The Chickens of Atlantis and Other Foul and Filthy Fiends (17 page)

Naturally, I knew Brentford, as I had been Lord Brentford's monkey butler and also his best monkey-man when he got married. I had lived with his lordship in Syon House, an old mile along the Isleworth Road from the little town of Brentford.

To know Brentford is to love it, as the old song says, and few who visit this ‘little piece of Heaven that has fallen to Earth’ are not moved by its beauty.

The sky seems somehow bluer in Brentford, the bricks of the houses that little bit brickier, the pavements more pavementy. Certainly the ladies there are prettier than those in other parts of London, and the gentlemen hold to such dignified deportment that when the term ‘God-like’ is used to describe them, it is not used casually.

‘Cradled lovingly in an elbow of Old Mother Thames’, as the poet once put it,
^*
Brentford remains to this very day (the
year 2012) one of England's top tourist attractions. Its flora and fauna attract naturalists, whilst its pub-night talent competitions draw in record-company executives from all over the world who seek to find next year's Big Thing.

Ah, Brentford.

A pity, though, about that dreadful gasworks.

A body blow! A pustule on the nose of the Madonna! This black and evil edifice stood upon the road between Brentford and Kew, obscuring the idyllic views of the Thames and poisoning the air.

The Brentford Gasworks were constructed in eighteen twenty-one to supply street lighting from Brentford to Kensington, to light the way for the fashionable as they travelled in their quilted curricles. A noble venture, to be sure. But to site so ugly a structure in such a beautiful place?

Many suspected it to be the work of the ever-jealous French. Johnny Frenchman, as is well known, looks bitterly from the shores of his dismal country towards the shining sands and sun-drenched vistas of our fair land.

So, yes, it seems fair to me that the blame must lie on a Frenchman's garlicky doorstep.
^*

But did the gasworks really ruin Brentford?

No, not a bit of it did they!

Because the philosophical folk of that blessed borough merely turned a blind eye to the gasworks and utterly ignored their very existence.

And so we fetched up in Brentford.

We had set the controls for midnight and I carefully steered the
Marie Lloyd
down into the grounds of Syon House, as far away from the mansion as I could manage.

Then we tasted brandy, enjoyed a cigar and took ourselves off to our beds.

To be rudely awakened at dawn.

A clamouring came to the hull of the
Marie Lloyd
. Great oaths were sworn and cries of anger, too.

I awoke and joined Mr Bell, who was peering bleary-eyed out through the windscreen and shaking his head from side to side.

‘Are we under attack?’ I asked my friend, who stood in his nightshirt and cap. ‘Is it chickens, or Nazis, or both?’

‘I do not think so,’ Mr Bell replied. ‘From what I gather, we have “parked our attraction in quite the wrong place”. I shall go and remonstrate. You would do well to stay here.’

I nodded in agreement then followed Mr Bell to the hatchway, which he unlocked and let down.

‘Cooee there,’ he called.

Some rather fierce-looking fellows wearing denim trousers and cotton vests (jeans and T-shirts, it was later explained) were rapping upon the
Marie Lloyd
and demanding that it be moved.

‘So sorry,’ called my friend to them. ‘We arrived rather late in the night.’

‘Well, now,’ said a fellow who was bigger than the rest. ‘You certainly look the part and no mistake.’

‘I do?’ said Mr Bell, and he shrugged his shoulders.

‘You certainly do, but you can't park it here – and where is the loader that brought it?’

‘We flew it in,’ said Mr Bell.

The large fellow laughed at this. ‘Priceless,’ said he, when he had done. ‘Well, we'll bring in the crane and shift you.’

‘Shift us to where, exactly?’

‘Oh, it's
us
, is it, then?’ And the fellow caught sight of me, dressed too in my nightshirt and cap.

‘You've got to be ******* joking,’ the fellow declared.

Mr Bell cast me a look that I felt was rather disparaging.

‘I told you to wait in the cabin,’ said he.

‘Well, that'll have to go back to where it came from,’ said the fellow. ‘Can't have one of them running around loose in the park.’

I looked up at Mr Bell.

And he looked down at me.

‘I do not think we are in any danger,’ he said to me, ‘but there appears to be a degree of misunderstanding. We'll let this fellow bring his crane, then see what we shall see.’

Mr Bell smiled at the fellow.

The fellow looked back, slack of jaw.

We attended to the morning's ablutions, dressed and set to breakfast.

‘There is only porridge, I regret,’ said Mr Bell. ‘We will have to take on more supplies – it is ever foolhardy to begin the day without a good breakfast inside you.’

Mr Bell was a man who took his food as he took his ale and indeed as he took his life: without moderation.

A sudden movement bothered at our breakfasting.

The
Marie Lloyd
was lifted aloft and borne along slowly but surely.

I gazed from a porthole of the dining salon. ‘I can see Syon House in the distance,’ I said. ‘It looks very much the same. It brings back many memories.’

Which of course it did, for I had enjoyed happy times whilst working for Lord Brentford.

But I
did
feel trepidation, because I remembered well the
terrible thing
. How I had crash-landed this very
Marie Lloyd
,
this time-ship, into the Bananary at the rear of Syon House in the year eighteen ninety-eight.

And how Lord Brentford, entering the crashed craft with his double-barrelled fowling piece, had shot the elderly me stone dead, thinking me an enemy.

It had all been a terrible thing and I remembered it clearly. But it
had
happened and it
would
happen, this I knew. But not until I was a very ancient ape.

Mr Bell gazed hard at my expression.

‘I know what you are thinking, my little friend,’ said he, ‘and you know that Lord Brentford loved you and that what he did was a dreadful mistake.’

‘I know,’ I said. ‘And I have forgiven him.’

‘Then,’ replied Mr Bell, a-wiping his mouth with a napkin, ‘let us go out and look at the world of the nineteen-sixties and see if we can fathom exactly what the ambitious Mr Knapton is up to in this day and age.’

‘Let us do that very thing.’

‘Oh my dear dead mother,’ said Cameron Bell.

For we had left the
Marie Lloyd
(carefully locking it behind us) and ventured out into the grounds of Syon, where we came upon a sign:

VICTORIAN THEME PARK

AND MONKEY SANCTUARY

I read this, as had Mr Bell, and I, too, expressed words regarding his defunct mama.

‘What is a
theme park
?’ I asked my friend. ‘And why would a monkey need sanctuary?’

I had read Victor Hugo's
The Hunchback of Notre-Dame
, where Quasimodo took sanctuary in the cathedral, and
wondered, perchance, whether the monkeys of this age were suffering from the same kind of religious persecution.

Around and about us stood traction engines and steam-driven carousels, swing boats and roundabouts and all the delights of a bright and gay Victorian funfair.

Mr Bell was in his tweeds and I in new summer linens. Many folk pointed in our direction and said we looked ‘very authentic’.

‘And
that
,’ said a laughing fellow, wearing jeans and a T-shirt as did most round about, ‘that really
does
look the part, doesn't it?’ And he pointed towards the
Marie Lloyd
. ‘That is exactly how you might have imagined a Victorian spaceship to be, if ever one had existed.’

‘Oh dear,’ I whispered to Mr Bell. ‘History hasn't changed back, then.’

‘You want to put a muzzle on that monkey, though,’ said the fellow. ‘They can turn right nasty and give you rabies if they bite your finger.’

‘Darwin is quite tame,’ said Mr Bell, and he tousled my head as I was sans pith helmet that day.

‘Darwin?’ said the fellow. ‘Like the father of the monkeys? Very good.’ And, grinning like a buffoon, he went upon his way.

‘Shall we take a walk up to the house?’ asked Mr Bell, when there was none but me to hear him ask it. ‘Perhaps we might meet one of Lord Brentford's grandchildren. Assuming they remain in residence. For it is clear that the house and grounds are now opened up to the public.’

Lord Brentford's grandchildren? I thought this over and then a sad thought struck me. Lord Brentford would of course be dead and gone. Long dead and gone by now and maybe long forgotten.

‘I would like to go to the house,’ I said.

And I put out my hand and my friend took it in his.

Very little had really changed, it appeared. The Bananary had
not
been rebuilt. Instead, where it had once so proudly stood, there was a sort of second-rate greenhouse affair that contained a cafeteria.

We strolled about to the big front door and this stood widely open. Within we encountered a kind of ticket booth.

Mr Bell patted his pockets. Of course we had no present-day currency.

‘You can go through as you're in the show,’ said a lady on the desk, and a very sweet lady she was, too. ‘And oh, doesn't he look cute in his little suit.’ And she smiled down at me and I could not help smiling back.

‘Don't let him touch anything,’ said the lady.

Mr Bell just grinned and nodded his head.

Many memories now came tumbling back as we walked through the house. Memories of the grand masked balls and lavish garden parties, of the famous folk who had cast their exotic shadows upon lawns lit by lanterns, feasted in the dining room and danced the night away in the grand hall, with its frescoed walls and glittering chandeliers.

Syon House looked rather sad and rather faded, too, like the dry dead husk of a once bright, vital place.

‘Oh my,’ said Cameron Bell, of a sudden. ‘Darwin, look at this.’

We stood now in what had been his lordship's private study. The furniture was mostly the same as I remembered, an eclectic mix of east and west, gathered to suit Lord Brentford's personal tastes.

But there above the fireplace was the portrait.

Framed within a gilt rococo frame.

The work of the painter Edward Burne-Jones.

The portrait of a monkey.

I looked. I stared. And tears fell from my eyes.

‘It is
you
,’ said my friend.

And yes, it was. The portrait was of me.

The painted me stood tall and proud, wearing the uniform of the Queen's Own Electric Fusiliers, blue with buttons of brass and braid of gold. He struck a most heroic pose, one hand on the pommel of a sword and in the other the staff of a Union Jack.

‘And see here,’ said Mr Cameron Bell, and he pointed to a brass plaque on the base of the gilded frame, too high for me to read from where I stood.

‘What does it say?’ I sniffed as I spoke. ‘Please read it to me, Mr Bell.’

My friend took a deep breath and read:

DARWIN

My loyal butler and bestest friend.

Mr Bell took my hand once more and we left Syon House.

‘What a beautiful thing to do,’ I said, when I had dried my eyes.

‘I told you he loved you,’ said Cameron Bell. ‘But you knew that anyway. Look, I have a folded pamphlet here – a potted history, I suppose. Let us sit beneath that tree over there and study it together.’

We sat beneath a spreading chestnut tree. I had climbed this tree myself in times past, and now I leaned back upon its trunk and wondered at the future.

‘It is wrong, you know,’ I said to Mr Bell.

‘Travelling through time, do you mean?’

I nodded. ‘It is wrong.’

‘I tend to agree,’ said my friend. ‘It is an unnatural thing to do. I have cautioned care before and I do so again now.’

‘You shot dead that MacTurnip, I recall.’

‘Hm,’ said Mr Cameron Bell, and then, ‘Oho,’ and Mr Bell laughed.

‘What is so very funny?’ I enquired.

‘Darwin,’ said my friend to me, ‘when you were Lord Brentford's monkey butler, did you ever, how shall I put this,
entertain
any lady monkeys here?’

‘A gentleman never divulges,’ I said. ‘But yes, there were one or two dalliances. Queen Victoria had a monkey maid, as did several of the grand ladies who lived nearabouts. They used to visit upon Sundays and I would take their monkeys for a walk.’

‘
For a walk?
’ croaked Mr Bell, suddenly made all but helpless by a fit of laughter.

‘I only did what was natural,’ I said, ‘as any ape would do.’

‘And did it well,’ said my friend, guffawing as he handed the pamphlet to me.

I perused it once.

Perused it twice.

Perused it once again.

‘Oh my,’ I said, when I had done. ‘Oh my, oh my, oh my.’

‘Oh my, indeed,’ said Mr Bell. ‘Now we understand what that fellow said earlier about you being the “father of the monkeys”. It would appear that a monkey house in the grounds is currently home to several hundred of your own descendants.’

And then Mr Bell had to run to the toilet.

For otherwise he would have wet himself, as he was laughing so hard.

*
I do not usually employ the term ‘poet’ when I describe myself. I prefer the term ‘visionary’ – but I appreciate the gesture. (R. R.)

*
It is not racist to poke fun at the French. In fact, it is to be admired. (R. R.)

20

r Bell at last regained sobriety.