Doreen Tovey - Donkey Work

We certainly couldn't. The howling was Solomon, with the other cats cornered in crevices or up trees, telling them what he'd do to them. Bite their ears off! he roared, undulating like an air-raid warning and probably deafening them for days. Pull their tails out! Punch their noses if they touched a twig on Siamese property! Which was all very well, but Solomon didn't catch the rats himself. All he did was come in with his eyes watering and frighten us into thinking he'd picked up a germ, until we realised it happened every time and the explanation was that the passion with which he'd been howling had made his eyes run. One day he also came in reeking of ammonia where a besieged adversary had sprayed at him in self-defence and we had, while he howled some more, to Dettol him. We were jolly glad when Annabel got keen on her food again, the rats and cats apparently disappeared, and life returned to normal.

As normal as it ever is, that is. We – it was now three weeks to Christmas – were having our sitting-room fireplace altered. The modern one, which had been the bugbear of our lives for years, taken out; an oak beam set in the wall as it must have been originally; and a simple, wide brick fireplace with an air-control principle behind it set back into the alcove.

Sidney, when we first asked him about doing the job, asked incredulously what did we want to move the old one out for. Nice shiny tiles, boiler and all behind, what did we want better than that? Sidney, reconciled eventually to our having a brick one, wilted again when we suggested setting it back in the alcove. Whip the first 'un out, he said persuasively; bung the brick 'un flat in its place – did we realise what it would mean in altering pipes alone if we went back into that wall? Sidney, bringing along his mate Norm to confirm the position when we still insisted on excavating the alcove, had a moment or two of intense hilarity when Norm said 'twould mean altering all the plumbing. I said we could do without hot water for a day or two. Norm and Sidney fell helpless on one another's shoulders at my innocence and said 'twould be more like a week but go ahead and order the thing if we wanted to. We did. The parts, ordered in September, arrived three months later. Sidney, when we told him, said Lumme he thought we'd forgotten that lot, he was in the middle of decorating his bathroom. Pressed for co-operation on account of the nearness of Christmas he said Norm and his other mate Ern might possibly help him. And so the job was done.

At weekends and evenings. Taking just over a fortnight and seeming like all eternity. With the windows open to the winter blasts to get the rubble out – half a lorry load at least said Sidney and Co., gleefully tipping it with Charles' co-operation into the storm ditch outside the gate and I knew, come January, we'd have to dig it out again. Discovering three flues built one behind the other in the chimney wall, the bar on which the first cottager's wife must have hung her cauldrons, but – to the team's great disappointment – no hidden gold.

The great oak beam was sawn to size on the sitting-room floor and hoisted into place, Sidney commenting relievedly that he was glad that was in. He wouldn't, he said (which was the first we'd heard of it) have slept in the place the last couple of nights himself, he wouldn't, with a hole like that in the wall and nothing to hold it up. The plumbing was disconnected and, through somebody not turning a screw tightly enough, water flooded the floor amid the sawdust and cement. A hole was made for the new air control pipe through from the sitting-room to the conservatory – a hole which went down like a mine and under and up, and as soon as the team went home the cats started going down like a mine and under and up too, yelling their surprise at finding themselves among the chrysanthemums and nipping round to the back door to be let in and try some more.

When the hole was filled in again Solomon took to being the Third Man in the Vienna sewers – creeping mysteriously around under dust covers and narrowly escaping being sat on. Sheba sat dramatically on the carpet, which was piled on the table with the underfelt and the table pushed against a window. The curtains were down on account of the dust and Sheba, perched perpetually on her mound of carpet, not only attracted far more attention from passers-by than our activities would otherwise have had, but at night, when the lights (without shades) were on, she added a waif-like touch to the scene that made it look as if we were either in for a Christmas like the Cratchits or else, as Charles remarked, as if she was expecting the floods at any minute and was already on Mount Ararat.

I was sweating pretty hard about Christmas myself, but we made it all right. The fireplace went in. The mess was cleared up. Ern, working dementedly in a clockwise direction, painted the entire room with two coats of white with the biggest brush he could find while Sidney and Norm put the finishing touches to the mantelpiece.

Not, even then, that the job was without its involvements. Sidney arrived one night towards the end of the period, tired out as were we all with the effort it had entailed, and informed us that his cousin Bert had called the night before about his staircase. Sidney, it seemed, had some time previously promised Bert that one of these days he'd alter it for him – to one of these modem styles, said Sidney, with open treads and bamboo poles to grow ivy up.

Fraught, apparently, with the same desire to have ivy and bamboo poles on their stairs for Christmas as we had to sit by an old-style fireplace, Bert and his wife had spent the previous Sunday stripping the staircase; come joyfully round to tell Sidney they were ready for him to start work; Sidney, exhausted with our little lot, said not before Christmas he wasn't; and when Bert's wife said but what were they going to do, they'd taken all the paper off, Sidney (a remark which we gathered he now regretted) had suggested they stick it back on again.

This has more to do with the story of Annabel than it may seem. While Sidney and Co. worked in their spare time on our fireplace, you see, they discussed these other jobs with us. At the beginning of the period they were working during the day on a farmhouse in the neighbourhood whose owners were restoring it to its original Elizabethan state, and Sidney's condition of near apoplexy at having to take up a fine polished parquet floor in the hall and replace it with flagstones (guess what he'd been doing all day, he said resignedly on one occasion; going round the outhouses, tapping the floor for flagstones, digging 'em up as if they was gold and washing 'em) was equalled only by his indignation the following night when he said what did we think he was doing now? Taking up the kitchen floor on account of its consisting of cracked old flagstones which they hadn't been able to find enough of in the outhouses. Transporting it by wheelbarrow through to the hall – the place, said Sidney, was nothing but duckboards and the cook was going mad. Replacing it in the kitchen, he informed us in a voice full of tragedy, not even by the parquet but by blooming old red cement.

By the time the fireplace was finished Sidney and Co. were engaged on another curious task. Digging up the village maypole, which was normally a permanent fixture in the school playground, and erecting it in the local guest house which had borrowed it for the Christmas festivities. Not to ask him why they were doing maypole dances at Christmas, said Sidney exasperatedly. For the same reason people took up flagstones in their kitchen and bunged 'em down in their hall he expected. What got him was that they had to keep putting it up and down. Up in the morning for the kids to practise, down at night for the guest house visitors to play table tennis. He and his mates was marching up and down the road like a picket patrol, he said, and if it came down when they was gigglegacking round it at Christmas and hit 'em on their silly gert heads 'twould serve 'em right.