Tom Sharpe - The Throwback

So did the police in the golf club. The sight of the burning train emerging from what appeared to be a napalm bomb exploded in the centre of East Pursley only lent weight to their conviction that they were dealing with an outbreak of urban and golf-course terrorism unprecedented in the annals of British history. They radioed for army help and explained that they were pinned down in the East Pursley Club House by suburban guerrillas firing from the houses in Sandicott Crescent who had just exploded a bomb under the London to Brighton express. Five minutes later helicopter gunships were hovering over the golf course searching for the enemy. But the policemen in the Simplons' garden had had their fill. Three lay wounded, one was dead and the rest were out of ammunition. Dragging their wounded they wormed their way across the lawn and round the side of the house, and ran for the police cars.

'Get the hell out of here,' they yelled as they scrambled in, 'there's a fucking army out there.' A minute later, their sirens receding into the distance, the patrol cars had left the Crescent and were heading towards the police station. They didn't reach it. The tanker that had exploded on to the express had doused the road beneath and the tunnel was an inferno. Behind them Sandicott Crescent was in little better shape. The fire in the Simplons ?garage had spread to the fence and from the fence to the Ogilvies' potting shed. It was well named. Riddled with bullet holes it added its flames and smoke to the general pall that hung over Jessica's inheritance and lent a grisly light to the scene. The Ogilvies clung to one another in the cellar listening to the whine of bullets ricocheting round their kitchen, and at Number 1 Mr Rickenshaw, tightening a tourniquet round his wife's leg, promised her that if they ever get out of this alive they'd get out of the house.

It was the same at the Pettigrews'. 'Promise me we'll move,' whined Mrs Pettigrew. 'Another night in this awful house and I'll go mad.'

Mr Pettigrew needed no urging. The series of events that had swept through Sandicott Crescent, and in particular their house, like the plagues that had affected Egypt inclined him to renounce his rationalism and return to religion. His social conscience had certainly deserted him and when Mr Rickenshaw, unable to phone for medical assistance thanks to the scythe-like activities of the fire engine's ladder, crawled across the street to ring the Pettigrews' doorbell to ask for help, Mr Pettigrew refused to open the door on the reasonable grounds that the last time anyone had asked for medical help, namely the ambulance men, of all people, they had introduced a mad dog into the house and that as far as he was concerned Mrs Rickenshaw could bleed to death before he opened his door again.

'You can think yourself lucky,' he shouted, 'your fucking wife's only got a hole in her leg, mine's got one in her head.' Mr Rickenshaw cursed him for his bad neighbourliness and, wholly unaware that Colonel Finch-Potter, having been relieved of his penis-grater, was now in intensive care at the Pursley Hospital, tried to knock him up. It was Jessica who finally came to his aid, and braving the slackening gun-fire from the Club House went down to Number 1 and applied her knowledge of first aid to Mrs Rickenshaw's wound. Lockhart took advantage of her absence to make a last sally into the sewer. Donning his wet-suit he crawled along to the outlet of Mr Grabble's house with a bucket and a World War II stirrup pump that Mr Sandicott had kept in his workshop for watering plants. Lockhart had another purpose in mind, and having introduced the nozzle into the discharge pipe and cemented it there with putty, filled the bucket from the sewer and began to pump vigorously. He worked steadily for an hour and then undid his apparatus and crawled home. By that time Mr Grabble's ground floor was awash with the effluent from every other house in the street and all his attempts to get his ground-floor lavatory to behave in the normal manner and discharge excreta out of the house rather than pump it in had failed disastrously. Driven to desperate measures and wading through sewage with his trousers rolled up, Mr Grabble had seized on the idea of using caustic soda. It was not a good idea. Instead of going down the pipe to unblock whatever infernal thing was blocking it, the caustic soda erupted from the pan in an extremely vindictive fashion. Fortunately Mr Grabble had had the good sense to foresee this possibility and was out of the tiny room when it happened. He was less sensible in resorting to an ordinary lavatory cleanser and when that failed, adding to it a liquid bleach. The two combined to produce chlorine and Mr Grabble was driven from his house by the poisonous gas. Standing on the back lawn he watched his living-room carpet lap up the foul liquid and the caustic soda eat into his best armchair. Mr Grabble took the unwise step of trying to dam the flood and the caustic soda dissuaded him. He sat on the edge of the fishpond bathing his feet and cursing.

In the bird sanctuary the Superintendent was still shouting for help, though less loudly, and at the far end the bull-terrier was sleeping it off on the mat outside his master's back door.

Lockhart, divesting himself of the wet-suit, ran himself a bath and lay in it contentedly. On the whole he thought he had done rather well. There could be no doubting now that Jessica would be in full possession of her inheritance and with the right to sell every house whenever she chose. He lay thinking about the tax problem. His experience at Sandicott & Partners had told him that Capital Gains Tax was levied on every extra house an individual owned. There had to be some way round it. The tax on twelve houses would be enormous. By the time he got out of the bath he had found a simple solution.

Nobody else could find a simple solution to the problem of what had occurred in East Pursley. The discovery by an army helicopter of the Superintendent of Police hanging to the upper branches of a monkey-puzzle tree which would have defied the efforts of any but the most insane men to climb it didn't help to clarify matters. He kept screaming about mad dogs being loose in the neighbourhood and his statement was supported by Mr Pettigrew and the Lowrys who had wounds to prove it.

'It hardly explains how six golfers and five of my own men came to be shot,' said the Commissioner of Police. 'Mad dogs and Englishmen may go out in the midday sun but the former don't carry side-arms. And what the hell do we say about that fire engine and the petrol tanker, not to mention the London to Brighton express? How many passengers went west in that inferno?'

'Ten,' said the Assistant Commissioner, 'though accurately speaking they were going south. The Southern Region

caters…'

'Shut up,' snarled the Commissioner, 'I've got to explain this to the Home Secretary and it's got to sound good.'-

'Well, I suppose we could divide the two incidents into separate areas,' suggested the Assistant Commissioner, but the Commissioner only looked at him the more lividly.

'Two? Two?' he yelled rattling the windows of his office. 'One, we have an utterly insane half-pay colonel whittling his prick with a cheese-grater in the company of a high-class whore. Two, we have a mad dog roaming the district biting everything in sight. Three, someone looses off firearms into several houses and then explodes a fucking garage with an unidentifiable woman in the inspection pit. Do I have to spell it all out for

you?'

'I take your point,' said the Assistant Commissioner, 'which according to Miss Gigi Lamont is what Colonel Finch-Potter…'

'Shut up,'said theCommissioner savagely and crossed his legs. They sat in silence and considered a convincing explanation.

'At least the TV people and the press weren't present,' said the Assistant Commissioner, and his superior nodded thankfully.