A Postillion Struck by Lightning (20 page)

By the time we reached it, and could look down over the valley below to Lewes and the castle sitting on top of the town like a piece of broken pumice stone, and Mount Cabum like a volcano, the sun was getting high and it was already warm. But they seemed very pleased because they could see the Ouse winding up the valley like a tin snake, and Reg said the tide would be in by the time we got down there. As we slithered down the steep slope to Itford Farm, Perce said that whatever I did I wasn't to come near the edge of the river bank, because the least shadow,
or movement, would scare the pike away and they'd clobber me one. But since they had let me go with them, and were older than me anyway, I just held my tongue and followed them bumpily over the mole hills to the road and then across the high railway line to the river.

The pike wasn't actually
in
the river; he lived, they said, in a sort of pond thing which ran off the river and was very deep, which is why he was there at all. Because he had grown so big eating all the other fishes in the pond-bit that he had grown too big to swim out again, so he was trapped until someone hooked him.

The pond was quite large, and very weedy. The tide was coming in, rippling the clear water up towards Lewes, and the ground all round was very wet and marshy—which is why they were wearing Wellingtons, I realised, because I was sopping wet already; but it didn't matter because it was so warm. Perce gave me a small jam jar with a paper lid and told me to start hunting for grasshoppers because he was going to try them on the pike.

“Get the big ‘uns,” he said, starting to put his bamboo rod together. “Don't go for the little ones, I want them big and jumping. ‘E won't take ‘em if they's little and not all wriggling. You can bait the hook if you like.”

I got quite a few poor old grasshoppers and a couple of beetles as well in case they would come in handy, and then I sat down, not too far away from the bank, and watched.

Well, there really wasn't very much to watch in the end. Just Reg and Perce sitting hunched up in the rushes not moving. So I opened my satchel and started to unwrap my sandwiches because I hadn't had any breakfast and I was getting quite hungry, but Reg shook a fist at me in the air, and Perce turned round and scowled, because the paper was a bit rustly and they looked very cross. So I lay back in the wettish grass and looked up at the sun and the clear shining sky. It was rather boring, I thought, and I was quite pleased when a lady came slowly walking across the field. She was tall and thin, with a long woolly, and fairish hair which looked rather wispy as if she had just washed it. She was carrying a walking stick and a bunch of wild flowers. When she saw us she stopped and shaded her eyes with her hand to see us better against the white light of the river. Reg looked very grumpily at her and went on fishing. Perce just hunched his
shoulders up and didn't move, which was very rude because she was smiling a little and looked quite kind.

“Fishing?” she said in a silly way. Because what else could they be doing? Reg just looked at her and nodded his head, and Perce didn't do anything. She looked vaguely round her and said: “I think I'm lost, I can't find the bridge.”

Reg swung his rod into the air and looked sullen. “Up behind you, on the road,” he said gruffly, and re-cast his line so that I heard the bait plop into the still morning water.

“Thank you,” said the lady and then she held up the bunch of flowers for us all to see. No one said anything, so she turned and started walking back the way she had come, towards the bridge, stepping carefully over the mole hills and tussocks. She didn't look back and I was glad, because we had been very rude, but she hadn't spoken to me so I didn't feel I was quite to blame, and I didn't dare speak or move because of the pike and Perce's face, which was very red and cross.

“Bloomin' nuisance her. She's always about when I get here. Always up and down the river she is, like a bloomin' witch.” He reeled in his line and told me to give him another grasshopper because the one he had was drowned and not jerking any longer. While he baited the hook again we all watched her scramble up the bank to the road and then walk across the bridge swinging the stick in her hand; she was smelling her bunch of flowers and didn't look back at us again.

“A foreigner, isn't she?” said Reg.

“Londoner. From over there at Rodmell,” said Perce, skewering the biggest grasshopper onto his hook. “They say she's a bit do-lally-tap … she writes books.” He swung the wriggling bait out into the still pond-like water and muttered something about never getting any peace and quiet. As the float plopped into the water and bobbed gently on the ripples from the tide, we all settled down again to fish. Which was pretty boring I was beginning to think.

So I just lay back quietly in the grasses, and watched the sky and wondered why there were so many witches in Sussex.

The bus from Seaford had just rumbled up to the Market Cross when we got back to the village, so I knew it was pretty late and
that Lally would be fidgeting if I didn't hurry on up the hill to the cottage.

We hadn't caught the pike. Of course. No one really believed that we would, it was just a “try”. Perce said that it was the pale-faced lady who put him off the whole day.

“Every time I sets meself down by that little pond-place along she comes wagging her stick and talking away to herself. Potty she is, so would anyone be living right next to a graveyard.” He was grumpy, but Reg said it was the bait we had used; next time we went, he said, we should take a bit of fresh liver or something really tempting. But Fred Brooks from the bus said that the pike was just a “rumour”, never mind what old Hallam over at Selmeston said, and that he'd been trying for the same pike ever since he was knee high to a duck, and had never had any luck, and that you'd have more luck trying to win the Irish Sweepstake than trying for the pike at Beddingham.

And that seemed to be that: so I just ambled home through the village and across the river and up the hill to the house. The sun was starting to set away behind the gully, and the shadows of the ash and oak were already quite long across the rutted path. The sun was orange-glinting on the diamond panes of glass in the cottage windows, and when I threw my arms up in the air, and stood with my legs apart, my own shadow looked very long and thin, with a tiny little head at the top, like the Long Man of Wilmington.

At the top of the gully, almost where our orchard started, a small white dog came skittering out of the bushes, barking and squealing and then dashed back again, and I knew that it was probably Mr Aleford and his brothers ferreting. And then they all came up through the hedgerow from the gully, with sacks, and a long pole with five rabbits hanging by their legs from it, and the little white dog, Tiger, leaping and jumping for pleasure. We all waved cheerfully and they went on down the hill laughing and talking. Suddenly Mr Ben turned round and called up to me, “Hey? You lost this then?” and he threw something like a ball up in the air towards me. I couldn't catch it because I was carrying my shoes and the satchel, so it rolled rustling into the grass at my feet.

“Butterfingers!” called Mr Ben. “Found it down the warren there, thought it must have belonged to you, reckon it got stuck in a hole and the badgers got it. Been there all summer by the look of it. Cheerio!” and he turned and went after his brothers.

It was George.

Even though it hadn't got a head or a tail or legs or anything, it was clearly George—but now he was just an empty shell looking like someone's old hat, with four holes in it. I took him up and went on up the hill.

“Will you dig a grave?” said my sister kindly, knowing I was miserable and trying to be nice. But I shook my head and finished the last bit of my gooseberry fool. Lally poured herself another cup of tea and clonked the spoon about.

“Not much point in having a funeral for just a shell,” she said cheerfully. “It's like making a grave for a suit of clothes, isn't it? And no one would want to do that. George has been all eaten up by badgers and ants and that's that: you should have put a string on him like young Fluke told you in the first place. You should always put a string on everything you want to keep, from buttons to tortoises.”

She really seemed not to know how miserable I was, but my sister did; anyway part of it, even if it wasn't the part she liked, had been hers too … so she understood better.

After supper, she came down to the pump with me, and we started to wash the shell so that all the mud and chalk swirled away. But it wasn't very much good because it was all scratched and chewed up looking and made me even sadder, so I just filled the two buckets for the washing-up and we humped them, slopping water, back to the kitchen. Lally took one, and set it on the copper to boil, and took the other with her to the sink for the rinsing.

“Cheer up, you two! You'd think you'd lost a shilling and found a farthing! It's a lovely summer evening, go out and enjoy it before bedtime.”

I started to dry up a cup rather slowly while she swirled the suds about and clinked and clonked the plates and saucers onto the draining board.

“I think it feels like the end of summer now,” I said.

“Aren't we the little actor then!” said Lally, drying up a bundle of forks. “All summers have to end sometime you know … can't have a summer without a good winter, can you? It stands to reason. It has to get the land ready for the next time.
Can't be summer all the time.” She stacked the forks in a neat pile and started on the knives, wiping them hard against her apron before she polished them on the drying cloth.

My sister hung the cups on the dresser hooks and arranged the plates back on the little shelves.

“I mean to say!” she said suddenly. “If there wasn't a winter whatever would happen to Christmas! Wouldn't it be simply awful with no Christmas! And you can't have a Christmas without a winter, can you? You couldn't have one in summer … not possibly.”

“They do in Australia,” I said grumpily but pleased I knew.

“Oh, Australia! They do everything upside down there, because they are upside down from us, everyone knows that. I expect they even play cricket on Christmas day with nuts or something.”

Lally bundled the knives and forks into a drawer, took up the tablecloth, shook it out of the window, and started to fold it, singing happily away as if she had no cares at all in the world.

Of course it didn't matter to her, really, about George; she didn't really know that I was feeling so miserable because I had been careless and let him wander and go off on his own and get eaten by badgers and so on. That was, anyway, all my fault. She just went on singing away “Dawn With Thine Rosy Mande” as if nothing awful had happened at all.

She even slammed the drawer shut hard, with a bang, when she put the cloth away, and sang even louder. No one cared. Not even my sister: she was mucking about with a jug of flowers on the table, so I just decided to go out into the garden and have a bit of a think, and be on my own.

It was cooler outside. The sky was flat and almost mauve-coloured. Bats swooped like little kites over the wigwams of runner beans in the vegetable garden as I wandered up to the iron gate and out into Great Meadow, holding George's shell in my hands, and wondering why everything had suddenly gone so beastly and sad-feeling.

I heard my sister rustling through the raspberry canes behind me, and the iron fence squeak as she clambered over it and lumped into the meadow. And then she was walking, quite quietly, just behind me, not saying anything, and I knew that she really was a bit sorry for me in her own peculiar way.

Up at the top of the gully, where they had all been ferreting,
the grass was trodden and muddy, and there was a bit of rabbit's fur caught on a clump of thistles. But there was no sign, this evening, of any rabbits as there usually was: they had all gone.

“Is this where they found him?” said my sister in a low voice.

“Yes. They were after the rabbits.”