Ace

by Dick King-Smith

  Farmer Tubbs was a very moderate drinker. Cider was his usual, but only on Sundays before lunch did he allow himself that quart mug. A half pint was his ration, especially on market days when he was driving.

  “What about your friend?” said the manager.

  The farmer held out his bucket.

  “Put some water in here, will you, Bob?” he said.

  “Go on, Ted!” someone shouted. “Buy ’im a beer. You can’t bring the poor beast into a pub and not give him a proper drink.”

  “He shall have one on the house,” said the manager, and he drew a pint of beer and poured it into the bucket.

  Ace, who had been listening carefully to these exchanges, noted with pleasure that the name on the pump handle was that of a brand highly recommended in the television commercials.

  He bent his head to the bucket.

  The beer looked good.

  He put his snout in the bucket.

  The beer smelled good.

  He drained the bucket.

  The beer tasted good.

  He gave a short happy squeal, and it was obvious to everyone what he meant.

  There came a chorus of voices.

  “He liked that!”

  “That were a drop of good stuff, old chap, weren’t it?”

  “Same again, that’s what he’s saying!”

  “He could do with the other half!”

  “And one for the road!”

  And the drinkers in the public bar rose, to a man, and poured their tankards of beer into Ace’s bucket.

  Almost before Farmer Tubbs had tasted his half pint of cider the pig’s bucket was empty again, and when they left, it was with some difficulty that the Ace of Clubs managed to get back into the pickup truck.

  “Good thing you’re not driving,” said the farmer as he strapped the pig in.

  Ace hiccupped.

  At first the drive home was uneventful, but then fate decreed that a police car should come up behind them just as Farmer Tubbs swerved wildly across the road. He swerved because Ace had fallen asleep and despite the seat belt had lurched sideways against him.

  The next moment there came the sound of a siren, and then the police car, lights flashing, pulled in front of the pickup and forced it to a stop.

  One of the two police officers in the car got out and walked to the driver’s side of the truck. Farmer Tubbs rolled down his window. The smell of beer inside the truck was overwhelming.

  “Good afternoon, sir,” said the police officer in the coldly polite way that police officers have on these occasions. “Having trouble with the steering, are we?”

  “ ’Twasn’t my fault,” said Farmer Tubbs. “ ’Twas the pig.”

  “I see,” said the officer. He produced his breath-analyzing kit.

  “Now, sir,” he said, “I’m going to ask you to blow into this tube. If you look at this machine, you’ll see that there are three little lights on it—just like traffic lights—green, amber, and red. Now then, sir, if the green light comes on when you blow, that means you have had no alcoholic drink at all.”

  “Well, I have had,” said Farmer Tubbs. “A half pint of cider in the Bull.”

  The police officer raised his eyebrows at this. The amount the farmer cited was within the allowable limit. But he wrinkled his nose at the stench of beer drifting out the window.

  “In that case,” he said, “the amber light will come on. This is to show that you have drunk alcohol in some shape or form. But if, after forty seconds, that amber light should go off and the red light come on, then, sir, you will be over the limit and I shall have to ask you to accompany me to the station for a blood test.”

  Farmer Tubbs shook his head in pity.

  “You’m barking up the wrong tree, young man,” he said. “I shan’t never be over the limit.”

  “Just blow, sir,” said the police officer. “Anyhow, it’s never safe to drink any alcohol before you drive,” he added as a stern warning. “Then we’ll see.”

  So he did, and they did.

  The amber light came on. The police officer watched, waiting for it to change to red, confident that here was yet one more drunken driver. A half pint of cider indeed! But after forty seconds the amber light went out and no red light appeared.

  “I don’t understand it,” said the officer. He went and fetched the second constable from the police car.

  “The stink of beer in there’s enough to knock you down,” he told his partner.

  “ ’Tis the pig,” said Farmer Tubbs.

  At this point Ace awoke, roused by the sound of voices. He looked happily at the six men he could see, four police officers and two Farmer Tubbses. He gave an enormous belch, and both police officers reeled backward.

  “Well, I never! Did you ever?” said Farmer Tubbs. “Ace, you’ve gone and made a proper pig of yourself!”

  A Pig in an Armchair

  “TELL YOU ONE thing,” said Farmer Tubbs as they drove on home. “With all that beer inside you, I reckons you better go straight in the box stall. We don’t want no accidents in the house, do we, Ace?”

  Ace let out two sleepy grunts. He had meant to give a single one, but he seemed not to be quite in control of things.

  “Oh, no, we don’t!” said Farmer Tubbs, and when they reached the farm he drew up outside the box-stall door.

  “It don’t matter,” he said, “if you wets your bed in here.”

  Nanny was peering out.

  “He’s had a skinful, Nanny,” said the farmer.

  Once the seat belt was undone, getting out of the truck was more a matter of falling out for Ace, and he walked into the box stall in a rather wobbly way. Nanny bleated anxiously.

  “Don’t you worry,” said Farmer Tubbs. “He’ll be all right when he’s had a good sleep.”

  Ace did indeed fall fast asleep.

  While he slept, Clarence came to visit.

  “Oh, Clarence, I’m worried!” said Nanny. “There’s something the matter with Ace. He wasn’t acting at all naturally. What can it be?”

  Clarence was a cat of the world. More than once he had courted the Blue Persian at the local pub, and the smell of alcohol was familiar to him. “He’s had a skinful, Nanny,” Clarence said. And when the simple old goat still looked mystified, Clarence explained.

  “Today,” he said, “this little piggy went to market, and by the look of things, he drank a good deal of beer. He’ll be all right when he’s had a good sleep.”

  Neither the farmer nor the cat was quite correct. Ace did have a good sleep, but when he woke he was not quite all right.

  “Oh, Nanny!” he groaned. “I’ve got an awful headache!” And after a while he explained all that had happened.

  “I must have drunk a whole bucketful,” he said.

  “Why did you drink so much?” asked Nanny.

  “I was so thirsty. And it did taste nice. But now I wish I hadn’t.”

  “Well, you’ve learned a lesson,” said Nanny. “A little of what you like does you good. But you can have too much of a good thing.”

  —

  Clarence was in the kitchen when Ace went into the farmhouse on the following morning. He got out of his bed by the oven and walked around the pig, looking critically at him with first the green eye, then the yellow eye.

  “Better?” he said.

  “Oh, yes, thanks, Clarence,” said Ace.

  The white cat sat down in front of Ace and gave him a quizzical green-and-yellow stare.

  “Seen Megan yet this morning?” he asked.

  “No. Why?”

  “She was wondering where you were yesterday.”

  “Did you tell her?”

  “Stupidly, I did.”

  “Why stupidly?”

  “Because I suspect Her Lowness is just longing to take you to task about your behavior,” said Clarence.

  He gave a fair imitation of Megan.

  “ ‘Going into a pub, look you, and drinking too much, see! There’s common!’ I would
stay out here and miss her if I was you.”

  “Oh, but it’s Wednesday,” said Ace.

  “So?”

  “Paddington Bear is on. I always watch that.”

  “I wish you luck,” said Clarence.

  Ace tiptoed into the living room, hoping to find Megan asleep. She was, so he turned on the TV very softly (he had long ago learned to operate the volume control with his teeth). But before Paddington could appear, the telephone rang, something that always woke the dog, for she considered it her duty to boost its sound with a volley of barks.

  This double summons brought Farmer Tubbs in from the yard, and when he had gone out again after answering the call and leaving muddy boot marks across the carpet, Megan lost no time in speaking.

  “We want a word with you, boyo,” she said sharply.

  The old Ace would have replied to this in the meek, respectful way in which he had long been used to speaking to the corgi. “Yes, Your Lowness?” he would have said, and perhaps added, “What is it, ma’am?”

  But now a sudden flame of rebellion burned in Ace’s broad breast. You stupid pompous little beast, he thought, with all your airs and graces, speaking to me as if I were no better than a…a dog. Western Princess of Llanllowell, my trotter! Why, you’re just a mouthy little Welsh cow hound. What am I doing kowtowing to you? And he did not answer.

  “Did you hear what we said?” snapped Megan.

  “Not now, Megan,” said Ace firmly. “I’m busy.”

  There was a short stunned silence before the Western Princess found her voice.

  Then, “Upon our word!” she spluttered. “Not now, indeed! Busy, indeed! Megan, indeed! You will kindly address us in the proper fashion.”

  At that moment Paddington appeared on the screen in his funny blue hat.

  “Oh, shut up!” said Ace, and he turned the volume up full.

  —

  “Oh, Nanny, you should have seen it!” said Clarence that night. Often he came in the small hours for a chat with Nanny, who like many old folk did not sleep well. Now he had jumped up to his usual perch on the crib, where on occasion he launched himself upon an unwary mouse. Ace was fast asleep in the straw.

  “Megan was jumping up and down in her chair,” Clarence went on, “yapping her head off, practically frothing at the mouth, and Ace just turned his back on her and sat watching till his program was over. Then he switched it off and turned around.

  “ ‘What was it,’ he said very quietly, ‘that you wanted to say to me?’ Well, by now her ladyship was so hopping mad at being treated so disrespectfully I thought she was going to have a fit.

  “ ‘How dare you tell us to shut up!’ she yelled. ‘How dare you!’ ”

  “And what did Ace say to that?” said Nanny.

  “Oh, it was great!” said Clarence. “He got up and he walked slowly over to where she was sitting, in the smaller of the two armchairs, and he said, still very quietly, ‘I’ll tell you how I dare. It is because I have suddenly realized that I am no longer a little piglet, bowing and scraping to you, and having to listen to you talking about your piffling pedigree and your rotten relations and what the Princess of Wales said to your great-aunt Fanny. I am now a large pig, about ten times as large as you, and I am fed up to the back teeth, of which I have a great many’—and he opened his mouth wide—‘with all your silly, snobbish nonsense.’ ”

  “And what did Megan say?” asked Nanny.

  “He didn’t give her a chance to say anything,” said Clarence. “He did all the talking. ‘Now,’ he said, ‘I want to watch Time for a Story on Channel Four, and I do not wish to be interrupted. On second thought, get out of this room. Just push off, quick!’ And he gnashed his teeth together with a very nasty noise that sounded like Chop-Chop! Chop-Chop! I don’t think Megan’s moved so fast in years. She couldn’t exactly put her tail between her legs—there isn’t enough of it—but she was out of that room like a…like a…”

  “Scalded cat?” said Nanny.

  “Exactly. And,” said Clarence, “this is the best part. Ace switched on Channel Four, and then he climbed up into Ted’s big armchair and sat there watching. Then after the program was over and all was quiet again, Megan came slinking back. Oh, Nanny, how are the mighty fallen! She stuck her head around the door and gave a little whine, as if to say, ‘Please, may I come in?’ ”

  “What did Ace say?” asked the old goat.

  The white cat looked down with a certain fondness at the sleeping pig, the strange black mark on his side rising and falling to the rhythm of his breathing. Clarence was not one to give his affection easily, but he had grown to like the Ace of Clubs.

  “I thought he handled it beautifully,” he said. “He could have gone on being tough with her—‘I’m bigger than you, watch your step’—that sort of stuff. Or he could have got a bit of his own back on her for the way she’s always patronized him—teased her or sneered at her for her high-and-mighty ways. But no, he just said quite firmly but in a kindly voice, ‘Come in, Megan. I’ve something to say to you.’

  “ ‘Yes, Ace,’ said Megan rather uneasily. You could see she was expecting him to tell her off again, but instead he said, ‘There’s a documentary about Cruft’s dog show on the telly this afternoon. They’ve just shown a clip of it, and there were quite a lot of corgis there. I wondered if you’d like me to switch it on for you when the time comes?’ ”

  “What did she say?” asked Nanny.

  “She looked at him,” said Clarence, “just like she looks at her master. She put her ears flat, and she wagged her rump, and she said in a humble voice, ‘Oh, we should like that, Ace! There’s kind of you.’

  “Oh, I wish you could have seen him, Nanny, sitting in that big armchair, looking for all the world like Ted Tubbs’s twin brother. He sat there staring down at Megan, and what d’you think he said to round it all off?”

  “What?”

  “ ‘There’s a good dog, Megan. There’s a good dog.’ ”

  A Pig in the Papers

  ON MARKET DAY the following week the Bull was, as usual, full of farmers and dealers and truck drivers. In addition there was a very young man who had just started in his first job as a cub reporter for the local newspaper, The Dummerset Chronicle.

  One of his duties was to cover the market and take note of the livestock prices, not the most interesting work. So he pricked up his ears, as he sat in a corner nursing a glass of lemonade, at a conversation between the pub manager and some of the customers.

  “Ted Tubbs been in with that pig, Bob?” asked one.

  “Ain’t seen him today,” said the manager.

  “I never seen nothing like that afore,” said another.

  “A pig drinking beer like that!” said a third.

  “I reckon he put down more than eight pints,” said the manager.

  “He had a skinful,” said the first man.

  A pig drinking beer, said the reporter to himself. Though he had not been long in the job, he knew that an interesting item of news that you got before anyone else was called a scoop, and he hastily swallowed his drink and hurried off to the newspaper offices.

  “It might make a story,” said his editor in the tired, bored way that editors have. “Go and see this Farmer Tubbs and find out what you can.”

  —

  When the cub reporter arrived at the farm and rang the front doorbell, no one answered. This was partly because Farmer Tubbs was busy with the afternoon milking and partly because the bell hadn’t worked in years.

  So the reporter walked around to the side of the farmhouse, where he found the garden door open. Someone had the television on, he could hear, so he walked in, calling, “Hello? Excuse me! Can I come in?”

  From the nearest room a dog barked, but then came the sound of a single loud grunt and the dog immediately fell silent.

  Nervously, for he felt that perhaps he had already gone too far, the young man opened the door to the room.

  Though in later years, as a
much-traveled reporter, he saw many strange sights in many strange countries, he never forgot the scene that now met his eyes.

  On the television was the cartoon Tom and Jerry.

  Directly in front of the TV set sat a white cat, its tail swishing angrily (for Jerry had just caught the tip of Tom’s tail in a mousetrap).

  In a small armchair lay a very fat corgi.

  In a big armchair sat a large pig.

  All three were watching the cartoon.

  All three took not the slightest notice of him.

  “Oh, I like Tom and Jerry!” said the cub reporter. “Can I watch, please?”

  And almost as though it was some sort of reply, the pig grunted twice.

  “Who was that?” said Ace after the young man had left to try to find the farmer.

  “Haven’t a clue,” said Clarence, and “We don’t know, we’re sure,” said Megan.

  “He likes Tom and Jerry anyway,” said Ace.

  “How do you know?” said Megan.

  “He said so.”

  “Of course!” said Megan. “We were forgetting.” For she now knew of Ace’s great gift. The old Megan would never have believed in the possibility of such a thing. The new Ace-worshipping Megan had no doubt at all of his powers.

  Across the yard the hum of the milking machine suddenly stopped.

  “I’m going for my supper,” said Ace. “Shall I switch the telly off?”

  “Sure,” said Clarence, and “There’s kind of you!” said Megan, so he did.

  —

  Hardly had the reporter found the farmer and introduced himself than there came the sound of a loud, urgent squeal.

  “Just a minute, my lad,” said Farmer Tubbs. “Time and tide and Ace wait for no man.” And he hurried off to fetch the pig’s supper.

  The old man and the young leaned on the half-door of the box stall, watching.

  “He’s enjoying that,” said the cub reporter. “Is there any beer in it?”

  “Bless you, no!” said Farmer Tubbs. “Why ever…? Oh, I see. You’ve heard tell, have you? When he had a few in the Bull?”