A Postillion Struck by Lightning (2 page)

“What is it? What's happened?” I called.

“Come quickly … come quickly … it's ghastly! Hurry! God's honour, it's the biggest one … it's the biggest! Quick.”

I ran. The wet grasses stinging my legs, and the tussocks and molehills tripping me. The yelling stopped but she was staring at me with great beseeching eyes.

“Come quickly!”

“This is as quick as I can. Is it a snake?” That was it, of course. An adder. And we'd both be bitten. “If it's a snake,” I said, stopping immediately, “come away. Don't stand there gawping, come away. It'll kill us. Just run.”

“It isn't a snake … it isn't a snake… it's terrible!” She hadn't moved, so I went on, rather reluctantly, but cheered that it was nothing too beastly … obviously not George mangled by a fox or something, otherwise she'd be snivelling. But now she was crouching in the grasses, staring at it like a mad rabbit.

Then I was beside her, my shirt had come out of the top of my shorts, and my shoes were soaking too.

“What is it? What is it then?”

When she spoke her voice was sort of roughish and very low with wonder. “Look,” she said, and very gently parted the grasses before her. “Look, it's the biggest mushroom in the world. Look!”

And it was. It must have been about as round as a dinner plate, quite. And it sat in a little hollow with some others around it; but they were smaller, this was a giant.

“Gosh!”

“Isn't it
huge
? It's the biggest in the world.”

“It might be a toadstool, or something.”

“Well, let's pick it and take it home and they'll tell us.”

Very gingerly I reached out and pulled the great shiny brown top … it smelt like a million mushrooms. It was golden brown in the sun and underneath it was pink and white, and damp. We smelt it carefully and she opened her skirt like an apron for it, and we walked breathlessly up to the house.

“It's like a beautiful parasol,” she said.

In the kitchen there was a breakfast smell. The kettle was steaming away on the Primus stove and Lally, plump in a print dress and tennis shoes, was sitting at the table buttering toast.

We stood on the brick floor looking at her, willing her to look up at us, but she went on scraping off the burnt bits and singing a song to herself. My sister deliberately dropped one sandal and then the other. Lally stopped singing and said: “Go-and-wash-your-hands-why-haven't-you-got-your-shoes-on?” all in one breath, but still not looking up, although she must have seen us.

My sister said in her Old Maid's voice: “We have something rather strange to show you.”

Lally looked briefly at her bulging skirt and said: “If it's living throw it out and if it's dead likewise. Kettle's boiling.”

“It's alive and dead at the same time, sort of,” I said.

“Well, we don't want it in here, do we?” said Lally, stacking up some toast and cutting off the crusts all round. “And I'd be pleased if you hurry up before the Prince of Wales is here.”

“It's a mushroom,” said my sister, moving across the floor with the bundle and laying it on the table among the crusts and the butter crock. “And it's possibly the biggest in the world … or anyway in Sussex.” And she carefully opened her skirt and showed it.

Lally took a look and then was interested. “Jerusalem!” she said. She always did when she couldn't think of anything else, or if you had surprised her, or if she was quite pleased but-not-going-to-show-it, or if she didn't understand clearly. And she didn't
understand this. For a moment we all looked at it in dead silence.

“Well, it's big I grant you, probably wormy too. What do you want me to do with it?”

My sister removed it very gently from the cloth of her skirt and, wiping her hands together, she said: “We could all have it for breakfast, couldn't we?”

“Fried,” I said.

“With bacon sort of,” said my sister.

“Be tough, I shouldn't doubt, you'd better ask your mother: it might be poisonous and then where should I be? Never get another job, not having poisoned a whole family. It's very large,” she said. “Give it a good wash and we'll see.”

Well, you could tell she was impressed because she forgot to remind us to wash ourselves, and taking down the big iron frying-pan she started singing her song again.

Carefully we washed it at the big sink and smelled the fresh damp smell of it and admired the pink underneath part, and there were no worms.

It was about the best thing I've ever eaten. Cut in strips, like bacon, and fried in butter with tomatoes and a bit of ham and soft toast.

“Where did you find it then?” Lally asked.

“We were looking for George in Great Meadow and she found it.” I indicated my sister with a flick of jealousy.

“It was sort of in a little hollow place, right in the middle,” she said.

“It's a wonder Aleford's stallion wasn't about,” said Lally, wiping round her plate with a bit of bread: she said this was all right to do ever since she came to France the first time with us. Anything the French did was all right by her, which shows just how ignorant she was. “That stallion could kick you to death with a look: there was a boy lived up at Teddington when I was your age, got kicked in the head by one. He was loopy all his life.” She cleaned the edge of her knife against the plate and stuck it in the butter. “Any cows in the meadow?”

“Some,” I said. “Right down at the bottom.”

“Well, you need cows and horses in the same field for mushrooms,” said Lally. “If you don't have it that way you can't get mushrooms.”

“Why?” asked my sister.

Lally was spreading damson jam all over her toast. “Because when you get cow dung and horse dung in the same field you get mushrooms, that's why,” she said and bit into the jam.

My sister looked white but a little scornful. “Dung,” she said.

“DUNG, dung,” said Lally. “You ask anyone, anyone you like. Ask Aleford or Beattie Fluke down the bottom, or the Prince of Wales. They'll all say the same thing. Dung.”

For a little time we were silent, except for the clink and scrape of knives and forks and the kettle lid plopping up and down. Sunlight streamed through the windows, across the table and the bumpy whitewashed walls.

“Do the French eat them?” I asked.

“Wee,” said Lally, nodding her head.

“Well, it must be all right for us to, I mean if they do it must be,” I said.

“They're the best cooks in the world, aren't they?” said my sister. “So they'd be bound to know if it was all right or not.”

Lally eased up from the table and started stacking the plates. “Can't all be right at the same time,” she said, going across to the sink and dumping them into some water. “Can't be right all the time. Even the French. Remember one thing,” she said, taking the soap up from the shelf. “The French eat snails too.”

We helped with the drying-up in a thoughtful silence.

We lay on our backs under the ash tree by the top of the gully and watched the crows wheeling and gliding in the wind. All around my head sorrel, buttercup and long bendy plantains shimmered and nodded. I crumbled a little empty snail shell, transparent and silvery. My sister had her eyes closed, her hands folded on her chest like a dead Plantagenet. She had the same kind of nose, poky and long; her hair was scattered with pollen.

I leant up on one elbow and sprinkled the snail shell all over her face.

She screamed and hit me with her fist.

I fell back into the grass and lay still, staring at the crows. She was mumbling and brushing her chin.

“Stupid fool,” she said.

“I merely wondered if you were feeling sick yet. That's all.”

“Well I'm not.” She lay back. “Are you?”

“No. Not sick. Full.”

“I think Lally is a liar anyway.”

“I know she is,” I said. “Look at the Prince of Wales.”

“What about him?”

“Well, you know: she's always saying he's coming, or she met him at the pictures, or Victoria Station. And she's always talking to him on the telephone. She says.”

“Well, that doesn't say she's a liar,” said my sister, rolling on to her stomach and squinting at the sun. “Not like Betty Engels. She's a liar properly.”

“Why … I mean how do you know she is properly?”

“Because,” said my sister patiently, “because she said her father was a millionaire and I know it's a lie.” She knelt up and picked some grass.

“How?”

“Because I saw him actually riding a bicycle.”

“Well I should think Lally is just as much of a liar as Betty Engels… I bet she's never even seen the Prince of Wales. And not at Victoria Station.”

“Why not Victoria Station?”

“Because to go to Sunningdale you have to leave from Waterloo.”

We lay still for a while, comforted by our proof and by the fact that we did not feel sick. After a little while I sat up and tucked my shirt into my shorts. Away across the meadow the Downs were smudged with the morning sun and a little red Post Office van went bundling along the lower road and got lost in the trees. You could just see it shining red here and there in the gaps and then it turned right up to Peachy Corner and disappeared. I got up. “I'm going to have another look for George. Coming?”

She groaned. “All right, coming,” she said. “And then we'll go down to Bakers and get a bottle of Tizer, I've got threepence.” I pulled her up and we ran howling and laughing down the meadow: a linnet shot up at our feet, spiralling into the sky like a singing leaf, and as we whooped and leapt over the tussocks I could see the river sequinned with sunlight. I gave a great big shout of happiness … we weren't going to be sick and it was going to be a beautiful morning.

Herbert Fluke said that they weren't really canaries at all. They were ordinary sparrows dyed yellow, sometimes pink, and stuck in their cages. He said he knew because his brother Reg had a friend who used to catch them with bird-lime on twigs every year when the fair came to the village.

But I wanted one very badly. Basically because they were birds, and I worshipped birds, and also because the cages were so terribly small. They hung all round the stall in clusters … little square wood and wire boxes about eight by eight with chippering, tweeting little yellow, and sometimes pink, birds flittering and fluttering against the bars while you rolled pennies down a slotted thing on to numbers, or lobbed bouncy ping-pong balls into glass jars for twopence a throw. If you scored thirty or over you got a bird … the most you ever seemed able to score was a five or a three which together made eight, and for that, the lowest amount, you sometimes got a matchbox with a fishing set in it or a black and a pink celluloid baby with a little bath, with “Japan” printed on their bottoms.

But sometimes people did win a bird, because I saw them. Farm boys, with tightly belted trousers and shiny hair and fat maid-girls giggling on their arms, swung a little wooden cage in their free hand as they loped and lumbered across the shadowy, trodden grass to the swings. So people did win them sometimes; and I had two and sixpence which I had pleaded, hinted, saved, and on one occasion, which I remembered with a scarlet face, thieved, from around the household. Once, when my sister and I were changing the water in the flower jar on the altar in the church by the cottage, I pinched fourpence left by a hiker in the box: and spent four days of agony before I threw the scorching and almost molten coppers wide into the barley field on the way to Berwick. A fat lot of good thieving did you.

But tonight I had two shillings and sixpence intact… and in coppers: we'd gone into Bakers in the village on the way and changed it all, to make it easier at the stalls. Lally's mother, Mrs Jane, was with us: tall and respectable in black with a high black hat bound round with a shiny ribbon and a big coral pin her
father had brought from Naples. Lally had on her tennis shoes and socks, and a nasty blue speckly frock which she wore always when we went shopping or out on any sort of social trip, and carried the black and red shopping bag with the candles, the rice and the pound of Cheddar for old Mr Jane's supper.