Once Upon A Time in the West . . . Country Page 4

  Talking to clergymen isn’t easy, especially for young men who think about little outside the realm of sinning. As I stared at his clerical dog collar, I became acutely aware of how regularly I devoted time to the consideration of having sex before marriage. Should I confess this to him, or should I continue with the inconsequential exchange on which we had both now embarked? In the event, a wasp intervened and the question became irrelevant.

  I’ve always been afraid of wasps, having experienced an extremely painful sting as a ten-year-old. Now, just as I was about to answer the vicar’s question about what A levels I was taking, there was a sudden swoop down by this amber assailant, and I began to panic. I swung at the wasp with my free hand, but to no avail. The air-strike continued unabated, and when my attacker moved in towards my face, I lost all sense of reason and control.

  Instinctively, I pushed out with both arms in the direction of this invasive flash of yellow and black. A second later the wasp was gone, and so was all hope of continuing the polite conversation with the vicar. Quite unintentionally, I had, with some considerable force, thrown a pint of real ale full into his face. He frowned, brushed down his clerical shirt, and with Spruggles (or Chattlespeare) still dripping from his nose, he headed off for the relative safety of a group of older ladies. To this day, I feel sure that he has never spoken to a group of teenagers again, and that the incident may even have rocked his very faith itself. After all, why would a loving God have allowed such a thing to happen?

  Just as this painful memory was threatening to overwhelm me, a voice restored a sense of reality.

  ‘That looks like a very nice cake!’

  It was the voice of Karen, the village fête committee member whose house call had instigated this gastronomic, sugary delight. Karen beckoned us over to the cake stall, took my cake with a perfunctory thank you, and unceremoniously labelled it at £2.50. She did exactly the same with Fran’s cake, which immediately sold to a family of four who had been eyeing everything else on display. Mine, it seemed, had a less obvious quality. It was more for the connoisseur. It was a niche cake and would have to wait to find its buyer.

  Free of the responsibility of not dropping my cake, only now did I begin to survey the scene around me in any detail. The small field was dotted with stalls, all actively manned by eager volunteers. One thing seemed to unify them – the requirement of the punter to cough up some money if they wanted to play anything. This seemed a little churlish. After all, hadn’t we already bought raffle tickets, donated books and cakes, and paid an admission fee? Since I didn’t yet know where the profits of this event were going to go, I was beginning to resent paying a pound to try and throw some hoops, or take a shy at a coconut. It wasn’t as if the prizes were that appealing.

  But then they never are. To me, this is the mystery of the British funfair or fête. Here’s the deal on offer, at least as far as I can fathom:

  You give me £1 for the privilege of trying to do something that is almost impossible to do, with the incentive of winning something that you don’t want, and probably isn’t even worth £1 anyway.

  It wasn’t an offer I couldn’t refuse, and despite the plaintive calls of eager volunteers for me to participate, I made polite refusals and headed for the bric-a-brac stall. Here, I redeemed myself by buying an antique douche pan for £2. I couldn’t resist it. I didn’t mind that I’d spend the rest of the fête carrying what looked like a portable toilet around with me, a bargain is a bargain, and I’d be laughing if there was an overly long queue for the portaloos.

  A five-piece band started up, playing a kind of easy-listening jazz, and made up of what looked like four teenage lads and one of their dads. Fran and I sat on some deckchairs that had been placed before the little tent they were performing in. They were doing a good job, and we applauded politely after each song, something that seemed to embarrass them slightly. When they took a break, I turned to Fran.

  ‘We’re not meeting very many people, are we?’

  ‘Not really. You kind of need to know people a bit already at events like this. There’s nothing really enabling people to mix together. At the moment, anyway.’

  ‘Does seem that way.’

  ‘You carrying a portable toilet around with you may not be helping. Shall we go?’

  ‘Yes, I think so. It’s too hot. No point in risking our lives any further.’

  As we walked home, I wondered if I’d been spoiled by the fêtes I had attended in France.2 Over there, the village fête centres around a meal for the villagers. Yes, you paid for it, but it was good value and at least you got something back for your money, and it created a wonderful opportunity for everyone to get together, share stories and put on weight.

  ‘I think that fête could benefit from some innovative ideas,’ I said to Fran, as we settled into the comfy chairs of our relatively cool living room.

  ‘Well, you should get yourself on the village fête committee then.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You heard.’

  Darn it. Fran had a point. Instead of being gently critical, maybe I needed to get involved. But did I really want to get that involved with village life? I swiftly changed the subject.

  ‘I hope my cake sold. I’m not sure she put it in the best position to catch someone’s eye.’

  I looked up to see that Fran had fallen asleep in her chair.

  Goodness, I thought, I must be getting dull.

  3

  Slugging It Out

  With the house in an ordered kind of disorder, we turned our attention to the garden. It was our intention to develop this, especially since we’d been told that the allotment we had sought to reserve was not available for another year after all. Since the sun continued to defy the clouds and reign supreme, the time couldn’t have been more opportune for gardening. We’d inherited a well-kept garden with lots of flowers and shrubs, none of which we could identify by name. I was now being punished for all the times I’d turned off the radio the moment Gardeners’ Question Time had come on. As a younger city dweller, I’d simply had no interest.

  I’d been duped into believing that I was a natural consumer. Other people grew and made things – I consumed them. That was the order of things, and to some extent the global economy depended on people like me to keep the wheels of capitalism turning. Food and goods are mass-produced and shipped around the globe for us to buy and consume. The endless drive for profit and growth conspires to have us purchasing electronic goods manufactured in the Far East so that the man in the local repair shop can tell us, once it has developed an inevitable fault, that he can’t help us and we should throw it away.

  All the while, career politicians continue to explain how the economy would be plunged into recession if consumers weren’t out in the High Street buying, buying, buying. No mention of what cost there may be to the environment, or even to our very souls (if you buy crap, don’t you feel crap?). Buying new stuff mattered, and it mattered big time because if it didn’t keep on happening – relentlessly – then the world’s brittle economic system was going to collapse.

  To my mind, it was going to collapse anyway, it was just a question of when and how. The optimist in me wondered if there could be a slow transition to a ‘better way of managing ourselves’, the pessimist knew the possibility of real suffering and wars over resources were more likely.

  So – what to do? Well, clearly the answer was for me and Fran to cultivate some crops in the three raised beds that were already in the garden. We were going to change the world by changing what was happening in that soil. It was a noble plan, and one we took seriously given the enormous global responsibility that rested upon our shoulders.

  Just a shame we knew sod all about gardening.

  ***

  Our quest began in the nursery. We were lucky enough to have one close by (the kind that dealt in plants rather than fledgling humans), so while Fran prepared lunch I drove down there to begin this epic and heroic quest. An initial foray before we took it on toget
her.

  I walked past greenhouses containing a host of plants and flowers that I couldn’t begin to name, and into the small shop that was in the corner of the nursery’s plot. Behind the counter, a meek-looking man awaited me, like a character in a TV sketch show waiting for the action to begin.

  I said hello – quickly getting the niceties out of the way – and then began to subject him to a barrage of questions.

  What soil do we need?

  How much water?

  When do we plant?

  Where do we plant?

  Do we need to put it in a greenhouse?

  When do you water it?

  How much do you water it?

  Is it best to wear tracksuit bottoms?

  Are platform shoes a no-no?

  Nursery Man answered each of my questions with great patience and diligence, but by the time I’d finished, his expression had changed from buoyant and dynamic to brow-beaten and deflated, as if someone had hit him quite hard in the stomach. Knowing that I’d return with Fran at a later date, I then scoured the shelves and returned with the rather pathetic haul of one tray of lettuce seedlings. As I faced Nursery Man over the counter, I realised that this wouldn’t represent a fair remuneration for what I’d just inflicted on the fellow. I quickly grabbed some gardening gloves for Fran. The man looked at me with an element of incredulity.

  ‘We’ll use them for gardening,’ I said, as he put the cash in the till.

  He needed reassurance.

  When I got home, Fran had left the kitchen and was eagerly awaiting me near the raised beds.

  ‘Well,’ she said, ‘how did you get on?’

  ‘I bought a tray of lettuce seedlings and . . .’

  ‘And what?’

  ‘And some spares in case you lose those,’ I said, pointing to the gardening gloves she was wearing, that I’d bought her two weeks ago but had forgotten about.

  ‘Did he explain what to do with the seedlings?’

  ‘He did.’

  ‘And?’

  I opened my mouth with the intention of relaying the wealth of information that Nursery Man had imparted, but suddenly I realised that I couldn’t remember a word of it. My brain can only cope with limited information in one hit. This is why, when I’m in the car and I pull over to ask directions, I can never really remember beyond ‘go to the end of this road and turn left at the lights’. Instead of absorbing the ensuing data, I am distracted by inconsequential matters relating to my roadside guide. I am unable to hear ‘take the third exit at the roundabout’, because I am too busy wondering whether the speaker’s receding hairline will result in complete baldness within two years. I don’t hear ‘after the Shell garage make a left’, because I’m wondering whether the woman beside him is his wife, lover, sister, or care worker. In brief, I have a short attention span. In fact, my attention span is so short that I can’t be arsed to finish this line of thought. So let’s move on.

  What I could remember from my encounter at the nursery was that the lettuces I’d purchased weren’t ready for putting in our raised beds yet. They needed ‘bringing on’ a little – or some such term – so I watered them and placed them in the greenhouse that we had inherited, which up until now had become a storage deposit for boxes and items that didn’t yet have a home in the house. I noted that none of these boxes had grown particularly well and I hoped this wasn’t an omen.

  It might as well have been. By dusk, my lettuces were as good as dead. Unbeknownst to me, my gentle watering had been at best, ineffectual (most of the water simply evaporates in the sun), and at worst, downright harmful (the droplets of water settle on the leaves and act like lenses that concentrate the sunlight and cause damage). Putting them in the greenhouse on a hot day meant that I had quite literally fried them. I’d jumped from growing to cooking far too quickly.

  ‘What we need to do,’ said Fran, as she surveyed the tray of shrivelled brown leaves that I had created within a matter of hours of becoming their custodian, ‘is to go on a gardening course.’

  It was difficult to argue with her. But worth a quick go.

  ‘Do you really think that’s necessary? It was just bad luck that I forgot nearly everything that the man told me. I’m beginning to remember it all now.’

  I’d made better arguments.

  ‘I’ll go online and find a course for us,’ said Fran, turning and heading for the house.

  I was left holding the dead lettuces. Now, what should I do with them? Didn’t Nursery Man say something about composting? He did, yes – just at the point when I was noticing his grey hairs and trying to hazard a guess at his age.

  I buried the lettuces.

  A quiet ceremony, with no guests and just a short speech from me. If I remember rightly it was:

  ‘Sorry.’

  Or something along those lines.

  ***

  Devon has main roads, of course it does. But it also has 10,000 miles of narrow country lanes. 10,000 miles. Think of 1,000 miles, and multiply it by ten, and then you’ll get some sense of what we’re talking about here. (Or 100 miles multiplied by one hundred will also do the trick.) Some of these lanes are thousands of years old, built as the principal routes between villages, and they still provide important links between rural hamlets. Flanked by hedgerows, they are like mini nature reserves packed with wildlife. They are also bloody annoying.

  Once again the Devonian sun (it’s the same as the other one apparently, although locals will tell you it’s more shy) blazed down upon us as we set off for our day-long organic gardening course. The drive would have been incident-free had it not been for our imprudent decision to seek the assistance of the new addition to our family – the sat nav.

  I’d always taken a Luddite approach to this technology, claiming that it was counter-intuitive to rely on satellites orbiting hundreds of miles above us to locate addresses here on earth. However, Fran had requested that we get one now that we were in a completely new environment and, displaying a measure of both spinelessness1 and astuteness2, I had made the necessary purchase.

  The danger with the sat nav is that you tend to shun the map, relying solely on a complicated piece of gadgetry. This is foolish. Maps are terrific things that were created by good, hard-working people who, like me, didn’t have the faintest idea how a satellite worked. Maps gave you a sense of where you were in the world and, best of all, they didn’t talk to you. Soon I came to realise that our sat nav had become possessed by an annoying, opinionated lady, who had no manners and who spoke too loud. Worse still, she continually interrupted me when I was talking and she would keep repeating herself. She also insisted on taking us on routes based on the shortest distance as the crow flies, which made absolutely no sense in terms of size of road or the speed that can be achieved on it.

  It was for this reason that we were now driving up a section of Devon’s aforementioned 10,000-mile labyrinthine network of lanes. Even though we were driving a Smart car – a hangover from city life – this lane was barely wide enough for us, and yet was supposed to accommodate two-way traffic. What would happen if we allowed our speed to get up to anything beyond a dawdle and if we happened to meet someone coming the other way reckless enough to do the same? It didn’t bear consideration.

  ‘We’ll be all right,’ I said. ‘It’s early on a Sunday morning and there won’t be any traffic about.’

  Of course, I shouldn’t have uttered the words. I should have known full well that I would be punished immediately by the malevolent God who listens out for this kind of benign and yet overconfident statement.

  No sooner had the words passed my lips, than the inevitable happened. Sod – let’s give this God a name – hadn’t just orchestrated us to meet a car coming the other way, but had arranged a kind of vehicular nemesis for us. The man who was now slamming on his brakes opposite us was an elderly man who was going to have a distinctive and not altogether reasonable approach to this chance encounter. Sod had pre-ordained a man who didn’t view us as two cars meet
ing in a lane but as ‘opponents’ meeting in an important struggle for moral supremacy. So there we were, facing a sensible and clean hatchback (probably a Honda, Hyundai, or something Japanese beginning with ‘H’) containing an elderly couple, looking at us like we were aliens.

  ‘What happens now?’ said Fran, naively.

  ‘Well, as I understand it, the etiquette in these situations is that the car closest to a wider bit of lane reverses there.’

  ‘And who is that?’

  ‘It’s them. I’ve been keeping a lookout for passing points and they seem to be every few hundred yards or so, and we passed one quite a long way back. If he goes in reverse, I bet there’s a passing point a few yards away.’

  ‘OK,’ said Fran, ‘but I’m not sure that they see it that way.’

  Ahead of us, the elderly man was gesturing for us to go back. It was a very firm kind of gesturing. The kind of gesturing the military might use when signalling to the enemy. The kind of gesturing that might just get your back up if you were a driver who was already irritated that the wretched satellite navigation system had dumped you in this lane in the first place.

  ‘Oh dear, we’ve got one here,’ I said. ‘The important thing is to stand firm.’

  As calmly as I could, I mirrored the same gesture that was being offered to me, quite possibly with less conviction (based on the fact that this was not the most important thing in the world to me).3

  The driver quite simply repeated his gesture, as if I had done nothing. Worse still, his co-pilot, an old lady with a sternness of expression probably nurtured from years of alerting children to the presence of signs saying ‘No ball games’, offered up her own version of the gesture.