SSC (2001) The Dog Catcher (19 page)

Nothing
bad ever happened to a Vosterov and they all grew up to believe that the world
was a benign and happy place where good things happened to good people and bad
people had swift and certain justice meted out to them by kindly strangers.

THE MAU MAU HAT

It was spring when he
came, the yellow hammers were darting over the fields of winter wheat and Sam
the farmer was out for the first time that year, poisoning wild flowers in the
lane.

When he
was poisoning wild flowers Sam always wore what looked like a rubber diving
suit, on the back of which were twin canisters, with a spray hose attached that
he worked with a lever up and down. Like aqualungs of death they were, those
canisters, if you were a Bee Orchid or a Bluebell.

The two
things Sam the farmer liked were killing things that he didn’t get a grant for
keeping alive and grabbing land, especially on a nice spring day.

The
narrow muddy lane that bordered my house, the lane where Sam stood in his space
suit, was solely an access road that ran to the dilapidated asbestos sheds and concrete
hard standing that lay behind my home. The sheds were where Sam housed whatever
poor creatures he was being subsidised to torture that year: pigs that he sold
as pork to the American airbases, hens, sheep, elephants, unicorns. Thus the
lane belonged to him, but right up against the lane ran my fence, the side
fence of my long front garden, so Sam’s road had only a narrow verge. A few
months after I moved to the village Sam offered to mend my fence for me, it was
falling to pieces in places.

He did
a fine job of fixing it but without me noticing he also moved it a foot into my
garden, so that Sam now had a fine wide verge. The rest of the village despised
me for being so easily duped, for not even noticing that I’d been robbed of a
precious twelve-inch-wide strip of grass, for continuing to wave and smile
hello to Sam and Mrs Sam as they sat in lawn chairs on their slate smooth
grass, in front of their three-car garage. It confirmed their opinion of me as
an effete fop.

Nevertheless
since that event Sam had felt a strange, uneasy sensation concerning the theft
that he had never identified to himself as guilt, farmers knowing only four
emotions: self-pity, greed, jealousy and inclinations towards suicide.
Certainly since then, in a forgetful sort of way, he had looked out for my
interests, if they didn’t conflict with his own. He never gave me the land back
though.

My name
is Hillary Wheat, I am seventy-two years old, I came to the Northamptonshire
village of Lyttleton Strachey thirty years ago and I am still nowhere near
fitting in. I don’t want you to think this is the cliché of rural suspicion
towards outsiders. It is just me.

The
couple who live in the other semi-detached house joined to mine, a pop-eyed
pair of social workers called Mike and Michaela Talmedge, have a
sixteen-year-old daughter called Suki. Suki has a boyfriend called Bateman who
is a six foot three inches tall, cross-dressing black man with dyed blue hair
and a ring through his nose. With her parents’ enthusiasm Bateman has come to
live with Suki in the parents’ house, in her childhood bedroom, still hung with
Take That posters. On summer afternoons with the windows open I can hear them
having mildly perverted sex, the crack of leather on black man. Bateman fitted
right in.

No
matter how hard I have tried to shake it off there is some quality that hangs
over me of diffidence, taste, restraint, politeness, that really, really,
annoyed the inhabitants of Lyttleton Strachey. In the village pub, which our
mad quacking landlady had re-named The People’s Princess after the famous
traffic casualty, I would enter to mumbled ‘How do’s …’ then sit quiet and
annoying in the corner with a flat pint of Hook Norton Bitter. ‘Bitter?’ the
duck landlady would ask when I entered.

‘A
little …’ I would always reply (apart from a ‘no, more rueful I would say …’
phase in the early Eighties). It just made people angry. Even couples who had
motored over from Banbury and had never been in the pub before felt a frisson
of irritation at my entrance.

By
contrast Bateman would blast in, dressed in a ball gown worn over lycra cycling
shorts, usually shouting the catchphrase from some television commercial, and
all the lads, Marty Spen, Paul Crouch, Miles Godmanchester, Ronny Raul, would
be pleased as punch to see him. There would be shouts and banter and lots of
admiring questions for the black man about what it was like to be a black man
or a black woman.

If I
had been some sort of spy my diffident qualities would have stood me in good
stead in Lyttleton Strachey. But I’m not a spy, I’m just a lonely old man.

A
lonely old man in exile. At least when the Tsars sent their troublesome
citizens to Siberia they had others there to greet them, to argue with, to go
hunting with, to make love to and the possibility of escape. It always sounded
like a rather nice winter break to me, excellent après ski, dancing lessons
from Leon Trotsky, a talk on penguins by Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, a sort of
Sandals of the Steppes.

But I
am my own gaoler so there is no escape.

My name
is Hillary Wheat, I am seventy-two years old and once, a long time ago, I was
what the newspapers called a ‘well known poet’. I was never avant garde, preferring
clear simple words about love and buttons and buses, that rhymed. God forgive
me but I also used my popularity to distend myself into a celebrity. The
television made an hour-long film about me that was shown at prime time on the
BBC, this being in the time when they used to force feed self-improving stuff
down the public’s gullet, hoping to swell their brains like Sam crammed bits of
their relatives and diseased swill down the gullets of his poor animals. I also
had my own weekly radio programme and once made an advert for breakfast cereal
in which there was an amusing play on my surname. Wheat.

My descent into
Northamptonshire began some time during 1968 and a lunch with my publisher, the
late Blink Caspari, of Caspari and Millipede. For some time I had been having
difficulty in contacting him. His secretary kept saying he was ‘in a meeting’.

Lying
in this way was a business practice recently imported from the United States,
like time and motion studies, so that when she said he was in a meeting I
thought he was actually in a meeting. ‘He’s in more meetings than the general
secretary of the TUC,’ I joked. You may not remember it but the TUC was a
powerful organisation back then, for trade unionists, run by a man with strange
hair. (It occurs to me I should perhaps explain what trade unionists used to
be. But then where would I stop? Threepenny bits? Moral rearmament? Emotional inhibition?
Ministerial responsibility? Sexual restraint?)

After a
lot of phone calls I had managed to get my publisher to invite me to lunch at a
restaurant in Camden Town that Blink described over the phone as ‘sort of
France at the time of the First World Warrey’. It was down some stairs.

I said
to Blink as we went down the stairs, ‘I thought when you said it was France at
the time of the First World War you meant a Belle Époque sort of thing, a
return to the classicism of Escoffier.’

‘No,
what I meant,’ said Blink, ‘is that it’s France during the First World War.’

By this
time we were in what I supposed was the restaurant. I stared about me. We had
passed through a door into another time. The underground room we had entered
was a re-creation of a brasserie in the centre of a town in Northern France
sometime in the middle of the year’ 1917, right in the middle of the First
World War. The café had seemingly a few hours before taken a number of direct
hits from a salvo of high explosive shells. Jagged holes had been blasted
through the walls in several spots, giving views of distant, badly painted
underground fields, the shell holes had been, apparently, hastily half-filled
with sandbags. Two old-fashioned Vickers machine guns were mounted on top of
the sandbags, belts of ammunition coiling from their cocked breeches. There had
been a recent firefight between the shop window dummies of the Allied powers
and the shop window dummies of the Central powers: casualties lay
blood-splattered in the uniforms of the German, French and British armies,
sprawled in stiff attitudes of death across the bags of sand.

All the
waiters were got up to look like members of the French general staff and the
tables and chairs were rough hewn, shrapnel-blasted mismatches such as would be
found in any bunker. On each table there was an old-style field telephone that
you could wind up and speak to anybody who took your fancy at another table,
these field telephones were taking seriously the current injunction to ‘Make
Love Not War’. Playing on a continuous tape loop via speakers buried in the
walls was the crump and whine of artillery. Every half an hour there was a
small explosion of smoke and sparks from beyond the sandbags.

It
occurs to me now, thirty-odd years later, that each period interprets the past
in its own particular way. So though to myself and Blink (and I expect to the
many survivors of the Great War who were still bumbling around in that year of
1968) the brasserie looked utterly authentic, viewed from our own age, from
now, the place would appear irredeemably 1 960s. And if anybody at this moment
would wish to make a brand-new, bombed-out, early twentieth century brasserie,
it would look very different.

‘You
were in the last war weren’t you, Hillary?’ said Blink as we sat down.

‘No,
too young.’

‘You
fought somewhere though, didn’t you? I’m sure you did. Had a life-changing
experience somewhere, there was a poem about it I’m certain.’

‘Yes,
Kenya, ‘52, ‘53.’

‘No
heebie jeebies though?’

‘Not so
as you’d notice.’

‘Ah
good. I suddenly got a bit worried this place might bring it back … if you’d
been in France and if there was anything to bring back. Lot of the teachers at
my prep school were the most barking mad fellows from the first war, gibbering
and crying at all hours and trying to grab your cock in the showers.’

‘I don’t
think war is very much like this,’ I said.

‘No, I
don’t suppose it is,’ said Blink.

‘You in
the war, Blink?’

‘In the
war? Not really. Old enough but medically unfit. Asthma. Eventually after a lot
of badgering friends of the family they gave me command of an anti-aircraft gun
in Regents Park, in the evenings after work. Do you remember at the start of
the war, before things got organised, they let groups of chums form up Home
Guard anti-aircraft batteries together? I was in charge of a bofors gun manned
by the most ferocious pack of modernist architecture students from the
Architects Institute in Portland Place. Spent most of my time stopping them
from taking potshots at old buildings that they violently disapproved of! Still
not entirely sure they didn’t blow up the old Abelard and Helois department
store in Oxford Street, one minute it was there then the next…’ He paused
while a shell in stereo seemed to whistle overhead, then went on. ‘… Well, it
was still there but it had a lot of really big holes in it and it was on fire
and I can’t say I remember the sound of any planes overhead or the sirens going
off or anything. Still it was a frightful old Victorian pile, better off
without it. I think it’s an Arts Lab now.’ Then, studying the menu which was
printed on maps showing the movements of great armies across the plains of
Picardy, ‘What’ll you have, old man?’

I
remember I felt myself to be another anachronism. I had dressed that morning in
my second-best town clothes: a navy chalk-stripe single-breasted suit made by
my tailors in Savile Row, club tie, cream Gieves and Hawkes shirt, silver
cufflinks from Aspreys, Church’s black Oxford lace ups, silk socks, cashmere
navy-blue overcoat, on my wrist my father’s old Smiths watch. All a mistake,
silly vain old peacock. Dapper I might have looked standing by the Cenotaph or
somewhere similarly old fellowish but not in that place. I looked like I was
lunching my son, perhaps as a well done for getting his first top-ten disc or
to celebrate him choreographing his first nude musical, despite the fact that
Blink was ten years older than me.

Once we
had ordered and General Petain or possibly Marshall Foch had thrown our first
course down in front of us, I said, ‘So, Blink, I wanted to talk to you about
where the firm sees me going in the next few years.

Blink
stared unblinkingly into my eyes.

‘And I
want you to look around, Hillary, the times they are a’ changin’.’

Obediently
I looked around as I had been told to. It seemed to me more than changin’, the
times were a’ gettin’ all a’ jumbled up. As was the new fashion, several of the
young men and even the young women at the other tables were wearing bright red
Edwardian Royal Guardsmen’s tunics. They looked as if they had somehow slipped
through time into the wrong war and although there were newspapers on sticks to
be read they were all from February 1917.

‘Yes,
if you say so, Blink.’

‘Caspari
and Millipede has to change with them. Pan global corporatisation is coming
whether we like it or not and as of next month Caspari and Millipede will be
folded into the publishing arm of the Deutsche Submarine Corporation.’