Turn Right at the Spotted Dog
Page 18
Soon after the trees arrived a local builder rolled up with a dustbin in which swam a huge golden fish, poached from a nearby Abbey for our pond.
‘It’s an orfe,’ he said. ‘We called it Eff.’
Some villagers are more reluctant to receive. An old lady refused some sticks of rhubarb recently because she hadn’t got a dish long enough to cook them in.
But there’s always something to laugh at here. Currently the great excitement is that Philip Howard (of Graduate Gardeners), the local landscape gardener, has moved into a new house, where he’s building a splendid U-turn drive with an underground car port, flanked by a huge wall, known locally as Howard’s Way.
‘How high is the wall going to go?’ I asked my very good friend, the milkman.
‘High as possible,’ he grinned. ‘His mother-in-law’s moving in opposite.’
But the laughter is always gentle. Pretension is chiefly what makes people chunter in a village, like the male half of a couple (who work for a weekending video millionaire) referring to himself as an estate manager, when there’s less than two acres to manage; or like a local snob (nicknamed Tugboat because he chugs from peer to peer) who, on being asked the other day if he had any ducks, replied: ‘Only on the upper lake.’
In other villages people take fearful revenge. One Wiltshire landowner hated his neighbour so much that on learning his neighbour’s daughter was getting married and holding the reception in the garden, he deliberately moved three hundred pigs into the next field on the wedding day. Another villager in Hampshire, who’d been ordered not to take a short cut across her neighbour’s field, organised a sponsored walk along his footpath of two hundred dogs who hadn’t been let out all day.
In Bisley, to warn neighbour not to fall out with neighbour, there is a tiny lock-up, built in 1824. Here, too, Nemesis proceeds at a more leisurely pace. The ex-landlord of the Stirrup, who was also the village undertaker for some time, was ruminating the other evening about a local schoolmistress who’d bullied them all unmercifully when they were little boys.
‘I got my revenge in the end,’ he added with quiet satisfaction. ‘It was me that laid her out and buried her.’
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Epub ISBN: 9781448108114
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TURN RIGHT AT THE SPOTTED DOG
First published in Great Britain 1987
by Methuen London Ltd
This edition published 1989
Reprinted 1990 (twice)
by Mandarin Paperbacks
Michelin House, 81 Fulham Road, London SW3 6RB
Mandarin is an imprint of the Random House Publishing Group
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The Random House Group Ltd Reg. No. 954009
Copyright © Jilly Cooper 1982, 1983, 1984, 1985, 1986, 1987
A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library
ISBN 9780749302528