Once Upon A Time in the West . . . Country (15 page)

I received a smattering of applause when I stepped up to the mat for the first time to bowl my balls. For those anticipating great things, there was only disappointment. It took three efforts to knock over only seven skittles and this resulted in some laughter, a little desultory (or sarcastic) applause, and one audible heckle of ‘Rubbish!’ from the corner of the room. I couldn’t identify the perpetrator, but if I were able to do so before the night was out, I would ensure that they were ‘dealt with’. We could not have the chairman being treated with such disrespect.

The chairman improved a little with his subsequent bowls, but this only served to make him unworthy of derision or celebration; an average player of the game, as unremarkable as the light-brown walls that surrounded him. Pleasingly though, an entertaining evening seemed to be had by all, chairman included, even though his team finished the evening in penultimate place.

But at least we were ahead of the West Indies.

‘Never mind,’ explained Ann, as we were all leaving, ‘skittles happens once a month and it’s a running score through till the spring. Plenty of time to make up ground.’

Good, I thought, that would give us the opportunity to make some key signings in the January transfer window, if necessary.

7

Brassica Massacre

‘What’s this called again?’ I asked, as we drove into the hospital car park.

‘It’s the ten-week scan.’

‘Ah yes, the one they also call the dating scan.’

I’d read about this in the idiot’s guide to pregnancy and had been intrigued by its name. Surely, I figured, if you’d got to the point where a ten-week-old baby was growing inside one of the couple, then you had gone beyond ‘dating’. It was nudging towards the point where an affirmative answer was necessary to the question that people ask courting couples: ‘Is it serious?’

The NHS kicked in and did its stuff. I’ve never liked hospitals much (who does?) but this one was all right, and compared to many of the hospitals I’d visited in Moldova, it was absolutely marvellous. Soon we were sitting with a bubbly lady in front of an ultrasound machine.

‘You’re going to meet your baby now,’ she announced.

I was nervous. However good-humoured the scan lady
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was, I knew that what she was doing was serious. She was making sure that the baby had a head, two arms, two legs, and the rest. She was checking to see whether it was one baby or two. Twins. I didn’t want twins. Twice the noise, twice the poo and sick, and basically twice the aggravation.

She smeared jelly onto Fran’s tummy and then started pushing around something resembling those gadgets that assistants use in supermarkets for scanning barcodes. Instead of finding out how much a can of beans cost, we were about to find out if we had a healthy foetus. Suddenly a horrific thought struck me. What if there had been serious implications resulting from the attack upon my penis by the compost heap that day? What if we now discovered that our baby was going to turn out to be half-human/half-wasp?

Much to our relief, Fran and I left the hospital having been told that she was expecting only one baby, and that it had no wings or orange-and-black abdomen. All was well. We’d been given a due date of 24 March and an appointment for a twenty-week scan. Until then, all the baby had to do was grow. Just like the seeds we had planted in our garden.

Well, with any luck, it would perform a little better than that.

***

Summer was giving way to autumn, as it did every year with irritating regularity. At least summer had been decent enough to put in a reasonable appearance this year. Years ago I’d met an American, now living in the UK.

‘How long have you been over here?’ I’d asked.

‘Four summers. Or ten years.’

The light faded, the leaves began to fall and the temperature dropped. I no longer had the toughness to walk down the garden and indulge in my daily Hawks Harness workouts in the makeshift pool. I emptied it and put it in the shed. Although Fran never said as much, I felt she was relieved.

Outdoor activity decreased dramatically, but sadly not for my old nemesis, the slugs. They carried on eating, regardless of the shorter days and decidedly lower temperatures. Slugs, however, were not our only rivals in the ‘Battle of the Back Garden’. We had already suffered a number of humiliating defeats. Our carrots had seemed to be growing rather well without any interference from bugs or slugs, until one morning I went down to water them, only to discover that the whole crop had been pulled out and eaten. Tony, our neighbour on the other side to Ken, peered over the fence, shaking his head as I looked down at the space where the carrots used to be.

‘That’ll be a badger,’ he said, ‘it had our lot too. The bugger waits till the carrots are big enough for him to eat, and then he swoops down and wolfs the lot in one night.’

Up until that moment, I’d quite liked badgers. They seemed rather attractive creatures and I tended to speak up for them in the debate about whether they should be culled or not. Now culling seemed too good for them. Too quick. Not enough suffering. That needed to be looked at.

We lost our cabbages, kale and broccoli to another foe. This came as a bitter blow, as we’d worked so hard on our defences. Following the advice that we’d picked up on our organic gardening course, we’d covered the brassica
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with protective netting and I was fairly convinced that it was impenetrable. This is why I was confused when on each successive visit the leaves were increasingly more decimated. No slugs could be in there, so why the damage?

One evening, I lifted off all the netting and surveyed the bed that lay beneath it. It felt like I was looking down on an aerial photo of Manhattan after a nuclear attack. The remaining kale, cabbages and broccoli resembled the shells of buildings after a horrific and devastating strike. Then I saw the problem. A small and brilliantly disguised caterpillar crawling across what was left of one of the leaves. Upon closer inspection, I saw that every leaf in the bed had several of these hungry little larvae hiding away on its stems.

I had made a schoolboy error. Fran and I had been delighted to see butterflies flitting around the garden. Simply divine. Our spirits had been lifted on a summer afternoon by the sight of these delightful, fluttering dashes of colour. However, unbeknownst to us, they’d been up to no good. They’d laid their tiny, almost invisible, little eggs on our brassica. I had then compounded the problem by placing netting over the bed and trapping the caterpillars inside. Even if the little pests had wanted to get out and feed elsewhere, they couldn’t. I had incarcerated them and given them no choice but to destroy our crop. There might have been tastier pickings elsewhere, but there was no escape from my secure unit.

Was it now time, I wondered, to follow the advice of W. C. Fields?

If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again. Then quit. There’s no point in being a damn fool about it.

Well, he did use the word ‘try’ twice.

There was always next year.

***

Ding Dong.

We’d acquired a reasonably sophisticated doorbell from the previous owners. I’d probably spent half my life living somewhere with a sign up next to the doorbell, saying: ‘Please knock, doorbell not working’. Doorbells weren’t important enough to fix. Knockers are for knocking. Knockers rock.

I made my way to the front door. We weren’t expecting anyone this afternoon.

‘It’ll be a parcel,’ I called to Fran. ‘I’ll get it.’

I opened the door to find a little boy looking up at me. Surely too young to be working for the Post Office. Furthermore, he was carrying no parcel.

‘Excuse me,’ the boy said politely, ‘but there’s a sheep in your garden.’

I was rather taken aback. I wanted to do a double take. A big, comedy double take. I wanted to say ‘I beg your pardon?’ in a taken-aback voice, a bit like a character in a sitcom.

‘I beg your pardon?’ I said, in a taken-aback voice.

There. Why not? It was my front door, and my right.

‘There’s a sheep in your back garden,’ the boy repeated, confidently.

‘I don’t think there is.’

‘There is. My mum’s dog chased him in there.’

Two adults joined the boy at this point, and added weight to his argument. Apparently, the lady’s dog had chased a sheep, and it had separated from the flock, run through the field at the back of our garden, gone through an open gate, doubled back up the lane, darted into Ken’s garden and then squeezed through a gap in the fence and into ours.

‘You’d better come and take a look,’ I said to my visitors.

Fran looked a little puzzled, as I now led two adults and a child through the house and into the garden.

‘Just going to deal with the sheep,’ I said, setting her mind at rest.

Outside, we could hear a sheep making sheep noises,
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but we could see no animal. The lady, who hurriedly introduced herself as Susie, was a little anxious because she knew that if anything happened to the sheep, then as owner of the dog she would take the rap and compensation would need to be paid to the farmer.

The man with her, in his early thirties, introduced himself as Sam. He had no connection beyond having been out walking and then becoming embroiled in the sheep debacle.

‘The sheep is startled and frightened,’ he said.

A noise from the bottom of the garden.

‘It’s behind the shed,’ called the little boy/ace sheep hunter.

We made our way down to the shed, where we found the boy’s statement to be spot-on. The anxious-looking animal had clambered to the top of a pile of soil and general garden debris and was now looking longingly back into the field from which it had originally escaped. It could see its brothers, sisters, friends, cousins, parents – or whoever the other sheep happened to be. They were clearly more preferable company for this sheep than the three adults and a child who were now hovering nervously behind it.

‘Get it to jump over the fence!’

This new voice was neighbour Tony’s. He had wandered around the back of his house and into the field, which actually belonged to him and that he rented to a tenant farmer.

‘Get it to jump over the fence,’ Tony repeated.

The sheep certainly looked like it wanted to jump, but it was hesitating like a swimmer at the end of the high board. It needed some encouragement.

‘How do we get it to jump?’ I asked.

‘Kick it up the backside!’ he called back.

Ah, the subtleties of country life.

My new acquaintances Susie and Sam now turned to me, as if I should do the kicking. The sheep was on my land, after all. It would have been rude to kick a sheep on someone else’s patch. It seemed that this was my responsibility, even though I had been blameless in the process that had led to the sheep’s presence here. I moved behind the sheep and took a step towards it. Then another. Soon I was within booting range.

I hesitated, a bit like a swimmer at the end of a high board. That made two of us now. The sheep and me. Anxious high divers. This wasn’t easy. I needed to get myself into a new mental state for this action. I’d never kicked a sheep up the arse before. Nor indeed had I done anything else with a sheep’s arse. Honest.

I stood there, unable to swing my foot into action. It was no good. The sheep looked too much like a sheep and not enough like a football. I felt too much like a city boy and not enough like a farmer. As far as I could recall, I’d never even touched a sheep before. How could I make a sharp kick up the backside my first contact with this kind of animal?

In the end I was spared the humiliation of having to explain to everyone that I couldn’t do it. The sheep must have sensed that someone was about to kick it up the arse because it jumped. All on its own, the sheep made the leap to freedom. Perhaps it was an act of compassion. It sensed that someone was expected to kick it up the arse but couldn’t do so, and it had taken pity. Either way, it was gone, and it was gambolling back to join the other sheep, as if nothing had happened.

‘Thank goodness for that,’ said Susie.

‘Hooray!’ said the little boy.

‘Fancy staying for a cup of tea?’ I suggested to the trio of unexpected guests.