After that, of course, the ginger cat positively haunted us. Parading along the lane, crooning love-songs across in the orchard, sitting watching the cottage from up on the hill. And Shebalu sat in the window and watched for him. Why, she demanded, couldn’t she go out to play? Because, though he couldn’t mate with her, he might maul her and give her an abscess; that had once happened to Sheba. And because we didn’t want Seeley getting into a fight, as had happened so often with Solomon. So, for the moment, we kept them under strict supervision – which wasn’t made any easier by the fact that our building was at last under way.
The plans had been passed. Charles, to my vast relief, had decided against doing the work himself. I could well have seen us with a bathroom upstairs and no roof on it for years. And then, luck being with us, we’d managed to find Henry, who at that moment was looking for a job.
Henry, officially a sub-contracting bricklayer, could do just about anything. Plastering, carpentry, decorating...
even cooking, we later learned. He’d been an Army Cook-Sergeant and would have become a pastry-cook after the War – only cooking fats were rationed and he couldn’t see any future in it so he’d gone back to building instead.
There he was anyway – just finished sub-contracting for one builder, wanting a job to fill in... only he didn’t 136
Double Trouble_INSIDES.indd 136
Double Trouble_INSIDES.indd 136
18/01/2007 13:06:46
18/01/2007 13:06:46
Doreen Tovey
like bothering with ordering the materials, he said, and he’d need somebody to give him a hand.
It couldn’t have been better. We didn’t mind ordering the materials. Charles, complete with Norwegian sweater, was only too willing to help with the labouring.
Henry was ready to start immediately – and within a week he had.
He worked so fast we could hardly believe it. Up went the scaffolding, off came the outer line of tiles, on went the blocks. He came just after seven in the morning and hardly stopped till six at night. With me on the telephone ordering materials. Charles acting as builder’s mate and the peculiarities of our household giving Henry sleepless nights.
That was Henry’s trouble. He was a dreadful worrier.
Whether the timber would come on time whether it would rain on his block work... just as he’d worried all those years ago about the cooking fat shortage and had taken up building instead. Annabel particularly worried him. He wasn’t used to donkeys, he said.
Annabel, sensing this, intimidated him for all she was worth. Her field rises directly behind the cottage.
She had always been able to look through the kitchen window. And now, from a point on her hillside level with the old bathroom roof only a few feet away from where he was working, Annabel stood and watched him from under her fringe. Stolidly. Unmoving. For hours.
Just as if she was a foreman, he said. Made him feel quite uncomfortable at times. And then, when he was sure she hadn’t moved an inch – darn him, if she hadn’t knocked down his ladder. That was a huge joke to Annabel. Teeth bared derisively, lips sucked in till they resembled a pair 137
Double Trouble_INSIDES.indd 137
Double Trouble_INSIDES.indd 137
18/01/2007 13:06:46
18/01/2007 13:06:46
Double Trouble of castanets, she’d stand there and patently laugh at him while he picked it up and re-set it. And when he’d gone in the evening and she had the place to herself, she’d go round and push down anything moveable she could find, ready for the morning.
Eventually he learned to tie everything to the scaffolding. Came the night, however, when we had a heavy storm – the one night’s rain we had in the whole time of building. We wouldn’t have heard it ourselves but for the fact that the glass conservatory roof was now covered by corrugated iron sheets... to catch him if he fell off, said Henry, prepared for all eventualities.
We were woken by the rain beating on it like something out of Somerset Maugham. And then ‘The timber!’
said Charles, leaping frantically out of bed. The roofing timber had been delivered that morning and lay exposed on the lawn. Charles, himself no optimist, envisaged it warping if it got wet. So up we got. Switched on the outside lights. Out on to the lawn we dashed in pyjamas and macintoshes. Covering up the timber with tarpaulins and plastic sheets, with the wind whistling wetly round our ankles at two o’clock in the morning.
Henry’s first words, when he arrived at seven, were that he hadn’t slept a wink all night. He’d been worrying, he said, how things were with us in the storm.
Oh, everything was all right, I said – we’d covered up all the timber. The rain on the corrugated iron had fortunately woken us up. Timber? said Henry. It wasn’t the timber he’d been worrying about. A night’s rain on that wouldn’t have done it any harm. It was the new bathroom window he’d put in place and propped up to keep it steady. In the middle of the night he remembered 138
Double Trouble_INSIDES.indd 138
Double Trouble_INSIDES.indd 138
18/01/2007 13:06:46
18/01/2007 13:06:46
Doreen Tovey
he hadn’t tied the poles, and he’d lain there imagining that donkey pushin’ ’em away and the wind blowing the window down through the roof.
Henry must have had extra-sensory perception.
Annabel hadn’t moved the poles and the window hadn’t come through the roof. But the very next day Henry asked Charles to help him lift the bathroom lintel, and Charles knocked a wall through the roof instead.
To give the picture I should explain that the old sloping roof at the back of the cottage was still in position –
Henry’s idea being to take off the outer line of tiles round the three edges of it, to build the shell of the extension up from there, and only when the new roof was safely on to take the rest of the old roof away from underneath.
From the level of the new bathroom window, therefore, one looked down upon the old back roof, as Charles discovered when he clambered up there holding one end of a heavy concrete lintel – on Henry’s scaffolding, which, he said, sagged under him like a bow. Worse was to come.
To lift the lintel to a height above the bathroom window Henry had positioned, on the sagging planking, a further single sagging plank raised up on concrete blocks.
Henry, who was used to it, went up on it like a ballet dancer. Charles, being inexperienced, went up like a lumbering elephant. He wobbled. Valiantly retaining his hold on the lintel he put out his elbow to balance himself. Just a touch against the wall, he said. How was he to know it would fall down?
Apparently the cement wasn’t dry. Henry hadn’t thought it necessary to tell him. All the years he’d been in the building trade, said Henry, and he’d never known anybody do that.
139
Double Trouble_INSIDES.indd 139
Double Trouble_INSIDES.indd 139
18/01/2007 13:06:46
18/01/2007 13:06:46
Double Trouble Well, but Charles wasn’t in the building trade, I said, trying to pour oil on troubled waters. Henry, looking at the gap where his wall had been, said I didn’t need to tell him that.
140
Double Trouble_INSIDES.indd 140
Double Trouble_INSIDES.indd 140
18/01/2007 13:06:46
18/01/2007 13:06:46
Fifteen
THE NEXT THING THAT happened was that Charles sprained his ankle. He’d been moving rubble from the cottage across to the orchard where he said it would be useful on the paths. Every morning before breakfast he carried up several plastic sacks full. Gosh, he felt fit, he said.
I thought I was seeing things when he strode past the window one morning carrying a consignment of rubble like Atlas and five minutes later... surely he couldn’t be limping, I thought... not just from dumping rubble on a path?