‘Reckons the village ought to be evacuated in case the flood comes again tonight,’ said Father Adams. ‘Says it’s a judgement from the Lord for our sins. Didn’t like it when I asked her what she’d bin a-doin’ we didn’t know about,’ he chuckled raucously.
Why the Lord should have taken it out on our goldfish was, as Charles remarked, presumably clear as crystal to Miss Wellington, if not to us… As a matter of fact, all was well, though.
Scooping the mud out with saucepans, tipping it out behind us as we worked… no point in carrying it out to the lane, said Charles, when the yard looked like the 26
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Thames estuary with the tide out in any case… we were about a foot from the bottom when we spotted the first glint of a red-gold side in a saucepan. ‘It’s dead,’ I said despondently. ‘It’s not, ’ said Charles. ‘I saw it move.’
And sure enough, as we slid the fish, its gills and mouth blocked solid with mud, into one of the buckets of water we had standing ready, it dropped like a stone towards the bottom, flapped a couple of times as if it could hardly believe it, rose in a cavorting spiral as it realised it was free – and then, with obviously heartfelt relief, spat a mouthful of mud and gravel out into the water. It was so comic, the disgusted spitting out of the mud, that we laughed. We felt even more triumphant when, having scooped right to the bottom of the pool, fourteen large goldfish and a tench were swirling happily in buckets and bowls around the yard. Every one of the goldfish was there, thanks to the paving stones. The only occupant missing was a tench, and as tench invariably stay at the bottom of the pool anyway (we’d put two in when we built the pool, to clean it, and had never seen them since), it was obvious that it hadn’t been swept away; it must have died some other time from natural causes.
We were standing there taking a breather, prepara tory to starting work on re-filling the pool and getting the mud off the yard, when Father Adams came by again – this time with a friend he was taking on a tour to see the damage.
Having spoken to us once already he raised a forefinger in acknowledgement and plodded on past the gate. His friend, however, whom we had never seen before, took one look at us, standing there surrounded by buckets of cele brating goldfish and, when he thought he was out of 27
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earshot, put his head near Father Adams’s and muttered
‘Didst thee see that?’
Voices carry easily in the Valley. ‘Thass nothing to what they gets up to sometimes,’ came back the untroubled tones of Father Adams.
How true that was – though always through force of circumstance.
It wasn’t our fault, for instance, that a week later we were haring up and down the Valley busily blocking up the ends of water-pipes. There were three stretches of these
– a fifteen-foot length that carried the stream under our drive entrance; a stretch of about thirty yards further up the Valley where the water had been piped past a field; and another length under the drive of a new house further on again. Normally the stream ran through them, high in the winter, low in the summer, gushing its clear, cold course down from the hills. But, as sometimes happens in limestone country, the force of the recent flood had opened up various swallets – swallow holes as they are some times called – in the stream bed. And down these fissures, until stones should accumulate and block them up again, the stream was now disappearing.
It seemed strange, after the roaring torrent of the previous week, to hear nothing but the buzz of the insects. The Council workmen had come and gone, leaving the lane with a brand-new surface and informing us with great excitement of the adder they’d found in their tea-hut.
‘Only up a day he were,’ the foreman told us – ‘he’ being the canvas shelter they’d put on the side of the lane. ‘An’
when Bill went in to start the brew-up, there were thic gurt adder on the floor.’
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It wasn’t surprising. We do have adders in the Valley, to which end the Council put up a notice a few years back.
‘ADDERS! IF BITTEN RING SO-AND-SO 4321’, it reads. As Charles commented at the time, we must be tough if they have to warn the adders…
Some visitors come here for years and never see them, but they are around all right. Safe enough if one keeps away from stone walls and long grass in summer – but there’d been a pair, we knew, in the orchard and occasionally we saw one in the lane. I always thanked my stars the cats weren’t about when we did so. Cats are supposed to be natural snake-killers. Sheba, I had no doubt, would be. But I always worried about Solomon.
One thing about the flood, I said to Charles – it would have cleared out all the adders. Rotten for anything, to be caught by the water in its hole, but at least now the Valley was safe…
That was where I was wrong. What actually happened was that the adders, warned by some pre monitory sense, must have made for higher ground ahead of the flood. For a week or two afterwards we’d had hot dry weather, and then they began coming back to the damp of the Valley bottom. Only now, with no stream running through it, the Valley wasn’t so very damp. Hence the one curled up in the shade of the tea-hut; the one Charles killed – reluctantly, but there were children and animals to be thought of – as it lay, perfectly camou flaged, in the grass by the side of the road; the one I saw vanishing, with the ominous zigzag pattern on its back, into one of the empty water-pipes in the lane…
Up the lane had always been a favourite walk of Solomon’s and as soon as the surface was replaced we’d 29
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started going again. We carried Sheba, who was apt to wail about the stones Hurting her Feet, or she Wasn’t Coming At All, if we gave her the option. But Solomon bounded joyously along behind us, stopping to sniff here, spray a spray to beat all other cats’ there, galloping after that on his long black legs to catch us up and, when he got to the new house, rushing in to roll ecstatically on its porch.
We used to joke that we’d better buy the house, he loved the porch so much. Then we’d put Sheba down for the walk back and she, forgetting her Feet, would rush in and dart, shouting, round the back of the house, and Solomon would chase joyfully after her, and Charles would stand in the lane and say they shouldn’t go in there, on somebody else’s property, while I had the job of getting them out again…
All part of the routine that Siamese like so much and it didn’t take long for Solomon, noticing the now empty water-pipes, to decide that they could be incorporated into the schedule. It was tentative at first. The wide-eyed peering in at one end and out again; the venturing a bit further; the first silent-in-case-the-bogeyman-got-him emergence at the other end of the pipe. After that, of course, there was nothing to it. He dashed for the pipes as soon as we neared them; rushed madly up and down inside like a galvanised tube-train; sometimes appeared, shouting at the far end; sometimes shot back out of the end he’d gone in at, in the hope of surprising Sheba peering down it to see where he was; sometimes he hid in the middle and wouldn’t come out at all and we worried in case something might have got him.
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A fox could hole up in those empty pipes, said Charles and when I said but there’d be a battle if he met up with a fox…
Well, a weasel then, said Charles, refusing to be comforted.