Роберт Рэнкин - The Dance of the Voodoo Handbag

A slightly surreal incident at the start of the proceedings set the tone for what was to come. One of the pall bearers had a cold and pulled from his pocket an oversized red gingham handkerchief. Such an item wouldn't have meant much to anyone else, but it meant a lot to me.

The last time I had seen a handkerchief like that was nearly forty years before. My Aunty Edna, my dad's sister, always carried one in her handbag. It was scented with lavender and I loved the smell so much that whenever she came to visit I would pretend to have a cold so she would let me blow my nose on it. I would bury my face in that hanky and draw in the marvellous perfume.

The sight of the pall bearer's hanky stirred some long-forgotten childhood memories. But it wasn't just the handkerchief.

It was the Polo mint.

As he pulled out the handkerchief, a Polo mint popped from his pocket. It flew through the air and fell to the church floor, spiralling slowly forward until it came to rest beneath my dad's coffin.

And there it remained throughout the service.

But the curious incident of the oversized red gingham handkerchief and the Polo mint was nothing, nothing in the face of what was to come.

'˜The vicar was one of those young, earnest, eager fellows, with the shining face of a freshly bathed infant. Why do they scrub their faces up like that? Is it the '˜cleanliness is next to godliness' angle? I don't know, but, all aglow and full of beans, he climbed into the pulpit, gathered his robes about him and began a discourse upon my dad.

'˜I have only been in this parish for nine months,' said the vicar, '˜and so I only knew Mr Rankin during the final stages of his long illness. But it became clear to me, through my many talks with him, that Mr Rankin was no ordinary man. He had lived the kind of life that most of us only read about. He had walked alone across the Kalahari Desert, sailed alone around Cape Horn, conquered some of the world's highest peaks, and been decorated twice for deeds of outstanding valour during the Second World War.'

My gaze, which had become fixed upon the Polo mint, rose rapidly upon hearing all this, and a look of horror must certainly have appeared upon my face. My immediate thoughts were that the vicar was talking about the wrong man. It was bloody typical, wasn't it, one old dying man looking just the same as another to a new vicar with his mind on other things, young housewives of the parish, probably! I was almost on the point of rising from my pew to take issue with the erring cleric when I heard the first titters of laughter.

The church was packed, my dad had a great many friends, and the laughter came in little muffled outbursts from his old cronies. And as the vicar continued with tales of my father's daring escapades, world wanderings and uncanny knack for always being in the right place at the right time when history was being made, the laughter spread.

But never so far as the pulpit.

My father had spent the last nine months of his life priming up the vicar.

As I say, I left the church with tears in my eyes.

But the best was yet to come, and it was almost as if my dad had planned it. In fact, looking back, I feel certain that he did.

Would you care to come back to the house for a cup of tea?' I asked the vicar. '˜Evidently you were very close to my dad at the end, and I'd like, at the very least, for us to have a chat.'

The vicar agreed and we returned to my dad's place.

And we hadn't been there for ten minutes when it came.

The vicar pointed to the large swordfish saw that hung above the fireplace. '˜Now, that can tell a tale or two, can't it?' he said to me.

I glanced up at it. As far as I knew the thing had been utterly mute ever since my dad had purchased it in a Hastings antique market. But then it might have confided a tale or two to him in private, I couldn't be certain.

'˜Would you like to refresh my memory?'

'˜Indeed,' said the man of the cloth, sipping tea. '˜Your father told me about the time he was fishing for sailfish alone off the Florida Keys, and a sudden storm blew his boat far out to sea. He lost all contact with land and during this storm, which was, according to your father, nothing less than the infamous Hurricane Flora of 1966, his oars were blown overboard.

'˜Your father thought that his time had surely come and, being the pious man he was, he offered himself to God's tender mercy. There was a flash of lightning and at that very moment a swordfish burst its saw - that very one hanging there - up through the bottom of the boat. Using the skills he had learned while working as a circus strongman, your father snapped off the saw, thrust his foot into the hole and, using the saw for a paddle, rowed back to land.'

To say that I was speechless would be to say, well, I was speechless.

After the vicar left, my mum took me quietly to one side. '˜I think it would probably be for the best if none of this was ever spoken of again, don't you, dear?' she said.

I nodded thoughtfully. '˜Trust me, Mum,' I told her. '˜I won't mention it to another living soul.'

And I have, of course, remained true to my promise.

My Uncle Brian, my dad's younger brother, was not a carpenter or a general foreman. He was a fox farmer. I never even knew that fox farms existed before he told me about them. Apparently, without fox farms the entire British economy would have ground to a halt a long time before it actually did in the year 2002, with the fall of the British book publishing industry and pretty much everything else. But during the 1980s and 1990s, fox farming at secret government establishments kept it buoyant. You see, there weren't enough foxes to hunt and so fox farms had to breed even more.

Allow me to explain.

As most folk will know, blood sports have, in recent times, become something of an issue and one which has deepened the divide between the rural and the urban communities.

There has always been a divide, but this is to be expected. Country folk have long considered themselves to be a cut above the simple townie. Country folk feel themselves to be closer to nature, more in tune with its natural rhythms and custodians of the land for generations yet to come. Townies, in their opinion, are a bunch of glue-sniffing football hooligans, packed like lab rats into high-rise blocks, stunted both mentally and physically by a diet of McDonald's burgers and traffic fumes. Gross, perverted and not nice to know.

Townies, however, lean to a different opinion. They consider themselves a cut above the simple bumpkin. Townies feel themselves to be better educated and more sophisticated, having greater access to the arts and information technology. They look upon country folk as a bunch of ignorant, inbred sheep-shaggers who get off on cruelty and blood-letting. Gross, perverted and not nice to know.

Both sides are, of course, way off the mark, although it could be argued that sheep-shagging is an almost exclusively rural recreation.

So it comes as little surprise to find that the countryman and the townie disagree over the matter of blood sports.

In the summer of 1997 almost half a million concerned country folk marched peacefully upon London to heighten the awareness of the public at large regarding the threat to rural England posed by a proposed Bill to abolish the blood sport of fox-hunting.

What the dim-witted townie failed to understand, the country folk patiently explained, was that without foxhunting there would be no English countryside. Consider, they said, all those people whose livelihoods depend directly upon foxhunting. The saddlers, the grooms, the ostlers, the stable lads and lasses. The riding instructors, the vets, the manufacturers of horse pills and tackle and donkey nuts and stirrup cups. The blacksmiths and the blacksmiths' apprentices, the horse-breeders, the makers of horse boxes and those who worked in the factories that produce those stickers you see in the rear windows of Range Rovers that say '˜I ♥ greys'.