 6.25 a.m. the next day, when I turned up at the house before Smith had even got the top off the thermos flask.
On the third morning the tea-drinking bomb disposal expert is conspicuous by his absence. Word has also obviously gotten around about me to his colleagues, as the exclusion zone around my good self is just slightly larger than the one around the house. Therefore, all I can do is stand and watch various men in green fatigues traipsing to and from the farmhouse in the kind of hobnailed military boots that can destroy the average brand-new floorboard in no time at all.
‘Hayley?’ a voice says from behind me. I turn to find Gerard O’Keefe walking down the road towards me, an old grey Jaguar parked behind him. I didn’t even hear him pull up; such is my obsession with damaged floorboards.
‘Gerard! What are you doing here?’
‘Mitchell called to say that work had halted thanks to a bomb scare?’
‘Yeah. That’s right. If it’s going to happen anywhere, it’s going to happen at Daley Farmhouse!’ I’m trying to make light of it, but inside I think I could just about cry right now.
‘So, no work at all for a week then?’
‘Nope.’
Gerard winces. ‘Costing you a fair bit, is it?’
My wince is much bigger. ‘Oh yes.’
He gives me a sympathetic look. ‘Fancy a hug?’
I nod. ‘Yes, Gerard. That would be very nice.’ I point over to the army lads. ‘They’re all ignoring me.’
‘Come here, then.’
The hug is warm, comfortable and smells faintly of paint thinner. All in all, quite the pleasant experience, I have to say.
‘So what do you plan on doing?’ he asks me once the hug is over.
‘I don’t know. I probably should go off and have some kind of life, but I can’t draw myself away from the place. Any second now I keep expecting them to find a massive bomb that means they’ll have to rip the flooring up. It’s potentially heart-breaking.’
Gerard puts his hands in his pockets. ‘Well, I’m not up to much today. I’ll hang around here with you, if you like.’
‘Wow. Thank you. It is a bit lonely stood here on my own.’
‘I’ve got a couple of camp chairs in the boot. I’ll go get them.’ Gerard turns to go back to his massive old Jag.
As he pulls the chairs out I have a little think. Gerard lives a good sixty miles away. He could have just called. But here he is, at the house, having come all the way down here on the off chance one of us might be around.
On the off chance you might be around, you silly sod.
My heart races. He’s still interested. Even though I turned him down for that date. So what do I do now? My reticence to get involved with another man still stands, but he’s come all the way down here from London and has brought a chair for me to sit on.
‘Here you go,’ Gerard says, plonking down a camp chair in front of me and unfolding it. He parks the second chair close to it and sits himself down, looking up at me expectantly. I sit down as well, making sure I’ve still got a decent line of sight to the army truck and the road up to the farmhouse. If anything destructive is likely to happen, I want to know about it.
‘So, tell me a bit more about yourself,’ Gerard says.
‘Huh?’ I reply, forcing my gaze away from the house.
Gerard laughs. ‘Tell me a bit more about you. We’re probably stuck here for a while, so we may as well have something to chat about!’
‘Fair enough,’ I say, returning the smile.
The next couple of hours are spent in idle chit-chat with Gerard, and not once do I feel bored, restless or anxious. This is a completely new experience for me, as the last man who I had such a long conversation with that wasn’t my brother was my ex-husband Simon. Conversations with him were usually stressful, unpleasant and demeaning – towards the end of the relationship anyway. Having a decent chat with a narcissist and a misogynist all rolled into one human being is nigh on impossible.
Gerard, on the other hand, is funny, insightful and thoroughly fascinating to talk to.
And did I mention the blue eyes?
They’re quite magnificent as well.
‘Can I say something that you might find a little . . . personal?’ he says to me, after finishing an anecdote about his elderly mother’s penchant for aerobics that has me guffawing like a madwoman for a good couple of minutes.
‘Yeah, okay.’ I reply a little uncertainly, still chuckling at the image of a rambunctious seventy-three-year-old woman in Lycra at a spinning class.
‘I think you have no idea who you actually are.’
‘I’m sorry, what?’
I wasn’t expecting that. I thought he was going to tell me I had a nice nose – or that I sound like a hyena when I laugh.
‘You think you’re two steps away from a meltdown, and that you’re not a strong person,’ Gerard continues, his deep blue eyes fixed on my face intently. ‘I think that ex of yours did you a lot of damage, and if I ever met him, I think I’d pull his kidneys out.’
I blink a couple of times. No one has ever offered to do brutal and amateur surgery on Simon before. The thought has a definite appeal. ‘Thank you, Gerard,’ I tell him. ‘I’m not sure I’m quite as tough as you think I am, but thanks for saying so anyway.’
Gerard holds a finger up. ‘And beautiful, Miss Daley! You are also quite, quite lovely to look at.’
There go my knees. Traitorous bloody things that they are. It’s a good job I’m sitting down.
I’m also apparently leaning forward in my seat to get closer to Gerard.
This is very strange. I’m not doing it consciously. It’s just happening without my say so. It’s almost as if my body has had quite enough of my timid brain and is taking matters into its own hands.
Gerard’s eyes go a little wide, but then he leans towards me too.
From the outside this all looks astronomically awkward I’m sure. I don’t recommend attempting a first kiss in a foldaway camp chair. There’s an unwholesome amount of straining and lurching involved that doesn’t lend itself to passionate romance in the slightest. Nevertheless, our lips are now almost touching.
‘Er, hello?’ Corporal Smith says from beyond the police tape.
I jump a mile.
Gerard and I both instantly lean back away from the kiss and look up at Smith, who has the good grace to look extremely awkward. ‘Um. Sorry to interrupt. Thought I’d better let you know that we’ve finished with the sweep.’
‘Already?’ I say in disbelief. ‘I thought you said it could take a week?’
‘I did, but the land has been easier to scan than I thought it would.’ He smiles. ‘Job’s done!’
Excellent!
For a moment I forget that this man has ruined my first kiss with a man in years. He’s just given me some very good news, after all. ‘You mean we can get back in the house today?’ I ask him excitedly.
‘Yep. We can be packed up in an hour.’
‘Thank you, Corporal Smith!’ I turn back to Gerard, who is looking faintly disappointed. ‘Isn’t that great, Gerard?’
‘Yes. That’s wonderful,’ he says, sounding more than a little forced.
‘Er, there’s something else,’ Corporal Smith says. ‘We didn’t find any more shells, but we did find something.’
‘What?’ I ask, wondering what the hell he’s on about.
‘I think—I think you should come and look for yourself,’ Smith suggests. ‘We put it in the living room for you.’
I look down at a large black trunk, encrusted with mud.
‘Where did you find it?’ I ask Smith.
‘Down the right-hand side of the house, close to the fence. Private Carmichael picked it up on his detector. We all held our breath for a quite a while before we got it unearthed. Thought it could have been another bomb. Turned out to just be this trunk, though.’
‘People have a habit of hiding things away in this house,’ Gerard remarks from beside me. ‘First all that stuff from up the chimney, and now this.’
He has a point. I still have no idea who secreted all the kinky stuff up that chimney. Maybe the same person is responsible for burying this trunk?
‘Is there anything in it?’ I ask the corporal.
Smith smiles. ‘Oh yes!’
He flips the trunk lid open to reveal a very old projector and four cans of film.
‘Good god!’ Gerard exclaims. ‘It’s an old 8 millimetre! A Bell & Howell if I’m not mistaken!’
‘You know about these things?’ I ask him, gobsmacked.
He rolls his eyes. ‘I work for the BBC, Hayley. We’re pretty much required to be steeped in useless knowledge about this type of stuff. Never ask me to tell you about eight-track recording. You’ll want to kill yourself within five minutes of me opening my mouth.’
He pulls the projector out of the trunk. It looks exactly the way you’d expect an old film projector to look. Two big wheels on top, big camera lens at the front, lots of complicated-looking switches and spindles on the side.
Gerard examines the thing for a few seconds. ‘It’s in very good nick,’ he says at last. ‘That trunk must have been pretty much airtight. Even the power cord still looks fine. I’d have to rewire it with a modern plug, but other than that, it’d be good to go.’
‘Do you think it’ll work?’ Corporal Smith asks, apparently caught up in the excitement of the find.
Gerard shrugs. ‘I have no idea. There’s no electricity here yet, so I don’t think we could get it working anyway.’
‘You could fire the generator up,’ I respond. Even I’m curious to see whether this antique still works or not. ‘There’s an extension cord over there. You could plug it in and have a go.’
Gerard’s eyes light up, as do Corporal Smith’s.
Within a few minutes Fred’s generator is up and running, Gerard has found a modern plug and rewired the power cord, and the projector has been propped up on one of the stepladders that lie around the house.
‘It’s got power!’ Gerard says with excitement, examining the side of the projector. ‘We could actually get this thing working!’
I look through the four round metal cans of film inside the trunk. Two aren’t labelled, and the film looks to have crumbled to dust, but two are in better condition, with the film still intact. They both have scuffed and faded black lettering on the outside of the can. One says ‘A Special Evening’ and means nothing to me, but when I read what’s written on the other, my excitement levels sky rocket. ‘Oh my God,’ I say breathlessly.
‘What is it?’ Gerard asks.
I hold up the film can to show him the title on the side of it.
‘“Genevieve in the Summer Garden”,’ Gerard reads. ‘What does it mean?’
‘Genevieve was my grandma’s name,’ I tell him. ‘This is a film of my grandmother!’
His eyes go wide. ‘Fantastic!’ He holds out a hand. ‘Let’s get it in the projector and see if it runs.’
I hand the film can over with one shaking hand. This is incredible. There’s every chance that I am about to see my grandmother fifty years ago, when she wasn’t that much older than I am now.
And the house! I’ll get to see the house before it fell apart!
I stand nervously chewing on one fingernail while Gerard goes thro
ugh the complicated business of spooling the film into the projector. After ten minutes of swearing and grunting he announces that it’s ready to go. ‘It might not look very bright,’ he warns, ‘but this room is quite dark and the plaster on the walls is white, so we should see something. If the projector works.’
‘What about sound?’ Corporal Smith asks.
‘Oh yes, these old beauties had sound on them as well. But it might be very bad quality.’ He hovers a finger over the on switch and looks at me. ‘Hold your breath,’ he says, and flicks it.
The projector starts to make a loud, rapid ticking noise as the film starts to feed from one spool, through the projector and onto the other. A bright light erupts from the lens and casts a vaguely square image on the plaster wall in front of it. The picture is a bit blurred, but otherwise Gerard has done a fine job getting the old projector to work.
‘Yes!’ he crows triumphantly.
‘Good bloody show!’ Corporal Smith shouts.
I can’t say anything, as I am transfixed.
In the blurry projector’s image is a summer garden, bathed in warm sunlight.
I was right, it is the garden here at Daley Farmhouse. The back garden to be precise.
Where now stands a cracked and disused patio, covered in weeds and old bits of rusted garden furniture, there once was a wooden gazebo, covered in trailing vines and flowers. The very same rusty garden furniture is in this shot, only looking in much better shape. Not brand new by any means, but still perfectly useable.
This is a description I could use for the whole house, actually – what I can see of it at least, in this shaky, blurred image. There’s a shabby chic quality to it that I rather like. You can tell it was an old Victorian home, even back then, but it was still in good enough shape to be inhabited. It’d take another fifty years of neglect for it to get to the dilapidated state Danny and I found it in.
In one of the patio chairs sits a woman in a light summer dress. It’s my grandmother. A very young version of my grandmother, anyway, with a neat early 1960s bob haircut. She looks beautiful.
‘Now I see where you get your looks,’ Gerard murmurs from my side.
My grandmother smiles, waves at the camera and stands up. ‘How long are you going to do that?’ I hear her say. The sound quality is atrocious, but even through its thick layer of static I can hear how strong and vibrant Grandma’s voice was when she was a young woman. I’ve been so used to hearing her at an old age and beyond, that it comes as a pleasant surprise to listen to her light, young and lyrical tone.
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