Then came summer, Mr Franc would lead his sheep to pasture on a fresh clearing in the pinewood, with a sack and a transistor radio, he would lie back on his sack, turn on the transistor and wallow in satisfaction at having put one over on Bombo the ram, his ewes being all wrapped in sacking, the sacks neatly stitched round their pelvic region, but Bombo the ram went for Mr Franc several times with such violence that once he had to sit on top of the bowser in the middle of the field, but the ram didn’t give up, he’d have killed him, and Mr Franc knew as much, so he kept calling for help until the ewes came and guided the by then starving Mr Franc back home themselves. There was another time when the ram Bombo attacked Mr Franc because of the chastity bikinis, and there was pine bark flying all over the place, and Mr Franc, although the pasture was only half an hour away, took three and a half hours to get back home, ducking and diving from one pine tree to the next… but Mr Franc laughed it off, because he believed it was the ram’s righteous reprisal for the contraceptive panties having served their purpose… though in three months’ time the sacks starting swelling suspiciously, splitting at the seams, and Mr Franc realised that the ram Bombo was doing better than ever even despite the ewes’ contraceptive bikinis…
I continued on alongside the fence and Mr Franc fingered the strings of the fence like the wretched King David, singing to me his lamentations and psalms… “It would be so beautiful here, such a good crop, look, there’ll be a good two tubfuls of Summerglaze, not to mention the Summer Astrachan, I even feed them to the sheep, but out of the twenty-one, there’s bound to be another six of them tupped… and three years back I wanted to cut them down to twelve and now there’ll be getting on for thirty… at home no one except me eats them… but whenever there’s lots of apples,” he wailed, “there’s also lots of wasps, just look at them! The bottles are forever full, I top the beer up every single day, and you can’t keep the little gits’ numbers down, any more than the sheep…” he wailed and strummed and slowly his rubber boots fell into step with the psalm and his fingers plucked at the strings…. “Jerry, Jerry,” he wailed like the old King… “it’s all piling up against you, everything you don’t want to, the flock and the wasps… and here, look, remember this one…,” Mr Franc brightened, “it’s a Mazánek’s Wonder! One of them’s going to have five tubfuls of apples… but this one, which I grafted onto an old rootstock, it must have caught cold and here it’s got just this one beautiful apple, see how it’s smiling at me, like my little grandson, like the cheeks of a pretty young lass… see, my pride and joy… but what the —?” he yelped in horror and dug all his fingers hard into the harpstrings of the wire fence. “What am I seeing, or maybe dreaming?” And he fetched a ladder and set it up against the old trunk and clambered up into the leaves, branches and twigs and called back down: “There’s a wasp in Mazánek’s Wonder! A wasp!” Mr Franc was aghast and his rubber boots slid back down the ladder… And Mr Franc fell silent and after a moment he popped and got some huge clippers, the size of a scythe, like two scythe blades turning on a stud bolt, and he smiled quietly, then, exasperated and resentful, he climbed up into the young twigs, opened the clippers and watched for the wasp to crawl back out of the apple in which it had already gnawed a hole as big as itself, bigger even…, and as the wasp reversed out of the sweet flesh, Mr Franc squeezed the clippers and nipped the wasp in half, and he looked at me triumphantly and gave vent to his feelings: “Little sod, that’s for tormenting me, now she’s in for her own torment…,” he revelled, but another infuriated wasp emerged from the apple, as if coupled to an axle-tree of vespine vengeance, and went straight for Mr Franc’s face, he just raised the shears, like two scythes they gleamed in the glittering summer sun, and Mr Franc threw his arms out as in religious ecstasy, raised them to the heavens, the shears hesitated for a second then crashed with the force of gravity into the grass, sinking up to the hilt in the soft earth… and Mr Franc slid down the ladder onto the grass and lay on his back, then he propped himself up on one arm and fingered the bruise growing beneath his eye and the swelling left by the wasp’s poison dart… and he rolled over and lay there lifeless… And a tyrannical female voice came from the porch: “Jerry!” and the voice was peevish and nourished by a fine anger, which was at the same time sheer glee at shouting, joy at possession of such a beautiful voice, such a vocal resource… and again even louder, until the apples shook on their stalks and the one that had been munched at proved too weak and fell to earth with the power of the voice… “Where are you? Just you wait!” the voice shouted and disappeared, and a moment later, there on the porch, glinting in the sun was the Austrian alarm clock, and the lady with the stupendous voice and frontage ran out into the garden of delight with the alarm clock jangling away in her hand, and she knelt down in the shade and the green of the grass and the scintillating colour-washes of the sun and yelled: “What are doing here asleep? Get up…,” but Mr Franc lay there, then he came to, propped himself up on the wet grass with one arm, the alarm clock jangled, Mr Franc was saying something, but the alarm clock out-jangled him… and when it finished jangling, Mrs Franc bent down and said: “Oh, no! A wasp sting… ambulance, ambulance!” She kept calling out and clapping her hands to her chubby cheeks and Mr Franc lay there as if felled, terribly pale… and then someone or other came along in a car, ran across and knelt down beneath Mazánek’s Wonder and set down on the ground a dazzlingly white first-aid kit with a dazzlingly red cross on the top, even its little brass key was unbelievably shiny… And her daughter ran out, and this gorgeous creature with curls falling into her gorgeous eyes screamed: “What have you done, Grandpa?” And she shook Mr Franc, set him back on his feet, with incredible strength for a kid she lifted her sixteen-stone father, but as soon as she got him upright in his rubber boots, he slid down again, as if he had no bones, just flesh — just overalls, pants and anorak on chopsticks… but he did come to and as they were about to pile him into the car, he raised himself on the ground, commanded silence with an expiring gesture of an expiring hand and said in an expiring voice: “Farewell, my darlings, farewell, my rams, farewell, my ewes, farewell my Sudeten Reinette, farewell my Mazánek’s Wonder, farewell, my faithful little dog…” And Mrs Franc raised the Austrian alarm clock ready to strike and was about to smash it on Mr Franc’s head, screaming, if in a low voice: “You ought to be ashamed! What’s to become of me…? Me?” And his daughter: “Grandpa, what’s to become of us, us?” And she pushed her little son forward for Mr Franc to bless him… And Mr Franc added: “And farewell, darlings, farewell, my Wonder, farewell, my faithful wife…,” and his daughter said: “Grandpa can’t tolerate wasp venom, that’s the trouble, you see,” she shouted, and Mr Franc fainted.