2008 - The Bearded Tit (8 page)

‘Last Sunday, the Christian Union were preparing for a prayer breakfast and when they opened the fridge, a pigeon flew out.’

‘A miracle!’ Kramer exclaimed.

‘How do you explain this?’ asked Dr Fletcher.

‘We couldn’t get a live lamb into the fridge, sir,’ Kramer replied, persisting with his cheek even though it was falling on very stony ground.

‘This is a serious matter for a great number of reasons, and for a great number of reasons, punishment will ensue. Did neither of you dwell on the possible cruelty of enclosing a wild bird in a refrigerator?’

‘It wasn’t wild,’ I said quickly.

‘It wasn’t over the moon, though, was it?’ Kramer added.

‘It was only in there for a couple of minutes. Max. And the door was left slightly open.’

‘A pigeon is a pigeon,’ said Fletcher.

‘Very good, sir. You’re obviously a bit of an ornithologist, then, Dr Fletcher,’ Kramer smirked.

‘It was a feral pigeon,’ I continued. ‘That is, it was once domesticated but has become wild.’

‘I think Dr Fletcher knows what ‘feral’ means,’ said Kramer. ‘He does eat in the Engineering Department canteen.’

Dr Fletcher rounded on Kramer. ‘Please do spare us the sub-Marx Brothers wisecracks, Kramer. Now, listen, it is within my gift to punish you severely for this. In one of several ways. You could be banned, for example, from the college bar.’

Mmm, yes, that would be a punishment, but one we’d get over, I thought.

‘Or possibly, McGrath, I should ban
you
from Blackwaters bookshop.’

This was a stab wound. The wily old don had rattled me. I wondered how much he actually knew.

‘Blackwaters?’ I asked, trying to sound baffled. ‘I hardly ever go there.’

‘Three times a day, every weekday?’ he smiled menacingly in my direction. This was deeply disturbing.

‘Otherwise, how could you have run up such a debt and be so over your account limit that they’ve written to me to see to it that you repay the debt immediately, and that you do not enter the shop until you have?’

I wasn’t prepared for a blow like this. In my mind I was hastily putting together a defence when Kramer thankfully jerked the conversation off on a different tack.

‘They put swastikas on their milk bottles, you know!’

‘What are you talking about, Kramer?’

Kramer was centre stage now and was going to make a meal of it.

‘Let’s not beat about the bush, Dr Fletcher. I am Jewish. McGrath here is a devout Roman Catholic.’

I nodded with hypocritical enthusiasm. Kramer warmed to his theme.

‘For some reason, we’ve ended up on the Christian Union staircase. They clearly don’t want ‘our sort’ as their neighbours. They want their own kind: Spotty Miller, the King of Zit. Or Halo Neville. Or any of those Bible-and-bishop bashers, but not us. That’s why they put swastikas on their milk. It’s persecution. McGrath hasn’t forgotten Cromwell and the Pale, have you, Rory?’

‘Er…I can’t remember.’

‘Suffice it to say,’ Kramer concluded, ‘they won’t be happy until we’re off that staircase.’

Fletcher maintained a steely composure throughout this.

‘Mmm. This all sounds like so much flim-flam-flummery to me. I shall spend twenty-four hours considering my next step. In the meantime, you two can get out of my sight. Good day, gentlemen.’

The stairs leading down from Fletcher’s chambers were gloomy with pessimism. I felt something unpleasant was about to happen. After a minute or so of his customary tutting, headshak-ing and shrugging, Kramer said, ‘Well, look on the bright side.’

‘And what is that, exactly?’

‘I never thought I’d hear anyone say ‘flim-flam-flummery’.’

A
duck is a
bird
. This is less obvious that it seems. To birdwatchers, new and old, it’s very easy to discount a duck. They are so familiar. We know about ducks from a very early age. Unless you were actually delivered to your parents by a stork, or were unfortunate enough to have your eyes pecked out by an arctic skua when you were in the cot, it’s most probable that your first experience of ‘a bird’ will have been of a duck.

‘Let’s put the baby in the buggy and go and feed the ducks.’ Ah yes, an appealingly low-maintenance way of spending time with your child.

And what’s the first bird children encounter in picture books? It’s going to be a duck, isn’t it? Not a black-bellied sand grouse.
Down on the Farm
, where dogs go ‘woof, cats ‘miaow’, cows ‘moo’, sheep go ‘baa’ and ducks go ‘quack, quack’. And it’ll no doubt be a cuddly, plump white duck with an orange bill. Not that there’s anything to recommend cuddling a duck.

And, to my ear, ‘quack, quack’ is not a great approximation. I think ‘wank, wank’ is closer but I’ve never seen that in any children’s book.

Now, Emmanuel College was one of the few Oxbridge colleges with a duck pond, and very pretty it was too. It achieved its duck-pond status by having all the absolute essentials of a duck pond. Water and ducks. It also had a large number of huge carp and, at certain times of the year, waterlilies. But these were fancy extras. Its duckiness came from its ducks, and its pondiness from its water.

As a nineteen-year-old modern languages student, I didn’t realize ducks were birds. Obviously I knew the mallard. The ordinary wild duck that everybody knows. But even when I was a child drawing birds, copying or tracing them out of books, I might do the mallard but skip the other twenty or so British ducks.

One lunch-break I suggested to JJ that she come and look at the college gardens and the unique duck pond.

‘What’s unique about it?’

‘It’s the only one of its kind in the college.’

‘What sort of birds does it have?’

‘Well, ducks, funnily enough.’

‘I presumed the duck pond had ducks, otherwise it would just be a pond.’

‘Well, you know, the usual. Mallards.’

‘What else?’ Her question made me realize I didn’t know any other ducks. I’d heard of Aylesbury duck but I thought you only got those in supermarkets. Or in Aylesbury, if there was such a place. Oh yes, and Bombay duck, which I’d had once in an Indian restaurant and was never one hundred per cent sure of its provenance and was too scared to ask in case it turned out to be smoked baboon scrotum.

‘It’s beautiful.’ JJ loved the college gardens and the duck pond. It was all I could do to stop myself being proud of the place. And it was a delight to have her there, not least because my room was about forty-seven yards from the duck pond. If there was a sudden downpour, which would not be untypical of the time of year, I could legitimately invite her back.

‘Wow, you’ve got loads of different ducks! That’s a shelduck.’

She was pointing at what I thought was a goose: a large white and orangey-brown bird with a black head and a bright red bill with what I now know is called a knob on the forehead. Three prettily marked birds, which she told me were a teal, a wigeon and a pochard, also seemed to excite JJ. Then I remembered something—I did know another type of duck after all.

‘We used to have a Jamaican whistling duck!’

‘Very exotic! What happened to it?’

‘Fox got it.’

‘Ah well, natural, I suppose.’

I hadn’t the heart to tell her that the demise of the Jamaican whistling duck was not as natural as she supposed. The duck had been a gift to the college from an ex-fellow who had gone on to make billions in the pharmaceutical industry. (Drug dealing, of course, was the
de rigueur
rumour we undergraduates circulated.) As a token of gratitude, this multi-millionaire alumnus had decided to reward the college with a duck. There was a low-key ceremony when the bizarre creature was released from its pen and made some unpleasant high-pitched hissing sounds and a few of the fellows applauded and the dean made a speech of thanks about how we would enjoy the bird and remember our benefactor fondly. That very night the bird was, I believe, enjoyed by a few of the undergraduates after it had been ‘bagged’ by the captain of the rowing club, who, for the record, was called Julian Fox.

The previous spring, the college catering manager had come in for some rough treatment courtesy of the Emmanuel ducks. It was that time of year when the gardens were overrun with duckling. In this ‘protected’ environment all the ducks bred well. Our catering manager was called Steve Chilton, an obsequious but two-faced toerag. This was Kramer’s description of him. ‘It’s true,’ he maintained. ‘That’s what it says on his CV.’ But he did try to improve the standard and variety of college meals. One night in hall he was proud to offer the undergraduates a couple of roast quail each. Luxury. But someone had Tippexed out ‘roast quails’ from the menu sheets and substituted ‘Emmanuel’s own baby ducklings’. There was a riot when the animal-rights society found out. The hall was invaded, meals were thrown, plates smashed; Rex the Chaplain’s sherry was knocked over and he fainted as a result.

‘And a tufted duck,’ exclaimed JJ. ‘They’re fantastic.’ Now tufted ducks certainly are value for money. They’re like playing-in-the-bath-ducks but black and white with a bright yellow eye and a long, wispy tuft or crest hanging down the back of their head. They are ‘diving ducks’ and disappear underwater for ages and then reappear somewhere completely different. You can spend many a pleasurable hour watching this duck. Well, you can if you’re supposed to be doing something else like working or studying; or if you’re not in bed with the girl of your dreams. So, yes, I have spent a great deal of time watching the tufted duck.

But there is a drawback to having a duck pond in a college. Put mathematically: duck pond plus student plus alcohol equals student being slung into duck pond late at night in underpants.

But this was Cambridge University so obviously it was a bit more sophisticated than that. The college had a club known as the Ponding Club.

This was basically a drinking club, which, as is often the way with drinking clubs, consisted mainly of rowers and rugby players. It wasn’t enough just to go out and get drunk. There had to be rituals, formalities, rules to be obeyed, a hierarchy of officers, a specially designed tie and a song. And like all such clubs there was a Masonic secrecy to it all. Only the committee members knew who the committee members were.

The other-than-alcoholic purpose of the club was to project into the pond, naked or clad only in underwear, certain students who, in the opinion of the committee, deserved it. Needless to say, the usual victims were not rugger hearties or boaties, but longhaired, slightly arty types, or perhaps Marxists, or eccentrics, the odd individual who maybe smoked cannabis, and on one occasion it was the college orchestra’s euphonium player. No surprise to anyone then that I should be on the list. Well, a surprise to me, when Lazy Lobby and Degsy from the first XV accosted me one night as I left the bar and dragged me off towards the pond.

‘You’re making a big mistake,’ I told them.

‘There has been one mistake, McGrath, you little sewer rat, and you’ve made it,’ said Lobby, tightening his grasp on the lapels of my jacket. I tried again.

‘You sure you’re not confusing me with the other Rory McGrath?’

They stopped and let me drop to the ground.

‘Which other Rory McGrath?’ spat Lobby.

I hadn’t expected them to take this question seriously so I had no answer prepared. I played for time. ‘Er…that twat!’

‘That’s you,’ Degsy cut in.

Lobby grabbed me again. ‘He’s stalling.’

‘Quit stalling, McGrath!’ Degsy’s peculiarly Hollywood command sounded more than faintly ludicrous coming from this Old Harrovian with a cut-glass English accent. I declined to mention this.

‘Just tell me this, lads: you clearly think I’ve done something wrong and I clearly think I haven’t, so maybe you could just let me know what it is and then you…er, well, can go ahead and throw me in the pond!’

I got to my feet and brushed myself down.

Degsy paused. ‘Well, we’ve heard that you—’

Lobby stopped him. ‘Wait, Degsy. You can’t tell him why he’s being ponded. That’s against the rules of the club. The pondees are chosen after solemn deliberation by the committee and when a decision is made, action must be taken.’

‘I was only—’

‘Degs, listen. The victim knows that the committee wouldn’t choose him lightly. This isn’t some frivolous piss-head club that chucks wankers in the pond. To explain to the pondee why he is chosen makes it sound like we’re in some way unsure, as though we feel we have to justify the sacred and binding judgement of the committee.’

Both the public-school oafs had let go of me in order to discuss the Holy Writ of the Ponders Club elite members. As a non-member, there was little I could contribute to this discussion so I thought it might be a good time to find somewhere else on the planet to stand. I legged it into the cloisters and did a sharp left and into the street. Neither of them seemed to be in pursuit but I did hear Lobby shout, ‘We’ll get you next time! You call me a poof again and you’re dead!’

I didn’t think it was worth returning to college too soon so I sought refuge in St John’s where the bar manager was a fellow Spanish student of mine.

‘Call Lobby a poof? I’ve never ever done that,’ I mused with Kramer later on in the safety and exceedingly cheap vodka of the Polish Club on Chesterton Road, which Kramer had blagged membership of through a refugee great-aunt of his from Gdansk.

‘I know where this is coming from,’ said the wise elder. ‘The Christians. Branfield! Think about it. We tell Fletcher they put swastikas on our milk and Fletcher bans them from having prayer breakfasts. Branfield plays rugby. He’s mates with Degsy and Lobby. It’s going to be easy for him to slip in the odd rumour about you or me.’ Kramer looked determined. ‘‘We must do something; and i’the heat!’
King Lear?

‘Don’t call me King Lear.’

Kramer, as far as we knew, had not crossed Degsy or Lobby’s path and would probably not be known to be one of my ‘gang’, so he went to work over a chance meeting by the pinball machine. Lobby held the record for the highest score, needless to say.

‘That’s a hell of a score to beat,’ Kramer said.

‘I know. It’s mine!’ Lobby sneered.