by Ian Hutson
Wiping tears of pure romance from her eyes Miss Rutherford closed the high-quality paperback book that she had been reading (a ‘Recommendation Of The Month’ from the Reader’s Digest). She looked across the room at Mr Stringer and sighed contentedly, imagining him in a mammoth-fur leotard and wielding a wooden club. Then she dismissed the scenario as really somewhat unlikely. Mr Stringer was certainly a man of many parts, but most of them were broken or missing and such components of his anatomy as had once been labelled as of a romantic nature were now quite beyond economic repair.
Miss Rutherford’s little cottage was in the sleepy village of Toastville in the rolling county of Teashire, in England, the World. Her carefully-tended garden was closing itself up at the end of a lovely, sunny evening. Delicate, feminine, roses made from sugar and spice and all things nice were beginning to hug their petals around themselves like pastel cashmere wraps. Gentlemanly hedgehogs were snuffling in the shadows, plotting out the course of their travels in search of juicy slugs and snails and puppy-dog tails. Dusk was growing in confidence and the sky, although still a beautiful blue, had taken on that certain metallic transparency that comes with nightfall.
Without warning or preamble what looked very much like a shooting star flashed across the sky and seemed almost to bury itself somewhere just outside the village. Miss Rutherford, throwing caution and a lifetime of experience to the wind, quickly made a heartfelt wish upon it. She gave a coy glance in Mr Stringer’s direction to see if her wish had been granted but no; he was still sipping his cocoa and utterly oblivious to her affections. She concluded that shooting stars were probably not what they had once been. This was probably for the best, since one should always be careful what one wishes for in view of the significant danger that one might actually get it.
Eighty years of frustration welled up inside her, and Miss Rutherford stabbed a crumpet on a toasting fork and thrust it towards the flames of the fireplace. Since butter wouldn’t melt in Mr Stringer’s mouth it would have to be melted elsewhere. She flicked through her mental catalogue of polite casual conversation gambits and chose one.
‘Fat, Mr Stringer, is something that men do to women.’
Hearing its name, Mr Stringer’s mind returned in a fluster from Lords MCC, where he had been scoring a valiant century and thereby retaining The Ashes for England.
‘I’m sorry - was I snoring again?’
‘Very nearly, Mr Stringer. Crumpet?’ Miss Rutherford replied, brandishing a hot item of regional English baking under his nose.
‘Oh yes - yes it is. May I have one too?’
Miss Rutherford, fond of Mr Stringer though she was, withered.
‘You just missed a spectacular shooting star Mr Stringer. It seemed almost to land nearby.’
‘Oh - I’ve never been fond of shooting stars since reading The Day of The Triffids - I always expect to awake to find that I have gone blind and that the giant flesh-eating leeks are on the warpath.’
Mr Stringer was not one of life’s incurable romantics. After his mug of cocoa and a second crumpet he bade farewell and went home, leaving Miss Rutherford to choose another pulp romance. Shimmying up and down her bookshelves Miss Rutherford found herself rather ironically humming the Rolling Stones (she couldn’t not get no satisfaction neither). She took her fresh book to her bed.
The following morning while rinsing a pair of Craster kippers for breakfast, Miss Rutherford listened with one ear to the news on the wireless.
The Communist Chinesers, the Union of Soviet Socialistics, and the United State of Americans continued to rattle sabres at each other. The United Kingdomites, to wit, England, yapped around their ankles like a randy Chihuahua and then bombed Cairo, as one always should during a crisis. Egypt was in some sort of a huff over the Suez Canal and the Aswan Dam and Foreign Aid or Lucozade or something.
The promised “Four Minute Warning” of any attempted nuclear annihilation was to be reduced to three minutes and ten seconds, and the Civil Defence Corps was to distribute leaflets detailing a fresh design for an under-the-stairs bomb shelter, plus six free toe-tags per household.
The weather was to continue to become cooler, the wireless said. Rain, sleet, snow, hail, wind, calm, frost and glorious, baking-hot sunshine were all expected, much as usual for England, and they were expected to be sometimes in curious conjunction or sometimes in injudicious juxtaposition. The long-term forecast was that the afternoon would be much the same as the morning.
In regional news there were roadworks on the promenade at Froomington-on-Sea, the Brighouse and Drastic Brass Band had been confirmed for the Christmas panto season in Weston Upperville, and a secret government satellite carrying stockpiled dinosaur DNA had crashed back down to earth. There then followed the usual information about dustbin collections, and two county-set obituaries, neither of whom had been in Miss Rutherford’s social circle.
Miss Rutherford dried her kippers on a Tower Bridge commemorative tea towel and slipped them into a pan to poach along with half a pint of Gold-Top milk, a chopped onion, a bay leaf and some thyme.
The morning post arrived, and it rather intriguingly contained a buff envelope bearing a government franking mark. Miss Rutherford’s hips creaked ominously as she bent down to retrieve everything from the coconut husk doormat.
Mr Stringer, like a lonely schoolboy out looking for his best friend to play with, stuck his head through the kitchen window. The window was fortunately, but quite incidentally, open.
‘Oh I say Miss Rutherford - if those are your call-up papers they’re very late.’
Miss Rutherford sliced open the rough envelope with the kitchen paperknife.
‘It is a telegram from Whitehall. They advise that a secret, government satellite carrying stockpiled dinosaur DNA may have crashed very near the village. The Army is to be mobilised at start of business hours on Monday morning and they recommend in the meanwhile that no-one drink the tap water.’
‘The tap water?’
‘The tap water, Mr Stringer. The village is supplied from the reservoir and the reservoir is filled by the run-off from Lessissomuch Moor. From the trajectory of yestereve’s putative shooting star I suspect that the satellite wreckage may well lie on that very moorland. This will be why the government is discouraging us from drinking the tap water.’
Miss Rutherford glanced towards her kitchen table and the half-empty second pot of tea of her morning. A pot and a half of best Darjeeling made with tap-water was already warming and lubricating Miss Rutherford’s kidneys.
‘Tea, Mr Stringer.’
‘Lovely - thank you.’
‘Tea is made with water Mr Stringer.’
‘Being only a man I have often wondered about the recipe.’
‘My kippers are rinsed in it.’
‘In tea?’
‘In water.’
‘You ladies have such a clever way with ingredients. This is something that we mere men will never master.’
‘Water, Mr Stringer, that our government has just spent hard-won tax guineas on telegrams advising us to temporarily avoid.’
‘Oh dear, yes, I do see what you mean. Is there some possible alternative ingredient to water then Miss Rutherford?’
‘None. We must take action, Mr Stringer.’
‘Action? But it’s Saturday, I really don’t think that I...’
‘Mr Stringer - what do you imagine will be the life-span of the average English woman or man in the village when denied tea and a well-rinsed breakfast kipper for forty-eight hours or more?’
‘I do see what you mean - although perhaps some other beverage and a cereal?’
Miss Rutherford silenced Mr Stringer’s quite preposterous suggestion with a glance and a raising of her eyebrow. ‘This is England, Mr Stringer, there is no substitute for tea and the only respectable alternative to kippers is toast or eggs. We are not savages to nibble on dreadful foreign “breakfast cereals” Mr Stringer.’
Mr Stringer, rather reluctantly given the obvious c
orollary in re taking action, was forced to agree.
‘Make haste - there is, in my experience, usually no time to lose during these E.S.A. emergencies.’
‘E.S.A.?’
‘English Space Agency.’
Miss Rutherford and Mr Stringer sallied forth with dispatch, with a work-a-day patent leather handbag and with a mission to save the world (England). All about them village life went on as calmly as it had for thousands of years and more.
The blacksmith was working at his horses’ bits with hammers. The grocer was chalking up his fresh daily sign that read “Yes, we still have no bananas, due to WWII rationing not ending in England until 1954”. The baker’s apprentice was unloading sacks of flour-stretching white lead from a delivery cart, and the young Vicar’s elderly Austin motor car was parked outside the Saracen’s Head Public House. The Vicar himself - less overcome by the holy spirits than he had been at eleven o’clock the previous evening - was snoring in the driving seat, his vestments in quite some ungodly disarray.
Meanwhile, out on the moor among the rare wild orchids and the butterflies and the shallow graves of a long list of local people who had yet to be missed, lay the potential doom of the village - even of England! Upturned alongside the wreckage with lids already askance, several thick glass bell-jars contained now no more than the remnants of the various escaped, wobbling, semi-sentient, sickly-green, putrid-yellow and fuchsia pink jellies that are the very stuff of fresh dinosaur DNA. Trails such as those left by slugs led away in all directions.
Really not much change there then - English village life a la SNAFU.
‘As I see it our duty is to first isolate the village’s water supply by somehow turning the enormous, rusted-up iron-wheel controlled valve in the isolated, dark, shadowy pump-house by the deep, menacing waters of the village reservoir. We must then tidy up the wreckage of the satellite and prevent the public from approaching more closely than might be safe - by establishing an exclusion zone of at least some ten or twelve feet in radius.’
‘That sounds like an awful lot for merely the two of us to achieve, Miss Rutherford.’
‘It is indeed, Mr Stringer, and this is why we shall recruit the assistance of Constable Goodboddie. To the village Police Station and don’t spare the horses, as they say.’
However, as with all best-laid plots and plans, the waste bio-matter appeared to have already been deleteriously affected by the actions of the domestic rotational air-circulation device: they met Constable Goodboddie while still en route to the Police Station, just two cottages along from Miss Rutherford’s own.
‘Hello, Constable Goodboddie.’
‘Oh - hello. Am I ever glad to see you, Miss Rutherford. There has been an... incident. I would appreciate the benefit of your experience in the matter. So far I have h’established h’an h’exclusion zone.’ The good constable had once been quite correctly severely reprimanded at school for dropping the aitch when pronouncing the word “herbs”, and he now very understandably over-compensated on the deep-seated psychological grounds that it was better to be safe than to sound pretentious or faux-French again.
From the roadside Doris’s cottage still looked idyllic. The roof was thatched, the small garden neat and crammed with tamed, well-fed wild-flowers. Only the burst windowpane and the shards of hand-blown glass outside gave any clue that some trouble that had recently been within was now without. Miss Rutherford opened the low front door slowly, ducked and advanced into the shadows. She was followed at not some little respectful distance by Mr Stringer and by the Constable (his lignum vitae truncheon erect and his lips puckered ready about his Police-issue whistle).
A domestic radiogram burbled happily in one corner, relaying the many dramatic existential tribulations of the cast of The Archers. The mahogany veneer of the cabinet was scratched and covered in quite monstrous amounts of chalky bird-poop. A tall ornamented and gilded bird cage rested at a jaunty angle against the chimney breast, its bars bent and snapped apart. Floral curtains hung in cotton tatters and almost all of the other soft furnishings had been piled into a makeshift nest in the room’s centre, out of which Doris Blenkinsopp’s slippers and uneaten ankles could be seen poking up over the edge.
‘’Ello ’ello ’ello’ expostulated the Constable, with no regard for the corny nature of his dialogue.
Mr Stringer, ever the optimist, made as though to step forward and render medical assistance to Doris, but Miss Rutherford with her more complete view stayed him with an outstretched arm.
‘Poor Doris, Miss Rutherford - surely a well-placed bandage or even a necessarily chaste kiss of life?’ cried Mr Stringer, somewhat distraught and itching to put his Saint John Ambulance Service training into action.
‘Mr Stringer, dear Doris has lost a considerable amount of body-weight since we spoke to her only yesterday, and I fear that it has done her general health a power of no good.’
‘Oh dear. Is Doris’s condition really so serious?’ queried Mr Stringer, still trying to look over Miss Rutherford’s shoulder.
‘It is, Mr Stringer. Indeed, Doris’s welfare has now passed into the purview of the gods.’
‘But what might possibly have happened to poor Doris, Miss Rutherford? Some new and fanciful London magazine diet perhaps?’
‘No, Mr Stringer, if you will observe the reckless discarding of dear Doris’s remains in the abominable nest-like formation, then combined with the violent damage to the ornamental bird cage the poor lady’s fate becomes quite, quite clear to the logical mind.’
‘I am afraid that I don’t understand, Miss Rutherford.’
‘Doris has been slaughtered, Mr Stringer. Slaughtered and eaten because she was kind enough to offer her sweet little pet budgerigar some fresh water on a daily basis. Note the unopened government telegram on the doormat. I venture that Doris, in her ignorance of the circumstances, used fresh water from the tap. You will remember the payload of the ill-fated satellite so recently crashed in these environs? DNA, Mr Stringer - deadly, all-powerful dinosaur DNA and almost certainly, given the usual modus operandi of our government, in its most virulent and dangerous sickly green, putrid yellow and fuchsia pink slithering, semi-sentient jelly form.’
Miss Rutherford girded her girdled loins and issued her judgement. ‘I conclude that in her uninformed avian husbandry dear Doris unwittingly created the first pterobudgie to stalk this sceptred isle for some sixty million years.’
‘Oh dear. Oh - but the window...’
‘The window, Mr Stringer, yes indeed the window. Doris’s pterobudgie, fortified by some eighty-five pounds of fresh little old lady flesh, is now loose about our sleepy village.’
‘Oh dear. Oh dear, oh dear.’ expostulated Mr Stringer, very, very loudly indeed and mainly in order to camouflage a certain trombone-like flatulence in his reaction to Miss Rutherford’s conclusions.
‘Pull yourself together, Mr Stringer, we must act.’
‘Oh ’ell oh ’ell oh ’ell’ muttered the Constable, this time in reference to a certain sulphurous taint that had suddenly permeated the atmosphere of the little cottage.
‘Pull yourself together too, Constable. We must act quickly.’
Miss Rutherford, Mr Stringer and the Constable returned to the fresh open air. With oxygen abundant once again, Miss Rutherford’s Girl Guide training came to the fore, and she took charge.
‘As I see it gentlemen, our initial plan remains unaltered even though our circumstances are now very much more parlous than hitherto. We must still endeavour to cut off the supply of contaminated water and we must still attempt to prevent further contamination leaking from the remains of the satellite payload.’
The constable had concerns. ‘But Miss Rutherford - I am concerned that the single, enormous, rusted-up iron-wheel controlled valve that needs turning in order to cut off the village’s mains water supply is located in the isolated, dark, shadowy pump-house by the deep, dark, menacing waters of the village reservoir; exactly where, should it ever need such attenti
on, we should be at most risk during a crisis.’
‘It is indeed, Constable; they always are. We must think of England though and do our civic duty, regardless of how much it makes us want to pee our constabulary knickers. We will all attend to the enormous, rusted-up iron wheel controlled valve while en route to the lonely moor where we will all search for the wreckage. We will then make it safe until the Army resume their duties on Monday morning.’
‘We will?’ said the Constable, still not entirely certain of his civic commitment, even on five hundred pounds a year with two uniforms supplied, a generous Station biscuit allowance and - as yet - dry underwear.
‘We will’ ordered Miss Rutherford, brooking no argument.
‘But Miss Rutherford, do you think it wise even to move about the village - with a pterobudgie on the loose?’
‘England, Mr Stringer, is a nation of shop-keeps and animal lovers. I think that you will find that the pterobudgie may well by now be the very least of our concerns.’
‘Animal lovers Miss Rutherford? I thought that only the French, or possibly the Italians...’
‘Lovers of animals, Mr Stringer, not animalistic lovers. We keep a lot of animals.’
‘You don’t mean...’
‘I do mean, Mr Stringer. Observe the relative lateness of the morning hour. By now every pig, every goat, every bulldog and mouser tabby in the village will have received a pat on the head, a kindly word and a supply of fresh water. If the water has been contaminated, well...’
‘Oh, I see.’
An unearthly Guineapigopod screech split the air with perfect timing, less than subtly emphasising Miss Rutherford’s point and confirming her theory. Mr Stringer suddenly realised that the three of them were almost quite alone.
‘Where did everyone go to? Half of the village was stood about just a few seconds ago, listening to our conversation and gawping in a most unseemly and obvious manner.’
‘This is a crisis, Mr Stringer, and nobody ever really wants to help out in a crisis if they can melt away into the background instead. Observe the twitching net curtains, if you will.’
