Дорин Тови - The Coming Of Saska

It was a foregone conclusion, therefore, that he’d be in at the end of the dog-food experiment. It was a few days later and we’d stopped giving Seeley Chum. Another Siamese owner had told us that her Vet said one shouldn’t feed cats on dog-food. Different types of animals have different metabolisms, she said, and the foods are geared specially to their needs.

We did rather wonder – while telling ourselves that the dog-chasing was, of course, just coincidence – whether leaving it off would make a difference in that respect. Even we didn’t bargain for anything so spectacular, however, as that on Wednesday there was Seeley chasing an Alsatian and by Sunday, sans the Chum, we were back to dogs chasing him .

‘Whass he doin’ up there?’ asked Father Adams, appearing as if by press-button as we once more hoisted our extension ladder against an ash-tree some fifty yards down the lane.

Down through the leaves, from the top-most branch, peered two blue eyes round with woe. Like Solomon before him, while normally a non-climber, when danger threatened he could get up all right; the snag was, also like Solomon, that he then developed vertigo and couldn’t get down.

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‘Don’t tell I he’ve chased a dog up there ,’ went on Father Adams, ready after eighteen years to believe anything as far as our animals were concerned. Anything, that is, except the truth. That Seeley had fled up there at the sight of a passing Corgi and didn’t Father Adams think it queer, I said, that he’d chased dogs when we gave him dog-food and got chased by them when we didn’t?

‘Sometimes it strikes I thee bist,’ said our neighbour, who is a man of few but succinct words. In the circumstances it was hardly surprising that he worried about us meeting up with grizzlies.

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Two

NORMALLY MISS WELLINGTON WOULD have worried too. She was always worrying about other people. Whether somebody ought to be told about the way they kept their garden. (Miss Wellington’s, where it could be seen for the stone gnomes and toadstools that dotted it like the Bayeux Tapestry, was immaculate and couldn’t be faulted.) Whether Annabel was happy. Miss Wellington spent many an anxious hour pondering this at Annabel’s fence and, because Annabel always bawled when she moved away, was sure she needed a companion. Annabel was actually informing the world that Miss Wellington was stingy with the peppermints... we could always tell her disgusted calls by the derisive snort at the end. But Miss Wellington liked to worry. It made life so much more interesting.

She worried about the church heating. She worried about what things were coming to. She worried considerably about the young people of today. She’d done that ever since 14

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she saw their goings-on on television and now – which was why she wasn’t as yet at hysteria stations at the thought of us going out to look for grizzlies – she had a trendy young couple living next door to her and she was worrying more than ever.

Convinced that all young men with beards had sinister motives and that flowing dresses and beads were a sign of fecklessness in girls, Miss Wellington nearly dropped when she saw the Bannetts looking over Rose Cottage. Ern Biggs, Father Adams’s rival for the handyman jobs in the village, was working in a nearby garden at the time and according to him she went straight indoors and started playing hymns on her piano. ‘Oh God Our Help In Ages Past,’ he said, and whether it was to frighten them off or in the hope of invoking heavenly protection nobody knew, but either way it didn’t work. The Bannetts bought the cottage, Miss Wellington fluttered round the village anticipating the worst – the place taken over by hippies and probably a pop festival on the village green before we’d finished... and the week before they moved in, everybody had a fright.

Everybody except us, that is. We happened to be coming back from town around ten o’clock at night and while, as we turned the corner by the Rose and Crown and drove along the lane, we were startled ourselves for a moment to see Rose Cottage apparently floodlit, with music throbbing out from it like Congo drums, we did get the true picture as we passed.

The Bannetts were showing another couple around (Liz Bannett’s parents, it later transpired). The son et lumière effect was the result of their having switched on the high-powered lamps installed by the builders for working on the dark, low-ceilinged interior. During the day, when 15

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The Coming of Saska the builders were using them, the lights didn’t show up so much; at night, through the uncurtained windows, they shone out like the Eddystone lighthouse. The music, we further realised as we drove slowly past with the car windows down (being as interested in our neighbours as anybody), was Beethoven... probably there was a concert on the radio... and it could be heard so clearly because the cottage door was open: the Bannetts and their visitors were just leaving and Tim Bannett was turning off the lights.

That wasn’t how the story hit the village, though. ‘Wunt half a party up at Rose Cottage last night,’ Father Adams told us when he brought us in some leeks. ‘Place all lit up like a gin palace,’ said Fred Ferry when I met him in the lane.

The Rose and Crown was the nearest he’d ever been to a gin palace but Fred likes a dramatic turn of phrase. ‘People up there drinkin’ and carryin’ on,’ Ern informed everybody he met. This was his interpretation of Fred’s gin palace, of course. Ern lives in the next village himself and hadn’t personally witnessed anything.

If Miss Wellington had heard the Beethoven she might have been happier about her prospective neighbours. Miss Wellington is a great believer in culture. But she happened to be away visiting her brother for a couple of days and was told the tale, on her return, by Father Adams. Supported by Fred Ferry and Ern Biggs, of course, who were at her gate as fast as their boots would carry them. We were very kind, she told us when we tried to give her our version of the affair.

She realised we were trying to spare her. She knew as well as we did what modern young people were like, however.

She’d never be surprised at anything that happened.

Miss Wellington was always expecting things to happen.

Only recently one of our neighbours had had his car banged 16

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in the lane near the church, by somebody coming round the corner on the wrong side. Miss Wellington’s comment on this had been that it wasn’t safe to go out these days without taking a bath and when I asked what that had to do with it – ‘In case one were hurt and taken to hospital,’

said Miss W. ‘One wouldn’t want to go there dirty, would one?’

What with presumably taking baths and waiting for the next-door orgies to start. Miss Wellington was pretty busy that summer. She was conspicuous by her absence from the preparations for our safari, anyway, which was probably just as well. It would only have needed her at her usual rate of attendance and we’d have gone clean up the wall.

There was so much to do, and so many people to tell us how to do it. For a start there was the garage door to be repaired. One of a pair of doors actually, made of heavy metal sheeting on wooden frames, and over the years one of the doorposts had rotted, and the door on that side had sagged and was dragged nightly into position by Charles with a horrible shrieking noise, and Father Adams had been saying for months that if we didn’t put he right we’d have a fine old job on there, and now of course we had.