Once Upon A Time in the West . . . Country

by Tony Hawks

  I have nothing against marriage, and I respect all the diverse cultural reasons why people opt for it. Some want a celebration to mark their love and mutual commitment, others to follow a religious duty. Some want to make a social statement, and spend a pile of money and lose themselves in relentless organising, others want a good, old-fashioned piss-up. Some want legal recognition, others are simply following social protocol. Some want to placate their family, others to defy them. Some want to cherish a holy exchange of vows, others do it for the tax breaks. Whatever the reason, it happens. And it happens quite a lot.

  For me, I’ve never wished my commitment to Fran to be a public affair. Nor have I ever wanted to enter into a promise that I might not be able to keep. Yes, it’s true that couples can tinker with the marriage vows these days, but the culturally recognised and fundamental gist of marriage is that you’re promising to stay with someone for the rest of your life. In the conventional Anglican wedding ceremony couples are asked to agree ‘to have and to hold from this day forward, for better for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish, till death us do part’. It’s very nice, and I’m sure that most people plan on keeping the promise when they make it. I’m sure my parents did. I’m sure Fran’s parents did, too. The trouble is, they didn’t. What they did instead was tear up the bit of paper on which the promise was written, and got divorced.

  So I rather like the idea of a mid-wife or mid-husband. You make a commitment but it’s tempered to suit a reality in which we are simply honest enough to admit that we don’t know what the future holds, or how we’re going to feel about someone in twenty-five years’ time; especially if they’ve been sleeping with our best friend or keeping us locked up in a basement. I could go for the kind of commitment that is required in the mid-wife/mid-husband version of the wedding ceremony. It’s much simpler and far more acceptable to agree ‘to have and to hold from this day forward, for better for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish, for as long as it seems like a good idea.’

  ‘Yep, I’m up for that.’

  Fran recognised my loving commitment to her. I’d promised to do everything I could to make our relationship work in a loving space. I’d pledged to ‘love’ her till death did us part. The difference was that we had made the significant distinction between love and ownership. We’d decided that ‘love’ should be defined as ‘wanting the other person to be happy’. As long as Fran was happy being with me, and I was happy being with her – and that we were prepared to work as hard as we possibly could ensuring that both our sets of needs were met – then we should stay together. If not, we should acknowledge the change in our relationship and get on with building a solid and loving friendship. Countless couples do it. They marry, they divorce, they become friends.2

  My theory is that the divorcees who stay angry (and suffer as a result) do so because they bought into those initial marriage vows so comprehensively that they are left with a bitter taste in their mouths – ‘You bastard/bitch, you said you’d never leave. You said you’d love me forever. You lied to me.’

  Yes, the mid-wife/mid-husband idea works better.

  When we met Maureen, our extremely jolly and convivial midwife, she put us right immediately on the meaning of her job description. Apparently, in Old English the word ‘wife’ (spelt ‘wif’ originally) meant ‘woman’, and ‘mid’ meant ‘with’. So it means ‘with woman’. That made sense. The midwife stayed with the woman and helped her deliver the child. In the NHS, though, she seemed mainly concerned with paperwork, for now at least. Form after form was completed, and Fran and I were handed a kind of idiot’s guide to having a baby, although its writers had cleverly given it another name, The Pregnancy and Baby Guide. Pleasingly, Fran was declared ‘low risk’ and we were given a hospital appointment for a couple of months’ time to go and have an ultrasound scan.

  ‘You can make all the decisions of where and how to have the baby much further down the line,’ said Maureen, as she showed us to the door. ‘For now, just concentrate on eating well and resting.’

  ‘I will,’ I said.

  A fairly poor attempt at a joke, but Maureen laughed generously. Most likely an act of compassion.

  ***

  I had always feared that it would be something quite bereft of glamour. I had figured there would be no excitement. A forum where the mundane always trumped the inspired, where protocol trounced flair and where, to put it frankly, there would not be many laughs to be had. Now I was discovering that I had not been wrong. In fact, I had been spot-on.

  The occasion was the first village hall committee meeting. We’d met in the hall itself, which looked very different from when there’d been a room full of ladies jumping around, mid-Zumba. Now just one table with a few chairs around it. It looked a little sad.

  We had just ploughed our way through the exciting Apologies for Absence,3 rejoiced in the treasurer’s financial report, and now we were discussing the seismic question of who should be the signatories in the cheque book.

  It was all quite riveting. (But only in the sense that a rivet is a short metal fastener with no exciting qualities.)

  I’m not meaning to criticise. This kind of stuff is necessary. I had lived my life trying to escape it and, by and large, I’d made a pretty good fist of it. However, all forms of governance require some kind of system, some protocol, some conventions. Except dictatorship. Dictators can do as they please. They can insist on only their signature in the cheque book if they like. Or they can even dispense with the cheque book altogether, by just taking over the bank. But I wasn’t at that level yet. Chairman Hawks would have to play by the rules a little longer.

  ‘Item six on the agenda,’ I announced, doing my best to sound absorbed. ‘The question of where we place the rag box that the parish council has given us.’

  This was good stuff. One day I’d write a musical about it.

  ***

  One of the many important things I’d learned at our first village hall meeting was that the Zumba class didn’t count as a ‘village hall event’. Sandra, the instructor, had hired the hall and was running her class for profit. What qualified as a ‘village hall event’ was one that the committee put on for the villagers, and from which any profit went into the treasurer’s coffers.

  Which is why Fran and I were going to be spending this Friday night at skittles.

  Skittles is a variant of bowls or bowling. Originally, it would have been played in the open air on lawns, but people soon realised that it rains and gets dark outside so they developed a game that could be played inside. Tonight I was about to witness our village hall variant.

  It’s certainly not normal for most rural newcomers to go to their first village hall event as its chairman, but that was my privilege. Not that it made any difference when I got to the door. The man collecting the £3 entry fee, whom I was to learn later was Jonathan, a tip-top gardener (the mud beneath his fingernails was a clue that he wasn’t a beautician), welcomed me jovially.

  ‘Aha! A newcomer!’ he said. ‘We’ll put you in the twinning team.’

  Rose, the village hall committee secretary, quickly intervened:

  ‘He’s for the village hall team.’

  ‘I thought he’d be good for “twinning” as they’re short of players.’

  ‘He ought to play for the village hall.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because he’s the chairman.’

  A moment passed, and Jonathan exhaled and smiled cheekily.

  ‘OK. I’ll put him down for village hall. He just about qualifies.’

  Ann, whom I already knew from our committee meeting (she’d been especially good on the issue of where to place the parish council’s rag box), popped up from nowhere.

  ‘Would you and Fran like to buy some raffle tickets?’

  She led me to the windowsill with her eyes, where the prizes were proudly laid out. A small carton of Maltesers, another unidentifiable b
ox of chocolates, some hand cream and a bottle of shampoo. Shampoo. How is it that shampoo always seems be a raffle prize at parochial events in the UK? Shampoo must be the most un-prize-like item you can have. Where can the excitement of winning come from? With chocolate one can look forward to the stimulation of eating the chocolate. With a small decorative item one might have a tingle of anticipation as you consider the moment that you place the item on your mantelpiece. But shampoo? What is the feeling when you win?

  ‘Great, I can use this to wash my hair. But better still, this solves a huge problem because, as we all know, shampoo is almost impossible to get hold of in pharmacies and supermarkets around the UK, and therefore this has saved me untold grief. Never mind that it’s a shampoo for another kind of hair type to mine, I care little about the damage that it may cause to my follicles, because these minor reservations are trumped by the overwhelming feeling of exhilaration.’

  I looked at the windowsill longingly.

  ‘Give me five pounds’ worth,’ I said to Ann, in a moment of quite irresponsible recklessness.

  ‘Certainly,’ she said, tearing off a strip of tickets and raising an eyebrow – not realising just how much my hair was itching to be washed.

  I thanked Ann and thrust the raffle tickets into my pocket, filled with a sense that tonight would be my night – the occasion when I finally won a raffle. I suspect that in my life to date I must have bought raffle tickets on more than a hundred occasions, but have never been the one at the end of the night who walked away with a spring in his step, clasping a bottle of VO5 or Pantene. Tonight, however, I could feel it in my bones. Inferius Prizus, the Greek god of piss-poor raffles, would atone for those terrible years of bad luck and disappointment.

  I was pleased by what I saw before me. The hall was full. Forty or fifty people were happily milling about, drinking, chatting and organising the trestle tables and chairs that lined one of the walls. Along the opposing wall was a large art installation. A long strip of material had been laid lengthways in both sympathy and contrast to the harshness of the wall beyond it. At one end, some white grooves had been cut, representing birth, and at the other end, after one’s eyes had traced the empty yards of flat and matted material that represented the monotonous routine of our daily lives, there stood nine upright objects, symbols of purgatory, death, or the afterlife.

  ‘How do you like the skittle lane?’ said Ann.

  Ah. I must stop spending so much time in those modern-art galleries.

  ‘It’s lovely,’ I said.

  I’d never played skittles before, but like many of us, I’d been tenpin bowling, so there were no surprises in store. The thrust of this game is probably in our DNA, the earliest forms of bowling and ground billiards dating as far back as 3000 BC in Ancient Egypt.4

  Skittles, played with nine pins, had remained popular as a pub game in alleys at the rear of pubs in the South West of England, whilst it had all but died out in the great metropolis of London, where people were too busy trading in money markets or forming gangs to have any time for such trifles. The village hall – my village hall – seemed the perfect setting for this ancient sport.

  Rose ushered me and Fran to a table, and soon I was sharing a beer with Francis, a healthy-looking sixty-something, while Fran chatted with his wife. Francis was a former winner of ‘best allotment in the village’. Roger joined us. It turned out he’d been a former allotment prize-winner too. I seemed to be surrounded by green-fingered horticulturists, who would have been appalled by my recent endeavours in the garden. (The pea plants had been optimistically tethered to a cane, but they had wilfully rejected the option of growing up it, favouring a form of shameful withering instead.) Around us, I noted that the atmosphere was warm and convivial. The kitchen at the far end of the hall had now become a bar, and drinks were being served by Steve the postman, the son of Tony and Edna, our neighbours, and his chum Mark. All age groups seemed to be represented, from teenagers through to pensioners, all apparently from our village.

  When we began playing the game of skittles itself, I learned that it was a great leveller. The athletic bowling of the eager teenager didn’t necessarily reap anymore results than the timorous effort of the sweet old lady whose ball dropped out of her frail hand and fairly trickled down the track. Luck played a big part. Strength counted for nothing. The way the skittles scattered seemed to be random. Yes, skill and accuracy were rewarded occasionally, but the incompetent players were able to turn in an average score without letting their team down too much.

  The nine skittles were repeatedly being knocked down by players and then eagerly put back up again by two young boys, who clearly relished this responsibility. Just to one side of where all this exhilarating action was taking place was a chalkboard that listed the names of the participating teams:

  Church Mice

  Fête

  Twinning

  Village Hall

  WI

  WI? What were the West Indies doing having a team here? And how had they managed to recruit so many white-haired old ladies to represent them?

  I received a smattering of applause when I stepped up to the mat for the first time to bowl my balls. For those anticipating great things, there was only disappointment. It took three efforts to knock over only seven skittles and this resulted in some laughter, a little desultory (or sarcastic) applause, and one audible heckle of ‘Rubbish!’ from the corner of the room. I couldn’t identify the perpetrator, but if I were able to do so before the night was out, I would ensure that they were ‘dealt with’. We could not have the chairman being treated with such disrespect.

  The chairman improved a little with his subsequent bowls, but this only served to make him unworthy of derision or celebration; an average player of the game, as unremarkable as the light-brown walls that surrounded him. Pleasingly though, an entertaining evening seemed to be had by all, chairman included, even though his team finished the evening in penultimate place.

  But at least we were ahead of the West Indies.

  ‘Never mind,’ explained Ann, as we were all leaving, ‘skittles happens once a month and it’s a running score through till the spring. Plenty of time to make up ground.’

  Good, I thought, that would give us the opportunity to make some key signings in the January transfer window, if necessary.

  7

  Brassica Massacre

  ‘What’s this called again?’ I asked, as we drove into the hospital car park.

  ‘It’s the ten-week scan.’

  ‘Ah yes, the one they also call the dating scan.’

  I’d read about this in the idiot’s guide to pregnancy and had been intrigued by its name. Surely, I figured, if you’d got to the point where a ten-week-old baby was growing inside one of the couple, then you had gone beyond ‘dating’. It was nudging towards the point where an affirmative answer was necessary to the question that people ask courting couples: ‘Is it serious?’

  The NHS kicked in and did its stuff. I’ve never liked hospitals much (who does?) but this one was all right, and compared to many of the hospitals I’d visited in Moldova, it was absolutely marvellous. Soon we were sitting with a bubbly lady in front of an ultrasound machine.

  ‘You’re going to meet your baby now,’ she announced.

  I was nervous. However good-humoured the scan lady1 was, I knew that what she was doing was serious. She was making sure that the baby had a head, two arms, two legs, and the rest. She was checking to see whether it was one baby or two. Twins. I didn’t want twins. Twice the noise, twice the poo and sick, and basically twice the aggravation.

  She smeared jelly onto Fran’s tummy and then started pushing around something resembling those gadgets that assistants use in supermarkets for scanning barcodes. Instead of finding out how much a can of beans cost, we were about to find out if we had a healthy foetus. Suddenly a horrific thought struck me. What if there had been serious implications resulting from the attack upon my penis by the compost heap that day? What if we no
w discovered that our baby was going to turn out to be half-human/half-wasp?

  Much to our relief, Fran and I left the hospital having been told that she was expecting only one baby, and that it had no wings or orange-and-black abdomen. All was well. We’d been given a due date of 24 March and an appointment for a twenty-week scan. Until then, all the baby had to do was grow. Just like the seeds we had planted in our garden.

  Well, with any luck, it would perform a little better than that.

  ***

  Summer was giving way to autumn, as it did every year with irritating regularity. At least summer had been decent enough to put in a reasonable appearance this year. Years ago I’d met an American, now living in the UK.

  ‘How long have you been over here?’ I’d asked.

  ‘Four summers. Or ten years.’

  The light faded, the leaves began to fall and the temperature dropped. I no longer had the toughness to walk down the garden and indulge in my daily Hawks Harness workouts in the makeshift pool. I emptied it and put it in the shed. Although Fran never said as much, I felt she was relieved.

  Outdoor activity decreased dramatically, but sadly not for my old nemesis, the slugs. They carried on eating, regardless of the shorter days and decidedly lower temperatures. Slugs, however, were not our only rivals in the ‘Battle of the Back Garden’. We had already suffered a number of humiliating defeats. Our carrots had seemed to be growing rather well without any interference from bugs or slugs, until one morning I went down to water them, only to discover that the whole crop had been pulled out and eaten. Tony, our neighbour on the other side to Ken, peered over the fence, shaking his head as I looked down at the space where the carrots used to be.

  ‘That’ll be a badger,’ he said, ‘it had our lot too. The bugger waits till the carrots are big enough for him to eat, and then he swoops down and wolfs the lot in one night.’

  Up until that moment, I’d quite liked badgers. They seemed rather attractive creatures and I tended to speak up for them in the debate about whether they should be culled or not. Now culling seemed too good for them. Too quick. Not enough suffering. That needed to be looked at.