Once Upon A Time in the West . . . Country (9 page)

Bereft of any ideas of my own, I had no option but to declare that this was a good one, regardless of nagging doubts to the contrary.

‘Good idea, Ken. I’ll hold the piano here. How long do you think you’ll be?’

‘Well, I’ve got to find the tool, but I shouldn’t be longer than ten minutes.’

Twenty minutes later I was still supporting my grand piano. I’d had ample time to assess what we’d achieved. In just under an hour we had put the piano on its side, removed two of its legs and established that we couldn’t remove the third. Ken was currently lost in some shed or another searching for tractor tools. I now realised that I had absolutely no chance of making my appointment with the councillor to discuss buses. Momentarily supporting the weight of the piano with my back, I fished in my pocket for my mobile phone and called the town councillor. With only one bar of signal on the phone, I knew that the line wouldn’t be a good one.

‘Hello, it’s Tony Hawks here,’ I began, sounding strained as a result of the weight on my back. ‘You know we’re supposed to be meeting at four? Yes, well I have a slight problem . . . I’m currently supporting a piano that has a leg on it that won’t come off . . .’

‘You’re
where
?’ I heard from the other end of the line.

The situation wasn’t helped by a poor signal on the phone.

‘I’m waiting on my neighbour, who’s fetching this tool we need. I can’t move from the piano till he gets back.’

‘You’re at your neighbour’s, playing the piano?’

‘No, I—’

The line went dead. Curses. The one bar of signal had buggered off. Where does it go when that happens, I wondered? And why does it come back again? Does it drift off in the wind? Whatever the reason, the councillor was now left thinking that me playing the piano to my neighbour was more important than honouring our appointment. I stood there, disappointed, a piano at my shoulder. Alone. Trapped. Once again I had been undone by my own misplaced confidence. I’d thought I knew how two men could move a piano, and I’d thought it would be easy. How wrong I’d been.

Finally Ken returned brandishing an odd-looking tool unlike any I had seen before. It somehow resembled a cross between a screwdriver and a scythe.

‘Sorry, Tony,’ he said, as he let himself in, ‘it was a bit trickier to find than I was hoping.’

What followed was crunch time. If Ken, with this new and unfamiliar tool, failed to remove the leg, there would be nothing for it but to give up and call in the professionals.

Ken strained as he pulled on the tool. He went blue again – for the third time in one afternoon. This time, though, his final gasp was exultant.

‘Gah! Dunnit!’

Heroically, Ken had loosened the leg, and now it could be unscrewed.

I’m not going to begin to say that the rest of the procedure went smoothly. We dragged the piano between rooms easily enough, but lifting the piano to get the legs back on tested us once again and we were unable to manage without recourse to the car jack. I’ve since looked at YouTube clips of pianos being dismantled and moved with relative ease and without a car jack in sight, but for some reason Ken and I couldn’t have managed without it.

So much for it taking less than an hour. We were still toiling away when Fran made it back from yoga.

‘Why are you both purple?’ she asked.

I dodged the answer and suggested, not without a sense of urgency, that she make us both some tea.

A little later, poor Ken went home exhausted.

I left a nice bottle of wine on his doorstep that night.

***

The summer continued to be the kind that made the front pages of the newspapers.

PHEW! WHAT A SCORCHER!

This sort of headline had always puzzled me. The weather was not news. Whilst a correspondent might be required to bring us the latest on missing planes or the latest conflict in the Middle East, we didn’t need the newspapers to tell us what was happening bang outside our front doors. Was it hot yesterday? I hadn’t noticed. Thank goodness for that alert newspaper reporter.

Whenever it’s hot, I want to swim. Devon’s beaches were only forty minutes away, but we’d discovered that they weren’t Britain’s best-kept secret. August brought hordes of holidaymakers, who selfishly got into cars and formed themselves into traffic jams, doubling the journey time for us. They made the beach experience uncomfortable and sometimes disagreeable. I’ve always much preferred being on a beach in a foreign country, where the conversations of the families on adjacent towels remain a mysterious burble of exotic sounds. Raised Italian voices, or instructions called to a child in French or Spanish, were a positive part of the experience, mainly because they had no meaning. On a beach in my own country I am drawn into the family conflict, however hard I try to shut it out.

‘DARREN! GIVE THE BUCKET BACK TO YOUR SISTER!’ shouts an irate dad.

I immediately check on Darren’s location, observe the tears of the sister, and wonder how the situation will become resolved.

‘NO, YOU CAN’T HAVE A BLOODY ICE CREAM! YOU HAD FOUR YESTERDAY!’ shouts a despairing mum.

‘Yes,’ I inwardly concur, ‘four does seem an awful lot. The mother seems to have a point.’

Thus my beach experience is ruined.

Which is why I came up with my idea.

‘Fran doesn’t think it will work,’ I said to Ken, as we chatted over the fence.

‘Well, I don’t see why it shouldn’t,’ he said, supportively.

‘I’m tempted to give it a try.’

‘I’ll help you, if you need a hand.’

‘Thanks, Ken.’

‘I’ve got a good name for it.’

‘What’s that?’

‘You can call it the Hawks Harness.’

‘Excellent idea.’

I’m no inventor, but I felt I was onto something with this. The trouble with small swimming pools is that if you want to do any meaningful swimming – the kind that keeps you fit and healthy – then you reach the end of the pool after only a few strokes. It can end up feeling like you’re doing more turning than swimming. What better idea than a harness that ties around your waist and attaches by rope to a pole at the rear of the pool? Essentially a swimming machine, in the same way that you have a running machine. You simply swim on the spot. If Ken thought it could work, then it couldn’t be crazy. This man was rebuilding a tractor. He’d built the house he was living in. He knew what tool would remove a stubborn leg of a piano and, better still, what that tool was called. Ken knew what was possible and what wasn’t.

‘Trust me,’ I said to Fran, as I made the online payment for the plastic pool. ‘This will work.’

***

The pool arrived a week later, a few days after some of Fran’s family had come to stay: Ted, her dad, and her half-brother Oli and sister Monica, who were ten and thirteen respectively. And her nan. Nan was in her mid- to late eighties (there was some familial dispute as to her definite age, no doubt caused by her own bogus claims to be younger than she actually was), but she was in good physical health. Mentally, she hadn’t fared so well in the last couple of years. Her memory was definitely on the wane, and she regularly told you the same thing over and over again. On her previous visit to see us in London, before we’d moved, she’d informed me about fifty times that she loved travel. The exact words she uttered on each occasion, never with any variation, are indelibly stamped on my brain.

‘I love travel, me. Ed, my husband, he used to come home sometimes and say to me “Do you want to go for a spin in the car?” and do you know? he didn’t need to ask twice. I love travel, me.’

She’d also told me forty times how she’d felt about moving.

‘I never wanted to move to Eastbourne.’

And thirty-five times how she managed her children financially.

‘I always took good care to treat my children equally. If I gave to one, then I always gave to the other.’

Some days I just couldn’t stop myself from being mischievous.

‘Nan, I’ve been wondering lately how you feel about travel?’

‘Oh, I love travel, me. Ed, my husband, he used to come home sometimes and say to me “Do you want to go for a spin in the car?” and do you know? he didn’t need to ask twice. I love travel, me.’

‘How about your children? Did you give more to one than the others?’

‘No. I always took good care to treat my children equally. If I gave to one, then I always gave to the other.’

I’d usually be belted by Fran before I could ask her how she felt about the move to Eastbourne.

As I unpacked the pool and spread it out in the garden, Nan went momentarily off-script.

‘What are you doing?’

‘I’m going to inflate this pool, fill it with water, and then try out the Hawks Harness.’

‘I see.’

Poor Nan. She spent most of her day pretending to ‘see’ what she clearly didn’t ‘see’, and had no way of differentiating between what was straightforward information, and what was downright confusing. However, on this occasion, given that no one in the family had grasped the concept of the Hawks Harness (only Ken and I had so far shown the intellectual capacity), then she could hardly be expected to ‘see’. She claimed that she did though, which made her unique in the house.

If ‘seeing’ meant ‘watching’, then she was excelling. She had great fun observing me as I stretched out the blue plastic onto the lawn, attached the hosepipe, and began filling the pool. I had not gone top of the range. I’d spent about £90 on a circular kids’ pool, twelve feet in diameter. It would be enough to establish whether my idea would work. As Nan and I watched the pool filling with water, I could see sceptical faces inside the house, observing from the kitchen window.

Swimming pools, even tiny ones, take a long time to fill. By the time the water had reached the required level, I was so magnificently aware that Nan liked to travel, that she treated her children equally, and that she hadn’t wanted to move to Eastbourne, that only a combination of family loyalty and a lack of suitable implements had prevented me from hoisting her in to see if she floated.

‘That’s very good,’ she said, coming off-script again when the pool was full.

If only she’d been correct. It wasn’t really very good at all. Like all non-professionals, in my eagerness to accomplish the task in hand, I’d only skimmed through the instructions. A glance at them had confirmed to me what I’d expected. They were poorly written, and stated only the obvious. Yes, there had been a line in there about ensuring the pool was placed on level ground, but the garden was only on a tiny slope, and that couldn’t be a problem, surely?

A tiny slope, it was now becoming apparent, was enough. At the end of the pool that was on the lower end of the gradient, water was now trickling over the side. Nan was watching this and smiling, as if it was a nice water feature. As if its creation had been the very reason I’d performed this laborious task in the first place. I rushed inside to get my harness and rope. The pool was now emptying itself, and at an alarming rate. I had only a small window to test the efficacy of the Hawks Harness. Ken had lent me a weightlifter’s belt that we had both surmised would be perfect for the job. It took me ten minutes to find it, and a further ten minutes to locate the rope.

Fran’s brother and sister chuckled and sniggered, as I chased around the house in swimming trunks and anxious search mode. I could see their point of view. People in swimming trunks belong by pools or on beaches. The moment they begin doing anything else of a domestic nature away from the waterside environment, they look like perverts. OK, attaching myself to a harness and rope and climbing into a kids’ paddling pool that was rapidly emptying itself of water wouldn’t make me look any less of a pervert, but I considered it a good enough reason to run around the house in a state close to nudity.

A single rain cloud had now spitefully come out of nowhere and arranged itself overhead. It began to empty itself, quite liberally, as if the maiden outing of the Hawks Harness had no divine backing. I rushed outside and fixed up a stepladder so I could attach the rope to a nearby tree. I glanced down and saw four giggling faces at the kitchen window, and Nan smiling and giving me the thumbs up.

The rope in place, I was ready to trial the Hawks Harness. The single cloud had now been joined by cumuli cronies, and together they were providing heavy rain as I clambered over the pool’s sagging sides. I soon found myself standing in a few feet of water. The pool had emptied much quicker than it had filled. The water now barely came up to my knees. Given that each second saw more water lost, my initial hope of attempting the stroke of front crawl was now out of the question, given that there was nowhere near enough water for the downward strokes of the arms. I still held out some hope that the breaststroke could work, though. I quickly got down into the swimming position.

Ah.

Not good.

I was like a beached whale. I had run aground. Pride, more than anything, made me attempt to swim the breaststroke, but too much of my body weight was pressing against the bottom of the pool for any forward momentum to be achieved. From the kitchen, Fran and her family looked on, as a man attached by a rope to a tree tried his best to do the breaststroke, lying in a few feet of water. Judging by the noises I could hear, this was a source of some amusement for them.