The Coming of Age. August Part 2.

24th August.The day of the Pageant. We are all quite excited though I worry about Val’s Solar Powered Cascade with Integral Water Tank. I hope the copper bowls shaped like water lily leaves don't get damaged.

Val and I make our way to the field at the foot of Nell’s Tump. We have brought a rug to sit on and find a space near to the ‘magic spring’. There seem to be rather more animals than appeared at the audition, including quite a few puppies and kittens being carried by children. Happily there are no ostriches.

All goes well until the Rev. Scuffling decides that the water, a pleasing blood red, is flowing rather too quickly round the Solar Powered Cascade. He goes to the back and moves the lever, unfortunately the wrong way. It was a pity he didn’t take notes when he was last at Val’s. I write everything down these days.

The water shoots out of the top of the cascade and bounces from copper waterlily leaf to copper waterlily leaf, splashing everything nearby. A troupe of small children who are supposed to be being cured of theatrically rendered skin lesions, are standing close and get soaked and turn red. Two of them are holding cats which leap from their arms, sinking their back claws in as they do so, causing more shrieks and indeed, more red, real blood this time, on the arms of the infants, and dash across the field.

One of livelier dogs slips his lead and pursues the cats while a labrador takes off, pulling its little owner behind it, closely pursued by its mother shouting, ‘Don’t let go, Don’t let go.’
The labrador veers sharply to avoid one of the organic pigs, which the butcher has bandaged to indicate that it is injured and needs curing, and its small owner trips over the pig which squeals horribly and dashes towards the Solar Powered Cascade. I didn’t realise how fast pigs can move when they want to.

Vera Buddle’s grandson’s rat, which was to have dual stardom, both as the vicar’s mouse which gets killed by the man with the withered arm’s cat, and as one of the animals which are brought to the spring to be cured, in this case apparently of baldness – it is one of those hairless rats of hideous aspect – also squeaks at this points, drawing entirely unnecessary attention to itself.

Mavis’s cat, which she practically guaranteed under oath, would never move at all, springs at the rat which turns and bites Vera Buddle’s grandson, who promptly lets it go. It too flees across the field among the crowds of onlookers, pursued for a very short time by Mavis’s cat; The cat, Moses by name, suddenly realises it is never going to catch the rat, sits down, put its back leg in the air and begins nonchalantly to lick its private parts.

Even the limping wheezing dog realises that this is a doddle and lumbers up, trying to relive its youth by biting a real, almost alive cat. Mavis is there luckily. She kicks out at the dog to save Moses.

The dog’s owner becomes quite abusive and turns on the Reverend Mr Scuffling saying it is all his fault and he would write to the Bishop. Poor Paul struggling to reduce the Solar Powered Cascade flow to a trickle, looks quite put out. Val rushes over to help him and gets a flush of red down her white shirt from the final burp of the cascade. Vera Buddle is wringing her hands and shouting about vile disease.

I didn’t understand this but Icarus Jones the organic pork butcher explained that bites from rats could give you Weil’s Disease, which was serious. However, he thought that ‘fancy rats’ probably didn’t carry it. It was very nice of him to explain this to me particularly as his bandaged pigs seemed to be heading for the main road.

Could I help him to catch them I asked.

‘No,’ he said, ‘get more in insurance if they were hit by a car than I would selling them.’

He does wander over towards the main road though, but in no particular hurry. Unlike various assorted small animals who are still running through peoples’ legs and causing panic.

Vera Buddle’s grandson’s rat with the acumen for which I understand rats are well known, decides the ground is not really safe with all the cats and dogs around and runs up the nearest vertical object which turns out to be Crispin Velge who is standing near 6ft 6in Fred Nutbeam leaning on his usual ethnic walking stick.

Crispin Velge screams – he has lost all credibility in my eyes, not that he ever had any – as the rat runs up his trouser leg. Luckily for Velge, on the outside. By the time it gets to the top, Velge is swaying hysterically and the rat on his head looks round for something safer.

Fred Waring is almost a foot taller than Velge and wearing his usual fetchingly embroidered pillbox hat. The rat, presumably thinking this is vegetation of some sort leaps from Velge to Waring and sits on the hat, surveying the crowds.

The labrador runs round the pair in circles whining, distressed at losing first the cats and now the rat, and then dashes back towards the ‘Magic Spring’, causing several old ladies to sway dangerously on their folding chairs.

Vera Buddle’s grandson runs up and tries to persuade the rat to come off Fred Nutbeam’s hat and when it doesn’t he suggests that Nutbeam bends or kneels down. Fred, who if not actually mad, lives very much in a world of his own, waves his stick at the boy just as Vera Buddle arrives. She wrenches the stick off him and he falls down, thus allowing the young boy to grab the rat from its perch.

The rat’s day of stardom is over but not Vera Buddle’s. With the usual shortage of men in this town, she has been drafted in as one of the twelve priests, so she, the boy and the rat return, muttering and chattering to the scene of the Pageant.

Meanwhile this has been continuing, with children dipping various limbs into what is now a mere trickle of water in the Solar Powered Cascade with Integral Water Tank.

Crispin Velge is stretchered off the field by members of St John Ambulance, several of whom are needed to lay restraining hands upon him. It is a pity Poppy is not here. Although Vera Buddle’s grandson’s rat bite happily did not pierce his skin, the remaining St John’s volunteer, very young and at her first event, pours a bottle of antiseptic over his finger just to be sure and then bandages it up. He spends the rest of the afternoon using this enlarged digit to make rude gestures behind his grandmother’s back, reducing the choir of school children to helpless giggles. Crispin Velge’s finest ode is mangled in this way.

Several people in the crowd now think that the excitement is over and they start to pick up their cushions and leave much to the annoyance of the Mayor and the distress of Paul Scuffling, especially as the most exciting bit, in his opinion, where the man moans and haunts the vicarage, is yet to come. My neighbour Keith, the pillar of the local drama club plays the part of the man. He moans and haunts so loudly that those members of the audience who had begun to drift away realise that there is more to come, and they return.

The rest of the Pageant goes more or less as planned although the Te Deum is a bit thin in spite of Piers Hackett’s sonorous bass, without Velge and Vera Buddle who, although present and robed, is too agitated to sing. The ‘vicarage’ they were supposed to be singing in front of, represented by two screens painted by Beryl Jinks, the town’s only disabled artist, falls down.

As this bears no resemblance to the façade of St Jude’s vicarage, or indeed, any building whatsoever, and nobody knows what it is meant to be, it doesn’t matter too much.

It was quite a clever idea, Paul Scuffling’s not Beryl Jinks, that the screens would be spread out as a backdrop to the 10 priests and one priestess, doing the exorcism in the 17th century and singing the Te Deum. It was then to be rearranged in a more compact way so that the reverse side, which was supposed to look like St Jude’s church (but didn’t) showed.

We are standing by the screens gazing probingly at the sludge coloured splodges on them and Val asks ‘By the way, what happened about that mural that was supposed to go on the Town Hall?’

‘Which mural?’

‘Beryl Jinks’s prizewinning mural of course.’
‘Oh that. It’s never been mentioned again has it?’

The children’s chorus then arrived to dance in a ring round the screens for the finale. I quite warmed to Paul Scuffling for all his effort but I wish Val would stop giving him such soppy smiles. She isn’t even cross about her stained shirt. He is young enough to be her son.

27th August. I ring her up the next day just to make sure she is behaving herself. We haven’t heard from Poppy for weeks since Roger the taxi driver. Julia is on a cruise. Val and I decide to go for a walk together and have a pub lunch so we can talk about Poppy and Julia in their absence. While there we see George Clooney look-alike Dr Houseman and Guy Prodger having an intense conversation. We assume they are talking clinical practice or something. Val is so thrilled at having seen the wild-eyed dentist outside her six monthly appointments she can eat nothing, but drinks a lot. She seems to have forgotten very quickly about the Reverend Scuffling, or Paul, as we now call him.

When I tackle her about this, she gets rather annoyed. She is very constant in her affections, she says, she just thought the Reverend Mr Scuffling, or Paul, was rather sweet, with unexpected depths.

I tell her about Poppy and the man at the talk. I’ve never seen Poppy firing on all cylinders before I say. I always thought that flirting at our age was ridiculous – mother’s voice ringing in my head again - but when Poppy does it, well that man took absolutely no interest in me. No wonder she has a string of them.

30th August. Vandals have attacked the frozen chicken factory out on the Newtown Road. Nobody knows whether it was animal rights activists or just disaffected local youth who broke in and dumped hundreds of frozen chickens in the road and painted Free All Chickens Now over the buildings.

This is the sort of occasion that makes me miss having teenage children. When Sarah, Harriet and Alex were living at home, one of them would always know the perpetrators of these events and would tell me most things; that is, I realise now, everything except the things they were involved in. I used to know whose parents kept whips in the wardrobe, who was having an affair with whom, whose parents were about to split up (on one occasion even before one of the participants) who threw the brick through the kebab house window, who was on drugs and where they were to be found. Now I live in a stratum inhabited almost entirely by the elderly except just occasionally when Alex comes home. I know everyone’s ailments and the numbers of their grandchildren. Not a lot to get one’s teeth in really.

Anyway, to return to the Chicken Factory. Every right-minded citizen of the town, which actually means extreme left thinking, and there are many, has hated the factory for years. The local paper is beside itself with excitement. ‘Mindless Yobbos,’ its favourite phrase for the perpetrators of any disturbance from football hooligans and five year olds who drop sweet papers to Al Qaeda, appears no less than four times in the leading article. The Mayor however is thrilled. National Newspaper journalists descended en masse and it was even on the television, it being the silly season. Now the town is ‘really on the map’. He says it will do wonders for tourism in the town. Particularly after the Pageant.

31st August. Harriet rings to tell me about her heartburn. She is a bit huffy because I haven’t rung her for a few days. Russell’s mother rings her daily. I explain about the Pageant and the frozen chicken factory. I don’t think she feels either of these justify my apparent lack of interest in her pregnancy.