by Tom Sharpe
In 1942 the camp had been moved to Handyman Hall and Blott had made the place his home. The Hall and the Handyman family appealed to him. They were both the epitome of Englishness and in Blott’s view there could be no higher praise. To be English was the supreme virtue and being a prisoner in England was better than being free anywhere else. If he had had his way the war would have continued indefinitely. He lived in a great house, he had a park to walk in, a river to fish in, a kitchen garden to grow things in, and the run of an idyllic countryside full of woods and hills and fair women whose husbands were away fighting to save the world from people like Blott. Even at night when the camp gates were closed it was perfectly easy to scale the walls and go where he liked. There were no air-raids, no sudden alarms and the whole question of earning a living was taken care of. Even the food was good, supplemented as it was by his poaching and his husbandry in the kitchen garden. To Blott the place was paradise and his only worry was that Germany might win the war. It was an eventuality he dreaded. It had been bad enough being a German in Germany. He couldn’t imagine what it would be like to be an Italian who was a German who looked like a Jew in conquered Britain, and the notion of trying to explain how he came to be what he was where he was to the German occupying authorities appalled him. It was one of the nicest things about the English that they didn’t seem to worry about such details, but he knew his own countrymen too well to imagine that they would be satisfied with his evasions. Layer by layer, they would peel off his equivocations until the nothing that was the essential Blott was revealed quite naked and then they would shoot what was left for desertion. Blott had no doubt about his fate, and what made matters worse was that as far as he could tell the British were quite incapable of winning the war. Half the time they seemed oblivious of the fact that there was a war on, and for the rest conducted it with an inefficiency that astonished him. Shortly after his arrival at the Hall, Western Command had conducted manoeuvres in the Cleene Forest and Blott had watched the chaos that ensued with horror. If these were the men on whose fighting qualities he had to depend for his captivity, he would have to look for his salvation elsewhere. He found it in a nearby ammunition dump which was, quite typically, unguarded and Blott, determined that if the English wouldn’t defend him he would, slowly acquired a small arsenal which he buried in the forest. Two-inch mortars, Bren guns, rifles, boxes of ammunition, all disappeared without notice and were cached, carefully greased and watertight, under the bracken in the hills behind the Hall. By 1945 Blott was in a position to fight a guerrilla war in South Worfordshire. And then the war ended and new problems arose.
The prospect of being repatriated to Italy was not one that appealed to him and he couldn’t see himself settling down in Naples after so many agreeable years in England. On the other hand he had no intention of returning to what remained of Dresden. It was in the Russian Zone and Blott had no desire to swop the comforts of life in Worfordshire for the rigours of existence in Siberia. Besides, he rather doubted if even a defeated Fatherland would welcome home a man who had spent five years masquerading as an Italian PoW. It seemed far wiser to stay where he was, and here his devotion to the Handyman family paid off.
Lord Handyman had been a man of enthusiasms. Long before it was generally fashionable he had conceived the notion that the world’s resources were on the verge of extinction and had sought to avoid the personal consequences by saving everything. He had been particularly keen on compost and Blott had dug enormous pits in the kitchen garden into which all household refuse of an organic sort was thrown.
‘Nothing must be wasted,’ the Earl had declared, and nothing was. Under his direction the Hall’s sewage system had been diverted to empty into the compost pits and Blott and the Earl had spent happy hours observing the layers of cabbage stalks, potato peelings and excrement which made up the day’s leavings. As each pit filled Blott dug another one and the process began again. The results were quite astonishing. Enormous cabbages and alarming marrows and cucumbers proliferated. So, in summer, did the flies until the situation became intolerable and Lady Handyman, who had lost her appetite since the recycling began, put her foot down and insisted that either the flies went or she would. Blott diverted the sewage system back to its proper place while the Earl, evidently inspired by the rate of reproduction of the flies, turned his attention to rabbits. Blott had constructed several dozen hutches built one above the other on the lines of apartment buildings in which the Earl installed the largest rabbits he could buy, a breed called Flemish Giants. Like all the Earl’s schemes, the rabbits had not been an unqualified success. They consumed enormous quantities of vegetation and the family had developed an aversion for rabbit pie, roast rabbit, rabbit stew and lapin à l’orange, while Blott had been driven to distraction trying to keep pace with their voracious appetites. To add to his problems Maud, then ten, had identified her father with Mr McGregor and had aided and abetted the rabbits to escape. As peace broke out in Europe the Gorge was overrun with Flemish Giants. By then Lord Handyman’s enthusiasm had waned. He turned to ducks and particularly to Khaki Campbells, a species which had the advantage that they were largely self-supporting and produced an abundance of eggs.
‘Can’t go wrong with ducks,’ he had said cheerfully as the family switched from a diet of rabbit to duck eggs. As usual with his prophecies this one had proved unfounded. It was all too easy to go wrong with ducks, as the family found out when the Earl succumbed to a lethal egg that had been laid too close to one of his old compost pits. Passing away as peacefully as ptomaine poisoning allowed, he had left Maud and her mother to manage alone. It was largely thanks to his death that Blott had been allowed to stay on at the Hall.
4
Over the next few weeks Lady Maud was intensely active. She took legal advice from Mr Turnbull daily. She canvassed opposition to the proposed motorway from every quarter of South Worfordshire and she sat almost continuously on committees. In particular she made her considerable presence felt on the Committee for the Preservation of the Cleene Gorge. General Burnett of the Grange, Guildstead Carbonell, was elected President but as Secretary Lady Maud was the driving force. Petitions were organized, protest meetings held, motions proposed, seconded and passed, money raised and posters printed.
‘The price of justice is eternal publicity,’ she said with an originality that startled her hearers, but which in fact she had found in Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations. ‘It is not enough to protest, we must make our protest known. If the Gorge is to be saved it will not be by words alone but by action.’ On the platform beside her Sir Giles nodded his apparent approval, but inwardly he was alarmed. Publicity was all very well, and justice was fine when it applied to other people but he didn’t want public attention focused too closely on his role in the affair. He had expected the motorway to upset Lady Maud; he had not foreseen that she would turn into a human tornado. He certainly hadn’t supposed that his seat would be jeopardized by the uproar she seemed bent on provoking.
‘If you don’t see that the Hall is saved,’ Lady Maud told him, ‘I’ll see to it that you don’t sit for South Worfordshire at the next election.’ Sir Giles took the threat seriously and consulted Hoskins at the Planning Authority in Worford.
‘I thought you wanted the thing to go through the Gorge,’ Hoskins told him as they sat in the bar of the Handyman Arms.
Sir Giles nodded unhappily. ‘I do,’ he admitted, ‘but Maud has gone berserk. She’s threatening … well, never mind.’
Hoskins was reassuring. ‘She’ll get over it. They always do. Got to give them time to get used to the idea.’
‘It’s all very well for you to talk,’ said Sir Giles, ‘but I have to live with the beastly woman. She’s up half the night thundering about the bloody house and I’m having to cook for myself. Besides, I don’t like the way she keeps cleaning her father’s shotgun in the kitchen.’
‘You know she took a potshot at one of the surveyors last week,’ Hoskins said.
‘Can’t you
have her charged?’ Sir Giles asked eagerly. ‘That would take the heat off for a bit. Haul her up before the local beaks.’
‘She is a local magistrate,’ Hoskins pointed out, ‘and anyway there’s no proof. She would just claim she was shooting rabbits.’
‘And that’s another thing. She’s got the house full of bloody great Alsatians. Hired them from some damned security firm. I tell you I can’t go down the passage for a pee in the night without running the risk of being bitten.’ He ordered another two whiskies and considered the problem. ‘There’ll have to be an Inquiry,’ he said finally. ‘Promise them an Inquiry and they’ll calm down a bit. Secondly, offer the Inquiry a totally unacceptable alternative. Like we did with the block of flats in Shrewton.’
‘You mean give planning permission for a sewage farm?’
‘That’s what we did there. Worked like a charm,’ Sir Giles said. ‘Now if we could come up with an alternative route which nobody in his right mind would accept …’
‘There’s always Ottertown,’ said Hoskins.
‘What about Ottertown?’
‘It’s ten miles out of the way and you’d have to go through a council estate.’
Sir Giles smiled. ‘Right through the middle?’
‘Right through the middle.’
‘It sounds promising,’ Sir Giles agreed. ‘I think I shall be the first to advocate the Ottertown route. You’re quite sure it’s unacceptable?’
‘Quite sure,’ said Hoskins. ‘And, by the way, I’ll take my fee in advance.’
Sir Giles looked round the bar. ‘My advice is to buy …’he began.
‘Cash this time,’ said Hoskins, ‘I lost on United Oils.’
Sir Giles returned to Handyman Hall in a fairly good humour. He disliked parting with money but Hoskins was worth it and the Ottertown idea was the sort of strategy he liked. It would take Maud’s mind off eternal publicity. Tempers would cool and the Inquiry would decide in favour of the Gorge. By then it would be too late to inflame public opinion once again. Inquiries were splendid soporifics. He ran the gauntlet of the guard dogs and spent the evening in his study writing a letter to the Minister of the Environment demanding the setting up of an Inquiry. No one could say that the Member of Parliament for South Worfordshire had not got the interests of his constituents at heart.
While Sir Giles connived and Lady Maud committeed, Blott in the kitchen garden had his work cut out trying to do his conflicting duties. He would settle down to weed the lettuces only to be interrupted by the bell in the greenhouse. Blott spent hours listening to long conversations between Sir Giles and officials at the Ministry, between Sir Giles and members of his constituency or his stockbroker or his business partners, but never between Sir Giles and Mrs Forthby. Sir Giles had been forewarned. Mrs Forthby’s remark that she had received a call from someone called Blott who had ordered a ton of pig manure had alarmed Sir Giles. There was obviously some mistake though how Blott could have got hold of the number in the first place he couldn’t imagine. It wasn’t in the telephone index on his desk. He kept it in his private diary and the diary was in his pocket. Sir Giles memorized the number and then erased it from the diary. There would be no more calls to Mrs Forthby from Handyman Hall.
When Sir Giles wasn’t on the telephone, Lady Maud was, issuing orders, drumming up support or hurling defiance at the authorities with a self-assurance that amazed and delighted Blott. You knew where you were with her and Blott, who prized certainty above all else, emerged from the greenhouse after listening to her with the feeling that all was well with the world and would remain so. Handyman Hall, the Park, the Lodge, a great triumphal arch at the bottom of the drive where Blott lived, the kitchen garden, all those things to which he had grafted his own anonymity in a hostile world, would remain safe and secure if Lady Maud had anything to do with it. Sir Giles’ calls left a different impression. His protests were muted, too polite and too equivocal to satisfy Blott, so that he came away with the feeling that something was wrong. He couldn’t put his finger on it, but whenever he took the earphones off after listening to Sir Giles he felt uneasy. There was too much talk about money for Blott’s liking, and in particular about ample compensation for the Hall. The sum most frequently mentioned was a quarter of a million pounds. As he went down the rows of lettuces with his hoe, Blott shook his head. ‘Money talks,’ Sir Giles had told his caller but it had said nothing to Blott. There were more important words in his vocabulary. On the other hand his hours of listening to Sir Giles had done wonders for his accent. With the headphones on Blott had sat practising Sir Giles’ pronunciation. In his study Sir Giles said, ‘Of course, my dear fellow, I absolutely agree with you …’ In the greenhouse Blott repeated the words. By the end of a week his imitation was so exact that Lady Maud, coming into the kitchen garden to collect some radishes and spring onions for lunch one day, had been astonished to hear Sir Giles’ voice issuing from among the geraniums. ‘I looked upon the whole thing as an infringement of the rules of conservation,’ he was saying. ‘My dear General, I shall do my damnedest to see that the matter is raised in the House.’ Lady Maud stood and gazed into the greenhouse and was just considering the possibility that Blott had rigged up a loudspeaker there when he emerged, beaming triumphantly.
‘You like it, my pronunciation?’ he asked.
‘Good heavens, was that you? You gave me quite a start,’ Lady Maud said.
Blott smirked proudly. ‘I have been practising correct English,’ he said.
‘But you speak English perfectly.’
‘I don’t. Not like an Englishman.’
‘Well, I’d be glad if you didn’t go round speaking like my husband,’ said Lady Maud. ‘It’s bad enough having one of him about the place.’
Blott smiled happily. These were his sentiments exactly.
‘Which reminds me,’ she continued, ‘I must see that the TV people cover the Inquiry. We must get the maximum publicity.’
Blott collected his hoe and went back to his lettuces while Lady Maud, having collected her radishes, returned to the kitchen. He was rather pleased with himself. It wasn’t often he got a chance to demonstrate his ability to mimic people. It was a skill that had developed from his earliest days at the orphanage. Not knowing who he was, Blott had tried out other people’s personalities. It had come in handy poaching, too. More than one gamekeeper had been startled to hear his employer’s voice issuing from the darkness to tell him to stop making an ass of himself while Blott made good his escape. Now as he worked away at the weeds he tried out Sir Giles again. ‘I demand that there be an Inquiry into this whole business,’ he said. Blott smiled to himself. It sounded quite authentic. And there was going to be an Inquiry too. Lady Maud had said so.
5
The Inquiry was held in the Old Courthouse in Worford. Everyone was there – everyone, that is, whose property stood on the proposed route through the Cleene Gorge. General Burnett, Mr and Mrs Bullett-Finch, Colonel and Mrs Chapman, Miss Percival, Mrs Thomas, the Dickinsons, all seven of them, and the Fullbrooks who rented a farm from the General. There were also a few other influential families who were quite unaffected by the motorway but who came to support Lady Maud. She sat in front with Sir Giles and Mr Turnbull and behind them the seats were all filled. Blott stood at the back. On the other side of the aisle the seats were empty except for a solicitor representing the Ottertown Town Council. It was quite clear that nobody seriously supposed that Lord Leakham would decide in favour of Ottertown. The thing was a foregone conclusion – or would have been but for the intervention of Lady Maud and the intransigence of Lord Leakham, whose previous career as a judge had been confined to criminal cases in the High Court. The choice of venue was unfortunate, too. The Old Courthouse resembled too closely the courtrooms of Lord Leakham’s youth for the old man to deal at all moderately with Lady Maud’s frequent interruption of the evidence.
‘Madam, you are trying the court’s patience,’ he told her when she rose to her feet for the tenth t
ime to protest that the scheme as outlined by Mr Hoskins for the Planning Board was an invasion of individual liberty and the rights of property. Lady Maud bristled in tweeds.
‘My family has held land in the Cleene Gorge since 1472!’ she shouted. ‘It was entrusted to us by Edward the Fourth who designated the Handyman family custodians of the Gorge—’
‘Whatever His Majesty Edward the Fourth may have done,’ said Lord Leakham, ‘in 1472 has no relevance to the evidence being presented by Mr Hoskins. Be so good as to sit down.’
