Monday, February 27, 2006

The long trip to teatime


There I was, dotted lines drawn all over me for Professor Nyfenfork's ease of scalpelling, when word came down from the top floor that my operation was postponed for (at least) twenty-four hours. I wasn't on the dinner list as the kitchen had expected me to be still unconscious this evening, but egg on toast was materialised on my behalf and duly munched-upon with great satisfaction. Tea, of course, followed, served from a mighty two-handler of a Brown Betty not much smaller than myself. No end of refills, too. Ah, tea.

The evenings are getting quite a stretch, I noticed, as I slid feet into slippers and arms into dressing-gown sleeves, intent on stretching my legs with a turn or two up and down the corridors.

Saint Feasance's is a vast old pile, though not, apart from the wing which contains my bed, in the best of order. The tiles are cracked in very many places, and many's the window is broken. Birds that I could not see but heard plainly, appear to live in the ceilings of many of the empty wards. And there are what I can only describe as termite mounds in what I took to be some sort of laundry room.

The quiet slap-slap of my slippers accompanied me as I followed my curiosity up yet another flight of stairs; this by way of beginning to explain how I- somehow- lost my bearings.

I know! Old Caroon who mapped a good eighth of the sky with nothing but a bit of butcher's paper and the stub of a pencil as the only-partly-under-control BERG 1 bounced along the atmosphere like a skimming stone...and here he is now: lost!

I smiled to myself as, from somewhere not too far away, the sound of a choir wafted sweetly oward my appreciative ears. William Byrd: O quam gloriosum et regnum. Quite a treat.

I listened awhile with mounting pleasure. And somewhere amidst that pleasure, the sun went down.

Silly me, expecting the light switches to work in this run-down part of Saint Feasance's. The music ended and the silence impinged upon me like a real thing. Do I sound like I was nervous? Perhaps I was. But steady the Buffs! and let's make a start on unravelling this maze of identical corridors.

Sure enough, I made it back to my ward, where certain members of the staff looked curiously upon my entrance. They seemed quite put out when I shed my slippers and dressing gown and clambered into bed. Indeed, they challenged me to explain myself.

Explain myself? Indeed. They wanted to know what I was doing in Wing Commander Caroon's bed. I took this to be a rather clumsy put-on, and pretended to go along with the joke. But joking they were not. Wing Commander Caroon, they revealed, had had his operation reinstated on the schedule and was in theatre right now, having been brought down in the service lift not half an hour ago.

So. If Victor Caroon was currently below being opened by Professor Nyfenfork, who was I? They spoke some more on this theme but I confess I barely heard them, my poor old brain having room at that moment for only one thought:

Not again.

Patron saint of the bewilderati


The staff at Saint Feasance's are very kind, bustling cheerfully up and down the corridors, wheeling tea trolleys or swinging bed pans with girlish abandon. The big joke among them is that I look far too healthy to need the surgery which I shall undergo tomorrow morning. But, as they say around here, Doctor knows best.

I'm told that there is another patient in the hospital, but as yet I have been able to glean no details.

Sunday, February 26, 2006

Shall we go, then?

It's always a bit of an ordeal, rattling around the house on the night before an operation. They wanted me down at Saint Feasance's tonight, of course, but Professor Nyfenfork graciously acceded to my request to wake up in my own bed, munch my own toast and watch the dawn mist roll back across my own garden.

They're opening me up again. And I shouldn't really be surprised. As to what they hope to find, not even the surgeons themselves know. They've tried most things already.

I'm getting on, I know. But strong. There's a few rounds in the old clip yet. Am I foolish to think that I can see my way to the end of today, along the sharp edge of the incising blade, under the skin of my tummy and round and around my guttyguts? Am I silly to imagine that I shall, indeed, finish the John Blackburn I began reading in the bath last Wednesday evening, that I shall listen to the Tallis Scholars' recording of the Lamentations of Jeremiah a few more times before the shutters come down, that I shall complete editing The Annotated Frank Richards before the smell and the buzzing of flies alerts the baker's boy that something is amiss in the study?

All these things I shall do, and more. The old apple tree will astound one and all with a crop or two yet. The lake has depths yet unplumbed. I have never walked to the top of Snetcher's Hill, and I shall. Life is rolling out like a mile-long Giles cartoon and I, my dear unknown friend, am there in the crowd.

Horses in the house; small ones


Davison regards it as convenient that the lake has moved that much closer to the house. This, of course, is the kind of utterance one hesitates to take at face value. Davison, of course, is giving nothing away, merely reaching anew for the teapot, testing it for content, then indicating with a look that I should boil the kettle again.

The afternoon sun does things to a chap, Davison agrees. Soap-smooth bars of Sunlight Soap-shaped sunlight drape languorously across the unfinished wood of the table. Davision chances a tootle on his oboe and the mood is perfected.

The kettle boils and everything and more seems possible.

The root cellar is full of gas masks again


How strange. The sea is far away- miles- and yet I can hear the tide when I lean slightly over the edge of the well near the orchard and look down into the salt-smelling darkness. Is this the well mentioned in the old letter I found when my wall-papering regimen revealed a hitherto unknown door under a rancid sheet of ersatz William Morris, giving onto a room that- window and all- I had never suspected was there before.

And once the room was discovered, it was as if I'd always known that particular window over the conservatory to be there; can't remember, in fact, a time when it wasn't there. Except, of course, it wasn't there yesterday.

Saturday, February 25, 2006

I've never counted all the knives in the house before


I can only conclude that Davison is right, and that the old map is, in fact, genuine. Damn the history books, then. They make no mention of any such thing within a hundred miles of here. Davison has also pointed out that the orchard itself is conspicuous by its absence on the most recent map to hand, printed (according to itself) by Bodfirm and Daughter, Charters and Circlists, Snedge, which, I'm am reliably informed, is an old form of the more familiar (at least this side of the Werts) Snudgepate (not, in itself, a placename; rather the family name of generations of snudgers (hence the name) who, alas, lost all records in a storm they insist I must remember.

A bucketful of rosy-tinged apples of all sizes was duly brought back to the house and emptied onto a sheet of newspaper on the kitchen table, apple tart for afters hoving into view as a distinct post-prandial delight.

I've always been a dab hand at the peeling of apples, managing nine times out of ten to remove the skin in a happily spiralling single piece. But these, these somehow defeat me.

Thursday, February 23, 2006

They're in the potting shed again with their musical instruments, but what harm?


Four little cowboy hats on the hall table again this evening (five gallon hats?). I must speak to someone about this, if only to know what to lay in for the owners of the hats, should they choose to appear.

"Help him! Help the bombardier."


Only this morning, walking in the overgrown part of the garden near the ornamental lake that was only discovered when I started to cut back the overgrowth, I caught a glimpse of something white in the lower branches of a magisterial oak and was intrigued enough to hurry away and fetch the ladder.

A closer look, then. Returning to the spot, it was difficult, for a moment, even to remember which tree had caught my attention. One day last year I counted over two hundred ivy-clad gentlemen (to say nothing of the trees on the far side of the lake, as yet uncounted) and another day managed a tally of only fifty or so.

It wasn't until almost noon, crunching around in the copper-leaf shadows, that I happened once again upon the sight that had first caught my eye.

But where had I left the ladder?

Wednesday, February 22, 2006

Ice in the Biscuit Barrel


The Unheard Voice is up to its old tricks again, muttering inaudibly in the glory hole at the bottom of the stairs, among the cobwebs and coal dust, setting the bedsheets to crackle with electric weasel-itch. There'll be no sleep tonight. Resigned, then, I lie awake. So be it, if that's the game he's playing.

I am equipped for this. This is not the first night the Unheard Voice has hissed its slurs in the small hours. I have a flask of tea, a bicycle lamp and a copy of Health & Efficiency.

We'll see who cracks first.

Angel Blake

Can it really be almost forty years since I shook the hand of Patrick Wymark?

An old flame writes


It all started with a piece of paper I found in the pocket of that old pair of trousers I use for gardening. 'Victor,' it begins, 'if that is indeed your name...'

You can well imagine that at this point I put said piece of paper down on the kitchen dresser and shook the kettle to see if there was any water in it. There was not. But more anon.

All afternoon he (I mean, I) avoided that innocent-looking, crumpled sheet. Barely a sheet, in fact. Half a sheet. Less. Torn, by the look of it, from some junior scholar's exercise book (the back of the sheet- barely a sheet!- was completely becrayonned, and scratched into the waxen mass- perhaps with a Helix compass like the one I once possessed myself (a good inch of the point of which still resides uneasily in my good leg)- these words: 'Help me. I'm not myself.'

You see? You see? It was no trouble at all to look at the reverse of the sheet (barely a quarter of a sheet, in fact) but something... something unutterable prevented my flipping it over (with a butter knife, perhaps; I wouldn't even have had to touch the thing) and casting an eye over what words it held scrawled upon its crumpled, parchment heart.

No. Not scrawled. The hand was elegant. Feminine. And yet I had no memory of ever a female hand being inside my old gardening trousers (perhaps it happened whilst I was in a faint).

The day wore on. I saw to the cabbages and the creeping beans, but no amount of vegetable solace could remove that piece of paper from the very gunsight of my mind. The veins of my skull begin to clench, fistlike, and I fancied I could hear the beams of my skull beginning to protest like an old frigate bobbed tennis-ways halfway to the breakers' yard upon a cheeky tide.

I was going to have to read it. But when I returned to the kitchen there was no sign of the note (Note? It was barely two lines, as I recall).

So. It was gone. Vanished. Disappeared.

I filled the kettle and boiled it (which simple action always puts me in mind of some of the old songs. 'High Germany', say, or 'Joe Soap's Army'; songs we sang all those years ago with many a lad whose lips are forever stilled now, unless there's singing in heaven). Afternoon tea was an uneasy affair that day, I don't mind admitting.

BERG 1 antwortet nicht


Very well, then. Here we are, crouched on the very brink of the imminent eschaton, searching our pockets for stray Toffos but finding only old bus tickets, the notes scribbled thereon having long since yielded to the great blurring that starts in the head and works outwards, ever outwards.

How long have we been ill now? asked Victor recently (still, strangely enough) referring to himself in the third person. Is that a survival mechanism, Victor?


Good heavens, man. You can't expect old Caroon to have the perspective to answer a boomerang of a question like that. He may have been through the Van Allen Belt in a vessel made of tinfoil and good intentions- he may have gazed down on the grainy old black and white earth from a bakelite rocketship that looked for all the world like a giant pen- but you can't expect a fellow to know what's going on in his own- his very own!- Dead Sea of a noggin.

The war of course, explains some of it.