Tovey, Doreen - Raining Cats and Donkeys

Trees crashed, bonfires blazed, the bulldozer thudded. At intervals the barrage appeared to be intensified by mortar fire which was, Charles happily insisted, old Alan firing back. Actually it was the quarry a mile away blasting rock for the next day's work, but it fitted into the cacophony like the guns in the 1812 Overture.

What really convinced the Duggans that it wasn't their year was when, in the middle of all this, the people on their other side started building a boat. A nice young couple they were, whose cabin cruiser, rising from their driveway like Venus from the foam, roused admiration on the part of all but the local diehards who wanted to know what they wanted it for in the middle of the country, and the Duggans, over the fence, who had to listen to the Seraph being built.

Peaceful as doves for six blasted years and now they had to blasted well start, said Alan. He hoped they sank at sea, he muttered savagely, listening night after night to the sawing. It was the hammering, however, that really got him. Hammering which in the normal way he'd never have noticed, but which, added to the clamour of the building, fell on his anguished ears like water torture.

We called on them one Saturday afternoon and heard it ourselves. From one side came the powerful thud of the bulldozer. From the other, gentle, spasmodic tapping.

'You wait a minute', said Alan sourly. 'In a second she'll start as well'. In a second she did. Rhythmically from over the fence came the sound of Maureen swinging practisedly into beat with Reggie, their hammers clanging merrily as a pair of Clydeside riveters while they dreamed of summer in their cruiser on the Broads. Up from the hillside echoed the shuddering of the bulldozer. Boom! in the background went the quarry detonators.

'Swine!' roared Alan – suddenly, to our consternation, shaking his fist at the ceiling. 'Swinehounds!' he shouted fiercely, rushing out and kicking as hard as he could at the fence. Nobody could hear him, of course, which was just as well for local relationships. He did it every Saturday, his wife explained placidly. It lessened his tensions, he said.

Our tensions at the time were concerned mainly with our septic tank which, for the umpteenth time since we'd bought the cottage, was waterlogged. It was partly the Spring, of course. The rain soaking the ground, the streams coming down from the hills, the fact that we lived in the Valley bottom where the water collected naturally. It was also, as we knew from experience, an undoubted fact that our outlet pipes were silted up. Had they been put in steeply sloping, as they should have been, they would have cleared themselves by gravity. Put in practically horizontally, as they were, over a period of time the silt built up, the water couldn't get through, the silt dried out like cement – and, as Sidney, our erstwhile handyman, cheerfully put it, there we were again, bunged up.

Sidney could afford to be cheerful. The last time it had happened he'd been working for us at weekends and had the job of digging down to the pipes himself. Since then, however, Sidney had prospered. Become his ageing builder-employer's right-hand man, drove the lorry, acted as fore-man. Sidney was beyond the spare-time clearing of people's drains now, and who could blame him? The snag was, so now he was in charge of it – was Sidney's firm.

'Have to wait a long time afore we'd get down to he', he informed us, checking off a list of waiting customers as long as the lane. 'You could do 'n yourself , though', he added, as though the thought had suddenly struck him. 'Dig down here ' – indicating an area under the rockery. 'Rod 'n through there' – indicating the line of the pipes under the lawn. 'Do 'n in half a day, as easy as pie'.

On the previous occasion it had taken Sidney a fortnight of spare-time work to get to the pipes, several hours of poking and prodding to clear out the silt, and ourselves (since at that stage Sidney had had enough and we didn't see sign of him for ages) a couple of months of personal endeavour to fill in the hole. Half a day – even though, as Sidney light-heartedly pointed out, we didn't need to dig the pipes right up this time; just find th' end and rod 'em along – seemed optimistic even at that stage. A fortnight later, with a positive slag-heap of earth on the lawn, Charles about eight feet deep down a hole like a churchyard vault and still no sign of the pipes, Charles turned purple when he thought of Sidney.

It wasn't just digging the hole, he said with feeling. It was being down it when people came past. Miss Wellington peering over and asking what he was doing, for instance – to which Charles replied 'Digging a hole'. Father Adams enquiring whether he were practising to be Sexton, then to which Charles's reply was unrepeatable. The Rector coming in to introduce a friend – neither of them apparently the least perturbed about Charles being down below ground level, but what, demanded Charles, must it have looked like?

What it looked like when he wasn't working, with the hole covered with sheets of corrugated iron on which sat two Siamese cats importantly mouse-hunting and, if she could possibly get at it, Annabel climbing the earth-mound for practice on her way back to her stable, was also a matter for speculation.

His most embarrassing moment was my fault, however. It was a Saturday afternoon when Charles, after a particularly frustrating morning, said he wasn't going out again; he'd finished. We'd get another contractor, he said. One out from town if necessary. Him all the time in dirty clothes, he said. People coming by and staring at him. That cat, he said, with a glare at Solomon, getting down the hole and under his feet as fast as he dug it – to which Solomon aggrievedly replied that he didn't want the mice down there biting him, did he?

It was I who said oh come now, just an inch or two more and he was bound to find the pipe, and if anybody came by he could duck. It was I, therefore, who was responsible for the fact that when a short while later the riding school came past – the only people who, from the backs of their horses, could look over the gate and down the hole and see him – Charles was there once more in the bottom of the trench.

It was a good thing he was, because at that moment he noticed something he hadn't seen before. Two feet up from the floor of the hole, there in the hard-packed earth wall, solid with silt itself which was why we hadn't spotted it, was the round clay rim of the outlet pipe. He'd been digging on beyond it for at least a week.

I didn't know that at the time. All I knew was that I heard voices and looked out to see the riding teacher conversing as imperturbably with Charles, in the bowels of the earth, as if he'd been sitting on a horse at her side, while surrounding her in a parade-style semi-circle, gazing down upon him with the greatest of interest, were ten round-eyed children and their ponies.

I wasn't surprised that his face was red when they'd gone and he clambered out. I forgot that, though, in the excitement of the discovery of the outlet. We fetched the drain-rods; pushed them up the pipes; Charles took off the cover of the septic tank to check the level, at which the cats appeared across the lawn as if by magic... Sheba to be immediately retrieved, wailing that she only wanted to look, from hanging head-first down the septic tank; Solomon to be hauled, howling about the mice he knew were there, from the by now highly vulnerable bottom of the hole. Just in time, too, for a moment later the silt gave way and four feet of drainage water shot into the hole with a roar. The operation, at last, was a success.

It was some days later that I was in the garden when the riding school went by again and the teacher heartily enquired as to whether I was pregnant. 'Huh?' I enquired open-mouthed, sure I must have misheard. 'I said are you PREGNANT?' she shouted stentorially. 'ANNABEL I mean', she yelled as she cantered past.