by Fay Weldon
‘You should have seen me only thirty years ago!’ said the house. ‘What a ruin. I must have fallen asleep. I woke to find myself a shambles. Chimney through the roof, dry rot in the laundry extension, rabbits living in the walls along with the mice, death-watch beetle in the minstrels’ gallery, the land drains blocked and water pushing up the kitchen tiles, and so overgrown with ivy I couldn’t even be seen from the road. What woke me? Why, a young couple pushing open the front door—how it creaked; enough to wake the dead. They looked strong, young and healthy. They had a Volvo. They came from the city: they had dogs, cats and babies. They’ll do, I thought; it’s better if they come with their smalls: they’ll see to the essentials first. My previous dwellers? They’d been old, so old, one family through generations: they left in their coffins: there was no strength in them; mine drained away. That’s why I fell asleep, not even bothered to shrug off the ivy. I woke only in the nick of time. Well, I thought, can’t let that happen again. So now I put out my charm and lure the young ones in, the new breed from the city, strong and resourceful. They fall in love with me; they give me all their money: but they have no stamina; I kept the first lot twelve years, then they had to go. Pity. But I tripped a small down the back stairs, to punish it for rattling the stained glass in its bedroom door, and it lay still for months, and the parents neglected me and cursed me so I got rid of them. But I found new dwellers soon enough, tougher, stronger, richer, who did for a time. Oh yes, I’m a success story! Now see, even the press takes an interest in my triumph! Journalists, photographers!’ And the house preened itself in the late summer sun, in the glowing evening light.
‘I say,’ said the photographer to Julian Simley, as he wheelbarrowed a load of red roof-tiles from the yard to the cider house, ‘you should get the ivy off the chimney; it’ll break down the cement.’ The photographer knew a thing or two—he’d just put in an offer for a house in the country himself. An old rectory: a lot to do to it, of course, but he was a dab hand at DIY, and with his new girlfriend working he could afford to spend a bit. A snip, a snip—and worth twice as much, three times, when he was through. Even the surveyor said so.
The house read his mind and sang, ‘When we’re through with you, when we’re through with you: you can call yourself an owner, who are but a slave, you who come and go within our walls, for all old houses are the same and think alike,’ and the photographer smiled admiringly up at the doves in the creeper, as they stirred and whirred, and only the journalist shivered and said, ‘There’s something wrong with my ears. I hear music in them, a creaky kind of music, I don’t like it at all.’
‘Wax’, said the photographer absently, ‘can sound like that.’
Julian Simley said, ‘Christ, is that ivy back again? That’s the last straw,’ which is not what you’re supposed to say when you’re telling the press a success story of restoration, or renovation, in return for a hundred-pound fee, which you desperately need, for reclaimed old brick and groceries. ‘I haven’t the head for heights I had.’
‘You fool, you fool,’ snarled the house, overhearing. ‘You pathetic weak-backed mortal. Let the ivy grow, will you? Turn me into weeds and landscape? Leave me a heap of rubble, would you! Wretched, poverty-stricken creature: grubbing around for money! You and your poor crippled wife, who’d rather fit a dresser handle than tile the kitchen floor! I’ve no more patience with you: I’ve finished with you!’ and as Julian Simley stood on a windowsill to open a mullioned pane so the photographer could get the effect of glancing light he wanted, the sill crumbled and Julian fell and his back clicked and there was his disc slipped again, and he lay on the ground, and Harriet rang for the ambulance, and House & Garden waited with them. It was the least they could do.
‘He should have replaced the sill,’ thought the photographer, ‘I would have done,’ and the house hugged itself to itself in triumph.
‘We can’t manage any longer,’ said Julian to Harriet, as he lay on the ground. ‘It’s no use, we’ll have to sell, even at a loss.’
‘It’s not the money I mind about,’ grieved Harriet. ‘It’s just I love this house so much.’
‘Don’t you think I do,’ said Julian, and gritted his teeth against the stabs of pain which ran up his legs to his back. He thought this time he’d done some extra-complicating damage. ‘But I get the feeling it’s unrequited love.’ The house sniggered.
‘But how will we know the next people will carry on as we have? They’ll cover up the kitchen floor and not let it dry out properly, I know they will.’ Harriet wept. Julian groaned. The ambulance came. The journalist and the photographer drove off.
‘You want to know the secret?’ the house shrieked after them. ‘The secret of my success? It’s chew them up and spit them out! One after the other! And I’ll have you next,’ it screamed at the photographer, who looked back at the house as they circled the drive, and thought, ‘So beautiful! I’ll withdraw the offer on the rectory, and make a bid on this one. I reckon I’ll get it cheap, in the circumstances. That looked like a broken back, not a slipped disc, to me,’ and the house settled back cosily into its excellent, well-drained, sheltered site—the original builders knew what they were doing—and smiled to itself, and whispered to the doves who stirred and whirred their wings in its creepers. ‘Flesh and blood, that’s all. Flesh and blood withers and dies. But a house like me can go on for ever, if it has its wits about it.’
The Day the World Came to Somerset
‘YOU CAN TELL THE children by the mothers,’ said Miss Walters. ‘Show me a tidy mother; I’ll show you a tidy child.’ She spoke definitely. She always did. She knew what the world was like. ‘Or the mothers by the children,’ said Mrs Windsor, unexpectedly. But she was only an auxiliary; the staff room didn’t take much notice of her. She was paid next to nothing. She came in from outside to hear reading, or help in the Infants Class, clearing up accidents or tying shoelaces. ‘What I mean is, if I see a child who is happy and easy and bright, I know that child will have a kind mother.’ But then, as Miss Jakes, who taught Class 4 and came from London, had remarked (in the new educational patois they all hated), Mrs Windsor was nothing if not child-centred. Soppy, that is.
East Bradley Junior was just about the smallest school in Somerset; threats of closure rumbled like thunder round its ears, and perhaps it was the noise of that thunder which deafened Mr Rossiter, the Headmaster, to the murmured protests of children and staff as he stalked the corridors, tall, grey, stooping, shouting and snapping at the children (and usually the wrong children), demanding peace, quiet and order in classrooms, school hall, staff room, everywhere; putting this out of bounds, declaring that out of order, putting pupils in corners for wearing red socks, disallowing trainers, and even standing infant wrongdoers in the wastepaper basket to prove just how worthless their chatter was. The two dinner ladies had caught his manner. Children who did not eat up were made to eat up, which kept Mrs Windsor busy cleaning up pupils who had been unexpectedly and distressingly sick. Mr Rossiter hated the PTA, but had to have one. The PTA raised money and the school was short of money. Without the parents, the school secretary would have had no typewriter, let alone paper for the endless notes, messages and reproaches which streamed out of the school to the parental world. Mr Rossiter had liked the old days, when a line had been painted on the school playground and a notice above it said ‘No Parents Beyond This Point’; even though the LEA’s policy had obliged him to remove these in the mid-sixties, it was the mid- seventies before the parents had ventured over the non-existent line. But now there seemed no keeping them out. The new-style parents—mostly the ones down from London—would be in the classrooms before school, after school, chatting to teachers and pupils, even popping their heads round doors while lessons were in progress, with messages about aunties or swimsuits or lost packed lunches. Lots of pupils took packed lunches. Mr Rossiter didn’t like that. It somehow loosened the school’s grip upon the child. It smacked of change: change smacked of chaos.
The nam
es on the school register changed, as the community outside changed. The ordinary Alans and Lindas and Michaels and Annes were sprinkled with Saffrons and Ishtars, Sebs and Felixes. The old stone villages were infilled with bungalows and housing estates: the farm cottages no longer housed farm workers—they’d been replaced long ago by tractors and the machinery of intensive farming—and who had to live on the spot any more?—but had been bought up by wealthy incomers from the cities, or let by farmers to hippy-style households—a safe enough thing to do, because the DHSS paid the rent—and in the meantime house prices went up, and up, and up—but who could blame the farmers? They had to survive somehow: no one wanted them to produce food any more. There was more than enough in the world, it seemed—all those people starved in undeveloped countries not for lack of food but because of someone else’s duty to make a profit or be politically in the right. The waves washed right back to East Bradley’s door, and changed the names on the school roll.
And the parents seemed to divide these days into the rich and the poor. New Volvos drove up to the school gates while from the school bus limped children who were wearing someone else’s shoes, because the parents couldn’t afford new; and the school fund was depleted paying the transport fares of children whose parents had to pay but wouldn’t, and there were two small children who walked almost six miles every day on their own along an arterial road—little Ellen Bryce and Kelly Rice—and slept or wept all day in lessons. They were both from one-parent families: one mother out to work, the other in need of psychiatric help—or so Miss Jakes said. Miss Walters said Mrs Rice should pull herself together.
It was just about the prettiest school in Somerset: a low stone building next to a twelfth-century church, surrounded by fields: and there was an old oak in the playground, towering above the churchyard yews, which was reputed to be seven hundred years old. Ishtar and Seb, Saffron and Felix played tag around it, along with Alan and Linda, Michael and Anne, and little Cleopatra, too, black as night. When she was older the boys wouldn’t go out with her, everyone knew. Though girls, later on, would vie to go out with her big brother Joseph. Okay, even stylish, for a girl to be seen with a black boy: all wrong for a boy to be seen with a black girl. Cleo got called names sometimes—nigger or black bitch—but Joseph didn’t. But then Cleo was a tearful, meek little thing, and everyone liked Joseph, who was big, confident and good at football.
Miss Jakes talked about the problems of racism, which was seen in the staff room as absurd, and Miss Walters, whose brother was a police sergeant in Bristol, said the minorities had only themselves to blame, there was bound to be trouble: not quite ‘why don’t they go back to where they came from’, but almost. There was an extraordinary occasion when a Mrs Havelock, a single parent who had come down from London and made a nuisance of herself on the PTA, and wore jeans and had fuzzy hair, demanded that Urdu be taught as a second language, as it was in Camden. Urdu, taught in London? Compulsory? The world was going mad. The world would have to be kept away from East Bradley, Mr Rossiter was the more determined, and the PTA must be allowed to talk, but not to act: let it confine itself to making money. Urdu!
Anyway, the day Mrs Windsor said you could tell the mothers by the children, the world came right up to East Bradley Junior School’s door, and nothing was ever the same again. It came in the form of the Zambezi Boys: a band: a world-famous band, not quite rock, not quite reggae, all the way from Zimbabwe, once Rhodesia. A big yellow van, with ‘Zambezi Boys’ written on it, and some notes of music and a palm tree or two, stopped outside the school one Friday afternoon when the children were rehearsing their end-of-year concert. The driver, a small black man wearing dark shiny glasses, hopped out and asked Miss Jakes for directions. They were on their way to Taunton; they had taken a short cut: now they were lost. Miss Jakes pointed the way. The sound of Class 3’s ‘I am a Snowdrop’ drifted through the open windows. Back got the driver into the van. The van would not start. Various members of the band—there were six of them, their leader a massive young man in a yellow gown even brighter than the van—got out, kicked it, or fiddled with the engine, or stood around discussing the matter—just like anyone else, as Miss Walters later remarked—and then asked to come in to call the AA. (Rebecca Ruddle, the AA man’s daughter, was in 6A, and the only child in the school ever to have been in trouble with the police.) Which they did, from the school office. And then of course they had to wait for Rebecca Ruddle’s dad. And the sensible place to wait was lined up against the back wall of the school hall while 2A sang, and the head boy, Harry Young, tentatively turned up the sound equipment—borrowed from Currys, whose daughter Melanie was in 3B—to make their tiny, timorous voices carry—and the children stopped paying attention to 2A’s ‘All Things Bright and Beautiful’ and turned their heads to see these extraordinary, brilliantly gowned men (men in dresses) who all of a sudden were standing there. And then—no one quite knew how it happened, though afterwards someone said it was Mrs Windsor of all people who set it in motion—the Zambezi Boys were carrying their instruments in and setting them up, and giving a performance to the children and staff of East Bradley School. They, who could fill Wembley, not to mention Bristol’s Colston Hall, they for whom the young of the world yearned and would empty their pockets (and other people’s as well, no doubt, the way the world is now), played for the children of East Bradley School! And when the parents arrived, because when the time came to collect the children the Zambezi Boys were still playing, they got out of their Volvos and 2CVs and Austin Travellers, leaving them parked any old how, and peered through the windows, and the villagers did the same, because the beat was so loud and strong and extraordinary it had brought them all out of their houses. For Harry Young, usually bright and clean and tidy and responsible, got so carried away that he turned the sound system up, up, up, right up (and those drums and the synthesizer—or was it an African piano?—were loud, very loud, even by themselves). The crows rose and cawed for miles around, the heads of the sheep turned, and cows paused in their grazing, as the beat of Africa, so different from Somerset’s slow, heavy heartbeat, escaped out of East Bradley School’s hall. Look, Mr Rossiter was furious! But what could he do?
One (slow), two (slow), three-four-five (quick), the beat went, simple but not simple, somehow interlaced and interwoven. The children tapped their feet: the children shook their shoulders: the children looked at their teachers: their teachers were tapping too (but who could help it?) and then all were clapping, because the man in the yellow gown up on the platform was clapping his hands above his head—one, two, three-four-five—faster, faster, faster, now they were clapping on their own, and he was singing, what was it about? Sometimes in a strange language, sometimes in English, about brotherhood, freedom, jubilation, exultation—and Mrs Windsor was on her feet—dancing, Mrs Windsor! Which of the children was the first to move? Why, all agreed later it was little Kelly Rice who didn’t have much to lose, who just didn’t seem to care about Mr Rossiter—anyway, one of them was on her feet, jigging about, dancing, and then all the children followed, out of their seats, dancing, clapping, laughing—one, two, three-four-five—and the band roared its approval, and the great firm drumbeats and the laughing crash of the hi-hat got into the bloodstream, and Miss Walters (ever prudent) actually pushed chairs out of the way so no one hurt themselves, and took off her tight shoes to dance the better, and Miss Jakes just gave up and laughed and danced herself silly, and the parents stopped peering in at the windows and came in without so much as a by-your-leave and joined in, including Mrs—or what did she call herself?—Ms Havelock (even that seemed okay; let everyone do what they wanted: perhaps these singing, leaping men were speaking Urdu, in which case every word and not every tenth word they chanted or sang made sense), and Darren Gorren, the bus driver no one liked because he’d have no talking on his bus (not even whispering), came in and smiled and caught Miss Robinson of 4B by the hand and danced with her, and amongst the children friends danced with enemies, and enemies with frien
ds, and the retired General Godden who put stones up on his patch of green to stop the parents clipping it with their tyres actually hopped about as best he could and his single strand of long white hair rose and fell to the beat; and look, on every fourth beat the man in the yellow gown leapt into the air, higher, higher, was it possible? He seemed held in the air, actually poised in the sheer energy of the music and the dance, somewhere near the ceiling, suspended by the animation and will of the Somerset children, old-style, new-style—up, up, stay-stay-stay—and as he stayed the church bell actually rang—dong, dong, just twice, on the beat—the vicar later said it must have been the vibration (thank you, Currys, for your technological assistance, thank you, Harry Young, for your act of grace, thank you, Zambezi Boys, for your wonderful performance)—and then Rebecca Ruddle’s father the AA man finally turned up, and wondered what was going on, was everyone mad, and saw his daughter dancing and laughing and for some reason the shame of her disgrace was washed away (she’d broken into a Taunton pub with a group of older boys and stolen some cigarettes and had had to appear in the Juvenile Court), and he felt more cheerful than he had for months, and when he tried the Zambezi Boys’ van the motor simply started—why it hadn’t before he couldn’t make out.
And as the engine started, the music stopped. The dancing, the cheering, the stamping died. And then little Ishtar Heddle flung herself against the door, arms outstretched. ‘Don’t go,’ she cried. ‘More! More!’ ‘More, more,’ commanded the children, roaring and stamping—how could such little things make such a noise?—and the Zambezi Boys obeyed. The great obeyed the little. The beat began again, as if it had merely been waiting for the order: the guitar thrummed, the synthesizer sang, and down from the platform leapt the man in the yellow gown and grabbed poor flustered helpless Mr Rossiter by the hands and made him dance—made Mr Rossiter dance!—and dance he did, and as he danced his arthritis, or whatever it was that made his limbs so stiff, seemed to fall away, and Mr Rossiter smiled and stopped counting the children who wore trainers and planning his individual letters to parents—because didn’t trainers make less noise than the clump, clump, clump-clump-clump of the properly black-booted children?—and he beamed at the staff, and he beamed at the children, and even at the parents, even at Ms Havelock, who was, even as she danced, quite startled. Then, as suddenly as it began, it stopped.
