Marrying Off Mother

by Gerald Durrell

  ‘Do you want to see them?’ I enquired, thinking of the casual way in which our family popped in and out of each other’s lives with infrequency, and less warning than a cuckoo’s sorties on its avian friends.

  ‘No, but it’s my family,’ he said simply. ‘That is why I cannot go to the south of France, where my girlfriend, Penny, is.’

  This struck me as carrying filial devotion too far.

  ‘Why not see them on the way back?’ I suggested. ‘Go and see Penny first.’

  Ludwig looked shocked.

  ‘Or,’ I continued, ‘why not one year say “damn the family”, and go to . . . go to . . . Mexico?’

  He considered this, while the barman and I waited to see if he would be corrupted.

  ‘I would like to see Mexico,’ he said at length. ‘But maybe it is too hot. I found Spain very hot.’

  ‘Why didn’t you complain to the government?’ I asked.

  He considered this.

  ‘It is not a justifiable complaint,’ he explained.

  Both the barman and I hoped fervently that this was a joke. It wasn’t; it was a plain statement of fact. The barman and I exchanged anguished looks.

  ‘Well,’ I said judiciously, ‘there are cooler places. Baffin-land, for example.’

  ‘Yes?’ asked Ludwig with interest.

  ‘Our friend here,’ I said, gesturing at the barman, ‘now, he can tell you about Baffin-land.’

  The barman, with a face as expressionless as a pool of tar, picked up a glass and started to polish it.

  ‘Baffin-land is cool,’ he said softly and earnestly. ‘It is so cool they have to make special spirits to drink there, otherwise the bottles burst.’

  Ludwig thought about this one for a moment.

  ‘What proof?’ he asked.

  The barman sighed. I could tell he was now beginning to understand my problem.

  ‘If you went to Baffin-land, you would have the hospitality of the Eskimos,’ I said, helpfully. ‘Vast quantities of blubber, rubbing noses with gay Eskimo wives . . .’

  ‘Blubber is what?’ asked Ludwig.

  The small, but important, semi-convoluted lower section of the bowel of a whale over the age of consent,’ I said.

  ‘When caught during the month of August at full moon when the icebergs start to melt,’ said the barman, placidly, and with total conviction, earning my undying admiration.

  ‘By hand harpoon,’ I added, greatly daring.

  ‘I don’t think I would like that,’ said Ludwig. ‘It tastes like fish, no? Kippers always make me sick when I am eating them, and I suffer a great thirst.’

  I looked at the barman, who gazed back at me with sympathy.

  ‘I’ve got a right one here,’ I said, ‘a veritable Hun.’

  ‘You have that, sir,’ said the barman. ‘I’m thinking a week or two in Dublin would be a fine cure; as good as a mental home, some say.’

  ‘I’ll think about it,’ I promised.

  ‘Dublin is very wet, isn’t it?’ asked Ludwig, earnestly enquiring after knowledge.

  ‘Yes,’ said the barman. ‘The Venice of the north, they call it. That’s where they invented the gondola.’

  ‘But I thought . . .’ began Ludwig, puzzled.

  ‘Come,’ I said, seizing his arm in a firm grip. ‘Let’s go and have a kipper.’

  During an excellent meal, Ludwig unburdened himself to me about Penny. She was young, she was gay (I strongly suspected she had a sense of humour), but always they were fighting, always. She was not ready when she should be, always she did not want to do what he suggested and, sin of sins, she left stockings and brassieres lying about on the floor in her efforts to get dressed quickly. He felt that this last habit, combined with a certain age gap, made the idea of marriage impossible, or, if not impossible, suspect. I said I thought that that was exactly what he wanted: someone young, vital, who would argue with him and keep him permanently waist-deep in discarded brassieres and stockings. I said that marriages had been ruined by the wife being too tidy and many others had been saved by a brassiere being dropped at the right moment. He was much struck by the novelty of this idea and, after two bottles of excellent wine, I almost had him and Penny owning their own hotel in Bournemouth, providing she promised not to drop brassieres in the corridors.

  ‘I have written to ask her if she will come up and join me for my holiday,’ he confessed.

  ‘And what did she say?’

  ‘She has not replied. It is very worrying,’ he said, worrying.

  ‘Stop worrying,’ I said firmly. ‘If you knew the French postal system like I do, you wouldn’t worry at all. The letter saying yes, she loves you will come on your hundredth birthday.’

  He looked alarmed.

  ‘Joke,’ I explained.

  ‘Ah!’ he said, relieved. ‘So you think she will agree?’

  ‘Can’t fail to,’ I assured him. ‘Who could resist the advances of a filthy Hun?’

  Ludwig, since he knew this joke, laughed uproariously. Then he fell serious.

  ‘You travel a lot?’ he asked.

  ‘A fair bit.’

  ‘Does it . . . you know . . . upset you?’

  ‘No. Why?’

  ‘Whenever I am going on holiday, I get very nervous and my bowels suffer,’ he confessed. The closer it gets to my holiday, the worse it gets. And then, when I go on holiday, it gets so bad that I do not enjoy myself.’

  ‘What you need is a tranquillizer,’ I said. ‘I’ll give you some.’

  They would work?’ he asked, hopefully.

  ‘Of course,’ I said. ‘Remind me — I’ve got some somewhere. I take them myself sometimes when I’ve been overdoing it.’

  ‘I’d be very grateful,’ he said. ‘I want to enjoy my holiday.’

  ‘You will,’ I promised, ‘and Penny too.’

  In good spirits, we set off to the old Sandbanks chain ferry, which is really rather like a curious gateway into another world. As Charon ferries you across the Styx, for far more pleasant reasons the ferry lumbered across the mouth of Poole harbour, island-dotted, seabird-flecked, from the glittering beehive hotels of Bournemouth into a piece of pastoral England which did not look as though it had changed since the 1700s. Here, the rolling hillsides were great green meadows, hedged with blackthorns, dark and spiky, tangled as a witch’s hair. The ploughed fields, neat and smooth as corduroy, had flocks of rooks and seagulls following the ploughs, as though the farmers were setting the trail for some strange avian paper-chase. The new catkins were lemon yellow, illuminating the hedgerows, and the willows had sealskin buds in profusion. In the tall, stark and leafless trees that rose along the crests of the hills, bare black branches intertwined against the sky to form a blue stained-glass window of great complexity, marred here and there by the early foundations of a rook’s or magpie’s nest. Ludwig put on his tape-recorder and loud, exuberant, brassy Bavarian music throbbed through the car. One could almost hear the slap of horny hands upon leather breeches and the clump of huge climbing boots as the Bavarians, with gigantic glasses of beer, enjoyed themselves. It made such a contrast to the landscape that we were passing through, that it became amusing.

  Then we rounded a corner and before us, on an almost conical mound, set in the declivity between two great green breasts of hills, stood the remains of Corfe Castle, like some huge, rotting dinosaur’s tooth embedded in the green gum of the hill upon which it stood. The central block, the only tall piece to have resisted the mines and gunpowder of Cromwell’s vandalistic Parliamentarians, now stood up against the blue sky like an admonishing, leprous finger, jackdaw-haunted, somehow macabre and sad at the same time.

  We parked the car and walked towards the castle. The cold crisp air and the wine that we had drunk made me feel slightly light-headed. At the entrance two squat fat towers, like pitted beer mugs, guarded a massive arch and to one side, in the remains of the wall, another similar tower leaned out at an acute angle, like a tree that, water-worn or wind-tossed, had been b
ent over but refused to relinquish its hold on the earth. The charge of powder used to try to destroy it had not been large enough to cope with this bulky chess-piece of Purbeck masonry.

  Ahead of us, walking in the same direction, was a tall girl with dark hair. She had those deliciously long legs that only American girls appear to have, racehorse legs, that seem to start at the chin and go on for ever.

  I started my lecture on English history for Ludwig’s benefit.

  ‘It was here,’ I said, pointing to the arch, ‘that the first of many murders was done. The dastardly deed was committed by Elfrieda on Ethelred the Unready. He was hunting in the district and he came here to visit his brother. Elfrieda was, of course, his step-mother and was jealous because Ethelred had no Oedipus complex about her. Anyway, as Ethelred the Unready — sometimes called Ethelred the Unsteady when he had been at the mead . . .’

  ‘Mead? What is?’ asked Ludwig, who had been following me with close attention.

  Three parts vodka, one part honey-and-water, and a touch of angostura bitters,’ I said crisply, and was delighted to see the girl ahead slow down from a long-legged, eager stride to a stroll, the better to hear my lecture.

  ‘Well, Ethelred the Unready galloped over the bridge, under this arch, and greeted his step-mother as warmly as anyone can do without an Oedipus complex. He said he wanted to see his brother. His step-mother said that his brother was down in the dungeons playing thumb-screws and would be called instantly. In the meantime, perhaps Ethelred would have a slug of mead to keep his end up. Ethelred said he would.’

  We had now reached the pay box and I could see the girl’s face. She was undeniably lovely. She bought a guide-book and she had an American accent. As she turned away, our eyes met. She grinned suddenly, and wagged the guide-book at me.

  ‘Some people,’ I said, ‘would hardly credit what happened next.’

  The girl hesitated and then started slowly up the slope to the main castle ruins, but slowly enough that she could still overhear our conversation.

  ‘What happened?’ asked Ludwig.

  ‘Well, Elfrieda mixed the mead in a ram’s horn cocktail-shaker and handed a horn of it to Ethelred. As he leant down to seize and quaff it, she stuck a knife in his back, an inhospitable action for which he was quite unready, hence his name. She then stuffed his body down a well, hence the origin of the old English saying, “All’s well that ends well”.’

  ‘The police never caught her?’ asked Ludwig.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘They spent months finger-printing everybody in the castle with no results. Old Scotland Yard, as it was known then, was completely baffled.’

  ‘And who,’ asked Ludwig, determined to get the historical facts straight, ‘was this Oedipus complex?’

  ‘An extremely wicked knight, Sir Oedipus, who wanted to marry Elfrieda and gain the throne. He wanted to become Rex, you know. You’ve heard of the saying “black as the night”?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Ludwig.

  They invented the phrase to describe Sir Oedipus,’ I said.

  The girl, I noticed, had paused within earshot and was studying her guide-book assiduously. I was glad to see that she was holding it upside-down. The man in the ticket office gazed at us reflectively.

  ‘You would not be wanting a guide-book, sir,’ he stated, rather than asked, in a lovely Dorset accent you could cut with a knife, like a piece of delicious cheese.

  ‘No, thank you,’ I said airily. ‘I am familiar with the history of this noble pile.’

  ‘So I hear, sir,’ he said, twinkling at me. Tour friend’s a foreign gentleman, I take it?’

  ‘German,’ I said. ‘You know what they’re like.’

  ‘Oh, aahh,’ said the man. ‘Oh, aahh. I know all right.’

  ‘You come from Dorset?’ asked Ludwig, interestedly.

  This was too much for the man’s gravity and with a muffled ‘Yes sir’, he fled to the back of the kiosk.

  ‘Come,’ I said to Ludwig. ‘We have much to see and the history is fascinating.’

  We passed the girl and slowly she started to follow us.

  ‘Now,’ I said, as we climbed the grassy slopes towards the castle, ‘we will skip a century or two until we come to the point where Henry VIII won the castle from Henry VII in a game of dice.’

  On the rich green grass, a small flock of sheep grazed, the ram with great, tightly curled horns like huge ammonites on each side of his skull.

  ‘Now, you know that Henry VIII had only three passions in life,’ I continued. ‘Women, food and music. Here you see before you the remains of the very flock of sheep that used to be served up to Henry with peas, chipped potatoes and mint sauce. Normally it was chops, but on the days when he had executed a wife or two he’d celebrate with a leg served with rosemary and thyme.’

  They are very dirty,’ said Ludwig, gazing at the sheep.

  They keep them dirty so that no one will poach them,’ I explained. They are washed once a year, on St Omo’s Day, in a great ceremony in the castle’s sheep-dip.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Ludwig.

  He gazed around at the huge blocks of fallen masonry and half-demolished walls.

  ‘Where are the kitchens?’ he asked.

  I led him into a room which I suppose in the old days was where the sentries sat and guarded the second entrance with the drawbridge into the castle, polishing their bows and arrows and keeping the boiling pitch at the right temperature. The room, which had no roof, was some twenty feet by nine. One end was curved, and in it was set a long narrow arrow-slit like a cross in the thick masonry.

  ‘This,’ I said, ‘was the great kitchen.’

  The American girl had paused just outside.

  ‘But it is small,’ said Ludwig.

  ‘Not if you are a skilful cook, and if you have got all the modern conveniences. Henry was very keen on his food, as I told you, and it was more than the cook’s life was worth to serve a bad meal, but a good cook can easily produce a banquet in a space like this, seven or ten courses, perhaps. The art of good cookery is tidiness,’ I said unctuously, remembering vividly that my wife had said that I was the untidiest cook she had ever met.

  ‘But how did they get the food upstairs?’ asked Ludwig, greatly puzzled.

  ‘Through the serving hatch,’ I said, pointing at the arrow-slit. ‘Tall things, like celery and so on, through the upright, and the trays of the small, flatter stuff, through the cross slit.’

  Ludwig stepped forward to examine it.

  ‘It is very extraordinary,’ he said.

  The American girl looked at me, shook her head reprovingly, grinned and then, to my annoyance, disappeared. I showed Ludwig round the rest of the castle, pouring misinformation into his eager ears and hoping that we might catch up with her, but she had vanished.

  Ludwig grew more and more worried. The guest rooms, some eight feet by six, would, he pointed out to me, only hold a moderate-sized double bed without any space to get in and out of the room. How did Queen Elizabeth who, I had informed him, came up for weekends with her father, manage? I said you simply opened the door and jumped into bed. It saved a lot of mucking about, and as the bed took up the whole room, you didn’t have to worry about sweeping under it. He was worried, too, by the sanitary arrangements — the remains of a round tower some five hundred yards away from the main castle, perched on the edge of the hill, which I told him served as a ladies’ and gents’ toilet.

  ‘Why so far away?’ he asked.

  Two reasons,’ I explained. ‘Firstly, as you can see by its position, every time they flushed it, the contents rushed down the hillside into the enemy’s camp, causing acute consternation. And, secondly, Henry had it built there as a punishment. He found his courtiers were simply using the battlements and the sentries below were complaining, so Henry had it built out there and everyone, on pain of death, had to use it. I can tell you, on a cold winter’s night, it was very effective.’

  The American girl had vanished just as completely and as
suddenly as a rabbit down a hole, and I felt sad. I thought that, maybe, a few more of my historical gems and we might have made contact. Slowly, we retraced our steps to the entrance, and as we walked down the slope, I glanced up at one part of the castle that remained more or less intact and saw, high above, in the carunculated remains of a window, with the jackdaws drifting round it like ash flakes, the beautiful girl leaning out and watching us. I waved and she waved back. I needed no further encouragement. Making my hands into a trumpet, I shouted:

  ‘Lady fair, it’s my day for rescuing beautiful princesses, and I know that you are in distress.’

  She considered me gravely, leaned forward, her mane of black hair falling over her shoulders.

  ‘Sir knight, I am in dire distress,’ she called melodiously, with that soft American accent. ‘How did you know my plight?’

  My heart warmed to her.

  ‘Lady, this whole kingdom knows it,’ I said, making, as they used to say, a leg. ‘I and my jester here have travelled many a weary mile to rescue you from a fate worse than death.’

  ‘What is jester?’ asked Ludwig.

  ‘A sort of fool,’ I said.

  ‘You mean, an idiot?’ he asked, indignantly.

  ‘Sir knight,’ called my princess, looking nervously behind her. ‘Speak low, I fear the guards may hear.’

  ‘Lady, the fact that your wicked uncle has imprisoned you, so that he may take both your kingdom and your virtue, has come to my ears,’ I shouted.

  ‘An idiot is a jester?’ asked Ludwig.

  ‘A licensed buffoon,’ I said.

  ‘My virtue too?’ enquired my princess.

  ‘What is a buffoon?’ asked Ludwig.

  ‘Yes, that precious gem that women hold so dear,’ I said. ‘Your uncle, even now, with black and ferocious brow . . .’

  ‘Is buffoon the same as jester?’ asked Ludwig. ‘So it means it is three words for idiot.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said tersely, for my princess was hanging upon my every word.

  ‘Tell me, fair knight, what is my uncle doing?’ she questioned, melodiously.

  ‘He is sitting, at this very moment, planning your doom, madam,’ I said. ‘But never fear, I will . . .’