Even the indicators worked the opposite way. Down was Right on ours... it was Left on hers... I whipped them up and down as if I was playing an organ. Also, our car had a long-rising clutch pedal, while hers made contact in an instant. Let ours in fast and we jumped like a bucking cow... or else I did it too cautiously and for ages we didn’t move at all.
It was always happening at junctions. ‘Come on now
– hurry up,’ Charles would urge me, seeing nothing in sight for miles. And I’d let out the clutch and we’d leap into the road and the engine would stop and I couldn’t get it started... ‘I don’t do this in hers,’ I would wail.
Charles said it was just as well, otherwise by this time she wouldn’t have had a body on her chassis.
The biggest snag, however, was the width of our car.
Even after I got over stopping it dead when anything came towards me on the wide roads I still wouldn’t take it round narrow lanes. Certainly I wouldn’t drive it from the main road down to the cottage. Our lane winds exceptionally and there are a couple of nasty corners –
and anyway I didn’t want anybody to see me. Ern might have told everyone I was a learner, but there was no need for them to actually see me at it.
One night, though, after I’d done quite a trouble-free journey out from town... only a couple of clutch-jumps this time, said Charles; we’d make a driver out of me yet... he suggested I did take it all the way home. There wouldn’t be much traffic, he said, and nobody’d know it was me in the dark and at some time or other I had to try it out...
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Poor Charles. He was trying to encourage me. Round the first corner I rolled – absolutely nothing in sight.
Towards the second bend... I could see car headlights coming round it. ‘Slow down!’ said Charles. It was all right; I already had. I’d pulled towards a gateway as a matter of fact and stopped to let the other car go through.
‘I only said Slow,’ said Charles. ‘No need to stop. ’ So obediently I went on – which was when I hit the wall.
Touched it actually. It was Charles who said I’d scraped it and, jamming on the hand-brake, leapt out and rushed to take over in the driving seat. He avoided looking at the wing. He said he couldn’t.
When I got home I looked at it and there was one minute scratch on the bumper. Charles, agreeing that perhaps he could polish it out, said it could have buckled the wing though. It didn’t make much difference that it hadn’t, he said. It was avoidance of the object that counted.
Not for the first time I wondered whether it was possible to win. It was though. The time came when Charles admitted I wasn’t driving too badly. It was fortunate I could, he said, even with L-plates, when he’d damaged his foot carrying the rubble. And the extension was nearly complete... everything was falling into place.
It promised to be a wonderful Spring, too – Shebalu’s first with us ever. I spent a lot of time with her and Seeley up on the hillside, watching over them on account of adders and enjoying, with them, their youth.
We were up there the morning the extension literally did fall into place. The downstairs part was nearly finished now. The old bathroom had been removed and the wall had been taken away, huge jacks supporting the ceiling while it was done. They’d stayed there while four 147
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Double Trouble enormous lintels had been cemented into place, and for three days more while it set. That very morning the jacks had been removed and Henry had actually smiled. The place had stayed up after all then, he said. Had I checked that the chimney pots were still on?
That wasn’t what I was doing on the hillside. Charles, that morning, had reported seeing Seeley chasing a mouse at the foot of a tree. And later that he’d chased it up the tree, and caught it and brought it down. Then he’d lost it, and the mouse had run up the tree again, and Seeley had once more climbed up after it...
Well, a mouse ran up a clock in the nursery-rhyme so there was no reason why it shouldn’t go up a tree...
or that Seeley, our seal-point clown, shouldn’t go up the tree after it. But for the mouse to run up the tree a second time – did it perhaps have its home up there?
That was what I was investigating when I heard the crash which sounded as if the cottage staircase had collapsed. I rushed from one direction, Charles from another, and we converged, white as sheets, in the sitting room. It wasn’t the staircase – and Henry hadn’t been flattened, as we’d feared. One of the ceiling beams had fallen down.
It was quite simple. The beams, which were false, were supported at either end on decorative brackets. Henry, in removing part of the wall, had removed the bracket from under one end of a beam. He’d supported the beam with a prop, removed the prop when he took away the jacks – and, with nothing to support it, the beam had simply collapsed. Not immediately. The ceiling-plaster had held it to the ceiling. Until, half-an-hour later, its weight brought it thundering down.
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One end lay on an armchair, the other on the floor...
it was so heavy the three of us could scarcely lift it Why hadn’t we told him it wasn’t screwed to the joists? said Henry. The answer was that we hadn’t known. Charles was absolutely appalled. All these years people had been sitting in that chair, and at any moment the beam could have come down. Only those brackets supporting it...
he’d have to see to them at once. He wouldn’t rest until all the beams were screwed to the joists.
’Twas all right for him to talk about resting. said Henry.
He’d nearly gone to his. He’d been bending down doing a bit of plastering when the thing had come down and it had missed his backside by inches. He was beginning to wonder, he said, what next was going to happen.
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Sixteen
NOTHING, AS A MATTER of fact. We are back to the peaceful calm of when we started. Annabel is grazing out on the hillside and Jane Robart has just ridden past. Still with the air of Elizabeth the First graciously patronising the peasants. ‘Ought to let thy donkey loose,’ Ern Biggs said the other day. ‘Bet he’d put the wind up her.’
‘She,’ I corrected him. ‘Annabel.’ Ern still gets everything wrong. ‘As a matter of fact she did, last year.’
‘Did she now?’ said Ern. ‘How was that, then?’ Father Adams superiorly told him.
That is the one thing the year has brought – those two now speak to each other. Each one trying to score, of course, as countrymen always do. Both of them bait Miss Wellington, too – and for all her indignation she enjoys it. She is up in her garden now, wearing the headgear she considers appropriate to the season. ‘Well, summer’s here then,’ Father 150
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Doreen Tovey
Adams always says. ‘Old Ma Wellington’s out in her straw hat.’
Ern Biggs’ eyes nearly jumped out when he saw it first, with its steeple-shaped crown and raffia flowers.
‘Whass she got on? A beehive?’ he enquired. Father Adams was quick to correct him. ‘Just shows thee ignorance – thass her hat,’ he roared. ‘She bin wearin’