by Dirk Bogarde
I tore off one corner of the paper before I set it on the floor just to see if everyone was all right inside. And everyone was: I just saw a pink foot and a little sniffling nose and felt very comforted to think that they were having an adventure like us. They had sawdust all over their floor, and a whole folded page of the Daily Mail to sop up anything which might have made a stink. They hadn’t died of fright or anything, which they easily could have, with all the banging about and bumps and swinging, and then Lally told me to put them down quick sharp or risk a sharp cuff, so I did. No point in getting a good cuffing, as she called it, in front of hundreds of strange people. She could cuff pretty hard when she wanted to.
The sandwiches were all spread out neatly on little paper napkins. Four each: bloater paste, egg and cress, Kraft cheese, and chicken and ham paste. It was quite good really. And when the Thermos came out, and the four cups were unwrapped and set about, and the sugar counted out carefully, one lump each, in a napkin, it all seemed Christmassy already. It really was a winter picnic. I rather liked it. We were never allowed to have tea out of the big hissing urn on account of ‘foreign bodies’ and chipped cups and ‘how-long-do-you-think-it’s-been-stewing-I’d-like-to-know?’
So we just had home-made, and it was pretty awful. It always tasted of tin, but our father said it was tannin but didn’t explain what that was. Anyway, it was pretty rotten, but hot. We couldn’t dawdle really, had to eat quite fast because the rest was only for half an hour and some people hadn’t even got their tea from the urn and were eating fat bun-things with white sugar on top. I liked the look of them, and I would have asked if I could have bought one, only Flora began to rustle about in her satchel-thing. It had a strap and hung over her shoulder and had a big ink blot on it, so I knew it was her best for school.
I was pretty interested really because I thought that perhaps she might be fishing about for a piece of Edinburgh rock, and that put me off thinking about the sugar-bun, and then Lally said, very kindly, ‘What are you looking for, Flora dear? A hanky?’ She was always kind to guests and used her Patient Voice. They were not what she called ‘her children’, like we were, so she took particular care to be absolutely lovely to them and that way she could be pretty rotten to us because we belonged to her and she was trying to make us into little ladies and gentlemen. Except, I wasn’t interested. Which is why she could give you a cuff.
Anyway, Flora was mucking about, tumbling things over in her satchel and beginning to whine. Girls always do, it seems. Her face screwed up like an old glove, all bumps and creases.
‘Whatever is it, Flora?’ said Lally in her Patient Voice.
‘Oh! Oh, dearie me! Dearie-me-today!’ wailed Flora. ‘I can’t find my wee black cat and it brings me luck and I’ve had him all my life and if I can’t find him, then I’ll just die. Here at this very table.’
That won’t do. Won’t do at all,’ said Lally a bit sharply.
My sister didn’t say anything. She just sat quietly chewing her egg and cress and swinging her legs. If she hadn’t been so busy chewing her sandwich she would have had a rather nasty smile on her face, but she just chewed, and bits of cress slid down her chin, and she went on chewing away watching wretched Flora.
Suddenly Lally grabbed the satchel and pulled out a terrific clutter of matchboxes, hair slides, a bit of ribbon, half a stick of liquorice, an empty scent bottle and a hair brush full of blond hair. And there, among the bristles and the old bits of Flora’s hair, was her black cat.
‘Oh!’ cried Flora. ‘You found him! How ever can I thank you, pray?’
‘Don’t want you falling dead in the middle of the Fel-bridge rest-café, do we?’ She started being brisk with the paper napkins and the cork of the Thermos. ‘Now then, quick sharp. We’ll be off soon, I reckon.’
Flora was mooning away like anything over her silly glass cat which hadn’t even been lost. Anyway, it was only as big as a fingernail, hardly worth bothering about.
‘Now all of you eat up. I declare we’ll be on our way because the driver and that very polite conductor have put on their caps, and that’s the signal for us to be off again. Quick sharp, please!’
Flora stuffed the last piece of chicken and ham into her mouth and showed me the stupid cat.
‘Look! He’s so pretty. He’s got a wee gold collar, see? And green diamond eyes. He’s terribly pretty, I think.’
‘There are no such things as green diamonds,’ I said.
‘There are too! He’s got them! So there must be. Look how they wink! That’s why he’s lucky, he knows.’
My sister had finished her sandwich and was swallowing hard, and at the same time pressed her fingertips on all the spilled crumbs on the table top. She was always greedy, and she put them on her lips and licked them in and ate them slowly. ‘I got one of those cats once, from a cracker,’ she said.
Flora looked at her with hatred. ‘Liar!’ she said, and Lally almost lifted her hand to give her a good cuff but remembered the guest-bit.
‘None of that, please! We’ll have good manners here.’
‘It was last Christmas, and mine had red diamond eyes. Didn’t it Lally? Red ones. I remember.’
‘Rubies,’ I said, and Flora twisted her face to begin whining again, but Lally gave me one of her looks and wrapped everything up in a clean tea-cloth.
‘Red or green makes no difference, no difference at all. Both are lucky, and we better be lucky and start to move. The driver has just trodden on his cigarette butt, and that’s a sure sign. So anyone who wants to be “excused” had better go off and do it now. Be off this instant – it’s a long journey ahead.’
Going back to the bus was quite difficult. It was icy, and our feet crunched over the tarmac and I held on to the Weekend very tightly for fear of them falling or something. It was quite worrying trying not to bang them against my knees, and Lally said she was worried about the other end, when we got to the cottage, because the way up from the road was a narrow chalk path, and it would likely be iced over in the dark of the trees. You couldn’t even ride a bike up it in the summer, it was so steep, so how will we manage with all the luggage and that dratted cage, she’d like to know? I knew she was worried because she said ‘dratted’. In front of a guest.
When we got into the bus and settled ourselves down, and she had counted the luggage on the rack, I said that perhaps Mrs Daukes, who lived in the cottage at the foot of the path, might give us a hand, or her husband, Mr Daukes.
Lally snorted, and resettled her hat with the ivy leaves. ‘Mrs Daukes hasn’t been known to give anyone a helping hand, nor anything else for that matter. A sly woman, Mrs Daukes. He’ll be down at the Magpie getting ready for Christmas. We’ll be lucky if she’s even aired the house. Though I wrote most particular and advised her of our impending arrival. But I wonder?’
Lally didn’t like Mrs Daukes because once last summer, when our parents came down to the cottage, without warning, they had discovered her sitting in her garden wearing a pair of our mother’s ankle-strap shoes from Paris. There was a terrible fuss, so now there was no knowing what we’d find. She could have set fire to the place. Or put the pink carbolic powder we used in the privy down the well. You couldn’t really trust her after that shoe business.
At Lewes it was already almost dark. There were lights in some of the shops up the hill, the lamp-posts were on, and by the time we had clambered off, said our thanks to the driver and the conductor and got on to the Seaford bus which would take us on over High-And-Over and down to Alfriston, it was really quite dark, and we only caught the bus because Lally waved her umbrella and shouted very loudly. And then we were safely on board.
After we moved out of Seaford there were only four other people left on the bus except for us: Ivy Bottle, who lived down Sloop Lane and was pretty boring, my mother said; Mr and Mrs Wooler, who were quite old and friends of the vicar’s sisters, Misses Ethel and Maude who ran the little shop down by the Flats, the water-meadows which got flooded in winter at high
tide; and another person we did not know. Everyone we did know called out and said how nice it was to see us all again and were we down for Christmas, and how was our mother and so on. It was very friendly and welcoming and I nearly told them about the Weekend, but a poke in the side from Lally made me change my mind.
Then the headlights of the bus swept across the old flint walls and the bobbly windows of Baker’s the confectioner’s and the bulging panes of glass in the double windows of Wilde’s the grocer’s, and then, like a skinny finger wearing a thimble, right in the middle of the square, there was the Market Cross and we knew we were safely home at last.
It seemed like the middle of the night, it was so dark, and we had to unload all our packages and cases, and call out to Ivy Bottle and the Woolers. Then we had to go and stand under the chestnut tree outside Waterloo Cottages and wait for Ted Deakin to arrive with his lorry, which he did pretty soon – well, just before we all wanted to be excused. I mean, just in time. His lorry arrived and made a half-turn under the tree, and he called out to us that we’d be home in a jiffy and jumped down to help load the baggage.
Flora was a bit worried because she saw Deakin and Son, Undertakers and General Removers printed on the side of the lorry, but I told her that it was perfectly all right. This was Deakin’s lorry, not the hearse. She felt a bit better when she was told to go and sit in the front cabin part with Lally while my sister and I had to squat among our baggage in the back.
It was jolly cold, I can tell you. But what was more frightening in the dark was a huge old sideboard which kept sliding about with its doors flapping open and shut every time we turned a corner.
‘If it falls on us we’ll be squashed flat,’ said my sister. ‘And no one will hear if we scream for help. I think it’s a vile thing to do, all that way from London.’
That rather worried me: supposing it squashed the Weekend as well?
‘What does he want a terrible old thing like that for in his lorry?’ said my sister, pushing against it with one foot. ‘I can’t hold it back. You push too.’
So we sat there pushing the sideboard while its doors slammed and opened like clapping hands. We couldn’t really see it because it was so dark, just a shape, but we knew what it was because we had seen it lit up by the lamps in Wood’s the butcher’s, down in the square, where they were just shutting up the shop and scrubbing down the counter and the chopping-block, and Mrs Wood, who was quite fat and sat in the cash desk, was sweeping out the sawdust. That’s how we saw the sideboard, pulling our suitcases and bags on board. And then suddenly we felt a turn to the left, very swervy, and the sideboard slid across the lorry and we crouched in the corners and then the worst thing happened. We began to climb the hill up to the cottage and the sideboard rattled very fast down to the end of the lorry and crashed against the tailboard, where it stuck with all our bags clustered round it like piglets at a sow.
It was quite funny in a kind of way, because I knew we were going up all the way, so it wouldn’t slither back and flatten us. And there was the wonderful smell of dung from the sties at Piggy Corner, and I called out to my sister that we were nearly home and she called back that she would have to be excused in a minute, she was ‘terrified’ by the sliding sideboard and had wanted to ‘go’ ever since we left the Market Cross.
But then we stopped and I heard Lally getting down and calling to Flora and heard her hurrying round to the back of the lorry with her dancing torch.
‘Oh my Lord!’ she cried. ‘Mr Deakin, I declare you’ve killed the children! Or else where are they?’ Then we clambered out into the road.
‘Good riddance!’ he shouted and drove off up the hill towards Milton Street, whistling like anything, leaving us standing at the path up to the cottage with all the luggage. There was a lamp glimmering in Mrs Daukes’s cottage, and pretty soon she came out and we all shook hands and started up the path with bags and cases, everyone carrying something.
‘I laid the fire,’ said Mrs Daukes. ‘All you ‘ave to do is touch ‘im with a match. ‘Ave a nice glow in no time. I got some nice dry kindling, and there’s half that old apple as fell in October last.’
Lally used her Extra-Polite voice, which could be a bit dangerous sometimes. That’s a kindness, Mrs Daukes, to be sure,’ she said.
‘Well, I ‘eard the door a’slammin’. That’ll be the Rectory people, I’ll be bound, I said to Mr Daukes, sat there in his chair. And so t’were! Out I come, and there you was.’
She was swinging her hurricane lamp about like a censer in St Catherine’s, which was all right for her because she was leading, and in the front, but / couldn’t see anything. I was humping the Weekend in one hand and Flora’s boring bag of presents in the other. Jolly heavy they were, but I almost felt cheerful because whatever they were this time, they couldn’t be just books or boxes of Edinburgh rock. They were round. But there were just little slits of light from Mrs Daukes’s lamp and spots from Lally’s torch which waggled about on the dead grasses along the path. Flora moaned about how much further it would be, and my sister started whining about wanting to ‘go’ pretty quickly, which reminded me that I wouldn’t mind myself. Then I saw the bobbly stalk of some old Brussels sprouts and I knew we were going through the vegetable garden and that meant the front door was near.
‘Mr Daukes poorly, then, is he? I mean, him in a chair and not in the pub?’ said Lally, stepping over a broken cloche.
“E took a nasty fall last week. Very nasty it was. Tripped on them cobbles down by the Cross. Caught ‘im on the head something cruel. All bloody he were, and Dr Wilmott had to give him a couple of stitches.’
We had reached the front door, and Lally was fumbling in her bag for the key and her torch was sticking up in the air like a searchlight. So that wasn’t much good.
‘I’m sure he’ll be right as rain shortly,’ said Lally. ‘Thank you for the hurricane lamp, it’ll see you home again.’
Mrs Daukes bobbed about and then we were all in the lean-to and the lovely smell of winter onions and paraffin was everywhere, and I knew we were back at the cottage.
‘If you ask me,’ said Lally, taking off her gloves in the darkness and starting to light one of the lamps, ‘Dr Wilmott could have obliged us all by putting a couple of stitches in his lips. Stop him imbibing. Now, look sharp, Mr Head-in-the-air, light up some candles.’
They were all set in a neat row, just as we had left them last time, ranged along the work-bench, little white enamel candlesticks with red and blue bands round them. I knew my one quickly, because it had a bad dent on it where I had dropped it years ago, and the white all came off and there was a scabby place like a map of Australia.
Flora said that she thought it was very dark and witchy, and had I got her presents, and my sister started whining away, and Lally said, ‘Outside, my girl, if you can’t wait, or fetch yourself your potty. Take a candle with you.’
And then she shrugged off her best check coat, and started to take off the halo-hat with the ivy leaves. And that was the sign that we had really arrived.
It was very nice indeed sitting round the big table in the kitchen in the lamplight. The fire was crackling in the range, there were two kettles hissing quietly on the Primus stoves on the top of the copper getting ready for the washing up part, and we had all had a ‘delicate sufficiency’, as Lally said, of a Melton Mowbray pie, cut in four chunks, pork and beans, tinned (which was not allowed by our father, who said we’d get ptomaine poisoning from things in tins). Lally had hidden this one away in her bag because it was an emergency.
The only rotten part was that she gave wretched Flora the lovely bit of pork because she was the Guest. Well, you might have guessed that. Guests were always favourite. There were some apples from last year, for afters, and Lally had a big piece of cheese with some pickled onions which were on the shelf in the lean-to.
‘At least we didn’t have Mrs Daukes pinching the pickled onions, and judging by her roving eye and wandering hand we very likely might have, and t
hat would not have pleased your father. Loves his pickled onion, he does. I put up ten pounds in September. They won’t last to Christmas, not with him!’
‘He’ll have my presents,’ said Flora.
‘He simply hates Edinburgh rock. All he really likes is wine gums or Rowntrees Fruit Gums. The clear ones,’ said my sister, nodding her head.
‘Who does?’ asked Flora, looking worriedly at me because I had had to lumber her wretched ‘presents’ all the way from Ted Deakin’s cart.
‘Well, our father. He’s particular, he doesn’t like sweet things.’
Lally got up and began stacking the plates, scraping off the bits into a bowl by the pickled onions. ‘Now, come along! We’ve all had a tiring day, the bricks are in the oven, and all your beds are made down. And they don’t lie, my children, their father can’t abide sweet things.’ She started off towards the sink, making head signs to us to follow. So I scraped my plate, and stacked my sister’s, and reached for Flora’s, who hit my hand and said she’d take it. And Lally said, ‘No. No sweet things . . . except of course your actual Rowntrees Fruit Gums, clear, in a tube, and your actual Maynards Wine Gums. Those he likes. For all the port wine is green and the sherry is black. But those he likes . . . and hand me over a kettle quick as may be.’
Flora offered her dirty plate. ‘It’s nothing sweet . . . they are two lovely haggis. And a Black-Man’s-Ear!’ she said.
