Notwithstanding: Stories From an English Village Read online

  I was preparing my apologies, when I noticed that the golfer was a woman, and so I ran back and hid in a holly bush. Male golfers are usually quite jolly and placid, but female golfers can be terrifying in a variety of ways, and it is best to avoid them at all costs, just in case they turn out to be someone with a degree in Art and an amazing collection of conspiracy theories.

  I didn’t escape, though, and before I knew it she was poking at me through the prickly leaves with a four-iron. ‘I know you’re in there,’ she said firmly, ‘I can see your shoes.’ Her voice sounded quite pleasant and mellifluous, with a happy burbling in it rather like a brook running over pebbles.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said, from the depths of the bush, ‘but my dog can’t help retrieving things. It’s his hobby, and I can’t stop him. I’ll give your ball back.’ And with that I tossed the ball through the branches, in the hope that she would be satisfied and go away.

  ‘You’re being very silly,’ she said. ‘It’s your dog I want to talk to you about. I’ve got a bitch just the same, and I’ve been meaning to breed from her. Your dog looks just right. A very fine specimen. I’ll pay you a stud fee and twenty pounds per pup. How about that?’

  ‘Archie would enjoy that,’ I said, disentangling myself from the bushes and coming face to face with a woman of about thirty years of age. She had blue eyes, and a mouth that curled up at the corners, as though she was always smiling and her mouth had to be ready on the blocks. For a lady golfer she seemed surprisingly on the level.

  That’s how it all started with Evie and me. All that hoo-ha and palaver about ovulation and being on heat, and making sure that there was penetration and fertilisation, gave us something in common, a good excuse to meet up and get to know each other. I think that talking frequently about mating must have got us all worked up subconsciously, and I can’t imagine how many pots of tea we drank while we eyed each other up across the kitchen table, with Mother hovering outside in the corridor.

  On the big day, Archie did his stuff pretty amateurishly, I’d say. He started at the wrong end, Evie’s bitch got muddled, and we had to rearrange them. All the same, Evie was thrilled, and later that afternoon we went to the shop and bought a bottle of Spanish champagne. She made a shepherd’s pie with caramel-flavoured Instant Whip to follow, and, well, you know how it is, how one thing leads to another.

  THE GIRT PIKE

  THE GIRT PIKE was caught in the days before the village pond had been sanitised. Once upon a time it was quite accepted that the village boys should spend their summers angling for rudd, squeezing pellets of dough on to size-twelve hooks, and casting out among the lilies. In the evenings the brassy rudd would skip for flies at the time of the hatch, and it seemed unbelievable that one small pond could hold so many fish. It was permissible in those days for people to throw sticks into the pond so that their dogs could fetch them, and the ragtaggle of semi-domesticated ducks would have to shift for themselves, paddling away in comical alarm. In later years the pond would be stocked with ornamental golden tench, little boys would be forbidden to fish, dogs would be forbidden to scare the ducks, and a fence would be erected around the banks to prevent erosion, and to prevent children from falling in. The pond became prettier, but in its prissified state it did not become better loved, and thenceforth it no longer played any part in cementing the friendships of the very young, or filling their holidays with sunshine and clean air.

  Before it was sanitised, there was nearly always a party of little boys there in the summer months, usually on the bank nearest the road that led to the village green and the shop. There would be little girls there, too, making daisy chains or squinting against the sunlight as they cried ‘Ugh, oh yuk!’ every time a boy laid hands on a fish to unhook it. The girls never did understand why anyone could bear to get their hands slimy and smelly, and so they watched the boys with appropriate disdain and uncomprehending disgust. If any boy was using maggots or worms, there would of necessity arise a moment when one or more of the girls would be chased squealing round and round the pond by one or more of the boys, who would be threatening to put the worm or the maggot down their necks, or even down their knickers. These episodes would normally end with somebody falling over and hurting their knee or sliding down the muddy bank into the water.

  On the morning that concerns us, however, one small boy was fishing on his own, his keepnet flashing at his feet with golden tiddlers. His name was Robert, and he lived in the small row of council houses on Cherryhurst, the road to the Institute of Oceanography, just past the house of Mr Hadgecock the spy, and the lane that led up to the house where Mrs Mac lived with her sister and the ghost of her husband. Many of the boys who fished were much posher than he was, but fortunately the brotherhood of the line counted for far more than deeply inculcated divisions of class and education, and he and they regarded each other with the kind of mutual awe tinged with fear which only a class-conscious Briton would appreciate. Robert used a small rod made of two sections of an ancient Avon rod that his grandfather had adapted for him. It had chrome-plated rings whipped carefully on to it in red button thread, and it had been craftsmanly rubbed down and varnished so that it gleamed. Many of the posher boys were envious of it, and once he had even refused an offer for it of as much as thirty shillings and a Goliath catapult, and a Milbro catapult that needed new rubber. Robert used a small brass centre-pin reel that his grandfather had also passed on, and which was the very same reel with which he had fished in the pond when he had been a little boy. Robert longed for a spinning reel, the kind where you could just open the bail arm and cast as far as you liked, but he was nonetheless adept at pulling out loops of line from the centre pin and placing his bait exactly where he wanted to. One day collectors would be paying implausible money for old brass centre pins such as his, but just now Robert wanted, more than anything, an Intrepid Prince Regent, which was even better than an Intrepid Black Prince, because it had a proper roller on the bail arm. Robert wanted an Intrepid Prince Regent just as much as other people wanted a Colston dishwasher or an E-Type Jaguar. The Prince Regent cost exactly thirty shillings, and so he was in the paradoxical and self-defeating position of being able to buy one only if he sold his rod to one of the rich boys.

  Robert was reeling in another small rudd, hoping it would be bigger than it was, when a voice behind him said, ‘Oh, you are clever. Do tell me what it is.’

  ‘It’s a rudd, missus,’ said Robert, turning round and dangling the unfortunate creature in front of the lady’s face.

  The lady concerned was Mrs Rendall, blonde and pretty and vivacious, who, one day soon, would be carried away by cancer before she was forty. All the boys experienced a sensation of longing in the throat when they saw her or thought of her, and none of them could ever imagine growing up to be loved by someone as lovely as she. They thought of her husband as especially blessed, as if he were like God, his status much enhanced by the devotion of angels.

  ‘How do you know it’s a rudd?’ she asked, with genuine interest.

  ‘The mouth turns up, missus, ’cause it feeds on the top, and it’s all golden. If it were a roach its mouth would turn down, and if it were a bream it’d be silver, and anyway, I just know it’s a rudd.’

  ‘You are clever,’ repeated Mrs Rendall, genuinely impressed. She watched as the little boy unhooked it and put it into his keepnet. ‘What do you do with them?’ she asked.

  ‘At the end of the day I count them up, and then I put them back.’

  ‘Can’t you eat them?’

  ‘Don’t know, missus. Haven’t tried.’

  ‘What’s the most you’ve ever caught? In one day?’

  ‘Twenty, missus,’ Robert told her, exaggerating by five.

  ‘Twenty! That’s an awful lot!’ She watched him as, very self-consciously, he cast his line back out. He was determined to do it beautifully, because Mrs Rendall was very nice and very pretty, and her niceness and prettiness made him want to do everything perfectly when she was near him.
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br />   ‘Have you ever caught a pike?’

  ‘No, missus. I never even seen one.’

  ‘Do you think that you could? Would you like to?’

  Robert’s eyes gleamed. There was nothing in the whole world more marvellous than the prospect of catching a pike. It was probably more marvellous even than catching a shark. Robert knew someone who had been dangling his toes in the water when they had been savaged by a pike. He had heard of an Alsatian dog that had been bitten on the paw by one.

  ‘I don’t know if I could,’ admitted Robert. ‘I may not yet be old enough. If I was older, I reckon I could.’

  ‘How old are you, then?’

  ‘I’m eleven, missus.’

  ‘I think that’s old enough. In fact, I’m sure it is. Would you come and catch my pike?’

  ‘What? The Girt Pike?’ asked Robert incredulously.

  Mrs Rendall lived in the Glebe House, opposite the cattle pound, and it had behind it a rectangular pond that must originally, perhaps a century before, have been a swimming pool. It was quite large, overhung with branches and it was absolutely full of starving tiddlers, as Robert had found out when poaching there from the shelter of a laurel. Robert had always kept an eye out for the Girt Pike, but he had never seen it. Everyone said it was there, and lots of people had claimed to have spotted it, or thought that maybe they might have done, but Robert never had, and he had become sceptical.

  ‘The Girt Pike? Is that what you call it? Why “Girt”?’

  ‘Don’t know, missus. That’s what it’s called, dunno why. It’s there, then, is it? I heard about it, but I wasn’t so sure.’

  ‘It’s there all right. Every year the ducks and the moorhens and the coots hatch out all these gorgeous little fluffy chicks, and that pike just gobbles them up one after the other.’

  Robert’s eyes widened. ‘You seen it, missus?’

  ‘Yes. One after the other! It’s awful! He just opens his mouth and his head comes out of the water, and that’s one more chick, just gone! Every year! He eats all the chicks and there’s never one left to grow up. I do wish you’d come and catch it.’

  ‘You’d let me, then?’ asked Robert, in disbelief.

  ‘Let you? I’d be so grateful that you’d have to run away to stop me kissing you!’

  ‘Gosh,’ said Robert, thinking that he would probably have to run away as a matter of form, even if he did not actually want to. ‘You’d let me, then?’ he asked again.

  ‘Please do come up and catch it. I’ll bring you cups of tea and as many sandwiches as you can eat, I promise.’

  ‘Peanut butter?’ asked Robert, aware that posh people sometimes put truly revolting pastes made of rotten anchovies into their sandwiches.

  ‘Peanut butter or jam, or anything,’ said Mrs Rendall, much amused.

  ‘I’ll come up next week,’ said Robert.

  ‘Just knock at the door, and I’ll make you tea and sandwiches, I promise.’

  ‘Crunchy peanut butter,’ Robert specified, with an intonation of warning in his voice.

  ‘I’ll go and get it now,’ she said, and turned to go back to the Cricket Green Stores. When she drove past him a few minutes later, smiling at the wheel of her green-and-cream Austin Cambridge, she tooted the horn and waved a pot of crunchy peanut butter at him, with its red lid and label. Robert reeled in his line and began to pack up his tackle. His air had become deeply serious and determined. He was about to undertake the greatest task of his life hitherto, and he was gallantly doing it for a beautiful lady. This was what it might be like to be Sir Lancelot.

  Robert had almost none of the equipment that one needs for pike, and he had very little money with which to acquire it. Nonetheless he went to Godalming on the bus, to C. F. Horne’s tackle shop in Bridge Street. Mr C. F. Horne was a very kindly man with a bald top and a brown shop coat. He would mend any little boy’s fishing rod very cheaply and beautifully, and nobody was ever aware, until he was one day found dead on the railway line, that his wife had been mentally ill for years, and that he had been suffering more stress and difficulty than most people could endure.

  ‘I’ve got to catch a pike, mister,’ Robert told him, adding, ‘I’ve got to catch it for a lady.’

  ‘How are you going to catch it, sir?’ asked Mr Horne, playing up to the boy’s earnestness.

  ‘Live bait,’ said Robert.

  ‘Well, then, sir, you’ll need a Jardine snap tackle and a trace.’ He reached under the counter and brought them out, neatly coiled inside cellophane packages. ‘Have you got a bung?’

  ‘I found one in the Wey, mister.’

  ‘How about the rod? Is yours up to it?’

  ‘No, mister, but I can’t buy another one. I ain’t got the money.’

  ‘That’s a shame. Do you know what you’re going to do?’

  ‘Yes, mister. I got a plan. I need some line, though.’

  ‘Is it a big pike, young sir?’

  ‘It’s the Girt Pike.’

  ‘The Girt Pike,’ repeated Mr Horne, unenlightened. ‘Well, if it’s the Girt Pike …’ He handed over a fifty-yard reel of thirty-pound line, and said, ‘This’ll hold anything short of a shark.’

  Robert felt the hefty monofilament with his fingers. It was thicker and more stiff than any line he had ever seen before. Mr Horne observed his apprehension and told him, ‘Use the half-blood knot as usual, but wet the line first, or it’ll be hard to draw tight.’

  Robert counted out his money and realised that he was sixpence short. He stared at the coins in his palm, the threepenny bits and the halfpennies, and felt the leaden weight of disappointment in his heart. He looked and looked at his coins, as if looking might conjure up the extra coin that he had to have. Tears came to his eyes, but he mastered them, and slowly he offered back the brown paper bag containing his purchases. ‘I ain’t got enough,’ he said.

  Mr C. F. Horne looked down at him sympathetically, and then he had a brainwave. ‘Let me look at those coins,’ he said, and he took them, turning them over in his hand with a scholarly air. ‘Ah!’ he exclaimed theatrically. ‘Just as I thought!’

  He held out a blackened old penny that bore the all but deleted image of Queen Victoria. ‘See this, young sir? This penny is very rare. In fact, it’s so rare that it’s not even worth a penny.’

  ‘Isn’t it?’ said Robert, fearing that it was so worn out that its value might have been reduced to a halfpenny.

  ‘As luck would have it,’ said Mr Horne gravely, ‘this penny is so rare that it’s worth sixpence, and sixpence is exactly what you owe me.’ He handed back the brown paper bag, saying, ‘Thank you kindly, and good luck with the, er, Girt Pike. And don’t go putting your fingers in its maw until you’re sure that it’s dead.’ He watched Robert leaving the shop, and sighed and shook his head on account of his own foolishness. For months afterwards, Robert was to wonder somewhat ungraciously whether his penny might have been worth even more than sixpence, and half suspected Mr C. F. Horne of having diddled him.

  The following day Robert took a small bowsaw from his father’s shed, and went to the Hurst. It was dark, wet, criss-crossed with inexplicable ditches, and in some places it had been coppiced for centuries. One of the ditches was oozing with the old engine oil emptied into it routinely by the gypsies at the scrapyard, but in those days no one thought anything of it. It was a place of kingcups and bluebells, pheasants, and abandoned iron pans with the bottoms rusted out. Through it ran the old cart track that in former times had been the main road to Chiddingfold and Abbot’s Notwithstanding. Nothing ever grew on it, and it remained a ghost road, or perhaps a road-in-waiting. He soon found a hazel that was in the ideal state, because he had often thought that one day such a wand might come in handy for something.

  Not far off, Polly Wantage, apparelled in plus fours, was banging away at squirrels with her twelve-bore, and Robert worked quickly, with the fear in his breast that she might mistake him for a squirrel and give him a peppering. He whistled out of tune, very
loudly, so that she would know he was a boy. His Uncle Dick frequently claimed to have been shot up the backside by irate gamekeepers, and liked to tell Robert that every evening he found lead shot in his underwear, where it had worked its way out of his bum during the day. He would put a hand down into the seat of his trousers, draw it out, and present the boy with pieces of warm swan shot, exclaiming, ‘There you are, son, get a load a’ that! Just think where that’s been, eh! Makes yer wince, don’ it?’

  The holy grail and ultimate ambition of every little fisherman was a twelve-foot fishing rod. One day Robert hoped to own the very best, a Sealey Octofloat, which was made with real split cane, and was a proper twelve-footer. Twelve foot was long enough to reach out beyond the lily pads at the fringes of ponds, it was long enough to drop a float delicately next to the bubbles being sent to the surface by a tench, it was long enough to feel like a grown-up’s weapon. Never mind if it was also long enough to get tangled in the branches overhead during lapses of concentration and periods of excitement. Robert cut a long hazel pole that looked as if it must be at least twelve foot, and pulled it out of the clump where he had found it. Rather self-consciously he walked back home with it, past the green and the village shop, and past Obadiah Oak, the village’s last peasant, who made no acknowledgement beyond a friendly nod of the head, conscious that little boys often need long sticks for all sorts of purposes. Robert was worried that it might have been illegal to cut sticks in the Hurst, and his heart thumped with anxiety until he had arrived safely home, in case he was passed by the bobby on his bicycle, who would probably know straight away that the stick was a stolen one.