by H. E. Bates
‘Just a modicum,’ Mr Ackerly said. ‘That’s ample—’
The sight of Pinkie pouring the port reminded Mr Ackerly that he was the bearer of a gift. With a struggling sigh he handed over the bottle to Spud as if it were The Bomb itself.
‘Just my usual little offering to both of you.’ He seemed to be about to render the first notes of a sepulchral anthem.
‘You’d better drink it up quick. If you ask me we haven’t got much time.’
Pinkie shut the door of the shelter and Spud ripped off the tissue wrapping of the bottle as if it concealed a new hat.
‘Oh! our favourite whisky. Nice man. Thank you so awfully much,’ Spud said. ‘Kiss.’
Mr Ackerly, with despondent reluctance, suffered himself to be kissed first on one cheek by Spud and then on the other by Pinkie.
‘How nice. How generous of you. Well, cheers,’ Spud said. ‘Here’s to Christmas. And the best of luck in the future.’
‘Great Heavens, we’ll need it,’ Mr Ackerly said. ‘No, we won’t though, because there isn’t going to be any.’
‘Any what?’ Spud said. ‘Future? Don’t talk out of your back collar-stud, man.’
‘Everybody was saying that in 1940,’ Pinkie said. ‘And dear knows they were the dark days—’
‘Ah!’ Mr Ackerly said, ‘but this is different. This is different.’
Spud laughed again, French-horn fashion, and held out her glass.
‘I’ll have a drop more, Pinkie dear, please. I need fortifying.’
‘We all do,’ Mr Ackerly said. ‘That’s why I say “Drink up your bottle while you can.” There isn’t much time. There can’t be.’
‘I vote we do that,’ Spud said. ‘What say, Pinkie? I feel in that mood.’
‘You know me,’ Pinkie said. ‘I’m game for anything. Especially the you know what. It’s Christmas anyway.’
Again the duet of careless laughter, to Mr Ackerly’s increasing despondency, echoed merrily about the shelter. Where, he thought, was there any possible cause for laughter? The terrible dark claw of everlasting oblivion was hanging over all of them and the best these two could do was howl with laughter. You might have thought it was just some silly bun-fight.
‘Shall we start the whisky?’ Spud said. ‘Let’s.’
She drained her third glass of port, at the same time urging Mr Ackerly to drink up, and held out her empty glass to Pinkie, who immediately started to tot out whisky.
‘Oh! by the way,’ Pinkie said. ‘Don’t let me forget when you go. We’ve got the most marvellous pumpkin chutney for you.’
Pumpkin chutney! – Mr Ackerly was shocked to speechlessness. Pumpkin chutney! – Ye Gods, it was as if in the middle of a terrible and obliterating earthquake you sat trying to thread a needle. It was like sitting under the fiery lava of Vesuvius trying to set a mouse-trap.
When he had partly recovered from the ghastly incongruity of the whole thing he started to get up and say:
‘If you don’t mind I think I ought to be getting along.’
‘Oh! no you don’t,’ Spud said. ‘You’re going to have some whisky. After all it was your idea.’
‘Of course,’ Pinkie said. ‘Don’t be inconsistent.’
‘No, but really I ought to go. It’s getting dark and I’ve quite a lot—’
‘Dark?’ Spud said. ‘Good Heavens, man, you’re not frightened, are you?’
‘No, no,’ Mr Ackerly said. ‘I’m not frightened of anything.’
‘Do have some whisky,’ Pinkie said. She sat sipping at her glass, all rosy fire in the candlelight, occasionally smacking her lips exactly like a panting little dog. ‘It’s delicious.’
‘Do you mind if I don’t mix it?’ Mr Ackerly said. ‘It really isn’t good for me.’
‘Have a piece of plum cake and some cheese,’ Spud said. ‘They go awfully well together.’
With rising nausea Mr Ackerly rejected the idea of cake and cheese and then slowly sat down again, painfully resigned.
‘We got quite tight once,’ Pinkie said, ‘didn’t we, Spud dear?’
‘Gloriously.’
Appropriately glorious peals of laughter greeted this new memory, filling Mr Ackerly with a fresh amazement.
‘And when we woke,’ Spud said, ‘the Ritz cinema had gone. Half of Cromwell Street and Johnson’s factory had gone. And the Baptist chapel and half the railway works. And we never knew a thing. The stars must have been watching over us that night.’
Mr Ackerly could think of no coherent or sensible answer to this reminiscence, which was offered as if it were a scene from some reckless pantomime. Again the shelter rang with laughter.
‘Do I hear the band?’ Pinkie said. ‘I think I do.’
A hush fell on the shelter. Pinkie opened the door and leaned out, poised and alert as a setter, listening.
‘All the stars are shining,’ she said, ‘and yes, it’s the band.’
‘Leave the door open,’ Spud said, ‘I like to hear it.’
It was chilly with the door open. A sharp draught swept about Mr Ackerly’s feet and legs. He was going to catch his death of cold; he knew he would.
‘They were playing Oh! Come All Ye Faithful,’ Pinkie said. ‘They’ve stopped now.’
‘Means they’re on their way here, I suppose,’ Spud said. ‘I think you ought to go and get the Christmas Box ready now, Pinkie dear.’
‘I think so too. How much? Five shillings?’
‘Oh! ten. After all it’s only Christmas once a year.’
Pinkie fled across the darkened garden, leaving Spud sipping with cushiony content at her whisky and Mr Ackerly bowed under deeper vapours of gloom. There would, he told himself, be no more Christmasses. Let there be no illusion about that. This, he thought, was the last there would ever be.
He was about to express these profoundly despondent thoughts to Spud when, outside in the street, the band struck up, brassily playing It Came Upon the Midnight Clear. Spud drank and listened. She wouldn’t be hearing that tune many more times, Mr Ackerly assured her miserably, but Spud didn’t seem to listen and didn’t seem to care. Under the influence of port and whisky she had suddenly begun to feel merriment drive out contentment and now and then she gave a fruity chuckle.
‘How you can sit there chuckling in what is probably the most solemn and awful crisis in all history I cannot think,’ Mr Ackerly said. ‘It’s dreadful – it’s wicked, it’s tempting Providence.’
‘I was thinking of one of the men who plays the euphonium in the band,’ Spud said. ‘Fred Sanders. He’s so small. He isn’t much bigger than the euphonium. He taught Pinkie to blow last year. Just one note, mind you.’
‘I can’t say I know him.’
‘I love him,’ Spud said, taking a big plum out of a piece of cake and gazing at it lovingly. ‘He’s great fun.’
Suddenly she gave up gazing at the plum and popped it in her mouth and then, thinking that she saw Pinkie moving in the light of the house, wobbled to the doorway of the shelter and called:
‘Is that you, Pinkie dear? Who’s collecting tonight? Fred?’
Pinkie’s merrily twittering voice called back that she didn’t know and they’d only played one carol yet and she thought that really, for ten bob, they ought to have two.
‘Well, find Fred anyway and bring him over for a tot.’
While waiting for Pinkie to come back Spud insisted on Mr Ackerly having another drop of port. This time he was too depressed to refuse and anyway he simply had to do something to keep out that dreadful cold. What a ghastly mocking situation it was to be sitting there under the Shadow of The Bomb and perhaps, all the time, simply catching your death of cold in the ordinary way. It hardly bore thinking about. You hadn’t a ghost of a chance whichever way you looked at it.
Meanwhile the band played Silent Night, Holy Night and the melancholy beauty of the tune suddenly drove Mr Ackerly to the verge of tears. He had the greatest difficulty in stiffling a sob and in order to do so drank half a glass of por
t very quickly, gulping loudly.
Spud took the opportunity to top up his glass and a moment later Pinkie was back, bringing Fred Sanders, who in turn had brought his euphonium. Fred was dressed in a maroon-coloured bandsman’s uniform with gold frogs and epaulettes and a matching peaked cap with the words Temperance Silver Band ringed across it.
‘So very nice to see you, Fred. Happy Christmas! Port or whisky?’
‘Well, I’ve been on whisky,’ Fred said, ‘except for a couple of beers before we started.’
‘Whisky it had better be,’ Spud said. ‘Come into the office anyway.’
Fred, who propped up his euphonium by the door, had a way of laughing that was discordant but not unpleasant, rather like one of those tunes played on an old cracked piano. His voice suddenly inspired both Pinkie and Spud to fresh merriment and they blessed him with: ‘Cheers and a happy Christmas and many of them.’
‘Mr Ackerly here thinks this’ll be the last one we’ll ever have,’ Spud said.
‘Gorblimey, why?’
‘The Bomb.’
‘Oh! to ruddy ’ell with The Bomb,’ Fred said. ‘Stone the crows.’
‘You hear what Fred says?’ Spud asked Mr Ackerly. ‘To ruddy Hell with The Bomb and stone the crows.’
‘Stoning the crows isn’t the sort of expedient I should recommend in this crisis,’ Mr Ackerly said. ‘Don’t you see? – we’re doomed!’
‘No?’ Fred said. ‘Well, you’re only dead once.’
‘That’s true,’ Pinkie said, laughing lightly. She was beginning to feel a higher sense of merriment too. Again she laughed, this time with little shrieks, and suddenly said she wondered if Fred was going to give them a little tune on the euphonium. Like he did last year. ‘Do Fred, please.’
‘I might if I get another wet,’ Fred said, and let off a few of his own cracked scales of laughter.
‘That’s right, let’s all have another wet,’ Spud said. ‘Mr Ackerly, what about another drop of Strontium Ninety—?’
Spud, Pinkie and Fred roared with laughter but the mention of Strontium Ninety under conditions that would have been farcical if they had not been tragic seemed to Mr Ackerly a terrible and shocking heresy. He could neither speak nor drink. The port filled him with revulsion and suddenly he felt the draught from the door climb up his spine like a chilling long-legged spider.
Fred, who hadn’t much idea what Strontium Ninety was, watched his glass being filled by Pinkie with eager relish. He quickly knocked back his whisky, gave another cracked laugh and then asked what would it be? The tune, he meant.
‘Nearer my God to Thee, Mr Ackerly?’
‘Oh! please. Don’t joke. Please.’
‘Play what you played for us last year,’ Pinkie said. ‘You said it was your favourite one.’
‘But that ain’t a carol,’ Fred said.
‘I know it isn’t. But I like it all the same. It puts you in such good humour.’
‘Little Brown Jug, wasn’t it?’ Spud said. ‘Yes, I remember now.’
To play Little Brown Jug while the Shadow of The Bomb was hanging over them seemed to Mr Ackerly an even more shocking heresy than talking of drinking Strontium Ninety in an old air-raid shelter, but as the ghastly noise of the euphonium rang through the shelter he was equally shocked to see both Spud and Pinkie singing loudly and then soon, hand in hand, dancing round.
‘My wife and I lived all alone
In a little log hut we called our own.
She loved gin and I loved rum –
I tell you what, we’d lots of fun.
Ha, ha, ha! you and me,
Little brown jug don’t I love thee!’
they sang; and then suddenly Spud shouted:
‘Happy Christmas to everybody! Let ’em all come! And to ruddy Hell with The Bomb!’
‘To blazes with it!’ Pinkie said. ‘And stone the crows.’
‘Are we down-’earted?’ Fred suddenly asked and got from the ladies an almost thunderous answer:
‘No!!’
Only Mr Ackerly was down-hearted. The strident noises of the euphonium and the singing were altogether too much for him and he now sought refuge in the garden, shivering.
‘What about me blowing a note now, Fred?’ Pinkie said. ‘Like last year.’
‘That’s a good idea,’ Fred said. ‘Blow the old raspberry.’
‘Splendid,’ Spud said. ‘Splendid. Let’s all go outside.’
In the garden Pinkie embraced the euphonium with fond anticipation, pointing the horn to the sky. She had almost forgotten which of the valves to press but Fred soon put her right on this and then urged her:
‘Go on. Now give ’er all you got, Miss. Ready? – one, two, three!—’
Pinkie blew hard, instantly producing what Fred called ‘a bit of a rag-tearer,’ a rude single blast that rose on the night air with something like defiance, mocking the darkness.
‘Splendid!’ Spud said. ‘Old Gabriel couldn’t have done better. What price our new bandsman, Mr Ackerly?’
‘Mr Ackerly’s gone,’ Fred said. ‘You blowed ’im to Kingdom come.’
‘Oh dear, the poor man’s gone and forgotten his pumpkin chutney,’ Pinkie said.
Mr Ackerly’s sudden, silent departure was a signal for not only another merry trio of laughter but in due course another whisky for Fred. As he prepared to drink it he wished the ladies ‘A very happy Christmas and many of ’em’ and they wished him the same in return. They also kissed him on both cheeks, Pinkie so enthusiastically that his bandsman’s cap was knocked askew, with the result that the words Temperance Silver Band were very much to one side.
‘Well, no use, I must be going,’ Fred said. ‘Never catch ’em up—’
‘Good-bye, Fred. Lovely seeing you. Happy, happy Christmas.’
‘Good-bye, Fred,’ Pinkie said. ‘And what do we say?’
‘Let ’em all come!’ Fred said. ‘That’s what we say!’
Like a silver ghost the euphonium passed across the garden. When it had disappeared into darkness Pinkie and Spud stood for some time framed in the door-way of the shelter, silent in the candlelight, looking up at the sky.
The laughter was over now.
‘Shall we thank our lucky stars, Pinkie dear? We always do.’
In silence they held up their glasses to the stars.
‘They always look so awfully eternal somehow, don’t they, Spud dear?’
By this time the band was playing again, now further away, and the sound of bells was bright across the town.
‘That’s the way they always look to me,’ Spud said. ‘But then I like to think we’re a bit of the old eternal too.’
Captain Poop-Deck’s Paradise
It was while walking home from an afternoon’s dull and desultory pike-fishing that I met Captain Poop-Deck for the first and only time. My pet name for him fitted him rather well, I thought.
The day was one of those airless, humid ones in late August that seem to sap the energy of both man and fish alike and when even the leaves of poplars hardly turn in the air.
The weather, however, was having no such effect on Captain Poop-Deck, who was briskly and merrily rubbing down the old brown paint of a shabby fifty-foot cabin cruiser chocked up on a grey stretch of gravel beside a thick wood of alder trees. Two young, smart, well-built girls were helping him, both with big pots of white paint, one of them actually hanging over the port side of the boat on a cradle, her large haunches bulging like magenta linen footballs. The other was a splendidly fleshy girl of twenty or so dressed in navy blue shorts and a very nautical blue-and-white striped shirt and a yachting cap from under which her dark hair hung down in a single pig-tail over her left shoulder.
Captain Poop-Deck, who looked about sixty, was also wearing a yachting cap, well cocked to one side, and it wouldn’t have surprised me very much if he too had sported a pig-tail. He looked altogether not unlike a very handsome pirate left over from a fancy dress ball. His frame was extraordinarily big-boned and muscular a
nd was draped – dressed would be far too formal a word – in a thick scarlet flannel shirt, canary yellow trousers held up by a brass belt fastened with a snake buckle and bright blue straw shoes. Round his neck he was wearing a stiff black and white scarf tied in such a way as to give more or less the effect of skull and cross-bones and as he rubbed at the paint he sang in sudden heaving crescendo of wordless song.
Seeing me passing with my rods and perhaps even guessing that I was nursing a certain luckless dejection he cheerily waved a strip of sand-paper in my direction and called:
‘Hail there! Any luck, sir?’
His voice, for so large a man, was smooth and soft as oil. It was quite cultivated too.
‘No,’ I had to confess, ‘not a touch. Too warm, I suppose.’
‘After chub?’
‘No,’ I told him, ‘pike.’
‘The chub are the boys here,’ he said. ‘Feller here last Sunday had a seven-pounder. And then, damme, about a quarter of an hour later, whipped out a twelve-pounder. Looked as big as a shark.’
I stared Captain Poop-Deck very firmly in the eye. He didn’t flinch a bit and the big transparent blue circles blandly placed between the sauciness of the yachting cap and the flamboyance of the skull and cross-bones might have been the eyes of a trusting child.
‘Come aboard, sir, and look the ship over,’ he suddenly said. ‘Come and have a noggin. We opened a keg at lunchtime.’
I was tired; I was very thirsty; and I wanted to get home.
‘The beer keeps ice-cold below decks or Lola’ll mix us a planter’s punch, won’t you, Bo’sun?’
Lola was the girl with the magenta footballs; she was as blonde as thistledown and she turned and gave me a slow, flowery smile.
‘The bo’sun mixes a beauty,’ Captain Poop-Deck said. ‘Heave yourself aboard, sir.’
Half a minute later I was heaving myself up a rope-ladder that looked about as trustworthy as a string bag and Poop-Deck was pulling me aboard with a warm and ebullient hand.
‘Welcome aboard, sir. Splendid to know you. Meet my first mate,’ he said. ‘Tina.’ The girl with the pig-tail gave me a quick, snappy smile. ‘Best Number One who ever sailed.’
