15/03/2006 16:50:06
15/03/2006 16:50:06
Right up the Pole
tell him they thought that helmet was bad for his little boy’s ears – to be met by the little boy retching realistically and sticking out his tongue. Everybody thought he was ours.
It wouldn’t have been so bad if he appreciated the relationship, but he didn’t. He followed Charles around informing him scathingly that he couldn’t grow cabbages like his Granfer. Me he advised professionally that my rake was no good. Break he I would if Charlie-boy didn’t put a nail in h’n, he said. And when a little later the rake did indeed come off the handle and I tried to slink nonchalantly past with it hidden in a bucket – did Timothy avert his gaze and ignore it like a gentleman? Like heck he did. Told I, didn’t he? he said.
His one saving grace was his interest in nature, and even that had complications. Because when I pointed out the birds to him, and Charles told him about them making their nests – and then Charles, in an unguarded moment, told him of the collection of birds’ eggs he had had as a boy – we had fresh problems with Timothy. He wanted a collection, too.
In vain I tried to persuade him against it. All he said, while Charles looked suitably guilty, was that Charlie-boy did. The best I could do, as the die was cast, was to stipulate sternly that he must never damage a nest, never frighten the bird, never take more than one egg – and then only if there were at least three there already. And only, in any case, I said firmly, if he was going to be a Naturalist.
He was, he assured us. On a business basis, apparently, because next time I asked after his collection he said he had six hedge sparrow’s eggs already. Only one from each nest, he assured me as I clutched my head and groaned. But 139
Cats In May_Insides.indd 139
Cats In May_Insides.indd 139
15/03/2006 16:50:06
15/03/2006 16:50:06
Cats in May
there were lots of them about, ’n’ if he swapped one with somebody who had, say, a spare moorhen’s egg, that would save him disturbing a moorhen, wouldn’t it?
It would also, I hoped, giving the scheme my dubious blessing, stop Timothy from falling in the pond – which was something Charles, nostalgically remembering his own childhood, hadn’t thought of.
As it was, spurred on by a book on birds which he’d persuaded Father Adams to buy for him, the next development was that Timothy started borrowing our stepladder to look at nests he’d spotted up the lane or in the woods, which meant that Charles or I – accompanied, of course, by Solomon; and, in the far, reproachful distance, Sheba – had to go with him to hold the ladder and prevent him breaking his neck.
That in itself wasn’t too bad. It was all quite local –
concentrated round a corner of the village where everybody thought we were nuts anyway. But one day Timothy turned up in a state of great excitement announcing that he’d found a hawfinch’s nest. Over by the church, he said it was; in a rather tall hawthorn, which meant taking the ladder – and, as the branches were prickly, please could he borrow the shears?
We all went on that expedition. I got roped in – hawthorns being rather tricky – to help hold the ladder. I didn’t mind that so much, but I did experience a qualm when we reached the church to find that Timothy had told us a little lie. That it wasn’t, he explained, quite right here after all, but some way down the lane.
I guessed what lay ahead of me, and I was right. A procession down the road with me trying to look as if I 140
Cats In May_Insides.indd 140
Cats In May_Insides.indd 140
15/03/2006 16:50:06
15/03/2006 16:50:06
Right up the Pole
always went for walks carrying the rear ends of ladders.
Timothy wearing his crash helmet. The cats marching happily behind. People, as I pointed out, were looking at us even then – but it was no good telling Charles. He, re-living the halcyon days of youth, was a Naturalist too by this time. ‘Take no notice,’ he said.
So there – when we reached the tree and my final fears were realised; it was not in some corner of a hidden copse but hanging right over the road – I stood. Holding the ladder while Charles pruned out the branches, Timothy directed operations from the sideline, and the cats sat conspicuously on top.
Just about everybody passed us while we were there.
The doctor laughing his head off, old ladies raising their eyebrows, Sidney tapping his head. What they’d be saying about us in the village I could just imagine, but it didn’t worry Charles. Not, that was, until he came down out of the tree – there was nothing in the nest and it was, once more, a hedge-sparrow’s – and heard what Timothy had to say. He’d just remembered, he announced. Rector’d given he a talking-to yesterday about birds’-nesting. Did we think we should go back across the fields with the ladder – so nobody’d know we’d been? he said.
Spring, in spite of that little setback, still surged steadfastly on. Starlings started nesting in the eaves and Solomon, trying to climb a wall to see them, fell down and hurt his foot. I made some dandelion wine, which attracted all the ants in the neighbourhood who immediately started getting drunk in the greenhouse. The Rector’s cats got spring eczema and were going round self-consciously painted with Gentian Violet – which scared our two practically out 141
Cats In May_Insides.indd 141
Cats In May_Insides.indd 141
15/03/2006 16:50:06
15/03/2006 16:50:06
Cats in May
of their points when they saw them. They thought it was Woad, they said.
We started going for walks after supper – round the village in the soft spring evenings, with the cats greeting people they hadn’t seen all winter Most Friendlily and people gazing apprehensively back. We went off for a few days by the sea to get our strength up for the summer – and when Solomon’s basket fell off its handle as we carried him into Halstock, there again was another sign. Woodworm on spring manoeuvres in the cover; the only part Solomon had left intact.
And finally – the one thing we needed to convince us that Spring was really with us – Tarzan the tortoise came back.
He appeared one day as magically as he had vanished, ambling down the garden helped by two excited paws. He didn’t half look thin to him, said Solomon, lying down when we appeared and squinting anxiously under his shell. What about giving him some rabbit? Found him in the garage, said Sheba, beaming proudly at Charles. Under that straw heap she’d been watching for days, and wasn’t she clever?
She was indeed. So was Charles, whose idea it subsequently was to paint a bull’s-eye on Tarzan’s back to match the cottage. White for the walls, he chanted, describing a neat lime-wash circle on his drab brown shell. Blue for the doors, he said, putting a small circle inside the first one while Timothy and the cats stood admiringly by. Now, he announced, we could never lose Tarzan. We could spot him anywhere he went. Even if he got out and wandered round the village, people would know he was ours.
Which was how, quite simply, we arrived at the next stage of our springtime saga. Visitors to the valley were apt to 142
Cats In May_Insides.indd 142
Cats In May_Insides.indd 142
15/03/2006 16:50:06
15/03/2006 16:50:06
Right up the Pole
be surprised these days anyway, when at the top they met Hardy and Willis sporting purple whiskers. When, rounding the corner one morning, one of them then encountered Timothy in his crash helmet, a tortoise painted blue and white, Solomon – because at that moment Tarzan had stopped for a rest – looking worriedly underneath and Sheba, following them at a distance shouting that they were all very silly and had Better Come Right Back Home… he jumped, and turned quite pale.
That, said the villager with him, was the lot from Cats In The Belfry. The visitor mopped his brow. If he asked him, he said shakenly, we were ruddy well up the pole.