The Europe That Was (20 page)

‘Knew it would 'appen!' the skipper yelled. ‘That's the last time I picks a Yank out of the mud!'

He jammed in the doorway with the mate. The bows came off the mud and described the same semi-circle as the stern. The engine-room telegraph rang like a fire engine. Wagstaff, flung off the settee on to the floor, sat there cross-legged shaking with laughter. Bill cradled the bowl grimly on his knees.

‘Allies, Bill, allies! What did I tell you? It's all your fault, and your towel has come off!'

‘Colonel,' said Bill, reknotting it round his waist, ‘how come all the guys that tried to shoot you missed?' He dropped his head on the table, and instantly fell asleep.

They were awakened by Bert, flinging down two still soggy bundles of clothes. ‘Skipper says 'e don't want no more to do with either of you,' he announced, ‘and if you ain't off this scow as soon as we ties up 'e'll send for the police.'

It was light. Up the reach the town, the castle and the municipal rubbish dump of Chesterford were in sight. The clock on the church tower made the time eight-thirty.

‘Bill,' said Wagstaff, breaking the silence, ‘that piece of linen in which you have wrapped the bowl was once my shirt.'

‘Say, colonel, I'm sorry. I wasn't thinking.'

‘Not a word. It will dry there. And I can do up my coat collar. Thank heaven I am known in Chesterford!'

Bill took the remark on trust, though it seemed to him when he was escorted by the mate through the corrugated iron door of the garbage wharf, before breakfast and looking as if he had been dug out of the tip, that personally he would prefer a town where he was not known.

Striding up the main street of Chesterford, however, alongside the colonel, he understood. Wagstaff's air was guiltless, so full indeed of a casual manliness as he greeted an occasional acquaintance
that only one of them thought it proper to comment on his appearance.

‘Showing our friend here some sport,' said the colonel. ‘Mallard right. Teal left. Got 'em both. Lost me balance. And this gallant fellow hauled me out.'

As they resumed their squelching progress up the High Street, Bill remarked that he sounded exactly like a British colonel on the movies.

‘A very useful accomplishment,' Wagstaff agreed, ‘which has enabled me before now to rescue allies from well deserved court martial. Later in the day which is now upon us, Bill, or even tomorrow or whenever that damned bowl permits us both a reasonably sober countenance, I shall accompany you to your commanding officer and obtain for you a mention in your home town paper and probably a medal from the Royal Humane Society.'

‘What's that?'

‘It gives medals. Did you not leap into mud of unknown bottom to rescue me?'

‘Don't mention it, colonel. It was the least I could do,' said Bill, and paused. ‘Say, wasn't it the bowl?'

‘The values are quite irrelevant, Bill. Me or the bowl? The bowl or me? We will now go into the Red Lion here for a bath and breakfast.'

‘Will the bar be open yet, colonel?'

‘Oh, that'll be all right. They know me there.'

‘Then I'm not going in with this bowl,' Bill said firmly. ‘Not to the Red Lion or any other of your animal friends.'

‘Fresh herrings, Bill. I can smell 'em. And Bacon and eggs to follow.'

‘We can have breakfast at a tea shop.'

‘Too respectable. They wouldn't let us in.'

Sergeant Torbin, desperately searching the market square for safety, was inspired by the opening of the double doors of the Chesterford Museum. He ran, vaulted the turnstile in the vestibule where the doorkeeper was just changing into his uniform coat, and charged down an alley of Roman tombstones into a collection of stuffed foxes and weasels marked ‘Natural History'. Hesitating wildly between ‘Neolithic', ‘Iron Age' and ‘Gentlemen', he saw a door to his left with
CURATOR
on it. He leaped through it, and found himself facing a desk where a very tall wisp of a man in his seventies was quietly cataloguing.

‘You take this,' he said. ‘Lock it up in your safe, quick!'

Before the Curator could get over the shock of an American sergeant, covered with mud from head to foot and offering with outstretched arms an unknown object wrapped in dirty linen, Wagstaff also was upon him.

‘Is it—is it a baby?' the curator asked.

‘It is, sir, a fifth-century Attic cylix,' the colonel replied with dignity.

The curator tremblingly extracted the bowl, and at the sight of it instantly recovered an almost ecclesiastical self-possession.

‘But this is an article of great value,' he intoned.

‘I know it is. You've no idea of the trouble I've had preserving it from destruction.'

‘This—um—er—has dispossessed you of it?'

‘Lord, no! It's his.'

‘Colonel, it is yours,' said Bill with what he hoped was finality.

The colonel took the bowl with both hands, pledged an imaginary draught to the gods and held it high above the stone floor of the curator's office.

‘I've nowhere to keep it,' Bill screamed.

‘Oh, that's all that is bothering you, is it?' the colonel exclaimed. ‘Well, what's that damned owl doing?'

A stuffed barn owl in a Victorian show case stood on the curator's work-bench. Wagstaff lifted the glass dome from the ebony base, and removed the owl which immediately disintegrated into dust and feathers.

‘Mouldy,' said the colonel. ‘Disgrace to the museum. That reminds me, I believe I'm on the committee. Give you a new one and stuff it myself.'

‘I was indeed considering—' the curator began.

‘Of course you were. Quite right! Mind if I sit down at your desk a minute?'

The colonel printed a neat card:

LENT TO THE MUSEUM BY COURTESY OF
SERGEANT WILLIAM TORBIN, USAF

He laid the bowl upon the ebony stand and propped the card up against it.

‘That will keep
you
quiet,' he said, replacing the glass dome, ‘until Bill has a mantelpiece for you again. The sergeant has only to write to you to get it, I suppose?' he added fiercely to the curator.

‘Yes, yes, but—'

‘Any objection to the Red Lion now, Bill? It will be a pleasant change to drink out of glasses once more.'

EGGS AS AIN'T

Mrs Swallop had been working her twenty-acre holding single-handed ever since Tom Swallop was killed in the Boer War when she was seventeen years old and a six-months' bride. He left her his scrap of freehold land, no child, and apparently so pleasant a memory that she preferred to live with it rather than change her status.

Her farm—if you can call it a farm—was up at the end of a grass track: a patch of cultivation in a dry bottom surrounded by the thorn and bracken on the slopes, and well fenced except for short stretches of queer material such as old bed-springs and rusty sheets of corrugated iron. It had a name on the map, but no one for ten miles around ever called it anything but ‘Noah's Ark.'

The birds and animals were not, however, in biblical couples. Mrs Swallop stocked her land with breeding females, for she had her own ways of encouraging them. There were two enormous turkey hens, a goose, a saddle-backed sow, a flock of undisciplined chickens, a black cow, a black nanny-goat and a big black cat who was fierce as a watch-dog when she had kittens. The only representative of the male sex was a buck rabbit who attended to the comfort of several prolific does.

She was a bright and cleanly old body—so far as one can be when farming alone—but her dress and her ways were odd. She might be wearing an old tweed skirt below an upper half swathed in sacking, or a new purple jersey with a horse blanket for a skirt. She had a black moustache, and she used to whisper under it to her animals.

Mrs Swallop would whisper for her neighbours, too, if she liked them; so they were always ready to lend her a male when she turned up driving one of her females in front of her, or pushing it, squawking, in the large dilapidated perambulator which was her only farm transport. If there were anything else in the bottom of the pram, such as eggs or cream, they would buy it from her by some careful method which would not draw the attention of Percy Crott.

Those were the days just after the war when farmers were making a lot more money than now. On the other hand, they had to put up with fellows like Crott. He had been a village schoolmaster till one of his fourteen-year-olds sent him to hospital; and when he came out he got
a job in the Ministry of Food. How he rose to be an inspector, no one ever discovered—for all he knew about food were the regulations to prevent the public eating it. He had a blotchy pink face as smooth as a pig's, with a nasty little mouth in the middle of it and a round chin which he used to stick out when he was speaking—like one of those business men who are so proud of their faces that they put their pictures in the advertisements in spite of the sales they must lose.

Crott could never catch the big farmers who generally obeyed the law, and had a dozen inspector-proof ways of covering themselves up when they didn't. If he wanted to bring a neighbour before the courts and make an example of him, he went for the little man who was sure to be breaking regulations because he had no time to read them. And he made a dead set at Mrs Swallop because she built a breeding hutch for the rabbits out of all the pamphlets and government forms which the postman brought her. Those rabbits fairly flourished under the welfare state, but when Percy Crott saw the hutch he said it was a scandal, and carried on as if Mrs Swallop had built it out of a stack of Bibles.

All the same, it was difficult to find an offence by which he could put her out of business. She had no books or accounts—for she insisted that she could not write—and old Trancard was always ready to tell any lie for her. Crott's only hope was to catch her red-handed selling eggs to the public.

Trancard took a very friendly interest in the old lady, for his sheep-run surrounded her land on the north and east, and the luck he had with the lambing was marvellous. He guessed what Percy Crott was up to when he saw him hiding behind a hedge and counting Mrs Swallop's birds. So he persuaded her to turn over a new leaf, and register herself as a poultry producer.

‘It won't give 'ee no trouble at all, missus,' he told her. ‘I'm a licensed packer, and you hand over your eggs to me for grading and packing, and get paid by the government at fifty shillings for ten dozen. But what you must not do, missus, is to sell 'em to anyone who ain't licensed. And if that young Crott catches you at it, you'll fetch up before the beaks.'

‘I don't want no more of ‘is papers,' Mrs Swallop answered.

‘Ain't no papers, not to speak of, me dear! You delivers your eggs to me whenever you happens to be passing, and along comes the money and your National Poultry Food regular. If you mixes it up with a bit of barley, which maybe I can find for 'ee, the hens won't hardly know what they're eatin'. Oh, it's all as easy as kiss your 'and, missus, begging your pardon,' he said.

Trancard was obviously making money out of his fine flock of Rhode Island Reds, so Mrs Swallop decided to take his advice. While there was plenty she wouldn't understand, there was nothing she
couldn't once she got her lips moving silently round the problem. She collected another score of hens, one by one wherever a bird caught her eye, and a shocking lot of mixed breeds they were; but she soon had them in the pink of condition and laying up and down the hedgerows as fast as if they had been their orderly sisters in Trancard's deep litter house.

When Mrs Swallop came up with her third load of eggs, six inches deep in the bottom of the pram, Trancard graded them and gave two dozen back to her. They were too small or too crooked.

‘And what must I do wi' 'em, mister?' she asked.

‘Do what you likes with 'em. The government don't want 'em.'

‘They be all egg inside,' she said.

‘But the public won't buy 'em in the shops, missus.'

‘Can I sell 'em,' she asked, ‘without that young Crott comin' up after me wi' the constable?'

‘No, you can't. Not to say sellin' 'em as
is
sellin' 'em. But you can give 'em away, and I'll tell 'ee where. And that's Mr Buckfast up at The Bull, with all his guests wanting two fried eggs to their breakfasts when he can't hardly give 'em one. He'll take all you can give 'im, and it wouldn't surprise me if 'e was to pay you at seventy bob instead of the fifty we gets from the government. But 'e won't be paying you for eggs, mind, but for carrots or such-like.'

Mrs Swallop leaned against the gate-post, calculating in so fast a whisper that she couldn't keep listening to herself; so she fell into a sort of trance, and old Trancard had to take her up to the house and bring her round with a glass of port.

‘And there's no point in you bringing eggs as ain't legal eggs up to me for grading,' he said, when he had given her an arm back to the pram. ‘You know an egg as ain't when you see it as well as I do. But don't you go giving away an egg that's an egg within the meaning of the Order, because it's not worth the risk.'

Next week it was all over the district that Mrs Swallop had another male to keep the buck rabbit company. He was a black leghorn cock of a fine laying strain, with a certificate to prove it; but his breast-bone was twisted over to one side like a plough-share, so that when he stretched out his neck to crow he had to spread his tail the other way to balance himself. Mrs Swallop, naturally enough, did not have to pay a penny for him, though she may have done some little favour to the bees in passing.

In spite of his looks the hens took to this young cripple, as females will. And Mrs Swallop groomed his tail feathers and whispered to him and stuffed him with National Poultry Food till the old buck was so jealous that he set about him and got a spur down his ear-hole before they could be separated.

When spring came, Mrs Swallop was not delivering anything like
the proper number of eggs, in spite of the fact that she and the black leghorn between them had raised her flock to nearly a hundred birds, most of them laying pullets of her own breeding. Trancard went down to her holding to see if he could help at all, and a repulsive sight the yard was for a careful farmer. He stared at those miscoloured, lopsided, sinister-looking freak pullets, and went purple in the face with the pressure of all he did not like to say.

‘Why, what's wrong wi' 'em?' she asked him.

‘Missus,' he said, ‘there's everything wrong with 'em. But if they're yourn, they're laying—and that young Crott has been up, lookin' at me books.'

Mrs Swallop gave him a sly smile under her moustache, with a twitch of the lips that must have enchanted Tom Swallop fifty years before.

‘Don't 'ee worry over me, me dear,' she said.

But Trancard did worry. He knew Mrs Swallop was making a mysterious profit. So did Percy Crott. She had had her fences repaired, and a pipe laid to the spring where she got her water instead of old lengths of rusty gutter stopped with clay. And there was nothing to account for all the eggs in town, especially at The Bull, except the visits of Mrs Swallop's pram.

Crott timed it nicely. He watched Mrs Swallop deliver a parcel of eggs—which should have been all she produced—to Trancard, and he let her go down to the town with her pram. Then he took his government car and the local cop from behind the haystack where he had parked the pair of them, and drove into Trancard's yard and asked to see the books.

Old Trancard tried to muddle him by passing off some of his own eggs as Mrs Swallop's. The cop did his best to help. But the ink was hardly dry in the book, and there was no getting away from the figures. Mrs Swallop had delivered only two dozen eggs that morning, and nothing else for a week.

‘She'll be on her way to The Bull now, constable,' said Percy Crott, pushing him into the car.

He started to drive slowly down the hill so as to reach the hotel about the same time as Mrs Swallop. All Trancard could do was to rumble behind in a tractor wondering how Mrs Swallop could ever pay the fifty pounds or so which the beaks would have to fine her, and whether they would give her six months if she didn't.

When they stopped in front of The Bull, Percy Crott and the constable nipped round into the backyard, with Trancard a second or two behind them trying to look as if he had just called to return the empties. There was Mrs Swallop talking to Buckfast, the proprietor.

‘Madam,' asked the inspector, ‘what have you got in that perambulator?'

‘Nothing but eggs, sir. Nothing at all,' she answered, pretending she was frightened of the cop.

‘And were you thinking of selling them?'

‘No, she weren't,' Buckfast told him pretty sharply. ‘She was giving them to me. And it's legal.'

‘Uncommonly kind of her!' said Percy Crott in a sarcastic way, and he whipped the cover off the pram.

It was stuffed with eggs. And not one of them was fairly oval. There were eggs which might have been fat white sausages, and round eggs and oblongs and lozenges, and pear-shaped eggs and eggs with a twist like a gibbous moon with round points.

Inspector Crott pushed them aside with the tips of his fingers as if they were something the dog had been rolling in. They were all the same quality right down to the bottom of the pram.

‘Don't your hens lay anything fit for human consumption?' he asked.

‘No, sir,' she told him, ‘they don't. A poor old woman can't afford good 'ens like you gentlemen.'

Then Buckfast was taken with a fit of the sniggers, and old Tran-card slapped his breeches and grinned at Mrs Swallop as if she were the knowingest farmer in all the county.

‘Damme if she ain't been breeding for rejects!' he roared. ‘Damme, and I tried to tell 'er how to run fowls! I tell you, Mr Percy Crott, that if only she 'ad a cock with a face like yourn, them 'ens would lay eggs and bacon, and burst out laughin' when they turned their 'eads round to look at what they 'ad done,' he said.