A Postillion Struck by Lightning (10 page)

We didn't see much of Mr and Mrs Poulter, they were quite old, and just now and then I would see him pottering about in his vegetables next door, or perhaps Mrs Poulter would peg out a bit of washing. Sometimes they'd wave at us. But usually they were very quiet. I don't think that they ever spoke to Mrs Jane or Lally over the little fence which ran down the middle of the
gardens, but Gooze did quite often. Gooze was older than Lally and wore glasses and a slide in her hair which was rather short and had a fringe in front. She wore plimsolls, black and white speckles, just the same as the ones we wore for Gym at school, and a long droopy woolly with a belt. She was very pale and smiled all the time. And she hadn't got many teeth. But she was very nice, and once she called us over to the fence to show us an Oxo tin with a dead mouse in it. “Found it in the wash-house dead,” she said. “Now I'm going to bury 'im, Mrs Poulter can't abide mice,” and she went away laughing a lot. We thought she was rather odd. Lally said she was “a bit thin up on top, but no harm in her”, and told us that when she had asked her mother and father where she came from they told her from under a gooseberry bush. And that's why she was called Gooze.

Thinking about it all I began to hum a bit and feel happy and looking forward to something. “When would we go to Twickenham?” I asked. Lally was just passing me, carrying the lamps on a tray into the sitting-room and she gave quite a jump. “Goodness, you startled me. I thought you were in one of your sulks,” she said and went on into the room. “We could go when I have my two weeks in September,” she called. “If your mother and father say yes you could come up with me then. September for the Victoria Plums.” I collected the wicks and took the chimneys from my sister, who was busy breathing on them and polishing them up with a yellow duster. I heard Lally climbing the stairs to the bedrooms with our lamps and so I called out to her, “All right. I'll let the canary go tomorrow morning if we can go to Twickenham in September.” My sister looked very astonished. “Don't forget to remind her about the other canary, the one she said you could have if you go there,” she hissed. “She might forget.” I went to the stairs and called up into the darkening rooms, “You won't forget the canary, tho', will you?”

Lally was in her room and the door was closed so that her voice sounded far away. “We'll see about that when the time comes. If you've done those wicks and the chimneys you'd better set the table for supper. The Prince of Wales will be here presently …” I went back to the kitchen and started smoothing out the tablecloth. “She hasn't forgotten about the bird, she's just not going to say anything definite,” I said.

My sister scattered some plates about and got the pickles down and the butter and the cocoa jug. “Well, let's let the other one go
first thing in the morning, that'll remind her of her promise,” she said and smiled a smug looking smile. “Perhaps we could get two canaries next time … real ones I mean. And then we could build an aviary place and have a real tree and things inside so that they could have a nest and eggs and everything. And we could sell the babies and make a lot of money, that would be nice, wouldn't it?” But I was too busy thinking about Twickenham to answer her.

Very early the next morning we took the cage out into the garden under the apple tree and I opened the door. The canary just skittered and fluttered and banged itself against the wires and Lally told us to come away and leave it alone. Which we did. And when we turned round it had gone! Just like that. It didn't fly away over the fields singing and singing for joy. Just vanished. There was nothing in the cage except a few crumbly feathers.

“I never saw it go!” said my sister. “It must have been in a terrific hurry to escape.”

I felt quite miserable really. I had been so proud of it. But of course if it was really a dyed linnet it was better to let it go because it would never have got tame; wild birds never do in cages. My sister tried to cheer me up; she could be quite nice sometimes when she was feeling in the mood, which wasn't often; and sometimes it was because she wanted me to do something for her which she knew she couldn't do for herself. And she was in one of those moods this morning, I could feel it.

“Come on,” she said, taking my arm, “let's go down to the gully, I've got something marvellous to show you. You will be surprised. Come on.” And because I hadn't anything else to do at that moment I went with her. We clambered up the hill outside the fence, to the top, and reached the big wood where the gully was hidden. It was cool and green and damp smelling under the trees; the sides of the gully were all big lumps of chalk with funny roots tangling about and long trails of ivy and deadly nightshade. It was very quiet in there; you could just hear the wind moving about in the tops of the trees and the noise of our feet slithering in the muddy ruts of the floor.

There were voles down there, and hedgehogs too. We used to hear them at dusk squeaking and rusding about in the leaves
looking for slugs. Which we thought rather disgusting. And once we found a great toad with golden eyes bulging in a little cave place in the chalk. It was almost as big as a plate and when we carried it back to the house and showed Lally she covered her face with her hands and threw the darning at us. “Take the horrible thing away!” she cried. “It'll give you warts you'll see. Take it out this instant.” She was really awfully silly about toads. She didn't mind anything else almost, except cows, but she was scared out of her wits by a humble, nice looking old toad.

But there weren't any toads down in the gully this morning. And we twisted along through the old cart ruts and brambles until my sister told me to stop, and there in front of me was a great pile of old tin cans and bits of bedsteads and rusty wire. It was just an old rubbish dump. Nothing exciting at all.

“I can't possibly be surprised by an old rubbish dump,” I said. “And anyway, I've seen it before. It's been here for years and years.”

My sister was rooting about in the tins and bits of old iron bedsteads, there were tangles of old chicken wire and an oil stove with a broken door lying in a clutter of pram wheels and shards of a broken plough.

Suddenly, amidst all the clanking and clonking my sister gave a cry and called out: “Shut your eyes. This is the surprise!” So I shut my eyes and heard her breathing and bonking and then she said I could open them and I did and there she was holding up a silly old tin box. There was nothing surprising about it at all. Just a biggish sort of biscuit tin with “Hundey and Palmers” written on it, that's all.

“Look!” she said. “Isn't it sweet, though?”

“It's a biscuit tin. I've seen hundreds and hundreds of them and I don't think it's a bit of a surprise.”

She came clambering over the pile of old junk holding her rotten old tin. “But it's practically new!” she said. “There's almost no rust on it. And it's got a nice lid which fits. It's just what I want to make my scent with.” And she set it down carefully in the muddy chalk.

“What do you mean, your scent?” I asked. She really could be very dotty sometimes, and I knew that somewhere she was getting me to do something for her. She was singing away and opening and closing the lid of her tin and tearing off the remains of the paper label.

“It's such a marvellous find. I discovered it yesterday all by myself. I was down here and I just saw it glinting in the sun, so I came all the way down, not a bit frightened really, and when I saw it I was
so
happy. Because now I can make my scent if you'll help me just a bit. All you have to do,” she said quickly in case I started to clamber up the gully and leave her in the junk heap, “all you have to do is to knock some lovely holes in the sides, and a few on top, and then I will have a wonderful stove thing to boil up the rose petals and so on.” She sat there looking up at me, her eyes wide with pleasure. I think she could almost smell her beastly scent already.

“Then what do you do? If I do knock holes in it?” I asked.

She crossed her legs importantly and hugged herself with her skinny brown arms. “Well,” she said thoughtfully. “Well then
when you do, I'll put it on some big stones, and then I'll make a fire inside with some logs, and put on the lid and then I'll have a stove. See? And the draught will come down through the holes and make the fire burn … and then it'll go up and heat the can of water and rose petals on top. And when it's all boiled it'll be scent.

I thought about this for a time. It seemed a bit dense really; but I had nothing else to do and no money to spend down at Bakers and I was still feeling a bit miserable about the canary linnet and the empty cage. So I agreed to help her and we knocked holes in the tin with a hammer and a quite big nail. I made a sort of ring pattern on each side and a bigger one on the lid. She went off collecting the stones to set it on so that we could get a good draught under it, and gathered some dead sticks and bits of bark to start the fire. And then came the boring part really; collecting the rose petals and the flowers to boil up. We got quite a lot. And some nasturtiums and a few sweet-peas which were growing all round the privy. And then she filled a cleanish tin can with water, poured in the petals and set it on the stove.

I must say that her idea worked a bit better than I thought. But it did take rather a long time to get the fire alight and we wasted hundreds of matches and used two pages of an old comic before it started to burn, and when it did there was so much smoke that my sister started coughing and groaning with her eyes pouring with tears; she looked just like a dreadful old witch. If Angelica had been there she really would have had to believe it, Catholic or not, because she was just like one. I got fed up with the smoke, and after all it wasn't my scent and I had helped her, so after a while when the smoke was rather thick and she was still spluttering and coughing away, I went off on my own under the trees and soon reached the end of the gully which came out at the very bottom of Great Meadow near the road to the village. People said that the gully was once part of an old smugglers road which led from a tunnel under our house and right down to the Magpie Public House in the village. Some people said that it went on from there all the way to the cliffs at Birling Gap where they landed all the rum and stuff on the beach and brought it up on ponies to our house where they hid it in the tunnel under our hall.

Once our mother was crossing the hall with a bowl of flowers to set on the sitting-room table and there was an awful crash and
a screech and when we all ran into the hall there was no sign of our mother at all. Just a big hole in the floor-boards. Our father was very shocked, indeed. We all were.

“Margaret!” he yelled out, “Margaret, what's happened, where are you?” And then far away under the hole, or so it seemed, we heard our mother's voice calling up, “I've fallen through the floor. I'm in a hole down here.”

Our father was peering over the edge of the hole and Lally was wringing her hands and saying, “Oh poor Lady! Poor soul! O! What'll we do?” My sister was too terrified to cry, but hearing our mother's voice was a bit reassuring.

“Margaret, are you hurt?” called our father, starting to struggle down the edge of the hole.

“No, just bruised, I think,” came our mother's voice. “Try and get a torch or a light, it's terribly dark down here.”

Lally ran off for a torch and our father threw down a box ot matches and started scrambling through the hole calling out to her all the time, “I'm coming down, dear, I'm coming down.” It was all very exciting once we knew she wasn't dead or covered in blood. At last he was hanging by his hands and I heard our mother saying in a very muffled sort of voice, “I've got your legs, darling,” or something and then he disappeared too. Just then Lally came back with the torch from the kitchen and gave a great cry when she saw no father and just the empty hole.

“Where's he gone?” she cried. “Oh Lord have mercy.”