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the clock back together again, mounted on its pinnacle, and working. We have never, to this day, been able to replace the second hand. It got a bit bent when we were taking it off and, though we straightened it again with a hammer, every time we put it back it gets hooked up in the other hands and the clock immediately stops. For days, too, we nearly went mad because no matter what we did to it the clock kept striking on the half-hour – five at half-past four, for instance, and midnight at half-past eleven. Which, even in a household like ours, was a little muddling.
We discovered what it was eventually. We had the minute hand on upside-down. A discovery that so delighted us we forgot the vicissitudes we’d gone through to get one simple weight running on one simple piece of catgut and went round boasting of our prowess in mending clocks.
Which was why, when Grandma broke the hand on her alarm clock a week or two later, she asked us, as experts, to put it right.
What we did to our own clock was, as Charles remarked only the other day, nothing to what we did to Grandma’s.
Quite by accident, of course. The clock had no glass in it to begin with – that had got broken one morning when the clock went off too early for Grandma’s liking and she had swept it on to the floor. The hand had snapped off another morning when she put the clock under the bedclothes to muffle it and it caught in the blankets. All it needed, as Charles assured her, was a touch of solder and it would be as good as new.
The trouble there was that we weren’t very expert with solder. At least four times we got the hand on – success at last! said Charles each time we did it – only to find we’d 134
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With Solder and Crowbar soldered it to the other one and they both went round together. And when at last we did get it on by itself we discovered that during our endeavours the clock face – the little circle round the hands – had been badly scorched by the soldering iron.
We painted that – or rather Charles did, being the artist of the family – with aluminium paint. Which made the rest of the clock face look shabby, so he painted that green. Only to discover that, in his enthusiasm, he’d painted over the numbers – so when the green paint was dry he put those in again in red. At which stage, putting in the figure twelve, he unfortunately touched the minute hand with his brush and, being very lightly soldered, it fell off again. And by the time we’d soldered it on once more the aluminium-painted circle behind it was not only scorched. The heat had cracked the paint…
Charles was for starting all over again, but I was feeling slightly cracked myself by that time. We gave it back to Grandma as it was. The hand, as I pointed out before she had a chance to say anything, was at any rate on.
Actually Grandma was too stunned to pass much comment. Yes, she said, gazing disbelievingly at her chameleon-like alarm clock, it was.
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FOURTEEN
Right up the Pole
Spring arrived in the valley at the end of March. It needed experts to detect it, mind you. Charles still had a cough.
Sidney still clung firmly to his muffler. Father Adams still clumped past the cottage every morning in a balaclava that made him deafer than ever – to protect, as we heard him informing the Rector at the top of the hill one day, his lug’oles from the frost.
But the cats knew it had come. Only a week before we had had snow, and it had been the easiest thing in the world to find them in the mornings. A small, neat line of tracks leading straight from the back door to the nearest cloche – that was Sheba. Ears down, coat stuck up like a parka, a quick dig in the early peas and in again.
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Right up the Pole
A trail that wound deeply through the wastes like a traveller lost in the Antarctic – pausing to inspect a bush, digressing to look in the greenhouse, ambling haphazardly up the drive and ending at a frozen puddle – that, on the other hand, was Solomon. Sitting interestedly on the ice and listening to it crack.
We had, when we got them in again, had the usual protest meeting over the bird table – with, outside, little wrens and blue tits gratefully fluttering in the snow, and, inside, Solomon and Sheba shouting battle songs in the window.
We had also witnessed an incident which Charles said sometimes came to nature-lovers like us, as a reward for diligence and patience.
One morning the cats, in the middle of raucous advice to the birds as to what they’d do if they laid hands on them
– and it wouldn’t, bawled Solomon, with his eye on his old enemy the blackbird, include giving him bacon rind, either – had suddenly gone quiet. Going in to see what was wrong, on the principle that silence in a Siamese household always means trouble – there, sure enough, was Sheba hiding behind the curtain, Solomon visible only as two ears stuck periscope-fashion above the windowsill, and magpies staging a raid outside.
Back and forwards they were going, the great black-and-white wings flashing so fast between the bird table and the woods that, as Solomon said in a small, un-Solomon-like voice from beneath the sill, there must be hundreds of them out there, and it was a jolly good thing we were in.
As a matter of fact, which was the interesting thing about it, there were only two. Working, according to Charles who understands these things, to a plan of Time and Motion.
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One chasing off the other birds and piling the cake over by the gate and the other – the girl she bet, said Sheba from behind her curtain; it was always the girls who did the work and the other one looked a lazypants to her, like Solomon
– busily transporting it from the gate into the woods.
But now, quite suddenly, it was Spring. With Sheba sitting on the cottage roof and refusing to come down – she could, she said, see every mouse-hole for miles around and the air was fine up here – Solomon chasing a ginger tom, and Timothy arriving for the Easter holidays.
We weren’t quite out of the woods yet, mind you. That night, looking for two little cats who had elected to stay out Both Ends of the Day now that Spring was here, we met the ginger tom chasing Solomon. While Timothy
– presumably to keep his lug’holes warm, too – was now wearing a crash helmet.
It added, as Charles remarked, little to the decor of the cottage or to Timothy, but he refused to take it off. He also, having once renewed his acquaintance with Solomon and with us, hardly ever seemed to go home. We had Sheba on the wall busily informing people he Wasn’t Ours, Solomon stalking admiringly after him being a space cat, Timothy himself performing landings on the lawn from Mars…
Wunnerful how the little chap’d took to us, wasn’t it? said Father Adams, beaming benignly over the gate at the mêlée on his way to the Rose and Crown – which was all very well for him.
People didn’t tell him his little boy’s trousers were coming down. People didn’t tell him his little boy was calling them rude names in the lane, or encouraging a cat with a long black face to walk deliberately over their cars. People didn’t 138
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