A Postillion Struck by Lightning

by Dirk Bogarde

  “Not all the time?” I said.

  “Not all the time,” she agreed quietly, “but I do like it.”

  “But it’s summer. It’s holidaytime!” said my sister. “You don’t read on holidays.”

  But Angelica smiled away and didn’t say anything. We clattered across the bridge, her brown suitcase banging my legs and my heart sinking with every footfall. It was going to be a hateful week.

  Lally was at the gate looking red and singing, a handful of wooden clothes pegs, and a big basket of washing in her arms. “Well! Here’s Her Highness!” she called. “Have a good trip did you? I expect you’re quite tired out and with that walk too. There’s ginger beer in the kitchen and supper’s at eight.”

  The room where Angelica was going to sleep was through our room, through Lally’s, and then through a little cupboard place. It was very small, with a bed, a chair and a table with a drawer. The window looked right down the meadow to High and Over; and on a clear day you could sometimes see the sea like a piece of silver paper. I put her suitcase on the table and said: “We have to tell you something. If you have to go to the lav in the night it’s under the bed.” Angelica went white. “You’ve got the prettiest one,” said my sister reasonably. “It’s got a pheasant on the bottom.” Angelica looked nervously round the room as if she expected it to rush out from under the bed or somewhere and peck her.

  My sister humped the chamber pot on to the bed and looked at it with pleasure. Angelica did a wrinkling thing with her mouth and gently pulled off her pom-pom hat. “It’s very nice,” she said flatly and smoothed her hat with her long thin fingers. I thought that she was going to cry. She often did. Usually did, in fact. Once when we were all on holiday together in Wimereux she cried and moaned all day because our father and her father were going out fishing in a little boat together, and she wanted to go too. And they had to take her, and she was most dreadfully sick all day and we were jolly pleased. Because none of the rest of us were allowed to go, and she was the eldest and rotten. And here she was wrinkling up her mouth and smoothing her hat and blinking away, and I knew the tears were coming and just because of an old chamber pot.

  “We caught you some fish today.”

  She went on blinking. And smoothing.

  “Because you’re a Catholic,” said my sister.

  “They aren’t very big, but big enough, and Lally has cleaned them and everything.”

  She stopped the blinking thing and sat on the edge of the bed.

  “Thank you,” she said in a sort of twisty voice.

  “Perhaps,” said my sister, “if you go to the lav just before we go to bed you won’t need to use it. And then,” she said happily, “I can have it back.” She was holding the chamber up in the air like a tea-cup and looking at the marks on the bottom. “Or else I’ll have to use my camel I won at the fair, and it’s small.”

  Angelica snuffled and buried her face in her pom-pom hat.

  Sitting under the apple tree was rather pleasant after that. It was a lovely tree, old and sort of leaning away from the sea winds. The bark was all rumply and covered with moss and lichens, and on one branch there was a bunch of yellowy-green mistletoe growing. And that’s why it was our most favourite tree. My sister was squashing the scarlet berries from some cuckoo-spit in a tin. She squelched them round and round with an old wooden spoon. We were making Hikers’ Wine. When we had squashed them into a pulp we poured them into an orangeade bottle, with the label still on, and then filled it with water. Then we used to go and leave it in the gully at a good place, and hoped that a hiker, feeling thirsty, would spot it and think how lucky he was. And of course it was deadly poison and if he drank it he’d probably die, which was fearfully funny. We had done this with about five bottles and they had all gone when we went to look the next day. The gully was full of the beastly people all clambering up in khaki shorts and green or yellow shirts, to see the smallest church in England. And we thought that Hikers’ Wine might put them off. Or kill them off. And it looked exactly like orangeade … had the same colour, and little bits of skin and orange-sort-of-stuff swirling about in it. It was better than setting rabbit traps for them, which we did … but they always seemed to avoid them. Feet too big, I think.

  “The trouble with her is,” said my sister, squashing away, “that she’s potty.”

  “I think it’s because she’s a Town person … and because she’s going to be a Nun.”

  My sister stopped squashing and looked at me with a mouth like an “O”.

  “In Czechoslovakia,” I said.

  “You’re a fibber!”

  “God’s honour.”

  “Who said?”

  “I heard Aunt Freda tell our Mother.”

  “Why is she going to be one in Czechoslovakia? Why not in Hampstead or somewhere?”

  I took the tin away from her and did a bit of squashing, because they weren’t quite mixed up and some of them looked like cuckoo-spit berries still.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Probably that’s where you have to go to be one. Probably it’s a sort of factory place where they specially make Nuns.” We cried out with laughter. The sun was getting pale and a wind came shuddering up among the grasses making the lupins bend and nod like people agreeing. From the house was a good smell of frying. We squashed the berries into a paste and started to pour them into the bottle.

  “I’ve seen Nuns in England. In Hampstead, in the Finchley Road and on a bus,” said my sister. “They can’t all come from the same place. Anyway,” she added, pouring very carefully so that the “muck” didn’t slide down the outside of the bottle and spoil the label, “anyway … they’re jolly well welcome to her.”

  I lay on my stomach and ate a bit of grass which tasted like liquorice. Right down at the bottom of the meadow stood a clump of cows, brown and white, all standing looking at nothing. Sometimes they stamped a foot to move the flies, or tossed their heads and mooed; their tails swung and flicked; and there they stood chewing and blinking and looking at nothing, round the little iron gate. If Lally or our mother saw them round the gate like that they turned right in the road and walked a mile and a half up the chalk road to the house. They were so frightened.

  My knees were cold; I rolled over and saw that my sister had got most of the stuff into the bottle, poured some water in, and was swirling it round and round, with her tongue sticking out like an adder’s.

  “That’s it!” she said happily and shoved the cork in with a thump of her fist.

  We took it and hid it in the scullery so that it could stand all night and settle. Otherwise it just looked like a sort of soup.

  But in the morning, about midday when it was hottest and the hikers were scrambling up the gully, it would look like a lovely cool bottle of orangeade left behind after a picnic. To make it look a bit like that, we used to scatter a few bits of paper about, and screw up some cake boxes and things; sometimes an eggshell or two, so that it looked more real.

  And the bottles always disappeared.

  We all sat round the kitchen table in the soft glow of the evening light. It was too early to light the lamps, and the pink sun outside the windows just glanced on the knives and forks and the amber handle of the brass kettle on the range.

  Angelica was pale but a bit more cheerful at the sight of food. She had changed her travelling clothes and combed her hair and washed her face, because she smelled of soap, and we wondered if she’d done any more than that, caught each other’s eyes and squirmed with giggles.

  Lally banged the fish server against the side of the pan.

  “That’s enough!” she said. “You two mind your P’s and Q’s or I’ll take the back of my hand to you.” She knew something was up, she always did.

  The roach had sort of shrivelled up a bit; not enough for us all as it happened. But we had pilchards on toast while Angelica picked her way through the bones of her fish. But it didn’t worry us because it made us look a bit more polite, and anyway we’d eaten hundreds of roach a
nd liked pilchards best.

  “They went specially out to catch these for you, these two,” said Lally, waving her fork at us. “So you know they must be fresh; can’t abide them myself, too muddy,” she went on, “but I must say I like a nice pilchard, for all they repeat till Thursday forenoon.” Angelica fiddled away at another bone.

  “We’re not actually supposed to have pilchards,” I explained, thinking she might be interested, but all she said was “Oh.”

  “Because,” I went on, cutting through a crust, “because our father won’t have anything in the house in tins.”

  “He says everything in tins is Japanese and they kill people,” said my sister.

  “And if you so much as open your mouth and say anything about this,” said Lally with a glinting look at us both, “I’ll fetch you a wallop on the side of your heads as’ll give you both a mastoid.”

  Chapter 4

  Eggshell had a humpity back, long white hair and a black coat down to her ankles. She never spoke to us, just hurried past with her head wagging and a funny black hat like half an egg pulled down to her eyes. So we called her Eggshell.

  She lived up at the top of Red Barn Hill in a wooden caravan with big wheels and a little door at one end which opened in two pieces like a stable door. The caravan was just outside a little elderberry wood right on the edge of the hill; it was painted red and the wheels were blue, but that was a long time ago, and now they were faded down to almost pale pink and grey. There was a pointy little chimney sticking out of the roof, and sometimes you could see the smoke coming out with a smell of cooking, which made her seem a bit more real and not frightening. To get to the caravan you had to go up a little path, high up the hill from the gully, and then into the elder wood, and along another little twisty path all among the rabbit burrows, and then you’d see an old rusty milk churn, a little bit of garden, about as big as a box, and then the steps and door of the caravan. And that’s as near as we ever got; it’s as near as anyone ever got ever. Even Reg Fluke, and he’s braver than I am, only got as far as that—so you can see that she was a bit frightening and of course she would be, because she was a witch.

  We knew that because of the long hair and the funny hat and coat and all the cats. She must have had a hundred cats at least. Well, perhaps not a hundred exactly but really millions of them. You could see them sitting round the caravan: playing, sleeping or just sitting. And they were all colours; not only black like a witch’s cat.

  Once when my sister and I were up there hiding in the elders watching her, we saw her feeding them and heard, actually heard, her talking to them! That was a bit amazing really because we never heard her talk to anyone in all our lives. Just the cats. But we couldn’t hear what she said; it was just a mumbling sort of sound, and she bent her way among them giving them bits of something to eat from a bag. We were a bit disappointed because, clear as clear, you could see the words “Home and Colonial” written on the bag and that didn’t seem to fit in. But my sister said it had probably been left behind by some Londoners on a picnic and she’d stolen it. I said that I didn’t think it could be stolen if she had found it and they had left it behind not wanting it, and my sister said: “Well, how do you know they didn’t want it? She most likely stole it. Witches do. Remember about children. They give them to the Gipsies.” And I fell silent, remembering what I had heard. But wanting to like her anyway, witch or not, because she liked the cats.

  Reg Fluke, who lived at Farm Cottages in the valley, said that his mother, Beattie Fluke, used to go and see the witch, when she was a girl, because of her chilblains. Reg Fluke was a Village Boy, and we weren’t, strictly speaking, allowed to play with him because of that. “They’ll spoil your speaking ways,” said Lally, and “They’ll get you into mischief and do things you wouldn’t like to tell your mother about,” which made Reg Pretty Exciting. But actually he was a bit soft in the head and we didn’t want to play with him anyway.

  His mother was a bit different. And she was grown up. We sometimes used to meet her outside the Magpie in the afternoon, walking a bit funnily and with a bit of a red face as if she had been running. But she was always very friendly and used to carry a big white jug full of beer home for her husband’s tea. She had a squashed face like a red orange, full of little holes, and a huge fat nose and no teeth, and she laughed so much you couldn’t see her eyes, which got all squeezed up and ran with tears, so that she was forever wiping them, and her nose, with the back of the hand which was not carrying the jug.

  “She’s a witch all right,” she roared with laughter when we asked her. “Been a witch all her life for all she’s called Nellie Wardle and had a son as went to the war. Seen her about on her broomstick many a winter’s night.” We were sitting with Beattie Fluke on the river-bank, just beside the bridge. It was very hot, and she was having little sips of her husband’s tea and fanning herself with her green tam o’shanter. “When I was a girl my mother used to take me along to her for my chilblains. I can’t tell you what I had to do, that wouldn’t be very nice, now would it, but it worked a treat. Oh! she had spells for everything … toothache, and harvest bugs and nettle-rash and never-you-mind-what-else. There’s many a lady in this village as has got a lot to be thankful for to Nellie Wardle—and they don’t go round the graveyard laying no wreaths, I can tell you that!” She roared with laughter and had some more of Mr Fluke’s tea.

  “But she doesn’t really fly, honestly Mrs Fluke?” said my sister.

  Mrs Fluke lay back in the grass and started laughing so much she spilled her jug. “Sometimes I actually seen ’er loop the loop!” she said, shaking with laughter and the tears pouring out of her screwed up eyes. “Loop the bloody loop, right over the church with streams of fire coming out of her behind.” And she laughed until she choked and sat up slowly. For a moment the three of us looked at each other in silence, and then Mrs Fluke made a rather rude noise and said: “I can almost see her this minute … with all the flames … twirling and twirling and twirling.” And she stopped, put her hand to her mouth with no teeth and said: “Now you run away and play, I’m going to have forty winks.” And laying back in the grass, she put her tam o’shanter over her face and started to snore.

  We walked along the path to the bridge in silence, pulling at the tall summer grasses and scuffing the stones along in front of us. Presently my sister said:

  “I think she was lying. You couldn’t possibly have flames coming from there, you’d get burnt.”

  “And anyhow they don’t fly on brooms … that’s old fairy tale stuff. They just live in dark places with cats and do spells.”

  “They do have cats,” agreed my sister, “and she’s got hundreds.”

  “And I bet she does spells. I think Mrs Fluke was right about that because Reg said she’d told him. About the chilblain part.”

  “Oh! I’m sure she’s a witch, she looks like a witch to start with. Anyway let’s make her a witch, it’s more creepy like that.”

  So Eggshell was a witch from then on. We leant over the bridge making spit gobs and watching them float under our feet, rather like Pooh-Sticks, only we couldn’t be bothered to run to the other side to see which of us had won.

  “I think she’s quite vulgar, don’t you?” my sister asked.

  “Mrs Fluke? Awfully. Saying ‘Bloody’ and making that noise. Awfully.”

  A moorhen went dibble-dabbling along the sedge and, seeing us, scurried into the willows.

  “Behind seems quite a rude word,” my sister said.

  “I bet the Prince of Wales never says it.”

  “Do you think he’s got one though?” my sister asked thoughtfully. “I don’t think Kings and Queens have them.”

  “How do they go’ then?” I said. “They must have.”

  “I suppose so. It’s too difficult. But I do think ‘behind’ is quite a rude word,” she said.

  I made a very big gob, sucking in my cheeks to do it, and watched it swirl slowly down until it went splot in the water. “Bu
m is much ruder,” I said.

  My sister gave a shriek of delight and spun round on one foot. “Oh! yes!” she cried. “Bum’s much ruder,” and ran away laughing up to the road.

  So we decided to take Angelica to see the witch. The week was pretty dull so far. When I showed her how to blow an egg she’d had a coughing fit and we had to hit her on the back quite hard; she had been quite polite and nice, and interested in the slow-worm, but not anxious to touch it, and enjoyed a picnic in the big haystack in the yard, but hadn’t liked the prickles, and come for a walk down the gully but found it damp, and generally was a Londoner. Lally said one evening that she was homesick, and that people who lived in towns usually were in the country because the quiet got them down. But my sister and I thought that she was (a) stuck up, (b) a cissy, and (c) soft in the head. Whoever went for walks, and quite long ones, in shiny London shoes—or read in her room on hot days when the larks were up in the sky wheeling and swooping and making it all loveliness? And Holy books at that. One we saw in her room was the Life of St Theresa. And there was a picture of a droopy sort of lady in brown, holding a bunch of roses and looking up to see if it was raining.

  However, we decided on the witch. And it was a wet day. Pouring wet.

  Lally was folding the tablecloth and my sister was clattering the forks back into their drawer when I said,