Helen Cresswell - The Bagthorpe Saga - Ordinary Jack

“Where are the crackers?” asked William.

They looked about the littered table.

“I put them out – I did! There was one on every side plate!” Tess was frantically darting her hands among the candles as she spoke. “And Daisy helped me.”

There was a real silence now.

“Good God,” said Uncle Parker at last. He had gone quite white. “Daisy.”

“She’s not here,” said Jack unnecessarily.

“Daisy, Daisy, where – oh where—” moaned Aunt Celia wildly. She pushed away her piece of bark and stood swaying like a reed.

“I clean forgot. Oh my God. I’ll find her – I will!”

“But what – where – the lake …” moaned Aunt Celia.

At Grandma’s end of the table concern for Daisy was not half so strong as concern for the crackers.

“She was here , I tell you, putting out crackers.” Tess’s face was lit now from below, the cake was sputtering and ablaze.

“We’ll have to blow the candles – we’ll have to sing – we can’t wait!” shrieked Mrs Bagthorpe.

“Look – here’s one!” Mr Bagthorpe snatched a cracker from under a crumpled napkin. “Quick – Jack – you pull it with me, and then there’ll be a hat for Grandma.”

Jack reached over and they pulled hard. Crack!

What happened next was so confusing that even when you put together the different accounts of everyone there present, nothing like a clear picture ever emerged. The Fire Brigade, when they arrived, could certainly make neither head nor tail of it and had never before attended a fire like it.

In the Bagthorpe family, the incident became known, in course of time, as “The Day Zero Piddled While Home Burned”. (No one actually saw this, but he sometimes did when he got nervous, and it rhymed so well with ‘fiddled’ that it was passed as Poetic Licence.)

Only a handful of facts – as opposed to impressions, which were legion – emerged. These were as follows:

Fact the First

Daisy, aged four, had been sitting underneath the table the whole time the party was going on.

Fact the Second

What she had been doing under the table was opening all the crackers and taking out whatever was inside. (After the fire quite a lot of melted plastic was found mixed in with the carpet.)

Fact the Third

What was also under the table (mistaken by Daisy for a second box of crackers) was a large box of fireworks which were a surprise present to Grandma from Uncle Parker. He said afterwards he had given them in the hope they would liven things up.

Fact the Fourth

Daisy was in the company of a mongrel dog called Zero who belonged to the Bagthorpes in general and Jack in particular. He had just appeared one day in the garden, and stayed. The Bagthorpes had advertised him in the local paper, but nobody seemed to have recognised the description, or if they had, had not come forward. Mr Bagthorpe disassociated himself from Zero and would often pretend he had never set eyes on him.

“There’s a dog out there on the landing,” he would say. “A great pudding-footed thing covered in fur. See what it wants.”

It was Mr Bagthorpe who had given Zero his name.

“If there was anything less than nothing,” he had said, “that hound would be it. But there isn’t, so we’ll have to settle for Zero.”

The family computers, William and Rosie, had pointed out that mathematically speaking there was a whole lot to choose from that was less than zero, but Mr Bagthorpe had dismissed this as idle speculation.

“You show me something less than nothing, and I’ll believe you,” he had told them.

Mr Bagthorpe could be very categorical, and was especially so on subjects about which he knew practically nothing, like mathematics. Anyway, Zero was called that, and Jack sometimes used to wonder if it had affected him, and given him an inferiority complex, because sometimes Zero seemed to drag his feet about rather, and his ears looked droopier than when they had first had him. Jack would spend hours poring over old snapshots of Zero, comparing ears. When they were alone together Jack would praise Zero up and tell him how wonderful and intelligent he was, to try and counteract this. Also, when in public Jack would call him “Nero” so as to give him a bit of dignity in the eyes of others, and as Zero hardly ever came when he was called anyway, it didn’t make much difference.

So the fact was that Zero was under the table with Daisy, who had probably given him some food to keep him quiet. When she was cross-examined afterwards Daisy said she had taken him under the table with her because she had thought it would be lonely under there by herself. Mr Bagthorpe flatly refused to believe this, and said that Daisy must have plotted the whole thing because if Zero hadn’t been there with her none of the things that did happen would have happened.

He and Uncle Parker used to have rows about this for weeks afterwards. Uncle Parker would say that while he admitted that Daisy was a genius (she had to be, with a reading age of 7.4 and the way she was always writing her thoughts on walls, and what with having Aunt Celia for a mother) she was too young to have plotted anything as complicated as that. He would also point out that the whole thing had hinged not so much on Zero being under the table as on the moment when a certain cracker was pulled, Mr Bagthorpe being the person who had made this suggestion and connived at its execution. Mr Bagthorpe would retaliate by saying that the coincidence of Uncle Parker’s having bought a large box of fireworks, and of Uncle Parker’s daughter being under the table with them, might strike some people as rather more than coincidence. He would usually end up advising Uncle Parker to take himself and Daisy off to a psychiatrist.

Fact the Fifth

When Jack and Mr Bagthorpe pulled the single available cracker, Zero, who was probably already nervous at being trapped so long under a table surrounded by so many feet and legs, had blown his mind. He had sprung forward, got both sets of paws wound in the tablecloth and pulled the whole lot after him, including the cake.

At the actual moment this happened, of course, no one had any inkling that Zero had been under the table, and the sight of the tablecloth leaping forward and rolling about on the floor had almost unhinged some of them, notably Grandma, Mrs Bagthorpe and Aunt Celia. The latter certainly always referred to it afterwards as a “manifestation” and would refer to how Daisy had been “delivered”. (This also helped make Daisy seem less of a culprit, because it made her seem more a victim, and it was difficult to see her in both roles at once.)

Grandma herself, with it being her birthday and her cake, had taken the whole thing personally and had thought she was being struck by a thunderbolt. She had miraculously escaped injury altogether, but Rosie’s Birthday Portrait had been one of the first things to go up in flames and always afterwards Grandma saw this as what she called a “Sign”. A Sign of what she didn’t specify, but she always said it very darkly, and when she was feeling low. Sometimes the others, to cheer her up when she got brooding about it, would say that if it were a “Sign” it was clearly a Sign that Rosie’s Birthday Portrait had not been worth a light – so to speak.

Grandpa had not of course heard the whole lot of cracks and bangs as all the crackers Daisy had dismantled started going off, but had not failed to note that the last remaining stuffed egg had been suddenly snatched from under his very nose. He had risen hastily to grab after it, knocked over his own chair, tripped, and fallen over Grandma and lost his hearing aid.

When the firemen came they were very helpful and said they would keep an eye open for it, but what with the whole room by then ablaze and the curtains just beginning to catch fire, they didn’t really have time. They were very good firemen but they did seem nervous about bangers still going off and sudden flares of blue or green light. They definitely seemed jumpy. Afterwards, when they were having some beer with the Bagthorpes to moisten their dried-out mouths, they apologised for this. They said that the Bagthorpe fire was not really a run-of-the-mill job or something for which they had been properly prepared during their training.