I couldn’t really, so I said as much.
The uncle waved his hands about. ‘For spying. You wouldn’t need to risk human spies, if plants could do it for you. Just think what the potted plants in the Russian embassy have overheard. They’d be prepared to tell you, if you asked them nicely.’
‘I see,’ I said, and I did. ‘But you’d have to learn how to speak Russian.’
‘Yes, yes, but you get the point?’
‘I do get the point,’ I said. ‘So that is the Great Work.’
‘It’s a part of it.’
‘You mean there’s more?’
‘Much more.’ The uncle preened at his lapels. ‘Communicating with plants was only the first part. You see I wanted to know just what it was that plants wanted out of life and so I asked them. The ones in this conservatory grow so well because they tell me what they want and I give it to them. How much heat, how much light and so on. But there’s one thing that all plants really want, and do you know what that is?’
‘Love?’ I said.
‘Love?’ said the Doveston.
‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘Not love then?’
‘They want to get about,’ said the uncle. ‘Move about like people do. They get really fed up spending all their lives stuck in one place in the ground. They want to uproot and get on the move.
‘And that’s why you’ve bred the chimeras.’
‘Exactly. They are the first of a new species. The plant/animal hybrid. My beautiful boys are a different order of being.’
‘They’re rather fierce,’ said I.
‘Well, you need to be fierce when you go into battle.’
‘Cubs,’ said the Doveston. ‘Time for the Cubs.’
‘No,’ I said. ‘What battle, sir?’
‘The final conflict,’ said the uncle, rising on his toes. ‘The battle of good against evil, as foretold in the Book of Revelation. This will come in the year two thousand and I shall be ready for it.’
‘Are you digging a fallout shelter then?’
‘No fallout shelter for me, lad. I shall be leading the charge. I intend to seed the entire globe with my chimeras. They will grow in any climate. They will grow big and fierce and when the call to arms comes, I shall give the signal and they will rise up in their millions, their hundreds of millions, and slay the oppressors. They will march across the lands, a mighty mutant army, destroying all before them, answering to only me. Only me, do you hear, only me!’
That was the last time I saw the uncle. I didn’t go calling on him again. About a month after that some other folk came knocking at his door. Policemen they were, accompanied by others in white coats. There had been some complaints about missing cats and dogs and apparently a number of blood-stained collars were found in a bag beneath his sink.
My friend Billy, who was leading a party of American tourists around the Butts, said that he saw the uncle being hauled away, dressed in a long-sleeved jacket that buckled down the back. There was foam coming out of his mouth and the tourists stopped to take pictures.
On the following day a fire broke out. The house itself was hardly touched, but the beautiful conservatory burned to the ground.
Nobody knew how the fire had started.
Nobody seemed to care.
Nobody but for the Doveston. And he was clearly upset. He had been very fond of his ‘adopted’ uncle and was greatly miffed at his hauling away. I did what I could to console him, of course, such as buying him sweeties and sharing my fags. I think that we must have grown rather close, because he began to call me Edwin and I began to understand that he had ‘adopted’ me also.
One lunchtime during the following school term he took me aside in the playground.
‘I believe that I have it in me to make my name famous,’ he said.
‘And I wish you to become my amanuensis and biographer. You will be a Boswell to my Johnson, a Watson to my Sherlock Holmes. It will be your job to chronicle my words and deeds for posterity. What say you to this offer?’
I pondered upon the Doveston’s words. ‘Will there be money and long-legged women?’ ‘Plenty of both,’ he replied.
‘Then count me in,’ I said and we shook hands.
And there have indeed been plenty of both. Plenty of both and then some. But before we close the page upon Uncle Jon Peru Joans, one thing remains to be mentioned.
And that is the matter of his ‘beautiful boys’.
With the destruction of his conservatory, it was my conviction that I had seen the last of those fierce fellows and so it came as a horrid surprise when four decades later I saw them again. No longer small and enclosed by glass, but wandering large on a country estate.
Called Castle Doveston.
4
Tobacco, divine, rare, superexcellent tobacco, which goes far beyond all their panaceas, potable gold and philosophers’ stones, a sovereign remedy for all diseases.
We were rarely afraid of anything much—although there was plenty to fear. These were, after all, the 1950s and we were living in the shadow of the Bomb.
Our parents worried a lot about the Bomb, but we had been given our pamphlets at school and knew that as long as you shielded your eyes from the big flash with a sweet wrapper and remembered to ‘duck and cover’, you’d come out of the holocaust unscathed. What fears we had, we saved for more tangible dangers. There were things you had to know in order to survive childhood and we were pretty sure we knew them all.
Snakes you had to be careful of. Snakes and the beetles that bite.
Of snakes there was much common lore, which was passed mouth to ear in the playground. All snakes were deadly and all snakes must die, it was get them before they got you.
Gunnersbury Park was the best place for snakes, or the worst place, perhaps I should say. It was well understood that the park fairly heaved with the buggers. They dangled from the trees, great anacondas and pythons, lurking camouflaged amongst the leaves, eager to take the heads off foolish children who dawdled underneath. The ornamental pond and boating lake were homes to water vipers, slim as hair and fast as Stirling Moss.
It was well known that if you took a piddle in the boating lake, they would swim up the stream of pee and enter your knob. Once inside they blocked the passage and you filled up with pee and died. The only cure was a terrible one: they had to cut off your willy.
Snakes loved to get inside you by whatever means they could. A boy from Hanwell, it was said, had taken a nap in the park and slept with his mouth open. An adder had slipped down his throat and taken up residence in his stomach. The boy, unaware of this, had eventually woken up and gone home. He was soon taken poorly, however. No matter how much food he now ate he remained all sickly and thin and complained of great churnings in the gut. His worried mother took him to the doctor, who placed his hand upon the boy’s stomach and realized the awful truth.
This boy was lucky, for he didn’t die. The doctor starved him for two days, then wedged his mouth open and hung a piece of raw meat above it. The hungry adder smelled the meat and came up for a bite. The doctor was able to drag it out of the boy’s mouth and kill it.
The snake was now preserved in a jar and many claimed to have seen it.
My friend Billy (who knew more than was healthy for one of his age) said that the story was palpable nonsense. In his opinion the boy would have choked to death had the adder been lured out of his throat.
Billy said that it came out of his bum.
But the threat was real enough and no one napped in Gunnersbury Park.