by Sue Townsend
I approached the tracksuited women to ask if I could join the Save the Post Office Campaign. I explained that due to personal reasons I was unable to do a sponsored run, gesturing vaguely at my legs.
‘I know who you are,’ said one of the women, wearing a pink and white tracksuit the exact shade of coconut ice. ‘I’ve seen you at the school gate. You live in one of them pigsties – you’re writing the community play. Can we all have a part?’
I told them that I would write a scene for them, and they laughed and did high fives with their porky arms across the table.
10 p.m.
On our way home the rain was thundering on to the umbrella. Gibbet Lane was more puddle than road. I had to push Daisy most of the way. It was no easy matter having a light-heavyweight boxer on the crossbar.
I told her that unless she bought a pair of wellingtons I would…
‘You’ll do what?’ she said, her hands tightening around my neck.
I did not reply. She knows I am a fool for love.
The field was so flooded that the water came ankle height up my wellingtons and I had to carry Daisy right up to the front door.
As I was putting the key in the lock, my mother came to her front door and said, ‘I saw you staggering up the drive – is she drunk again?’
Daisy slid off my back and said, ‘Again, Pauline? Again? I can’t remember the last time I was drunk!’
‘I can,’ said my mother. ‘It was yesterday. I nipped in to cadge a fag and you were lying on the settee.’
‘I was playing at casualty with Gracie!’ said Daisy heatedly.
By now we were in the cramped hallway. I took off my sodden coat and trousers, put on my dressing gown and went into the living room. My mother and Daisy remained in the hall, having a whispered conversation. Then I heard my mother’s raised voice. ‘You might think you can fool him, Daisy. But you can’t fool me!’
Before we went to bed, I checked the alcohol supplies in the kitchen cupboard. There was very little vodka left in the bottle and all the leftover Christmas liqueurs and novelty drinks (Nigel’s birthday gift of scorpion tequila) had gone.
Friday 29th June
Mr Carlton-Hayes, who returned to work on Monday, said the incessant rain reminded him of the floods of 1953 when his aunt was swept from her bungalow in Skegness, carried downstream and ended up on the roof of the bus station. He didn’t say why he had been away from the shop, but I noticed that he is walking very gingerly.
Sunday 1st July
NO SMOKING DAY
A momentous day! Smoking in a public place or place of work is forbidden in England. Though if you are a lunatic, a prisoner, an MP or a member of the Royal Family you are exempt.
Smoking has blighted my life. There is a photograph of me in my mother’s arms, the day I was released from the maternity hospital. She is standing in the hospital car park with me cradled in one arm, the other arm is hanging at her side and in her hand is a lit cigarette.
I have been ingesting smoke since I was five days old. My childhood memories are clouded by smoke-filled rooms and car journeys made miserable by my chain-smoking parents. From my subservient position in the back of the car I would plead for a window to be opened, but my father would refuse angrily, saying fresh air was bad for his bronchitic chest. I remember, on a long traffic-choked journey to Hunstanton, improvising a facemask out of a Kleenex Mansize tissue. My parents found this to be hilarious and called me ‘bandit boy’ throughout our short stay.
After breakfast (two Weetabix, chocolate croissant, banana) I went next door to invite them to Sunday lunch at The Bear. I said, ‘I want to experience for the first time what it’s like to enjoy a meal with you without both of you blowing smoke in my face.’
My father went into a rant, saying, ‘This bloody authoritarian government, they’re a bunch of fascists, Nazis!’
My mother looked broken. ‘This is a sad, sad day,’ she said.
‘It’s hardly the end of civilization,’ I said, as I went around the room emptying ashtrays into the pedal bin.
My mother said, ‘Well, it’s the end of my little world.’
She went into a lamentation about what will be lost.
‘What will be lost,’ I said, ‘will be your hacking cough, the foul stink, the experience –’
Interrupting, my mother reached for her cigarette packet and said dreamily, ‘I’ve smoked since I was thirteen. At fifteen I wore three-quarter-length gloves and used a tortoiseshell cigarette holder.’
‘They’d lynch you nowadays,’ my father said.
‘Who would?’ I asked.
‘Bleedin’ animal rights tossers, save the bloody tortoise.’
My mother continued, ‘At sixteen I was going to the Hot Sounds jazz club in Norwich. It was there I smoked my first Disque Bleu.’
‘I was on Capstan Full Strength by the time I was sixteen,’ boasted my father.
I left them to their smoking reminiscences, I could hear Daisy and Gracie shouting at each other through the party wall.
When I got in, I found them engaged in yet another ridiculous argument about clothing. Why does my daughter always have to be dressed as a Disney character of some kind? She is a merchandiser’s dream. I still remember her first day at nursery school, her pirate costume did not go down well with the reception class teacher, and it took for ever to wrest the cutlass from her tiny fingers.
Gracie shouted, ‘Why can’t I wear my Tinker Bell costume to the pub?’
Daisy said, ‘You can, but you’re not wearing the wings.’
‘Fairies have to wear their wings, or they can’t fly,’ said Gracie.
‘You’re not wearing those bloody wings,’ said Daisy. ‘The last time you wore them in the pub, they knocked every glass off the next table and it cost your dad twenty-five quid to replace the drinks.’
Gracie shouted, ‘Well, if my wings knock anything over today, I’ll pay with my million pounds in the bank.’
Daisy and I looked at each other guiltily. We had pillaged Gracie’s saving-for-the-future bank account to pay the last electricity bill. She stomped off to her bedroom and returned wearing the Tinker Bell dress and wings. I did not have the heart to remonstrate. When Gracie said, ‘I look beautiful, don’t I?’ I weakened and said, ‘Yes.’
Daisy exploded, saying that I was ganging up against her and undermining her authority. I took a tea towel and began to dry the breakfast things that Daisy had left on the draining board and remained calm as she berated me for actual and imaginary wrongs. It was a long and familiar list.
The cesspit.
The fact that she doesn’t have a car.
I earn a pittance at the bookshop.
She is tired of colouring her own hair and the lack of Sky Plus.
She hates the taste and texture of the bread I make twice a week.
She thinks the villagers of Mangold Parva are imbeciles.
She hates giving the pigsty address to anybody.
She is sick of my parents interfering in our lives.
She sat down at the kitchen table and began to cry. It was a heartbreaking sound and I suddenly became afraid. Gracie wriggled out of the contentious Tinker Bell costume and waved the twinkly wand over her mother’s head as though magic would stop her tears.
I don’t know how I can make my wife happy.
Gracie and I sat on our own for most of our meal at The Bear. Daisy and my mother and father were outside, smoking in the rain, together with most of the regulars. Tom Urquhart, the landlord, said, ‘This no-smoking malarkey is going to finish The Bear.’
I did not enjoy my meal. It was overcooked and had a curious texture that set my gag mechanism off, I suspect because Lee Grant, the chef, was constantly nipping out to have a cigarette. Also, Gracie kept up an interminable monologue about a boy at nursery school called Mason, who lives in one of the council houses. She told me that he has a packed lunch of two bags of crisps, a bottle of Coke, a bag of Haribo sweets and a cheese string. According to
Gracie, Mason was made to stand in front of the assembled school whilst the contents of his lunch box were displayed and condemned by Mrs Bull, the headmistress. The box reference reminded me that it was months since I had last spoken to Pandora. I think about her several times a day but I am a proud man and I have been waiting for her to ring me. I saw that the smokers had been joined in the drizzle by Hugo Fairfax-Lycett, the heir apparent of Fairfax Hall. As I watched, he lit Daisy’s cigarette and she threw her head back and did her party trick of blowing a succession of smoke rings. I saw the admiration on his face and watched as my mother undid the top button of her mock-satin shirt. I don’t see why women go so barmy about Fairfax-Lycett. He is far too tall, looks like a ravaged Hugh Grant and is vulgarly ostentatious with his sports cars and Savile Row tweeds. I bet he has never opened a book since leaving Cambridge. Pandora would make mincemeat of him.
After an interminable-seeming ten minutes I heard the roar of Fairfax-Lycett’s car and my family came back inside for their pudding.
My mother pushed her soggy peach cobbler to the side of the bowl and said, ‘The food in this place has gone off.’
My father said, ‘Everything has gone off since New Labour took over. Do you know who owns our water now? The fucking French! And you can’t even pick your nose in private any more, there’ll be a bloody CCTV camera watching where you put your bogeys. You’ve got nutters in Glasgow bombing the bleeding airport, and soon we’re all going to be up to our waists in floodwater. What next?’
Tony Wellbeck from the post office said, ‘Foot and mouth, George. They’ve got it in Hardton, less than a mile from Mangold.’
Diary, if somebody had walked into the pub and said, ‘There’s a plague of locusts outside,’ I would not have raised an eyebrow.
Is this the end of the world as we know it?
Later, I was going to have it out with Daisy, but then I noticed she was reading For the Sake of Argument by Christopher Hitchens and again decided against it.
Monday 2nd July
Mr Carlton-Hayes phoned to say that he was ‘incapacitated’. I don’t like it when he’s not at the shop. It’s not that he does very much these days, but I feel better when he’s there.
He truly loves books, to the detriment of the business. The other day a middle-aged woman with John Lennon glasses and overlarge breasts came in and tried to buy a second edition of The Mill on the Floss for £150. She introduced herself as Dr Pearce and said she was looking for a retirement present for the head of the English Department at De Montfort University. Mr Carlton-Hayes unlocked the glass cabinet where the antiquarian books are kept, and took the two-volume edition down from the shelf. He handed volume one to the woman, watched her leaf through it, then took it back and replaced both books in the cabinet. When Dr Pearce had left, empty-handed and bewildered, Mr Carlton-Hayes said, ‘I thought she handled it too roughly,’ as though the book were an RSPCA rescue dog.
It’s no wonder the accountants are advising him to sell the shop premises to Tesco. When he told me this, I saw a rare flash of anger pass over his face. He spread his arms out to the shelves and stacks of books and said, ‘But where would they go?’ as though they were a displaced people.
I took advantage of Mr Carlton-Hayes’s absence, phoned De Montfort University and left a message for Dr Pearce to the effect that The Mill on the Floss was now for sale. She came in only minutes before I closed. We talked about George Eliot and she seemed pleased to find a fellow enthusiast. It was 6.30 before I noticed the time. She waited while I locked up, then we walked down the High Street together, me pushing my bike, she holding an umbrella over our heads. She kept me talking on the corner of the Holiday Inn car park for another half an hour.
When Daisy asked why I was late home, I told her that the chain had come off my bike. Don’t ask me why.
Thursday 5th July
Mr C-H back
Received a disaster alert text on my mobile as we were eating our sandwiches in the back of the shop. Twenty-five killed and thirty-three injured in an explosion in a karaoke bar in Tianshifu in China.
‘Shocking, isn’t it?’ I said to Mr Carlton-Hayes.
‘It is indeed,’ he said, sighing. ‘Karaoke in Chin, Weep, Confucius, weep!’
Friday 6th July
Woken up by the phone. It was my mother. ‘Have you looked outside?’ she shrieked.
I took the phone and drew back the bedroom curtains. The fields had vanished and been replaced by shimmering floodwater as far as the eye could see.
‘Have you got any sandbags?’ my mother asked.
I said, ‘You know I haven’t got any sandbags. Why would I have sandbags?’
I phoned Mr Carlton-Hayes to tell him that I wouldn’t be in today and he said, ‘Yes, it was rather exciting driving through the floods. The water came up to the wheel arches of the Rover.’ I spent most of the rest of the day trying, Canute-like, to prevent the water from breaching our doorstep.
When the flood had receded somewhat, I sat down with Gracie to watch television. Postman Pat has been promoted, he has got to leave Greendale Village and his red van to move to a middle-management position at Head Office. Some fool at the BBC said, ‘We are taking Postman Pat into a dynamic new environment. There will be highly charged storylines.’ So even Postman Pat is sacrificed on the altar of progress. Without his uniform and his red van, Pat is nothing. NOTHING!
This is just a blatant attempt to exploit the commercial arm of the BBC. I expect there will be a new range of Postman Pat merchandise. Will I have to buy Gracie a Postman Pat Montego and a suit and briefcase set?
Wednesday 11th July
Day off today. I intended to spend it diligently colour coding my CDs and updating a few pages of my serial killer comedy, The White Van. I lay awake last night thinking about it. Obviously Pauline Quirke and Harry Enfield are a bit old now to play the serial killer and his wife, but Russell Brand and Amy Winehouse would make good substitutes.
I was also going to offer to do half the ironing, but something came over me, and I did nothing but watch television. At 4 p.m. I tore myself away from Flog It! (I really wanted to know how much a Clarice Cliff egg cup set went for at auction) and ran in my wellingtons through the last few inches of floodwater to the post office, to post a birthday card to my sister-in-law, Marigold, and a parcel for Daisy. She had eBayed her Louis Vuitton holdall to a woman in Nuneaton to pay the Severn Trent water bill before they cut us off. The postmaster and postmistress, Tony and Wendy Wellbeck, were both behind the counter bickering over the cost of airmail stamps to Timbuktu. I signed the Keep Our Post Office Open petition and waited. They both smiled politely when they noticed me at the counter.
‘Who in Mangold Parva is writing to Timbuktu?’ I asked.
Wendy looked around the post office, then lowered her voice and said, out of the corner of her mouth, ‘I’m not allowed to say – confidentiality or data protection – but if you nip out and look up Gibbet Lane…’
I went outside and saw old Mrs Lewis-Masters inching her way up the hill behind a Zimmer frame. Timbuktu? She looked like the type of woman who only ever wrote to some distant relation in Sydenham about knitting patterns and the trials of dealing with one’s bank via their call centre in Calcutta.
As she weighed Daisy’s parcel, Mrs Wellbeck said, ‘She writes to Timbuktu once a fortnight, sends cards at Christmas and Easter and a birthday card in early July.’
The Mangold Parva post office is like an illustration out of one of Gracie’s books, apart from the fact that Mr and Mrs Wellbeck are not squirrels in Edwardian clothing. Every inch of the interior is lined with shelving and stuff for sale, though I think the Wellbecks lost control of their stock years ago. There are tins of beans next to a box of Jiffy bags. Pots of pens and pencils share a shelf with tins of cat and dog food. Greetings cards are jumbled together in shoeboxes: ‘Happy First Birthday’ shares a box with ‘Condolences On Your Recent Bereavement’.
The stationery shelves tempted me with thei
r luscious spiral-bound notebooks containing virginal white, black-lined paper with margins in red. I was drawn to them as other men are drawn to adult toys in sex shops.
‘Another notebook?’ said Mrs Wellbeck. ‘What are you doin’, eating ’em?’
‘Mr Mole’s a bit of a writer,’ said Mr Wellbeck. Everything he said sounded faintly insulting, as though he was having a private joke.
‘I could write a book, working ’ere,’ said Mrs Wellbeck. ‘You wouldn’t believe the things we see and hear.’
It is my habit to challenge people like Mrs Wellbeck, who make such empty boasts. ‘Why don’t you write a book then?’ I said.
Mrs Wellbeck sighed. ‘I would if I ’ad the time.’
‘Wendy’s a brilliant writer,’ said Wellbeck. ‘Her letters are famous in the family.’
‘A book is a very different thing, though, isn’t it?’ I pressed. ‘A book needs structure, plot, characterizations.’
‘Her punctuation is second to none,’ said Wellbeck. ‘She knows exactly where to place her full stops.’
‘Then she must go ahead and write her book,’ I said.
‘I told you, I haven’t got the time,’ she said quite irritably, I thought, considering I was a customer.
‘Why? What do you do with the hours you are not working?’ I asked, genuinely wanting to know.
‘I sleep for eight of them,’ she said.
‘And the rest?’ I asked. I couldn’t stop, even though I could see that our conversation was leading to a confrontation about the artistic sensibility.
‘I cook, I clean, I wash, I iron, I do a daily sudoku, I garden…’ She went on in this vein.
I happen to know that Mrs Wellbeck is an ardent follower of various soap operas. I have often heard her talking proprietorially about characters in EastEnders, Coronation Street and Emmerdale.