Funderland

by Nigel Jarrett

  He bought the mule. The new farm owners turned the building into a home and rented out the fields as pasture. I suppose they were among the first of a wave of the immigrant rich. For a time the mule was kept in a field on a neighbouring farm, but Uncle Ben fell out with the farmer over something trivial and withdrew the animal to his back ‘lawn’: a quarter-acre by now sweet with clover and grass a foot high. Here it remained, except when Uncle Ben trailed it round the village, its reluctance to be exercised a caricature of beastly stubbornness. This was a year after I failed my exams. One evening, out of work and out of favour, I stood with Uncle Ben in his back garden, staring at the mule and its sad, drooping features.

  Then Uncle Ben began to neglect himself. He refused to eat properly and he was allowing the house to crumble around him. Protests and offers of help were unavailing. I saw that the settee was riddled with tiny holes made by showering tobacco ash. He built a manger for the mule, complete with chimney stack and lean-to. He became very silent. One of the first calls on my parents’ new phone was from one of his neighbours. ‘You’d better come round,’ he said. ‘It’s mad. What he’s doing is mad.’

  The PoWs’ birches were growing tall and slender. As our car turned the corner at the old toll house, they came into view, swaying in the headlights like phantom dancers, the council houses plan having been shelved.

  A group of people were outside the gate. There was a fire at the back. ‘He’s locked himself in,’ said the man who’d phoned. I went to the window. I could make out Uncle Ben in shadow on the settee, like Old Coker that time in the wood, and behind him, at the bottom of the garden, the manger in flames. I waved, but I must have appeared to him as he appeared to me, a figure with its features removed, a half-obliterated presence of something that might have been, now reduced to gesture. They found the mule on Forestry Commission land among the dull pines, staring in the wet at the dead end of its existence.

  Uncle Ben was sent to Ashbourne Court, the place every pestered mother threatened her kids with on the grounds that her committal would be to their detriment through the pain of guilt and separation. He spent three years at ‘the Ash’ before he died. I don’t think he said a word during that whole time, but we visited just the same. Friendly doctors would explain to us what was going on in his head, as though we were ignorant people who had taken on more than we could properly handle. They sat between us on the park benches, daring the mute Uncle Ben to contradict them. Then they’d leave him with a pat on the back. These visits eventually tired the others and, in the end, I was the only one who made the weekly trip. During summer I would wait and they would bring him to me; in winter I’d be led straight to his ward. At first I believed that his natural reticence had simply become pathological and once or twice I thought of telling the doctors in the hope that the theory might be useful to them in devising therapy. Then I had the idea that Uncle Ben could really understand everything, that he could soak up sights and sounds without, at last, the need to react. These were not enlightened days at ‘the Ash’; they were days of interrupted peace, of distant skirmishes in corridors and the foetal position assumed unnoticed among the rosebeds. In Uncle Ben’s case the haven could stand it. I reached the stage where I could tell him what I’d made of things so far and how a setback need not necessarily make you cower before the seemingly impossible. In one sense I was defying him to accept that my confessions were an adjunct of postwar privilege; in another I was goading him into speech, but his face remained almost beatific, his tongue motionless. I convinced myself that these were thoughts that Uncle Ben shared but which had always had to scramble up the rock face of his obtuseness. Yet not even the possibility of a mind in retreat from light and purpose could advance my unburdening to its extremity. I realised that important matters had once wedged themselves into his life. But they had departed, leaving a door banging uselessly in an empty room.

  When we collected his belongings, I knew we would be travelling light on our return. His bed was already being made for its next occupant. In the room, there was a sense of someone who had passed through, having been no trouble yet having missed out on so much.

  Acknowledgements

  Thanks are due to the editors of the following publications in which most of these stories, or early versions of them, first appeared: London Magazine, Staple, Panurge, Sons of Camus Writers International Journal, Brand, Dreamcatcher and Black Mountain Review (Ulster). Special thanks to David Caddy, editor of Tears in the Fence, for publishing so many of the stories that didn’t make this list. No one should forget the modest renaissance of the short story in Wales instigated in the 1980s by Arthur Smith, editor of Cambrensis, who started me off.

  I would also like to thank the writer Richard (Lewis) Davies, founder of Parthian, for his commitment to Anglo-Welsh short fiction and his willingness to allow me to make some small contribution to it; and Eluned Gramich, my editor, for reading the manuscript so assiduously and making the improvements demanded by sense, shape and structure.

  ‘Nomad’ was anthologised in Mother’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe (Parthian/Arts Council of Wales/Cambrensis) and ‘The Lister Building’ in Signals 2 (London Magazine Editions).

  ‘Mrs Kuroda on Penyfan’ won the Rhys Davies Prize for short fiction.

  About the Author

  Nigel Jarrett is a freelance writer, a former newspaper reporter and a winner of the Rhys Davies Prize for short fiction. For many years he has been music critic of the South Wales Argus. Born in Cwmbran, he was educated at West Mon School, Pontypool, and Cardiff University. He reviews poetry for Acumen magazine and jazz for Jazz Journal. He likes drawing, never tires of gazing at his cat and lives in Monmouthshire with his wife, Ann, a former teacher.

  Copyright

  First published in 2011

  by Parthian

  The Old Surgery

  Napier Street

  Cardigan

  SA43 1ED

  www.parthianbooks.co.uk

  The publisher acknowledges the financial support of the Welsh Books Council.

  This ebook edition first published in 2011.

  All rights Reserved

  © Nigel Jarrett

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  ISBN 9781908069177

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