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The Coming of Saska junk that nobody but Charles could find a use for. Even he, I sometimes doubted, would hardly find a use for the picture of his Aunt Ethel as a girl clutching a tennis racket, or a step-ladder minus its steps.
Charles thought otherwise, however, so there he was for about a fortnight, putting in a new doorpost, hammering the metal sheeting flat, making a complete new frame for the back of the door... every morning laying the whole thing on the driveway for easy working and every night hoisting it back to fill the gap again.
Our mentors were in their element, of course. ‘Told thee theest should have done he months ago,’ Father Adams advised us a dozen times a day. ‘Still working’ on thee raft then?’ was Fred Ferry’s daily quip about how we were going to Canada. ‘Theest do better to let I finish he,’ Ern Biggs said hopefully and persistently – to which Father Adams’s reply was that finished it certainly would be if Ern Biggs ever laid hammer to it.
Finished it eventually was, though – perfectly, as Charles does everything, though it takes him a time in the doing of it. And then he painted it, still flat on the drive for convenience and, as the paint wasn’t dry, for the first time ever we didn’t hoist it into the gap that night and the next morning we found we had visitors.
We’d noticed them the previous evening. Two exhausted swallows resting on our telephone wire after their thousand-mile flight from Africa: a sign that summer had come.
‘Young ones,’ said Charles. ‘Probably born up at the farm last year.’ And then, after marvelling at the tremendous distance they’d flown and the instinct that brought them back to raise their own young in this remote corner of England where they themselves had been born, we thought 18
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no more about it. They were just resting. They wouldn’t stay with us. We’d never had swallows in the Valley. At the farm at the top of the hill, yes – they’d nested in the barn up there for years. But the only comparable structure in the Valley was Annabel’s stable and obviously the roof of that wasn’t high enough for them.
Except that now there was our garage with its door off, on the very evening the swallows arrived... and there was this young pair (they reminded him of the Bannetts, said Charles) obviously wanting to set up on their own...
though how they could have known our garage door was off, nearly half a mile away from the barn...
They were still there next morning, perched on the wire, considering the space where the door should have been and occasionally venturing through it. They watched everything that happened during the day. The cats going up to the vegetable garden to eat grass, Annabel being led out of her stable and put up on the hill, Charles putting a second coat of paint on the recumbent door... careful to avoid appearing to notice them but they were certainly studying him, he said. Several times the male had swooped daringly low over his head while the female, much more cautious, twittered anxiously, like Miss Wellington, from the wire.
They moved in, of course. Who wouldn’t with those high rafters waiting to be nested in, mud for building in the stream bank by the garden wall, a valley full of insects for the catching and a couple of humans who, having been deliberately tested, obviously didn’t object to swallows?
There was no question of our putting back the garage door. There it stood, propped against the wall, while Father Adams said we were never right, Fred Ferry told everybody 19
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The Coming of Saska we couldn’t rehang it because it didn’t fit, and the swallows swept confidently in and out. ‘What be goin’ to do when theest go to Canada?’ asked Ern. Charles said the brood would be flying by then.
They were flying all right. We watched through the weeks
– when we should have been doing so many other things
– while the nest was built, like a tiny parson’s pulpit, high under the roof, snug against a rafter: while the eggs were laid, and then hatched – there were four of them – and the cleverness of the nesting site was revealed. They’d chosen the one rafter that adjoined a bracing strut that ran right across the garage and there, when they were hatched, four little swallows were able to sidle out, even before they could fly, sit in a row as on a trapeze bar, and peer out at what went on in the garden. What was more, said Charles, if they did fall they’d land in the canoe, which was suspended by ropes from the roof. Wasn’t that clever of the parents?
It certainly was, though we didn’t appreciate it quite so much when we got the canoe down one afternoon to do a bit of practice on the river and saw what they’d done to the inside. Four little swallows sitting up there getting excited...
still, as Charles said, at least it kept it off the car.
Where, you may ask, were the cats while all this was going on? In the canoe themselves, if they got the chance.
They would get on the car roof, from there up into the canoe, and sit there one in each seat section. They couldn’t reach the swallows, who knew it perfectly well and took no notice of them. We didn’t bother either – for once we knew where the pair of them were – but it certainly shook Ern Biggs when he saw them. He’d called to ask if we wanted any work done. I sent him up to see Charles, who was in the garage, and he’d looked up when he heard the swallows 20
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twittering. ‘N there were thic cats,’ he reported later in the Rose and Crown, ‘sittin’ up in thic canoe, like a couple of they Polynesian Islanders.’ He’d apparently added that, knowing us, it wouldn’t have surprised he if they’d paddled the ruddy thing out of the garage.
We soldiered on. We couldn’t put the door back but there were plenty of other things to be done. Getting the garden straight; studying maps and getting our luggage together; me practising up on my riding.
For me this was a necessity. Among other things we were going to revisit our friends on a couple of Alberta ranches and while I knew full well that Charles, as had happened last time, would go out there not having ridden for ages, leap into a Western saddle and go careering about the range as if he’d been born on it, I also knew that I, who never missed a week without riding in England, didn’t have Charles’s way with horses whatsoever.
On our last visit I’d been lent, on one ranch, a fat little cow-pony called Sheba who was adept at slipping her saddle. True I’d had to concentrate on riding lop-sidedly
– to get her saddle back straight every time she slipped it sideways because I hadn’t a clue as to how to tighten a cinch. But that should have been all in a day’s work. I shouldn’t, as both she and I knew was the case, have been in danger of vanishing over the horizon if for a moment I let her have her head.
This time, I decided, it would be different. I too would manage my horse, like Charles, by the way I sat it and used my legs. I too would ride nonchalantly, reins in one hand, with my mount moving obediently beneath me. To which end I was practising diligently at the local stables, supervised by Mrs Hutchings and her daughter.
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The Coming of Saska As always I rode Mio, the Number Two horse of the remuda. Merlin was still there – 20 years old now, the grand old man of the stables and still the best bet on which to mount beginners: carrying them carefully as babies until he knew they had their balance, then cantering with them regardless – though still gently – just to prove to them that they could go. So was Cobnut, the fast little dark chestnut gelding beloved of my friend Tina, who was a nurse. So were Gusto who, with me clinging to his neck, had once given a Wild West bucking demonstration, and Kelly, the eternally doleful Irish horse, and Alex, the big chestnut hunter.