A Postillion Struck by Lightning
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Authors: Dirk Bogarde
Dirk Bogarde
This book is for
My Father and Mother, Elizabeth,
Gareth, Tony and Lally.
With my love.
D. v.d. B.
Preface
In 1968 when I left England to live abroad, I suggested to my father that I might perhaps start to write a book about my early childhood. The severance had not been very easy, and I felt that by recalling some of the intense pleasures of the early days the break might be somewhat soothed. He agreed, but reminded me that as far as I was concerned my early family background was very hazy. He felt that I would receive little help from the Scottish side, apart from my mother, and that there was no one left on his side save for himself. Consequently, if I liked, he would start to collect as much information as he could to assist me in what, he said, would be a very lengthy task. I accepted with pleasure. It was only after his death, in 1972, that clearing up private papers in his studio I came across a packet and a cigar box labelled simply “For Dirk”. He had been as good as his word and had assembled a wide collection of diaries, letters, school reports, photographs, glass negatives, cuttings and written notes in his own hand on dates and times. It is from this carefully amassed selection from a life that this book has, in the main, been written. For the rest I have had to depend on my own memories and those of my English family and my friends.
Where it was impossible to remember a real name, I have substituted another: and also where I have felt that this might save embarrassment. Street names and some identifiable town names have likewise been altered. Otherwise the events, as I remember them, all took place as written. Although, clearly, many of the conversations have been re-constructed, these are the words we used, the phrases we used and the way we were then. Part One is a condensation of at least two summers, but Part Two is “as it was” to the best of my recollection.
I am indebted very much to the following people for assistance with “remembering”, and for the use of their own letters and diaries: Mrs G. Goodings; Mrs A. Holt; E. L. L. Forwood; W. A. Wightman; and G. van den Bogaerde. And to Mrs Glur Dyson Taylor who was “godmother” to the book.
To Mrs Sally Betts, who typed it, and corrected my appalling spelling, punctuation and almost indecipherable typescript, my warmest thanks and gratitude.
Dirk Bogarde
Chateauneuf de Grasse
Summer
We were almost halfway down the gully when my sister screamed and called out, “I've found him!”
But she hadn't: it was just an old rusty can gleaming wet in the dew among the leaves. It wasn't George by any stretch of the imagination: I'd know George anywhere and he wouldn't be down the gully, of that I was pretty sure. He'd be up top, in the Great Meadow where the grass was fresh and tender, and there were hosts of dandelions which he liked.
Not in the gully, which was deep, and dry, usually, and lined with great ash and oak, and chalky along the edges full of warrens and, down at the bottom by the road, old cans and bedsteads and stoves which people dumped among the nettles. George was the kind of tortoise who thought for himself, and he would never have thought to wander so far from the house when the Great Meadow was bung full of food and surrounded the place in which he usually lived. He wasn't a complete fool.
I struggled up the side of the gully and broke through the nettles and elder bushes into the field. I was soaking with dew. Down below in the valley the first chimneys were smoking and the meadow lay still in silver light, a good hundred acres of it. It was going to be a bit of a job to find George among all that grass.
My sister was behind me, having scrambled painfully through the elder branches, whimpering from time to time. I didn't take any notice. If you said anything the least bit kind, or helpful, or sympathetic, they started to snivel, and after that cry. And you might as well have said nothing, because then they only did a whimper or two and, seeing you didn't care much, stopped. So I didn't say a thing to her. She rubbed her stung knees with a dock leaf and pushed her hair from her eyes.
“Why did we have to get up at dawn to look for him?”
“Because.”
“But because why?”
“Because it's the best time to find them. That's why.”
“To find tortoises!” she scoffed, rubbing away at her wretched knees. “You'd think you'd been hunting them all your life.”
I started to hum and sing a bit.
“And you haven't,” she continued, “because they come from Africa and you've never been there.”
I left her and started walking down the long slope to the valley, peering at molehills and under tussocks of ragwort, and generally trying to seem as if I had a pattern. Pretty soon she'd get windy left up there by the dark old gully and she'd come trolling and skittering down to join me.
I found a large rabbit hole, and stooped to search it. Once, a month ago, he'd got out and stuck himself in a rabbit hole in the orchard.
She wasn't far behind me now, singing a bit, and brushing the long wet grasses with her skinny brown hands. She grabbed some sorrel leaves and chewed them.
“If he gets stuck in a hole again, we'll never find him, there must be five hundred million in this field. There must be.”
I got up and dusted my hands and walked on singing my bit of humming-song. She was right, but I wasn't going to let her know that.
“We'll just have to search every single one.”
“Well I won't!” She stopped some paces behind me, waving her arms like a windmill. I walked on, looking and kicking about the big grass clumps.
“It's not my tortoise. And I'm soaking wet. My sandals are all slimy. You'll be sorry!” she screeched.
Patiently I turned and looked up at her against the morning.
“It's half yours,” I said politely, but coldly. “Uncle Salmon gave it to us
both
. So it stands to reason that it's
ours
. Not just mine.”
She shrugged, but was silent. I stared at her. She suddenly bent and started to unbuckle her sandal. “Well, I don't want my half of it. You've got the part with the head. That's the best part.” She sat down in the wet shaking her old brown sandal. I could see her knickers, but I didn't bother to tell her. She was so rotten.
“Well, go on home and I'll look for him alone. And when I find him I'll have both halves and you'll have to lump it.” I turned and ran away down the hill⦠in case she tried to follow. She didn't, but she screeched again.
“The head part is the most interesting part. You said so. I don't like the tail part. And if I go home alone Aleford's stallion could get me.”
I reached the edge of the meadow and threw myself on to the grass under the ash tree and lay there looking at the sky and puffing a bit. It was quite a long run down from the top.
It was only yesterday evening that I had carefully washed his shell, and then put a little olive oil on it so that it shone and gleamed like a great golden brown pebble on the beach at Birling Gap. Only yesterday that he'd had the very innermost heart of a lettuce. The pale, yellowish-whitish bit. And only yesterday that Reg Fluke told me to put a little hole in her end of the shell and fix a bit of string to it. “Then he won't wander,” he said.
But I didn't, and here we were in the dawn, searching for him, in vain it seemed.
There was a thumping in the earth under my back, and I could hear her running. Her feet thumping along in the grass. She slithered down beside me clutching her soaking sandals and peered at me. Her long hair hung over her face, and brushed my cheek. She looked like a hideous witch-thing: she crossed her eyes at me.
“Don't!” I said in alarm. “You'll stay like it.”
“Not that you'd care. You left me up there and the stallion might be anywhere. You just don't mind about me. I won't help you look.” She leapt to her feet and ran barefoot through the field, jumping over molehills, waving her skirts about, and singing very loudly indeed. This was not to impress me, but to frighten away Aleford's stallion, which we had never actually seen, but which we'd been told about in great detail by Reg Fluke and a boy from Woods, the butchers in the village.
And the telling was bad enough. I wasn't exactly anxious to see it myself. But I lay on, listening to her singing away in puffs and gasps as she ran furiously uphill.
The sun had been up only a little while and beside me, close to my face, so that it was actually all blurry and looked like an eagle, was a burnet-moth on a bit of grass, feeling the sun, and waiting for the dusk to come. I rolled over on my stomach and looked up the hill. She looked quite small now, leaping over the grasses, and jumping about with her long legs and the sandals held high, as if a great dog was running beside her trying to grab them.
A blackbird was singing in the ash tree and I was just wondering if there was a nest nearby when I heard her: it was rather frightening actually. She let out a terrible shriek, and then another and another as if someone was stabbing her.
I jumped up and stared. She was standing quite still, staring at the ground and holding her sandals close to her heart. Shrieking.
It must be George, and of course, he must be dead. Horribly, by the way she was yelling ⦠I started to walk up the hill towards her.