At weekends and evenings. Taking just over a fortnight and seeming like all eternity. With the windows open to the winter blasts to get the rubble out – half a lorry load at least said Sidney and Co., gleefully tipping it with Charles' co-operation into the storm ditch outside the gate and I knew, come January, we'd have to dig it out again. Discovering three flues built one behind the other in the chimney wall, the bar on which the first cottager's wife must have hung her cauldrons, but – to the team's great disappointment – no hidden gold.
The great oak beam was sawn to size on the sitting-room floor and hoisted into place, Sidney commenting relievedly that he was glad that was in. He wouldn't, he said (which was the first we'd heard of it) have slept in the place the last couple of nights himself, he wouldn't, with a hole like that in the wall and nothing to hold it up. The plumbing was disconnected and, through somebody not turning a screw tightly enough, water flooded the floor amid the sawdust and cement. A hole was made for the new air control pipe through from the sitting-room to the conservatory – a hole which went down like a mine and under and up, and as soon as the team went home the cats started going down like a mine and under and up too, yelling their surprise at finding themselves among the chrysanthemums and nipping round to the back door to be let in and try some more.
When the hole was filled in again Solomon took to being the Third Man in the Vienna sewers – creeping mysteriously around under dust covers and narrowly escaping being sat on. Sheba sat dramatically on the carpet, which was piled on the table with the underfelt and the table pushed against a window. The curtains were down on account of the dust and Sheba, perched perpetually on her mound of carpet, not only attracted far more attention from passers-by than our activities would otherwise have had, but at night, when the lights (without shades) were on, she added a waif-like touch to the scene that made it look as if we were either in for a Christmas like the Cratchits or else, as Charles remarked, as if she was expecting the floods at any minute and was already on Mount Ararat.
I was sweating pretty hard about Christmas myself, but we made it all right. The fireplace went in. The mess was cleared up. Ern, working dementedly in a clockwise direction, painted the entire room with two coats of white with the biggest brush he could find while Sidney and Norm put the finishing touches to the mantelpiece.
Not, even then, that the job was without its involvements. Sidney arrived one night towards the end of the period, tired out as were we all with the effort it had entailed, and informed us that his cousin Bert had called the night before about his staircase. Sidney, it seemed, had some time previously promised Bert that one of these days he'd alter it for him – to one of these modem styles, said Sidney, with open treads and bamboo poles to grow ivy up.
Fraught, apparently, with the same desire to have ivy and bamboo poles on their stairs for Christmas as we had to sit by an old-style fireplace, Bert and his wife had spent the previous Sunday stripping the staircase; come joyfully round to tell Sidney they were ready for him to start work; Sidney, exhausted with our little lot, said not before Christmas he wasn't; and when Bert's wife said but what were they going to do, they'd taken all the paper off, Sidney (a remark which we gathered he now regretted) had suggested they stick it back on again.
This has more to do with the story of Annabel than it may seem. While Sidney and Co. worked in their spare time on our fireplace, you see, they discussed these other jobs with us. At the beginning of the period they were working during the day on a farmhouse in the neighbourhood whose owners were restoring it to its original Elizabethan state, and Sidney's condition of near apoplexy at having to take up a fine polished parquet floor in the hall and replace it with flagstones (guess what he'd been doing all day, he said resignedly on one occasion; going round the outhouses, tapping the floor for flagstones, digging 'em up as if they was gold and washing 'em) was equalled only by his indignation the following night when he said what did we think he was doing now? Taking up the kitchen floor on account of its consisting of cracked old flagstones which they hadn't been able to find enough of in the outhouses. Transporting it by wheelbarrow through to the hall – the place, said Sidney, was nothing but duckboards and the cook was going mad. Replacing it in the kitchen, he informed us in a voice full of tragedy, not even by the parquet but by blooming old red cement.
By the time the fireplace was finished Sidney and Co. were engaged on another curious task. Digging up the village maypole, which was normally a permanent fixture in the school playground, and erecting it in the local guest house which had borrowed it for the Christmas festivities. Not to ask him why they were doing maypole dances at Christmas, said Sidney exasperatedly. For the same reason people took up flagstones in their kitchen and bunged 'em down in their hall he expected. What got him was that they had to keep putting it up and down. Up in the morning for the kids to practise, down at night for the guest house visitors to play table tennis. He and his mates was marching up and down the road like a picket patrol, he said, and if it came down when they was gigglegacking round it at Christmas and hit 'em on their silly gert heads 'twould serve 'em right.
Sidney told us about the maypole. Sidney, on his visits to raise or lower the maypole at the guest house, told Mrs. Reynolds about us and Annabel...
It was the fault of the season, of course. People singing Little Donkey on the radio. Miss Wellington coming by while we were giving Annabel supper in her house saying what a picture she made by lantern-light. The Rector recalling the year the choirboys, in scarlet cassocks and ruffs, toured the village singing carols with lanterns slung on poles. Coming over the hill in procession like a mediaeval picture, he said. Singing so sweetly it brought the tears to one's eyes. The only year they'd done it, alas, for most of them caught colds...
When after that Mrs. Reynolds rang us to say could she – with memories of Dolly and Desmond – have Annabel in her Christmas entertainment, what could we say but yes.
FOURTEEN
A Quiet Country Christmas
What could we say but yes, either, when the carol party got wind of Mrs. Reynolds' venture and asked if Annabel could accompany them as well. To brighten things up, they said, as the carol party, since the year the choir caught cold, was now a sober, adult affair with everybody in headscarves and gum-boots. The only concession to a Dickensian atmosphere was the lantern borrowed from the choir and borne aloft on its pole by Mr Smithson – and that, said the carol party organiser resignedly, couldn't look very romantic, could it, when one opened one's front door and saw him holding it in a homburg and woollen gloves.
So Annabel went carol-singing, wearing a yellow wool scarf with bobbles to add colour to the occasion, padding virtuously along the lanes beneath the lantern, insisting on being first up people's paths and occasionally getting jammed in gateways with Mr Smithson, who was also used to being first in with his pole.
There were minor difficulties, as there always are on such occasions. Annabel going the wrong side of telegraph poles on her lead, for instance, and continually bringing the party to a kaleidoscopic halt. And the incident at the Duggans' bungalow, blocked by what in the flickering lantern-light appeared to be Mr Duggan having suddenly gone mad and erected Glastonbury Tor across his drive. We nearly dropped when the lights went on and it turned out to be ten tons of manure ordered by Mr Duggan for his garden and delivered in his absence by a man who, with nobody around to stop him had deposited it with alacrity on the doorstep and departed. We pulled ourselves together. We sang Noel on one side of the manure heap. The Duggans joined in invisibly on the other a trifle dispiritedly, perhaps, at the prospect of having to get up next day and shovel it all away, but the tradition of singing in one's porch with the carollers has to be kept up. And Annabel Aaaw-Hoooed at the end to let them know she was with us and got a mince pie over the top. Annabel's personal tradition about carol-singing, this; she'd already achieved six since starting out.