Дорин Тови - A Comfort Оf Cats

Did he ever stop to think, I said later that night as we lazed before the sitting-room fire... Saska on my lap, Shebalu on Charles's, Lancelot happily cracking nuts out in the porch... Did he ever stop to think what other people did? Stored their caravans in their gardens? Under a carport, under a tarpaulin, or even standing in the open? I bet nobody else would have worked so hard to remove all the rubbish we had.

Maybe not, said Charles, but it would be worth it in the long run. That caravan was a little beauty. Think of us going off to Cornwall and Scotland in it. Taking the cats. Maybe even taking Annabel. In the caravan ? I said incredulously. Charles said he didn't see why not.

Changing the subject, he said (he could see I was about to raise objections to the idea of the caravan doubling as a horse-box)... talking of self-sufficiency... he'd been talking to Tim after we'd got the caravan in. Had I heard about him and the graveyard?

Six

It dated from the days when this was a mining area. In the late 1700s, at the time of the Industrial Revolution, there was a tremendous demand for calamine, which was used with copper to make brass. Our hills contained particularly good calamine – the finest, some said, in Europe – and miners came into the district from Wales, Cornwall, Yorkshire, building their own cottages in the Valley by the stream, or straggling higgledy-piggledy up the hill.

By the 1890s the calamine had run out, however, and the miners moved away. To Australia. To the Klondyke. A few of the less adventurous became farm labourers. Eventually most of the cottages fell into decay, helped on by the local Squire on whose great-grandfather's land the miners had squatted in the first place and who now, when a cottage became empty, took the roof off and left the walls to crumble so that the land could revert to his pheasants.

When we came to the Valley there were only four cottages still standing in it, though there were more at the top of the hill. Up there, too, was a heap of stones which according to tradition had once been the miners' chapel and adjoining it a bramble patch surrounded by a crumbling wall – a small enclosure, about thirty feet by forty. It was said to have been the chapel graveyard, though nobody was really sure about it.

Prior to our coming the estate had been broken up and the chapel ruins sold as a site for a bungalow. The enclosure, however, had been excluded from the sale and left sleeping beneath its brambles, and thus it stayed until a stone fell off the wall and Miss Wellington started to worry.

Miss Wellington was always worrying. Everlastingly, monumentally, and with disaster as her lodestar at the end of it. When it snowed, for instance, she worried about people getting their cars up out of the Valley. When the cars were all up and parked safely at the farm, from where the track out to the main road was usually easy, Miss Wellington would immediately start worrying about the hill being cleared so that the cars (though she didn't own one) could get down again. When we first had Annabel she worried about her being lonely and pleaded with us to let her have a foal. On the two occasions when Annabel was thought to be enceinte (actually she was having everybody on) Miss Wellington immediately started panicking in circles in case anything should go wrong. When the stone fell off the graveyard wall, needless to say, it afforded endless permutations for worrying.

The whole thing might fall on somebody, she said. Father Adams pointed out that as it was only three feet high they'd have to be lying down before it could. 'Unless 'twas old Fred comin' home from the Rose and Crown,' he added. 'I've seen he afore now on his hands and knees.' It was a joke of course, but Miss Wellington didn't take it that way. The wall was on Fred's route home from the Rose and Crown. From that time on, when he was going past at closing time – needless to say on his feet – he was apt to have a torch shone on him from Miss Wellington's gateway while she waited for him or the wall to fall down.

Came the spring and she thought up another worry. There could be adders in there, she said. So there could. This is adder country and nobody underestimates the possibilities. But it wasn't likely, as she colourfully imagined, that while the three-foot wall had contained them like a snake-pit (conveniently overlooking the broken gate which had stood ajar for years) the moment one stone was off they'd come leaping over in their hordes, attacking people in all directions. Particularly Fred Ferry, one gathered, coming past on hands and knees.

She complained to the Parish Council. So did everybody else. They'd had enough of Miss Wellington and the wall. The Council lobbed back a speedy statement explaining why they couldn't replace the stone. If they did, they said, they'd be accepting responsibility and if any more stones fell off, they'd be liable if anybody got hurt and the cost would go on the rates.

They would, they added placatingly, try to find out whose responsibility it was . Father Adams said we could write that lot off then. He'd heard that one before. They'd send somebody a letter, wait for a reply, chew it over at a meeting six months later... 'Took 'em two years once to get a seat on the green,' he reminisced. ''N then they put 'n up back to front. Cemented 'n so people sat with their legs stickin' uphill. Took another two years to get 'n turned round.'

How right he was. The following winter, with letters to the Rector, the Church Commissioners and the local Methodist headquarters behind them, the Council wrote a final abortive missive to some obscure sect in Wales, announced that they had now explored every avenue – and, following a frost, two more stones fell off.

Miss Wellington nearly had a fit. She envisaged the wall coming down like an avalanche – all three feet high of it, with Fred Ferry underneath, needless to say. She envisaged it alternatively happening in a snowstorm and cars running into it, with bodies strewn Excelsior-like on the ice. To try to placate her somebody replaced the stones (anonymously, not to incur responsibility) – and then, suddenly seeing it as a solution to his problems, not the least of which was that he was Miss Wellington's neighbour, Tim Bannett suggested that he should clear the graveyard and use it as an extension to his garden.

The Parish Council gave their approval as being a way of getting it looked after – carefully pointing out, of course, that permission wasn't really theirs to give. Miss Wellington was delighted. Tim and Liz were her two ewe lambs. The rest of the village was equally happy that somebody else had taken on the job – for nothing, moreover – which only went to show how stupid people could be. Until it suddenly dawned on them that Tim had got some land for nothing.

He hadn't really. He wasn't laying claim to the graveyard. He was only going to use it as an allotment in return for keeping it in order. But he'd got the use of it and they hadn't. They'd let land slip through their fingers. From under their very noses – and to a comparative newcomer, too. Half the village promptly said 'twas sacrilege and he shouldn't be allowed to use it. The other half claimed that by rights it ought to be theirs. Their forefathers had lived next door, or had owned land opposite or adjoining. Fred Ferry said his granddad used to graze sheep in there.

How that made it his by rights, or was more respectful than growing vegetables in it, derived from logic clear only to Fred. On one thing he and the rest of the village were united, however. They wouldn't, they told each other at every opportunity, fancy eating anything grown in there .