“Could be fun,” said Peter. “What about you?”
“If I’m spared, I shall retire gracefully to the country. I’ve got a small cottage in Hampshire, near some pretty good fishing. We could set up home there together if you like.”
“It’s what we’ve always wanted,” mused Peter. “Perhaps I could get Suzy over as well. She’s an excellent cook, you know. I’m sure you’d like her.”
“And she’s already pretty good at looking after both of us,” said Maurice.
The girl came round with the Champagne.
***
4. - UP IN ARMS
It’s all very well for you, sitting there, reading this. You haven’t a clue what it was like to be my age. You can’t remember a thing about it, anymore than I probably shall when I’m your age.
Well, let me tell you that it’s no real fun. And that’s mostly thanks to people of about your age. If you could only remember what it was like, you’d treat people like me a bit differently. Not that you mean to be unkind, I’m sure, but the indignity of some of the things we have to put up with is quite awful. And we can do nothing about it yet, because we have none of the skills that you seem to have. I suppose one day we’ll catch up, but until then, being my age is no real fun.
In my house, there seem to be three people around most of the time, although they are different. One is shorter, with long hair and knobbly bits that give me milk when I’m hungry – or at least, when they think I should be hungry. Her name seems to be Mum-mum or Mamma or something, so she keeps trying to tell me, and another one is taller, out of the house a lot and generally not much use except that he seems to take his turn getting up in the night when I yell. He seems to be Dada, or something like that. He doesn’t do milk.
Then there’s a much shorter one, also with long hair, whose name is Yoursister, although she seems a bit unsure of this herself. Quite often, I hear her telling people ‘I’m four’, so perhaps she has two names. Anyway, Four or Yoursister or whatever she is called, is my favourite, as she is always around, and seems to have plenty of time to spare. She makes me laugh, too, but doesn’t actually seem able to do much that’s useful. She doesn’t do milk, either.
There are others about, whom I come across from time to time, but I know nothing about any of them. Mostly, they are just intensely annoying.
In general, I find life extremely frustrating, and not a little boring. So would you. For a start, I spend a great deal of my time lying on my back, either on the floor, or in bed. I spend hours staring at the ceiling, which is white and nothing ever happens up there, apart from the odd spider or fly. The others in the house, who are strong enough to sit up and have learnt to walk about, don’t have this problem. For one thing, there’s a sort of flat box thing in a couple of the rooms downstairs, which have colour pictures moving about on the front, and which make noises. They seem to spend hours watching the things. Why can’t I have one on the ceiling, that’s what I’d like to know? I bet if those boxes just had pictures of the ceiling and nothing else apart from the occasional fly or spider, they wouldn’t sit there for long, and would soon switch them off.
I have a sort of thing on wheels that I get pushed about in outside from time to time, and sometimes I’m left in it indoors. There’s a string across the front just above my head with coloured bits hanging on it. I think it’s supposed to amuse me and keep me quiet. It would be a good deal better if I could get at the thing, since some of the bits rattle, except that they don’t unless someone twangs the string. I can’t do that, because I can’t reach it. I’d also like to see what the bits taste like. I like to have a suck at everything new that I come across, although most of it is rubbish, and not even cooked, and certainly none that I have discovered so far does milk. I have small soft things I can play with, but the fluff comes off when I put those in my mouth, and they taste like nothing on earth. They don’t really seem to be a lot of use, except that I’m getting quite good at throwing them over the side. I find then that, if I yell loud enough, someone will pick them up for me and put them back, so I can chuck them out again. I could play for hours like this, but pretty soon they yell back at me and keep the things. Even Four or Yoursister or whatever her real name is, and she’s usually pretty good at providing some amusement. Sometimes, she brings along soft things of her own to show me, but, more often than not, I’m not allowed to touch, let alone suck.
She can be a bit sensitive, though, I have discovered. There’s one thing I quite enjoy having around – it’s sort of short white plastic stick thing, with a ball on the end that rattles when you shake it. I have discovered that, if you hold the stick at the end, you can really throw it quite a long way. That’s about all its good for, really, as it certainly isn’t worth chewing. Anyway, one day, after weeks of practice, I managed to hit Yoursister on the head with it. You should have heard the noise. I wish I could yell like that, although one day I shall be able to, as I’m practicing that as well. I’ve heard people say what a good pair of lungs I’ve got, and it seems to run in the family, if Yoursister is anything to go by.
Mind you, I think she’s a bit deficient in other areas. For one thing, I’ve noticed when we’ve been in the bathroom together, that she doesn’t seem to have a willie, poor thing, which is probably why she takes such a keen interest in mine. But she can at least get about, like the rest of them, on her two legs. I’m in training for that, of course. I spend as much time as I can, kicking my legs about to build up the muscles, and they do already seem to be getting a bit stronger. Certainly, the cup of tea I hit the other day went further than I thought it would, much to the annoyance of the tall thing that was holding it while pulling faces at me and making funny gurgling sounds. Do you know, that really does annoy me. It is supposed to amuse me, I think, but I thought the flying cup and saucer was much funnier, although the reaction was a bit fiercer than usual I must admit, and accompanied by a good deal of yelling. But I raise my hat to Yoursister – she thought it was hysterical and laughed out loud, until she got shouted at as well.
If I could, I would complain about my diet. I’ve been downstairs when all the others have been having a meal, and they get platefuls of the most interesting looking stuff, some of which smells pretty good as well. Even Yoursister is given some. Me? Me, I get milk, and not much else. And it’s not delivered on a plate, either – I have to work hard to get any at all sometimes, and all that sucking can be quite tiring. Every now and then, it comes in a bottle, but I still have to work at it. At least it’s warm, but that’s about all you can say for it. Never strawberry flavoured or anything like that for a change. I’ve seen the others getting milk, too, and theirs comes in a cardboard box of some sort. I haven’t been able to work out how mine gets from the box to the knobbly bits of the Mamma person. Just recently, she has tried to give me stuff on a bit of bent metal, but it seems to go all over the place, especially if I blow with a mouthful. It tastes pretty awful, too, whatever it is. But it makes a change, and it could be the start of something better, because I’ve seen the others using these metal things when they eat.
But what really gripes me about the whole procedure is what happens straight afterwards. When you’ve had a decent meal and taken on board just about all you can hold, all you want is to put your head down and sleep it off, right? Not in this house, you can’t! You get hoist onto the shoulder of the Mamma one, and thumped hard on the back. I’ve got the message now, I think. Their theory is that it makes you burp. Well, let me tell you that I burp when I want to burp, not when someone else thinks I should. Apart from anything else, when you’re full up, it is most uncomfortable hanging over someone’s shoulder, especially when all you want is a quiet doze. I had thought I had worked out how to put a stop to this nonsense, but it didn’t quite work out as planned. My theory was that if I threw up instead of burping, I would immediately get put down, and so be able to have forty winks. But I only managed to achieve this once, and it caused such a fuss, there was no way I could get to sleep. So now I have to put up with it, but I do manage to put the elevated position to some use, as I study all there is on view from this lofty perch. There’s a good deal of very tempting stuff down there, and I can’t wait until I can get mobile and have a really good look at it all. So I have redoubled my training, and kick hard whenever I can.
As I mentioned earlier, I quite often get taken out of the house in a thing on wheels. It’s the second one I’ve had. The first was a sort of bed, and I would normally lie down in it, so the outlook was nothing special, not least because I faced the way I’d been. This view was largely dominated by Mamma’s crutch, which I can tell you is not a pretty sight even when hidden in jeans. But once they started propping me up a bit, so that I could see things a bit better, I eventually got a different sort of machine. In this one, I face the way I’m going, which is a mixed blessing. The view is better, but you come close to hitting things, since you arrive before anyone else. Trees and lampposts are obvious hazards, which so far have been avoided, but only just. We’ve managed to take the paint off one or two other pushchairs, and run in to numerous people who should, apparently, have been looking where they were going. But I really don’t like being launched head first into moving traffic when we cross the road. Apart from the jolt as we crash off the kerb, the mad dash to get to the other side is really quite scary. And you’d be surprised how big busses look from low down. So do dogs. I don’t like dogs. I went off them in a big way when I was left parked outside a shop – only for a few moments, of course, - and one of the brutes came sniffing around. The stick thing at the other end was wagging about, but my end gave me a good licking. It then had the nerve to pee against the wheel, until someone heard me yelling and chased it off.
Apart from my temporary lack of mobility, which I am in training to overcome, my other big problem is that I seem unable to communicate with the others properly. Try as I might, they never seem to understand what I’m saying, and I never get the drift of what they are on about, either. They never seem to have the time to teach me, that’s the problem, although sometimes they will repeat the odd word a couple of times, bent low over me, and seem to expect me to immediately grasp what’s going on. Yoursister is best, I must admit, as she has more time, and doesn’t mind devoting some of it to my education. She’s quite good company, and chatters away, trying to get me to understand what’s going on. But at least I know her real name at last.
It happened the other day, when we all got dressed up to go out. They even put me into some sort of long white thing, which I’m not sure quite suited me, but there you are. We ended up in a place I hadn’t been to before, with lots of other people milling about. It all looked a bit serious at one stage, and there was a lot of muttering, and then some singing. There seemed to be a chap in charge of all this, who also had a long white thing on like mine. Eventually, I was handed over to him, and he splashed water on my face for some reason, and then we all went outside to have our photos taken. Everyone kept coming over to tell me I was Hugh and hadn’t I been a good boy. The more people said I was Hugh, the more Yoursister told them she was Four, so that’s how I came to learn her real name. Whoever it was who had said all that time ago, “This is Yoursister,” obviously hadn’t a clue what he was talking about.
The odd thing is that no sooner had they made all that fuss about me being Hugh, than they all started calling me Huggy, and even my thing on wheels is called a Huggy Buggy now. Anyway, after all this fuss, we all went back home, and the tall ones got stuck in to great plates of food and strong smelling glasses of something that didn’t look much like milk, but more like something else I’d better not mention. It smelt awful, as I know, because they kept coming over to me and breathing on me while making goo-goo noises. Some of the longhaired ones even kissed me, which I don’t like, so I started yelling. That put a stop to it, thank goodness, but they obviously didn’t like the noise, so I had a dummy shoved in my mouth. Do you know, I think that’s the biggest con I’ve come across so far. It looks like Mamma’s knobbly bit, but no matter how hard you suck, nothing comes out of it. Absolutely nothing. Even chewing on it makes no difference, and if you spit it out, they simply wipe it on the seat of their trousers and shove it back in again.
So what with one thing and another, I’ve no real idea about what’s going on, although as I said at the beginning it’s no real fun. I can’t properly make myself understood, even to Four, and I can’t get about on my own yet, although that day will come, believe me, and then watch out. They’ll soon know about it. I have a lot of old scores to settle, lots of things I want to explore, and many more things I want to do – although they would probably rather I didn’t.
Huggy, indeed.
And just you wait until I’ve got teeth.
***
5 - DEATH BY DROWNING
(Based on an original idea by Vida Goodfellow)
Charles Toogood and his wife Jo had decided to have an early holiday this year, and to do a bit of touring in the car instead of going abroad. They had motored in leisurely fashion, as much as one could on motorways, to the Lake District. Even off the motorways, the roads around the lakes were crowded, but they had managed to see what they had planned, and the hotels they had chosen had been comfortable, so they were in a relaxed mood as they eventually headed north, over Shap and across the Scottish border, towards the Stranraer to the Belfast ferry and the next leg of their tour.
They had never been to Northern Ireland before, but friends had been insisting for some time that they should pay a visit, so that’s what they were going to do. There had been a long debate about whether to fly to Belfast and hire a car when they got there, rather than take the ferry, but eventually Charles had been persuaded that it would be easier and more convenient to take their own car. He was not, however, looking forward to the crossing. He had managed to avoid the Lake steamers on Windermere and Coniston, and although he had been tempted by the thought of fishing for Arctic Char, one look at the small rowing boat was enough to make him change his mind.
The fact was that Charles Toogood wasn’t a good sailor, although he should have been.
Both his Grandfather and his uncle had served in the Royal Navy, but Charles had never shared their love of the sea. Indeed, Grandfather Toogood had served most of the war as a gunnery officer on HMS Rodney, and, if you accepted only half of what he said, you would be forgiven for thinking that he had been personally responsible for sinking the Bismarck. It was only later that Charles discovered that it was not the guns of HMS Rodney that had finally sunk the German Battleship, but her torpedoes, although Rodney’s guns had inflicted mortal damage earlier in the engagement that day.
Charles had also discovered, long ago, that the sea did not agree with him. He enjoyed watching it, especially when it was rough, but only with his feet firmly planted on the beach. He didn’t much care for swimming in it, and particularly disliked being on the water, however big the boat.
He somehow managed to survive the ‘voyage’ from Stranraer to Belfast, all of 3¼ hours, thanks largely to two powerful seasickness tablets and a day cabin where he could put his feet up.
In the end, he and Jo very much enjoyed an agreeable few days with their friends near Belfast in spite of the weather, which their friends described as ‘soft’. That meant it was raining, which it nearly always was. They were told that if you could see the Mountains of Mourne it was going to rain, and if you couldn’t, it already was. They never did see them, although they spent a good deal of time touring the lush, green, countryside with its patchwork of small fields. Their friends, however, had insisted on taking them out mackerel fishing on Strangford Lough, the very thought of which had quite terrified Charles and threatened to ruin their stay. However, it turned out to be quite fun, again, no doubt, thanks to two more powerful tablets. Charles had not been ill, and had actually caught a few fish.
The Irish Sea on their return had been different, though.
This time, tablets and a day cabin did not work. Granted, it was only a car ferry, which the operators claimed was fitted with stabilisers, but everyone knows what the Irish Sea can be like, even in May, and it had lived up to its reputation that morning. Which was why he was very glad to have made landfall at Stranraer. Charles was not feeling at all well.
Jo drove the car off the ferry, and eventually found a quiet teashop in the town where Charles sat for a bit to recover. The next part of their planned itinerary was somewhat unusual, but Charles wanted to visit the Parish Church at Inch, which was only just outside Stranraer. Not that the church itself was anything spectacular, but his Grandfather had spoken of it so often as being the final home of HMS Rodney’s ensign, that he simply had to have a look while he was in the area.
Charles had been very fond of his Grandfather, who had retired to a cottage on the Sussex coast when he left the Navy. The family had spent many happy school holidays there, playing cricket on the lawn, looking for crabs in the rock pools when the tide was out, and sometimes even fishing off the beach. Grandpa Toogood always had a yarn to tell about his adventures at sea, but was always saddened by his experience during the engagement with the Bismarck.
He had served on HMS Rodney for most of the war, and although it had been an old ship, launched from the Cammell-Laird yard at Birkenhead in 1925, it was regarded as one of the Navy’s most powerful battleships for a decade or more. It was in May 1941, while commanded by Captain Sir Frederick Dalrymple-Hamilton, that the Rodney was diverted from escorting to the troop ship Brittanic on its way to Canada, to join in the pursuit of the German battleship Bismarck. Radio silence was ordered as HMS Rodney joined up with another battleship, HMS King George V.
It was early morning when the two battleships, and the cruisers HMS Norfolk and Dorsetshire, engaged the Bismarck, which had already had its rudder machinery damaged by a torpedo the previous day. The bombardment soon knocked out Bismarck's guns, and HMS Rodney was able to close in on the Bismarck, until she was firing essentially a flat trajectory. Grandpa Toogood recalled how he could actually follow the shells to the target through his binoculars. By then, there were German sailors in the water as the Bismarck began to keel over.
The Captain wanted to break off the engagement to rescue survivors, but the Admiral refused, and ordered Rodney to continue its shelling. Eventually, recalled Grandpa Toogood, the battleship was ordered to turn for home because there were reports of U-boats in the area and because she was by then also low on fuel. Before doing so, though, she had finished off the Bismarck by firing torpedoes into both sides of the stricken German battleship. Once again, Captain Dalrymple-Hamilton was ordered to make for Rodney’s home port with all speed, and not to loiter to rescue survivors. Although HMS Rodney had picked up some of the German crew, they could only watch and listen as the deperate men shouted and waved in the water, clinging to their liferafts and bits of debris, as Rodney turned away.
It was a scene Grandpa Toogood would never forget, and the memory of it had always haunted him. With his own dread of the sea, Charles could only imagine the terror which the German sailors faced, struggling to survive in the oily, burning water, and watching a potential life-saving rescue ship turn away from them.
But now Charles planned to do something his Grandfather had not been able to do during his lifetime. He was going to visit the small church at Inch, where the Rodney’s