‘We’ll have to put up that cage,’ we kept say ing – but it was early yet. Only February. Too cold for a little cat to sit in the open in a cage. So I alternated between digging the flowerbeds and run ning to fetch back Seeley (Seeley was definitely my cat, said Charles; he wouldn’t come to him) while Charles got busy on his fruit trees.
This year, he said, he was determined to have some fruit
– to which end (as, being in a valley, we are particularly susceptible to frost) he set about pro tecting the early-blooming pear trees. He started by covering them with some old lace curtains; relics of my grandmother’s, which my Aunt Louisa had given us. He continued – getting really enthusiastic about this frost protection now and there weren’t enough curtains to go round – by using large hessian sacks which he bought up by the dozens. Charles being an artistic type who doesn’t worry too much about the appearance of things, the result was that that spring visitors to the Valley (and any residents, too, who hadn’t been past for a while) were positively electrified by the sight of our orchard, which looked as though it had been taken over by a convocation of monks, about ten feet tall, wearing white lace cassocks surmounted by sinisterly hooded habits.
They had this pointed-hood appearance because Charles, to keep the hessian from touching the blossom, had one corner of each huge sack propped high above its tree on a cane. A simple and, if one knew it, a perfectly reasonable explanation, but as usual few people did. As usual, too, in a country village, people put their own interpret ations upon the phenomenon.
135
The New Boy_INSIDES.indd 135
25/05/2006 14:24:54
The New Boy
‘Scarecrows,’ I heard one old man inform another as they stood at the orchard gate and stared. ‘Oh ah,’ said his companion placidly, as though thirty-odd scarecrows to an acre was nothing at all unusual. ‘Put there to keep the cats off was another knowledgeable verdict. (Though we hadn’t come to that yet, even with Seeley.) ‘Bet they frightens the horses,’ said somebody else. ‘Looks like a lot of witches,’
said another. ‘’Ouldn’t like to come across they in the dark unbeknownst,’ said a further voice going past in the dusk.
By moonlight, in fact, with the frost glittering on them, they did look rather spooky. ‘Minds I,’ said Father Adams, who’d seen them himself one night en route to the Rose and Crown ‘of Fred Ferry’s father and the ghost in the churchyard.’
We didn’t know there was a churchyard ghost, we said.
Nor there weren’t, said Father Adams, proceed ing to tell us the tale.
It seemed that years before, Fred Ferry’s father, whose name was also Fred, had been renowned for getting rolling drunk and then going and sitting on a stone in the churchyard, moaning to himself about being such a sinner.
‘Used to frighten all the women coming home from the Mother’s Meeting,’ said Father Adams. ‘Didn’t matter that they knowed ’twas he. The noise he made did always put the wind up ’em.’ So the other men decided to teach old Fred a lesson and one night, when there was to be a funeral the following day, one of them got down into the newly dug grave just after closing time while the rest hid behind the adjoining headstones.
‘Along comes Old Fred,’ said Father Adams. ‘A-moaning and a-blathering about this business of being a sinner, 136
The New Boy_INSIDES.indd 136
25/05/2006 14:24:54
Doreen Tovey
and up rises Tom in an old white sheet and calls on’n to repent.’
‘And did it work?’ I asked Father Adams. ‘Naw,’ he said reminiscently, ‘but ’twere nearly the end of Tom. Old Fred, thinking ’twere a ghost, picked up the sexton’s spade and hit
’n on the head. ‘Get back down there, you b.’ he shouted.
‘Stay down where theest belong!’
I thought of the story every time I saw the frost covers in the dusk after that. At the top of the hill, in the village, too, another mysterious erection had suddenly appeared.
They were putting a new roof on the old schoolhouse – a building long turned over to private occupation. The local children went to school now in the adjoining village.
The surrounding cottages were very small, like ours. But the schoolhouse towered over them to about twice their height, and when the builders had put scaffolding all round it they covered the house with a complete tarpaulin roof and then – on account of this is high-up hill country and the wind through the scaffolding was rather fierce – they lashed tar paulins all round the sides of the scaffolding as well. Inside this the men worked, made their tea on a plank about thirty feet up and were, from the sound of it, ecstatically happy.
From the outside, however, this enormous tar paulined cube presented another focal point for speculation. Some wits decided there was a statue going up under it. ‘Dam’ gert bloke then… p’raps ’tis a group of ’em’ said one onlooker, following which rumours of the Parish Council being done in stone were rife in the Rose and Crown. ‘Putting up a supermarket’ said another – and from the size of the tarpaulin casing, that could have been possible too.
137
The New Boy_INSIDES.indd 137
25/05/2006 14:24:54
The New Boy
We were glad too, though we certainly needed our wits about us. One day, for instance, when for once I wasn’t trailing him, Seeley vanished com pletely. We searched, we called him, I did my cat imitations – Seeley didn’t answer.
‘He’s up on the hillside somewhere,’ said Charles. ‘I saw him going in that direction.’ So, keeping a weather eye on the hillside where the grass was now so long we couldn’t possibly find him unless he decided to co operate, we continued – albeit anxiously – with our gardening.
It was a little while later that I heard squawking and, looking up, saw a magpie advancing in determined hops through the grass. One of a pair that were friendly with Annabel, and often pecked round her while she grazed. ‘Got his eye on some thing,’ I thought, and went on weeding.
Until, a second or two afterwards, I saw the second magpie hopping through the grass from another direction and, dropping my trowel, I shouted and started to run.
I was right. It was Seeley they were after. He was there in the grass just beyond them. Whether they were playing with him or whether, which was more likely, he’d been stalking them and they were out to teach him a lesson – either way it was a good thing I’d been watching for him. I’d heard of magpies attacking cats before… One deliberately attracting the cat’s attention, while the other crept up from behind.
He was very subdued when I carried him back, lying as inconspicuously as he could in my arms, his eyes as round as an owl’s, his ears so flat he looked practically streamlined.
Wasn’t going out Again, he announced – which was how he came to discover the little fish.
We’d hatched them ourselves the previous year. After the flood, as a result of giving them the fresh supply of water, 138
The New Boy_INSIDES.indd 138
25/05/2006 14:24:54
Doreen Tovey
our goldfish had started spawning like mad. Usually they ate the eggs as soon as they laid them but this time, by way of experiment, I took some out with a teaspoon and put them into teacups to hatch. Teacups without handles, of which we have rather a lot, and it needs shallow water to hatch them out.
They looked like tiny, transparent pinheads – with, after a day or two, a little black dot inside them which showed they were fertile. According to the book they should have taken from four days to a fortnight to hatch, depending on the weather – but the summer was very cold that year and when, after nearly a fortnight, they still showed no signs of emerging, I tried putting them in warmer water.
The result was miraculous. Those fish were out within seconds. One moment there was a tiny little globule with what now looked like an eyelash in it – and the next the egg was rolling emptily on the bottom of the teacup while the eyelash was out, clinging prehensilely to the side. For days we had a row of teacups with static black eyelashes in them in the kitchen window – and then the eyelashes began to swim, and developed two little eyes, and eventually, unbelievably, they became tiny transparent fish.