Tom Sharpe - The Throwback

And the Flawse is fled fra' the fell But those that are left can aye recall

The tales he used to tell.

Twa deaths he died, twa lives he led,

Twa men he might have been; The ane spake words he had but read

The ither he didna mean.

And so he struggled his whole life through

And niver in strife he ceased. And he allus sought what was good and true

Though hissel' to be half a beast.

'Twas all the truth he iver knew

Since Science and God had fled, And you couldna shake his firm held view

That the best of men are dead.

But their words remain to ease our pain

And he'd have us now rejoice That though he's gan we can hear again

The sound of his living voice.'

While Mr Dodd squeezed on with his tune, Lockhart jumped down from the table and left the pele tower. Behind him Mr Bullstrode and Dr Magrew looked at one another in wonderment and for once even Jessica, startled into womanly concern by Lockhart's tears, lost her sentimental streak and stood dry-eyed. She was about to follow Lockhart out when Mr Dodd stopped her.

'Let him be by hissel', hinnie,' he said. 'He gan to dree his weird awhile.'

Mr Dodd was only partly right. Lockhart was not dreeing but what came next was certainly weird. As the sun rose over Tombstone Law a thousand loudspeakers planted across the fell boomed forth again. This time the sound was not that of shell and shot but the gigantic voice of Edwin Tyndale Flawse. He was singing the 'The Ballad of Prick 'Em Dry'.

As the final echoes of that enormous voice died away and the deafened birds in the pinewoods round the reservoir fluttered back to their perches and tried to resume their morning chorus, Lockhart and Jessica stood on the roof of the peel tower and looked over the battlements at the land that was truly theirs. Lockhart's tears were gone. They had never been entirely for the conflagration of his grandfather but more for the loss of that terrible innocence which had been the old man's intellectual legacy to him. And, like some incubus, that innocence had lain heavily upon him denying him the right to guilt and the true humanity which comes from guilt and innocence. Lockhart had stated it all unconsciously in his lament but now he felt free to be his divided self, a man of lusts as well as loves, of ingenuity mingled with compassion, of fear as well as mindless bravery, in short a man like other men. All this his grandfather's obsession with heroes and hero-worship had denied him but, in the flames that had consumed Mr Flawse, Lockhart had been born anew, his own man, never mind his ancestry or who and what his father might have been and done,

And so while Mr Bullstrode and Dr Magrew drove off down the road to Hexham and Mr Dodd with brush and dust-pan swept the ashes of his late master from the grate and, separating those foreign parts which had been the components of old Mr Flawse's posthumous animation, deposited the rest in the cucumber frame, Lockhart and Jessica stood together and were content to be themselves.

The same could hardly be said for Mr Mirkin or the Excise men now back in Hexham. Mr Mirkin in particular was not himself and no longer beside himself. He had no self to be beside. The Senior Collector of Taxes (Supertax Division; sub-department. Evasion of) was back in hospital outwardly unscathed but suffering internally the simultaneous after-effects of extremely low-frequency waves, His condition baffled the doctors who could make neither head nor tail of his symptoms. At one end he fluttered; at the other end he wowed. The combination was one they had never previously encountered and it was only with the arrival of Dr Magrew, who suggested plastering his plastered legs together to stop them oscillating, that Mr Mirkin could be kept in bed. Even so he wowed, his most insistent wow being to have bis Schedule D, a demand that led to some confusion with the Vitamin. In the end he was gagged and his head encased in lead-filled icebags to stop it vibrating.

'He's clean off his rocker,' said Dr Magrew gratuitously as the Senior Collector bounced on the bed. 'The best and safest place for him would be a padded cell. Besides, it would keep the rumble down.'

"His stomach doesn't seem to be capable of keeping anything down,' said a consultant, 'and its rumble is quite revolting.'

To make the diagnosis even more difficult Mr Mirkin, unable to hear, refused to answer questions, even those concerned with his name and address, and when the gag was removed he simply wowed the louder. In the maternity ward nearby his wowing led

to complaints and the demand that he be transferred out of earshot Dr Magrew agreed at once and signed a committal order to the local mental hospital on the perfectly sensible grounds that a man whose extremities were so clearly at odds with one another, and who seemed to have lost his memory, was suffering from incurably split personality. And so with that anonymity that was entirely in keeping with his profession as a Tax Collector, Mr Mirkin, now a mere digit himself, was taken at public expense and registered under Schedule D in the most padded and soundless of cells.

Meanwhile the Excise men and the head VAT man were too taken up with their own loss of hearing to consider with any enthusiasm a return visit to Flawse Hall. They spent their time writing notes to one another and to their solicitors concerning the actions for damages which they were bringing against the Ministry of Defence for failing to draw their attention to the fact that they were, on the night of the raid, entering an artillery range. The case was a prolonged one made longer still by the Army's adamant denial that they fired at night and by the need for all cross-examination of the Excise men to be done in longhand.

Meanwhile life at Flawse Hall resumed its quiet routine. There too things had changed. The cucumbers in the frames grew larger than Mr Dodd had ever known them to and Jessica expanded likewise. And all summer long the bees in the straw hives buzzed over the heather and young rabbits gambolled outside warrens. Even the foxes, sensing the changed atmosphere, returned and for the first time in many a year curlews called over Flawse Fell. Life was returning and Lockhart had given up his previous desire to shoot things. This was partly thanks to Jessica but much more to Miss Deyntry who had taken Jessica under her wing and while instilling a dislike of bloodsports had also knocked the sentimentality out of her. Morning sickness had helped and all talk of storks had ended. Jessica had broadened out into a homely woman with a sharp tongue in her head and the Sandicott strain had reasserted itself. It was a practical strain that placed some value on comfort and the Hall had been transformed. The windows had been replaced and central heating installed to cut out the damp and the draughts but Jessica still stuck to open fires in the main rooms. And Mr Dodd still mined coal from the drift mine, though rather more easily than before. As a result of Lockhart's sonic warfare strange things had happened in the mine.

'The roof has fallen in some places,' Mr Dodd reported, 'but it's the seam itself that puzzles me. The coal has crumbled and there's an afful amount of dust down there.'

Lockhart went to inspect and spent several hours examining this strange occurrence. The coal had certainly crumbled and coal dust was thick everywhere. He emerged blackened but elated.

'It could be we've hit upon a new method of mining,' he said. 'If sonic waves can break windows and shatter glass, I can see no reason why they shouldn't be used underground to more purpose.'

'You'll not expect me to be down there with some infernal whistle, I trust,' said Mr Dodd. 'I dinna want to go out of my mind in the interest of science and there's a number of sheep and bullocks that canna rightly be called undemented yet.'