Lantana Lane (25 page)

When Jack Hawkins and Joe Hardy strolled down, with Butch at heel, they found Nelson and Herbie Bassett already there, but taking no notice of each other. Nelson was sitting on a telegraph pole, and looking rather disreputable, as he always does after wet weather. His plumage was askew, his white breast stained and ruffled; he had been on short rations during the cyclone and, unwilling to wait for breakfast at Gwinny's, had begun digging worms at daybreak, so his beak and claws were heavily encrusted with red mud. He was also put out, for the meal Gwinny had at last provided was disgracefully meagre, and she had even tried to palm off a bit of cooked sausage on him. Offended by this, he had flown straight off to the Kennedys', but they—though lavish with endearments and apologies—had found nothing better to offer him than the dead worms from the bathroom floor. Then, cruising disconsolately along the Lane, he had found one of his favourite perches no longer perpendicular. To a bird of pretty fixed habits, all this was gravely disturbing.

Herbie had been up since daybreak too, but so far he had done nothing except place outside his gate a packing-case upon which he was still seated, staring with great contentment at the brand-new spectacle so conveniently provided right opposite his house.

It was worth staring at, too. Lying as it did at the foot of the Lane's first hill, the tree had formed an effective dam, and there now stretched out on its western side quite an extensive lake of muddy water. This so altered the aspect of a familiar spot that not only a confirmed starer like Herbie, but any resident of the Lane, could be excused for finding it worthy of prolonged study. Its vast roots, towering nakedly above the lantana, were festooned with ancient barbed wire, for it had elected to grow exactly on Herbie's boundary, and its downfall had torn out what was left of that part of the fence. Its head—which consisted of several bare branches, and one which still boasted a few tufts of leaves—had come down well inside the Achesons' property, and across two rows of their pines. One glance was sufficient to assure Jack that no vehicle now east of it—not Aub's jeep, nor Bruce's Land Rover, nor even Kelly—was going to get out of the Lane till it was removed. This was a matter of some moment to himself, for no doubt the meat and the mail would get through to the store to-day, and since Herbie had no car, and Joe's ute was not registered for the road, and all the others were on the wrong side of the tree, it would clearly be up to him. He sighed.

“No hope of sneaking round this one,” he observed.

“Not Buckley's chance,” agreed Joe. “Take a bit out of her—that's the only way.”

They waded through the lake, clambered over the trunk, and stood back on the other side to consider the problem.

“Made a mess, hasn't she?” Jack remarked with that note of appreciation which anything superlative inspires, even a superlative nuisance.

“Always reckoned she'd go some day,” said Joe. “Never thought she'd last as long as she has. Pretty near dead these last ten years, she's been.”

Jack nodded.

“She has, too. Done in your fence, Herbie.”

“No matter,” replied Herbie placidly. “The cows ain't going to get past the roots.”

Jack inspected the roots, and grunted acquiescence. He crossed the road and studied the other end. “Won't worry Tim much, either—the lantanna's close around it.” He peered into the mashed up vegetation. “Hey, Joe,” he called, “see that bit of rusty iron sticking up there? . . . Bet you don't know what that is!”

“Looks like a plough,” said Joe.

“It is, too.” Jack stared at it with a kind of awe. “Old plough my dad dumped there. Must have been pretty near twenty years ago! Dumped an old stove at the same time—that might be it a bit farther in . . . see?”

“Go on!” said Joe, impressed. “And that there,” he added, pointing, “that'd be the mudguard off Harry Maxwell's Ford—remember? It conked out a few years before he sold to Tim. He must've chucked his old wire-netting there too, when he put up the new fowlyard. What's that pink thing? . . .” He climbed on to the trunk for a better view. “Cripes, it's a real big mirror with roses painted on it—not broken, or nothin'! Who d'you reckon would throw out a good thing like that? . . .”

“Me,” said Herbie. Joe turned to stare at him.

“What for?”

“It got in me way.”

“Break it down I “protested Joe. “How'd a mirror get in your way—just hangin' on the wall? Real artistic, it is. I reckon it's a shame, throwin' out a nice article like that.” He was shaking his head as he climbed down from the trunk and rejoined Jack, who was now prodding into the lantana with his brush-hook. “What's that you found?”

“Only old fencing wire. All tangled up with the lantanna. There won't be any cows poking far into that, so Tim's pines ought to be safe enough. But the tree's flattened some of them already.”

“Pretty near due to come out anyhow—that lot,” said Joe. They returned to the middle of the road, and stared hard at the trunk again.

“Have to get her shifted,” said Jack.

“Too right,” responded Joe. “We'll get cracking as soon as a few others turn up. Here's Tim comin' down now.”

Tim and Biddy were both coming—but slowly, for they were followed by Jeremy and Jennifer, who were finding it heavy going in the slippery mud, and required constant encouragement. They all gained the road at last, however, and after greetings had been exchanged, Tim related his adventures while crawling about inside the roof looking for a leak, and Biddy chipped in at intervals, describing her agitation as she imagined the roof going, and Tim, presumably, going with it. This recital was interrupted by the arrival of Tony, who spattered everyone with water as he jumped from the tree trunk into the lake, where he was joined almost at once by Dave and Tommy Hawkins. Biddy, after some fruitless attempts to persuade her offspring that they didn't really want to play in the nasty, muddy water, said resignedly that, after all, everything was too wet for them to keep dry anyhow, and gave them permission to go in. “They're in already,” Tony pointed out, and was deservedly ignored.

Conversation then began again, and Joe stated that he never took much notice of cyclones now, because he reckoned there wasn't much more they could do to bother him—but Uncle Cuth, he had the wind up properly. Jack described the row made by a four-gallon oil drum as it rolled down the iron roof, and told what had happened to Amy's clothes-prop. Herbie, when asked for an account of his experiences, merely smiled, and replied that he had spent most of the crisis in bed and asleep; he could not be bothered explaining that a cyclone is not a rewarding thing to watch, on account of its restlessness.

While they were chatting thus, Aub and Alf came along, and as soon as they were within earshot, Aub shouted his intention of going straight back into the newsagency business just as soon as he could find some ruddy lunatic to buy his farm. Nelson burst into loud, derisive laughter, and Alf made rumbling noises which his neighbours understood to mean that cyclones were fair cows, but it didn't do to let them get you down.

The Lane at this moment provided a spectacle probably unprecedented in the whole of its history. It is not possible to take it in from ground level however; what is needed is a bird's-eye view, so we cannot do better than to borrow Nelson's. His most noticeable characteristic, as we have already indicated, is imperturbability, but any member of the group below who had happened to glance up at him now would have remarked an uneasiness amounting almost to agitation in his demeanour. For the whole road, both to the east and the west, was dotted with the figures of those who, by immemorial custom, should at this hour have been variously employed behind their own lantana, but who were, instead, converging singly, in pairs or in groups upon this spot. Rather in the manner of a spectator at a tennis match, Nelson was turning his head rapidly from side to side in an attempt to keep them all under observation.

Heading the procession from the east came Bruce Kennedy, but he was presently overtaken and left behind by the Bell twins and Lynette, whose excitement on gaining the top of the hill, and observing the aquatic gambols in progress near the Tree, lent wings to their bare feet.

“Yippee-ee-ee-ee!” yelled Ding and Dong, charging down the slope.

“Come on!” shouted Tony unnecessarily.

“Yee-ee-ee-ee!” shrieked Lynette with such breath as she could spare from the task of keeping up with her brothers. They arrived in a body, scrambled on to the fallen trunk, and leapt gladly into the water; but the adults had moved back in time.

Bruce had stopped to wait for Dick and Henry, and these three were the next to arrive, closely followed by Daphne who, with motherly solicitude, was holding Joy by the hand to keep her from slipping—an attention which Joy was fiercely resisting. Behind them came a hilarious group consisting of Sue, Marge and Aunt Isabelle, escorted by Ken, and surrounded, as it were, by Jake. Turning once more to the west, Nelson perceived another hand-in-hand pair approaching, namely old Mrs. Hawkins and her youngest grandson, Keithie, but—whether owing to the age of the one, or the youth of the other—their progress was very slow, so he clicked his head eastward again to watch the rest of the Bell family swinging along at a good pace, as the Bells always do, heads up and shoulders back, and Gwinny marching every bit as smartly as EElaine and the boys.

By the time all these had added themselves to the group at the Tree, there were twenty-nine persons present (not counting Nelson, Jake and Butch), which is only five short of the Lane's full muster. The meeting had noticeably assumed the character of a social occasion, so it seems advisable to repeat that the adults, at least, were still informed by a commendable spirit of duty and communal self-help—proof of which was to be seen in the axes, brush-hooks and crowbars with which all the men had equipped themselves; and though the ill-natured might say they seemed in no hurry to use them, the fair-minded might justly retort that there had so far been no chance to do so. For each new arrival had to report the character and extent of the damage his property had suffered, and the others were naturally required to repeat for his benefit an account of their own ordeals. Aunt Isabelle's discourse, in particular, took a very long time, for besides describing events, and giving a detailed analysis of her emotions, she touched upon such matters as the effect of noise upon the nervous systems of Sue and Henry (“. . . me, I am unaffected . . .”), the efficacy of will-power as an aid to sleep, and the purpose of Divine Providence in allowing cyclones at all.

Yet even with all this to engage their attention, the men did not completely forget the real purpose of the gathering. Now and then one of them would make a remark about the Tree, and there would be a pause in the chatter while everyone stood and looked at it, pondering. Joe, for instance, expressed the opinion that the white ants had been at her, so Jack prodded the trunk with a crowbar, and Bruce knocked out a few chips with his axe, and Aub gave it a kick, and Ken took a swipe at it with his brush-hook, and they all gravely agreed that the white ants had, indeed, been at her. Then, a little later on, Jack remarked, eyeing it critically, that he reckoned they could do the job with two cuts; and Aub objected that she was all of four feet in diameter, and if you put one cut
here,
and the other
here,
you'd have a twelve-foot length to get rid of; and Henry said hopefully that maybe the jeep and the Rover between them could move it. Bruce then did a few measurements with a stick, squatted on his heels making cabbalistic marks in the mud, and presently announced that the cut out length would have a content of about a hundred and fifty cubic feet; did anyone know, he enquired, what a cubic foot of hardwood weighed? While all the women were respectfully waiting for the men to answer this, and all the men were knitting their brows, and trying to look as if they really did know, but had forgotten for the moment, Biddy suddenly said in a bewildered voice that the trunk was round, and she thought cubes were square? . . . Bruce replied quite civilly that cubes were cubic, and Biddy retorted that anyway, they weren't
round,
and she couldn't see what square cubes had to do with a round trunk. Bruce, in a tone of slightly strained patience, pointed out that the trunk was not round, but cylindrical, and Biddy—her Irish blood well up—said that even if it was, all the cylinders she had ever seen were round, so what were they arguing about? This led to a general and extremely animated discussion (accompanied by much drawing of diagrams on the ground, and much quoting of such examples as pennies, wedding-rings, tennis balls and water pipes), about the nature of discs, globes, spheres, circles and cylinders, from which it seemed to transpire, rather to everyone's astonishment, that simply nothing at all was round.

It is pretty universally accepted that in any undertaking theory should be mastered before practice is attempted, so it cannot be said that this excursion into the theoretical, mathematical, etymological and (one might almost say) metaphysical aspects of chopping through a tree trunk was a waste of time. But it certainly made everyone feel thirsty, and the loudly cheered appearance of the five missing Lane dwellers could not have been more opportune. Here we may note, too, another demonstration of how unnecessary organisation is when the common need is understood by all; for there, coming down the western hill, were Amy Hawkins and Bill, with baskets containing mugs and scones in their hands, and a kerosene tin full of tea slung on the copper stick between them; and there, coming over the eastern hill at precisely the same moment, were Myra and Heather, bearing more baskets containing more scones, more mugs, and more tea in thermos flasks.

That, you will say, makes four—not five. But we have yet to explain that the fifth was Uncle Cuth who, having seen the tea set out, had hurriedly scuttled forth in pursuit, and was now, despite his years, gaining upon it so fast that everyone was much impressed, and gave him a cheer all to himself.