A Postillion Struck by Lightning (6 page)

“I've seen Nuns in England. In Hampstead, in the Finchley Road and on a bus,” said my sister. “They can't all come from the same place. Anyway,” she added, pouring very carefully so that the “muck” didn't slide down the outside of the bottle and spoil the label, “anyway … they're jolly well welcome to her.”

I lay on my stomach and ate a bit of grass which tasted like liquorice. Right down at the bottom of the meadow stood a clump of cows, brown and white, all standing looking at nothing. Sometimes they stamped a foot to move the flies, or tossed their heads and mooed; their tails swung and flicked; and there they stood chewing and blinking and looking at nothing, round the little iron gate. If Lally or our mother saw them round the gate like that they turned right in the road and walked a mile and a half up the chalk road to the house. They were so frightened.

My knees were cold; I rolled over and saw that my sister had got most of the stuff into the bottle, poured some water in, and was swirling it round and round, with her tongue sticking out like an adder's.

“That's it!” she said happily and shoved the cork in with a thump of her fist.

We took it and hid it in the scullery so that it could stand all night and settle. Otherwise it just looked like a sort of soup.

But in the morning, about midday when it was hottest and the hikers were scrambling up the gully, it would look like a lovely cool bottle of orangeade left behind after a picnic. To make it look a bit like that, we used to scatter a few bits of paper about, and screw up some cake boxes and things; sometimes an eggshell or two, so that it looked more real.

And the bottles always disappeared.

We all sat round the kitchen table in the soft glow of the evening light. It was too early to light the lamps, and the pink sun outside the windows just glanced on the knives and forks and the amber handle of the brass kettle on the range.

Angelica was pale but a bit more cheerful at the sight of food. She had changed her travelling clothes and combed her hair and washed her face, because she smelled of soap, and we wondered if she'd done any more than that, caught each other's eyes and squirmed with giggles.

Lally banged the fish server against the side of the pan.

“That's enough!” she said. “You two mind your P's and Q's or I'll take the back of my hand to you.” She knew something was up, she always did.

The roach had sort of shrivelled up a bit; not enough for us all as it happened. But
we
had pilchards on toast while Angelica picked her way through the bones of her fish. But it didn't worry us because it made us look a bit more polite, and anyway we'd eaten hundreds of roach and liked pilchards best.

“They went specially out to catch these for you, these two,” said Lally, waving her fork at us. “So you know they must be fresh; can't abide them myself, too muddy,” she went on, “but I must say I like a nice pilchard, for all they repeat till Thursday forenoon.” Angelica fiddled away at another bone.

“We're not actually supposed to have pilchards,” I explained, thinking she might be interested, but all she said was “Oh.”

“Because,” I went on, cutting through a crust, “because our father won't have anything in the house in tins.”

“He says everything in tins is Japanese and they kill people,” said my sister.

“And if you so much as open your mouth and say anything about this,” said Lally with a glinting look at us both, “I'll fetch you a wallop on the side of your heads as'll give you both a mastoid.”

Eggshell had a humpity back, long white hair and a black coat down to her ankles. She never spoke to us, just hurried past with her head wagging and a funny black hat like half an egg pulled down to her eyes. So we called her Eggshell.

She lived up at the top of Red Barn Hill in a wooden caravan with big wheels and a little door at one end which opened in two pieces like a stable door. The caravan was just outside a little elderberry wood right on the edge of the hill; it was painted red and the wheels were blue, but that was a long time ago, and now they were faded down to almost pale pink and grey. There was a pointy little chimney sticking out of the roof, and sometimes you could see the smoke coming out with a smell of cooking, which made her seem a bit more real and not frightening. To get to the caravan you had to go up a little path, high up the hill from the gully, and then into the elder wood, and along another little twisty path all among the rabbit burrows, and then you'd see an old rusty milk churn, a little bit of garden, about as big as a box, and then the steps and door of the caravan. And that's as near as we ever got; it's as near as anyone ever got ever. Even Reg Fluke, and he's braver than I am, only got as far as that—so you can see that she
was
a
bit
frightening and of course she would be, because she was a witch.

We knew that because of the long hair and the funny hat and coat and all the cats. She must have had a hundred cats at least. Well, perhaps not a hundred exactly but really millions of them. You could see them sitting round the caravan: playing, sleeping or just sitting. And they were all colours; not only black like a witch's cat.

Once when my sister and I were up there hiding in the elders watching her, we saw her feeding them and heard, actually heard, her talking to them! That was a bit amazing really because we never heard her talk to anyone in all our lives. Just the cats. But we couldn't hear what she said; it was just a mumbling sort of sound, and she bent her way among them giving them bits of something to eat from a bag. We were a bit disappointed because, clear as clear, you could see the words “Home and Colonial”
written on the bag and that didn't seem to fit in. But my sister said it had probably been left behind by some Londoners on a picnic and she'd stolen it. I said that I didn't think it could be stolen if she had found it and they had left it behind not wanting it, and my sister said: “Well, how do you know they didn't want it? She most likely stole it. Witches do. Remember about children. They give them to the Gipsies.” And I fell silent, remembering what I had heard. But wanting to like her anyway, witch or not, because she liked the cats.

Reg Fluke, who lived at Farm Cottages in the valley, said that his mother, Beattie Fluke, used to go and see the witch, when she was a girl, because of her chilblains. Reg Fluke was a Village Boy, and we weren't, strictly speaking, allowed to play with him because of that. “They'll spoil your speaking ways,” said Lally, and “They'll get you into mischief and do things you wouldn't like to tell your mother about,” which made Reg Pretty Exciting. But actually he was a bit soft in the head and we didn't want to play with him anyway.

His mother was a bit different. And she was grown up. We sometimes used to meet her outside the Magpie in the afternoon, walking a bit funnily and with a bit of a red face as if she had been running. But she was always very friendly and used to carry a big white jug full of beer home for her husband's tea. She had a squashed face like a red orange, full of little holes, and a huge fat nose and no teeth, and she laughed so much you couldn't see her eyes, which got all squeezed up and ran with tears, so that she was forever wiping them, and her nose, with the back of the hand which was not carrying the jug.

“She's a witch all right,” she roared with laughter when we asked her. “Been a witch all her life for all she's called Nellie Wardle and had a son as went to the war. Seen her about on her broomstick many a winter's night.” We were sitting with Beattie Fluke on the river-bank, just beside the bridge. It was very hot, and she was having little sips of her husband's tea and fanning herself with her green tam o'shanter. “When I was a girl my mother used to take me along to her for my chilblains. I can't tell you what I had to
do
, that wouldn't be very nice, now would it, but it worked a treat. Oh! she had spells for everything … toothache, and harvest bugs and nettle-rash and never-you-mind-what-else. There's many a lady in this village as has got a lot to be thankful for to Nellie Wardle—and they don't go round the
graveyard laying no wreaths, I can tell you that!” She roared with laughter and had some more of Mr Fluke's tea.

“But she doesn't really fly, honestly Mrs Fluke?” said my sister.

Mrs Fluke lay back in the grass and started laughing so much she spilled her jug. “Sometimes I actually seen 'er loop the loop!” she said, shaking with laughter and the tears pouring out of her screwed up eyes. “Loop the bloody loop, right over the church with streams of fire coming out of her behind.” And she laughed until she choked and sat up slowly. For a moment the three of us looked at each other in silence, and then Mrs Fluke made a rather rude noise and said: “I can almost see her this minute … with all the flames … twirling and twirling and twirling.” And she stopped, put her hand to her mouth with no teeth and said: “Now you run away and play, I'm going to have forty winks.” And laying back in the grass, she put her tam o'shanter over her face and started to snore.

We walked along the path to the bridge in silence, pulling at the tall summer grasses and scuffing the stones along in front of us. Presently my sister said:

“I think she was lying. You couldn't possibly have flames coming from there, you'd get burnt.”

“And anyhow they don't fly on brooms … that's old fairy tale stuff. They just live in dark places with cats and do spells.”

“They
do
have cats,” agreed my sister, “and she's got hundreds.”

“And I bet she does spells. I think Mrs Fluke was right about that because Reg said she'd told him. About the chilblain part.”

“Oh! I'm sure she's a witch, she
looks
like a witch to start with. Anyway let's make her a witch, it's more creepy like that.”

So Eggshell was a witch from then on. We leant over the bridge making spit gobs and watching them float under our feet, rather like Pooh-Sticks, only we couldn't be bothered to run to the other side to see which of us had won.

“I think she's quite
vulgar
, don't you?” my sister asked.

“Mrs Fluke? Awfully. Saying ‘Bloody' and making that noise. Awfully.”

A moorhen went dibble-dabbling along the sedge and, seeing us, scurried into the willows.

“Behind seems quite a rude word,” my sister said.

“I bet the Prince of Wales never says it.”

“Do you think he's got one though?” my sister asked thoughtfully. “I don't think Kings and Queens have them.”

“How do they go' then?” I said. “They must have.”

“I suppose so. It's too difficult. But I do think ‘behind' is quite a rude word,” she said.

I made a very big gob, sucking in my cheeks to do it, and watched it swirl slowly down until it went splot in the water. “Bum is much ruder,” I said.

My sister gave a shriek of delight and spun round on one foot. “Oh! yes!” she cried. “Bum's much ruder,” and ran away laughing up to the road.

So we decided to take Angelica to see the witch. The week was pretty dull so far. When I showed her how to blow an egg she'd had a coughing fit and we had to hit her on the back quite hard; she had been quite polite and nice, and interested in the slow-worm, but not anxious to touch it, and enjoyed a picnic in the big haystack in the yard, but hadn't liked the prickles, and come for a walk down the gully but found it damp, and generally was a Londoner. Lally said one evening that she was homesick, and that people who lived in towns usually were in the country because the quiet got them down. But my sister and I thought that she was (a) stuck up, (b) a cissy, and (c) soft in the head. Whoever went for walks, and quite long ones, in shiny London shoes—or read in her room on hot days when the larks were up in the sky wheeling and swooping and making it all loveliness? And Holy books at that. One we saw in her room was the Life of St Theresa. And there was a picture of a droopy sort of lady in brown, holding a bunch of roses and looking up to see if it was raining.