Opposite the Cross Keys (15 page)

It was during my convalescence at Opposite the Cross Keys that the matter of the AA sign came to a head. In those days and, so far as I can remember, right up to the outbreak of World War II, when they were taken down for security reasons or else requisitioned for scrap, every village in Britain, by courtesy of the Automobile Association, sported, on a conveniently sited building, an outsize metal medallion, black-printed on a background of mustard, giving the name of the village and the names and distances of the next populated places along the road in either direction.

The occupiers of the premises on which these useful objects were displayed received the princely sum of five shillings per annum for allowing them to be so used; and Mrs Fenner was one of the AA's beneficiaries in this respect. The five shillings was her private income, notionally spent and re-spent a dozen times before the actual postal order arrived in the post. It gave her status as a woman of independent means. As to the sign itself, it was nailed to the front wall a little above the living-room window, so much part of the facade that nobody (the notional passing motorist apart) ever gave it a thought.

Until, that is, the day it was taken down and put up on the Leaches' cottage instead.

The reason for this unheralded sideways movement was that, a little before, Mr Leach had left his former occupation, whatever that might have been, to become an AA scout, one of those stalwarts who patrolled the highways and byways of the UK on motor-cycle combinations raising their gauntleted hands in salute to any driver whose vehicle sported the gleaming AA insignia on its radiator.

Apart from this modern equivalent of forelock-pulling, they also rendered assistance in cases of puncture or minor mechanical breakdown, though – or so one got the impression – not enough to risk dirtying their natty uniforms of mustard and black, which none of the Association's members, even
in extremis
, would have wanted, for the sight of one of those godlike creatures touching his cap was enough to make a driver's day. If, on the other hand, you preferred blue-grey to mustard and black (as my mother did) you joined the Royal Automobile Club instead: but as to the sheer panache of their individual salutes, there was nothing to choose between them.

When the news of Mr Leach's new job filtered through to the neighbours, the Fenners fell about laughing, because there was nothing either stalwart or godlike about Mr Leach. But it was amazing: buttoned tightly into his mustard jacket, the two rows of buttons slanting down from broad-seeming shoulders to slim-seeming waist, his breeches tailored to a T and his black-peaked cap on his head, he looked transformed, whilst his salute alone was worth the annual subscription.

As if they weren't uppish enough already, the Leaches in their new role became insufferable. Mrs Leach stopped going about with her hair in curling pins, and went into Norwich once a week to have it marcelled. She let it be known that they were thinking of taking their annual holiday in Dunkirk sur mer, which was a place in France, very French.

Having got the AA to shift the sign to their wall, they went to the police – specifically to PC Utting, who lived in the Salham St Awdry police house – when, or so they alleged, Charlie Fenner shinned up a ladder one night when they'd gone into Norwich to the pictures, and painted it black all over.

PC Utting didn't think much of the AA scouts, whom he saw as encroachers on his own bailiwick. He didn't think much of the Fenners either, but at least they didn't act as if they were a superior order of police. Before the Fenner-Leach feud blew up, separating the village into two opposing camps, most people in St Awdry's would have been surprised to learn that there ever was an AA sign on Opposite the Cross Keys; but once their attention was directed to the circular discoloration left by its abduction they instantly remembered that of course there was.

Most of them became angry with the Leaches, not so much because they were for the Fenners, who, to be truthful, were not all that popular in the village – though poor they weren't meek, as God had intended the poor to be – as because, on principle, they did not care to have things altered, even things which they hadn't noticed in the first place. PC Utting, having pondered the facts submitted to him by the Leaches, gave it as his considered opinion, off the record, that the obliteration of the sign was most probably the work of RAC saboteurs, though he doubted if it could be proved.

The AA sent down a new sign.

Mrs Fenner was so upset about the loss of her private income that, without telling her, I wrote to the AA, to their regional headquarters in Norwich.

Dear Sir
, I wrote.

I am writing on beharf of Mrs Fenner who has ruhmitisem and cant write herself at the moment.
(It was an unwritten convention at Opposite the Cross Keys that Mrs Fenner could read and write as well as anybody, if only she hadn't just broken her glasses, come down with writer's cramp, or was seeing spots in front of her eyes any time those skills were called for.)
I am writing to say it isnt fare to take her sing away just because Mr Leech has gon to work for you. Mrs Fenner has had it for donkies years and needs the 5/ - a lot mor than Mr Leech does. My father has a car, a Moris Oxford, only he belongs to the RAC because my mother doesnt like the culler of the AA, but if youll put the sing back on Mrs fenners I am pretty sure they will joyn the AA if I ask, because they do most things I ask them to do.

Hopeing you are well,

Yours sinserely,

Mrs Fenner (on beharf of)

After I had written the letter and posted it, I asked Miss Lethaby to get St Giles reverse charges because I wanted my father to start in right away getting my mother used to the idea of being saluted by men in mustard and black instead of blue-grey. When I explained my reasons, my father, to my surprise, sounded serious. He said that what I proposed doing was attempted bribery which was a criminal offence, and I wasn't on any account to send the letter. I didn't let on that I had already sent it.

As the post van hadn't yet called, I asked Miss Lethaby to unlock the box and let me get the letter out, but she went livid and told me that tampering with His Majesty's Mails was something I could go to prison for; to say nothing of where would she be, for aiding and abetting. So I went back to Opposite the Cross Keys and wrote another letter to the Sir at the AA, cancelling the earlier letter because I didn't want to go to prizon either for bryberry or tampring with the males, but I still didn't think it was fare and when I grew up and had a car of my own I would never joyn the AA, never, not if they beged me on bended knee.

Within days a letter came back, addressed to Mrs Fenner (on beharf of), and enclosing a postal order for one pound which they hoped would prove acceptable as some recompense for the loss of the AA sign. They hoped the postal order would not be construed as an attempt to bribe me to join the AA instead of the RAC when I had a car of my own. There was no such intention and they hoped I was well, yours faithfully.

After that, things in Salham St Awdry cooled down, though we no longer spoke to the Leaches and, whenever we went down the garden and saw Mr Leach's feet and ankles showing below his lav door wearing the mustard colour socks which were part of his uniform, Mrs Fenner would make some loud remark about what the colour put her in mind of.

It wasn't until ten days later, when a car stopped alongside one morning as I was out on the pavement, that I realized the Affaire AA had not quite run out of steam.

‘I'm looking for Salham St Awdry,' the driver explained; and when I answered, naturally enough, that that was where he was, he looked at me as if I were the original village idiot. Pointing to the sign on the Leaches' wall, he demanded, ‘What's that, then?'

For the first time in days, I looked up at the sign which said, as plain as black on mustard,
Salham Norgate
.

The man took some convincing that, appearances notwithstanding, Salham St Awdry was where I said it was. Once I'd got rid of him I walked the mile or so up the road to Salham Norgate to see if their sign – fixed to a house whose front parlour was the village grocery shop – had got it right.

I took a look at the sign, and then went inside, where the woman who ran the shop, a comfortable, grey-haired body, greeted me with the smile due to an important customer for sherbet suckers.

‘Please, is this Salham St Awdry or Salham Norgate?'

The smile faded. ‘Don't talk daft! You know as well as I do!'

I persuaded her to come outside and look at her sign, which said, beyond denial,
Salham St Awdry
.

‘Oh, that!' she said, to my disappointment. ‘Someone did mention somethin' a couple of days ago. Funny, in't it? But I can't be bothered. Five bob a year's not worth spending a stamp to let 'em know.' The shop lady was obviously in a different financial bracket from that of Mrs Fenner. ‘If they aren't satisfied wi' what it says, let 'em come an' take it away, for all I care. I shan't lose any sleep. I mean, arter all, St Awdry's near enough, in't it? Anyone going there's bound to come to it if they keep on down the road a bit, an' anyone coming the other way, well, they'll have been there already, won't they, so they'll know it couldn't be.' She smoothed her apron and dismissed the matter from her mind. ‘
We
know where we're at, don't we? Tha's what matters, in't it?'

When I had a chance to speak to him privately, I asked Charlie if it was he who had switched over the signs.

‘Switch?' he repeated, blank-faced: but little pinpoints of light danced in his blue eyes, so like his father's, and I came to my own conclusion.

‘You goin' to let on to the Leaches?' he demanded.

‘Course not!'

After that, though I never felt about Charlie the way I did about Tom, we got to be much better friends. As for the signs themselves, if it weren't for the exigencies of war I bet those switched mustard and black tin plates would be there still, reversed for all eternity. It's a pity they aren't, really, to the confusion of map makers and the pleasurable confabulation of local history pundits. Someone might even write a book about it.

Whenever, at Opposite the Cross Keys, I fancied a little peace and quiet, I crossed the High Street and followed the churchyard wall until I came to the church gate; let myself in and took possession of my favourite spot, between an elderberry bush and a tombstone so delicately patterned with lichens and moulds as to look, for all its ancient stoniness, like softest suede. Thanks to Maud, I was something of an
aficionado
of cemeteries. Maud was forever being crossed in love, I don't know why, unless it was that she was plain, dowdy and totally lacking in sexual attraction. Even her cornucopian offerings to the current love object of Woodbines and Cadbury Dairy Milk (the half-pound size!) seemed to pall in time when proffered by an unglamorous virgin bent on matrimony and willing to settle for nothing less.

Whenever, then, Maud was jilted, which was roughly three or four times a year, she turned melancholy and addicted to intimations of mortality. At such periods, our walks together tended to take us either to one or other of Norwich's two lunatic asylums, or else to cemeteries and graveyards, of which there was a plentiful selection within the city boundaries.

I did not much care for the lunatic asylums, fancying I heard shrieks and groans coming from behind their high walls; but the cemeteries were lovely and quiet. Nobody there seemed to have any complaints about their situation. No screams from people roasting in hell came seeping up through the grass or the marble chippings which paved their neat little front yards. Plainly, all the dead people in Norwich were good and had gone straight up to heaven.

Whilst Maud paced the paths wearing her longest face – give or take the irrepressible smirk of gratification when, as happened every now and again, someone took her for a newly bereaved widow – I ran about the narrow grass aisles visiting my favourite graves (an admiral's, girt about with ropes and anchors; a sepulchre on whose lid sat a perspiring marble angel, pressing down with all its weight to keep it shut against the push of a skeletal hand; a memorial to a young woman, decorated with a closed fan and a furled parasol) and was quite sorry when the end of the current period of mourning was signified by a shy stopping off at the sweetshop or the tobacconist's on the way home.

That part of Salham St Awdry churchyard planted with the younger graves was kept trim and tidy, the tombstones bolt upright, like guests at a cocktail party who hadn't yet drunk enough to feel sociable. In what I was pleased to think of as ‘my' corner, the memorials leaned towards each other like elderly friends a little hard of hearing and not wanting to miss a word of the other's conversation. There, the grass was long and peppered with poppies. When I lay on my stomach, as I did the day after Mrs Fenner and I went plucking, the yellowing sprays of fescue and cocks-foot met above my head. Panicles of hairy brome drooped over my book, which was
Holiday House
, an old favourite inherited from my sister, about a family of Scottish children who were always getting up to tricks except for Dick, who was delicate and spent most of his time on a couch by the window until the day God took him to heaven, which, in the circumstances, was the best thing that could have happened to him, especially as he was musical.

I always wept buckets over the chapter about Dick's death, most enjoyable. I knew it by heart, which was why I didn't mind the brome grass getting in the way, or its prickly spikelets catching in my hair.

Every now and again as I lay drowsing, still tired from my efforts of the previous day, three or four ants, working in teams in the best mountaineering tradition, crawled up the spine of the book and hauled themselves into sight at the top of the open page as if they had just conquered Everest. Insects with translucent wings paused there briefly on legs that were threads of spun silk. Bees buzzed and bumbled, rooks cawed in distant trees. From the High Street the sound of passing cars was reduced by distance to merely another insect noise, as much a part of the natural world as all the other hummings and buzzings, clickings and rustlings which encompassed me.