Meanwhile the snow came implacably down; Solomon spoke for the first time in weeks, wailing from under the table that he was Convalescent if we remembered, and he'd like some food if we'd finished playing; and our lives returned to normal.
More normal than they'd been for a long time, for in the interim Robertson had been adopted. By a family new to the district who wanted a cat and who, when they heard the story of our ginger outcast, offered to give him a home. It was the only possible solution. Sorry for him as we were, we couldn't have kept him any longer, with his terrible hatred for Solomon. So Robertson – fed, sheltered and with a family at last to call his own – went to live at the top of the hill, and we, with Solomon and Sheba, returned to peace once more in the Valley.
For a little while, at any rate. No sooner was Solomon on his feet and out again than we heard, one day, the old familiar war-cry from the hillside. 'Robertson!' we cried in unison, making as one for the door.
It wasn't Robertson. It was a strange black cat who, after one close-up howl from Solomon, fled for his life into the trees. We grabbed Solomon, brought him back, set him down, with warnings about fighting, in the yard... It was no use, of course. Solomon – King of the Valley again what with Mr Harler's vitamins, a successful wrestling bout or two with Sheba and now this strange cat running away from him, was back up on the hillside like a longshot.
I was up there like a longshot after him, too, and so it was that I was on hand when Annabel, grazing blissfully a dozen yards or so away, suddenly decided to charge him. Only in fun, no doubt, seeing that everybody else seemed to be running after him and there he was so temptingly standing on a tussock. But Solomon had his back to her – and Annabel, these days, was temperamentally unpredictable.
There was no time to get between them. At top speed I raced after her, gave her a push from behind that sent her
flying down the hill away from Solomon, unable to stop myself I went flying down behind her...
Now we were really back to normal said Charles as with Annabel snorting derisively from the pathway and Solomon, calm as a cucumber, still surveying the land for the other cat from his tussock, I retrieved myself from a clump of nettles.
Thank goodness, indeed we were.
THIRTEEN
Comes the Spring
The trouble between Father Adams and Fred Ferry resolved itself around this time, too. Quite simply through Father Adams's television set catching on fire. If they'd thought of it somebody could have arranged it afore, said a wit in the Rose and Crown that night when, after their vicissitudes of the past few months, the pair of them sat sheepishly quaffing their cider side by side at the table by the fire.
But nobody had thought of it, and it had taken spontaneous combustion on the part of the ancient set while Father Adams was, as Fred kept joyfully informing his audience, 'Out in the little old outhouse', to bring about the desired reunion. Fred, passing by and seeing the flames, had rushed into the house and pulled out the plug. Mr Carey had rushed in after him and smothered the fire with a rug, which explained why the third member of the trio at the table, looking more sheepish even than the other two and assuring everybody who spoke to him that it was only ginger ale he was drinking, was the Rose and Crown's erstwhile bête noir.
Not any more, though. The brewery-men had long grown accustomed to taking the beer through the other door which, to tell the truth, was more convenient. The fact that the heather had taken root on his banks showed Mr Carey to be a man who knew his gardening. The County Council's decision not only that it was legal for him to alter his entrance if he wished but that people who used his entrance for passing in were in point of fact committing trespass, proved that he knew his rights (and of nobody does a country-dweller approve more heartily than the man who knows those). All it needed was something like the fire to break the ice and there he was. Discussing the best way of planting rhubarb crowns with Alby Smith. Where the new post-box ought to be (as against where the authorities had recently put it) with Harry Freeman. One of the village at last.
As fast as one door closes another opens, however, as Miss Wellington is fond of saying, and never is it truer than in a village. No sooner had that little problem settled itself than the Duggans were in the soup.
It was Spring, of course, when ventures start up like snowdrops, so it was hardly surprising when the Duggans woke up one morning in their bungalow on the hilltop to find that someone had started building on the steep, wooded slope below them.
They wouldn't have minded normal building, said Alan Duggan a few days later. Cement mixers and men dropping planks and lorries coming past with piles of bricks – it had happened with their own bungalow and they'd have stood it, in their turn, with other people's. But a bulldozer, he said (for the hillside had to be dug out to level the site). Working at weekends, he said (for the construction, we soon discovered, was being done by a part-time builder). Working at night, he howled, when an arc-light went up while the bulldozer chugged on without respite.
Trees crashed, bonfires blazed, the bulldozer thudded. At intervals the barrage appeared to be intensified by mortar fire which was, Charles happily insisted, old Alan firing back. Actually it was the quarry a mile away blasting rock for the next day's work, but it fitted into the cacophony like the guns in the 1812 Overture.
What really convinced the Duggans that it wasn't their year was when, in the middle of all this, the people on their other side started building a boat. A nice young couple they were, whose cabin cruiser, rising from their driveway like Venus from the foam, roused admiration on the part of all but the local diehards who wanted to know what they wanted it for in the middle of the country, and the Duggans, over the fence, who had to listen to the Seraph being built.
Peaceful as doves for six blasted years and now they had to blasted well start, said Alan. He hoped they sank at sea, he muttered savagely, listening night after night to the sawing. It was the hammering, however, that really got him. Hammering which in the normal way he'd never have noticed, but which, added to the clamour of the building, fell on his anguished ears like water torture.
We called on them one Saturday afternoon and heard it ourselves. From one side came the powerful thud of the bulldozer. From the other, gentle, spasmodic tapping.
'You wait a minute', said Alan sourly. 'In a second she'll start as well'. In a second she did. Rhythmically from over the fence came the sound of Maureen swinging practisedly into beat with Reggie, their hammers clanging merrily as a pair of Clydeside riveters while they dreamed of summer in their cruiser on the Broads. Up from the hillside echoed the shuddering of the bulldozer. Boom! in the background went the quarry detonators.
'Swine!' roared Alan – suddenly, to our consternation, shaking his fist at the ceiling. 'Swinehounds!' he shouted fiercely, rushing out and kicking as hard as he could at the fence. Nobody could hear him, of course, which was just as well for local relationships. He did it every Saturday, his wife explained placidly. It lessened his tensions, he said.
Our tensions at the time were concerned mainly with our septic tank which, for the umpteenth time since we'd bought the cottage, was waterlogged. It was partly the Spring, of course. The rain soaking the ground, the streams coming down from the hills, the fact that we lived in the Valley bottom where the water collected naturally. It was also, as we knew from experience, an undoubted fact that our outlet pipes were silted up. Had they been put in steeply sloping, as they should have been, they would have cleared themselves by gravity. Put in practically horizontally, as they were, over a period of time the silt built up, the water couldn't get through, the silt dried out like cement – and, as Sidney, our erstwhile handyman, cheerfully put it, there we were again, bunged up.