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The Bagthorpe Saga: Absolute Zero
Helen Cresswell
The second book in the super-funny classic series The Bagthorpe Saga, starring the TOTALLY unforgettable Bagthorpe family – from best-loved author Helen Cresswell.Bad, mad and brilliant to know - the Bagthorpes are back! Something even stranger than normal is happening in the Bagsthorpe house. Ever since Uncle Parker won a luxury cruise in a competition, the family’s gone competition crazy. Only Jack and his trusty dog Zero are staying out of it. So just how does the mixed-up mutt become the most famous dog in Britain?
First published in Great Britain by Faber and Faber Ltd in 1978
First published by HarperCollins Children’s Books in 2017
HarperCollins Children’s Books is a division of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd,
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www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk)
В© The Estate of Helen Creswell 1978
Cover design В© HarperCollins Publishers 2017
Cover illustration В© Sara Ogilvie 2017
Helen Cresswell asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books
Source ISBN: 9780008211707
Ebook Edition В© 2015 ISBN: 9780008211721
Version: 2017-03-17
To Candida with love
Table of Contents
Cover (#u3b176348-e1c5-55aa-837b-6ac00d1fdac3)
Title Page (#u940e7701-32ea-5b77-8c4c-b31300481747)
Copyright (#u2784f822-e5b8-5d6b-8dd9-f6565e51c80d)
Dedication (#ueb4d12da-52d2-537d-b33f-58cd4a7731fe)
Chapter One (#u69e46b19-0c95-5cdd-9068-9a9c307eff85)
Chapter Two (#ua9473871-9a2f-51fc-8fd1-a2156d667a37)
Chapter Three (#uf6771489-3047-578c-94f0-d98cae0ad7e0)
Chapter Four (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Five (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Six (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Seven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eight (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Nine (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Ten (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eleven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twelve (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fourteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fifteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Keep Reading … (#litres_trial_promo)
Books By (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter One (#uea92cdb3-8d65-5de3-8084-bd8b93b0f95c)
The whole thing started when Uncle Parker won a cruise in the Caribbean for two after filling in a leaflet he had idly picked up in the village shop. The minute the news was known in the Bagthorpe household disbelief, annoyance and downright jealousy began to degenerate into what became, inevitably, an All Out Furore.
The company who had promoted this competition sold SUGAR-COATED PUFFBALLS breakfast cereal. Mr Bagthorpe immediately stated that Uncle Parker should refuse the prize on moral grounds. Uncle Parker, he said, had never consumed so much as a single SUGAR-COATED PUFFBALL in his entire life, and was thus automatically disqualified from reaping a reward for doing so. Mrs Bagthorpe did not agree. Daisy Parker, she said, ate a lot of SUGAR-COATED PUFFBALLS, she ate them every day of her life.
In that case, Mr Bagthorpe said, Daisy should have filled in the competition form. He then turned on his own children.
“Don’t you lot ever eat SUGAR-COATED PUFFBALLS?” he demanded. “What’s the matter with you?”
“I do,” said Jack promptly. “I really like them.”
“So why didn’t you go in for this thing?”
“I haven’t got a leaflet,” Jack said. “And even if I had, I wouldn’t have bothered. Nobody ever wins those things.”
“On the contrary, somebody does win them,” said Mr Bagthorpe in a tight voice. “We know that.”
“Why didn’t you tell me there was a competition?” asked William. “Then I could’ve won a prize.”
“You don’t automatically win by filling in a form, you know,” Tess told him. “Usually some kind of skill is required. And usually the deciding factor is a slogan.”
“So?” said William.
“I’d be better at slogans than you,” said Tess.
She turned not a hair as she spoke. In the Bagthorpe house everybody boasted. It was not called boasting, it was called “having a just pride in one’s own talents and achievements” – a phrase coined by Mrs Bagthorpe, who was very strong on Positive Thinking. The only ones who did not go in for it were Jack and his mongrel dog, Zero. They just kept quiet and lay low, mostly.
“I,” interposed Mr Bagthorpe now, “would be better than anybody at slogans, I believe. And how that layabout insensitive parasite managed to string so many as half a dozen words together is beyond me.”
“Perhaps Aunt Celia helped him,” said Rosie. “She can do The Times crossword three times as quickly as you can, Father. And she doesn’t use dictionaries and things.”
Honesty, especially of the tactless variety, was also a common trait of the Bagthorpe family.
“Nothing to do with it,” said Mr Bagthorpe. “Any fool can do crosswords. It’s creativity that counts.”
“But Aunt Celia writes poetry,” said Rosie, who could be as incorrigible as anyone if she chose, even though she was only just nine.
“Aunt Celia writes poetry,” repeated Mr Bagthorpe. “So she does. And does anybody ever understand a single word of it?”
No one answered this.
“I spend my entire life wrestling with words,” went on Mr Bagthorpe. (He wrote scripts for television.) “I live, breathe, sleep and eat words.”
(This was not strictly true. One thing Mr Bagthorpe never did was eat his words.)
The news of Uncle Parker’s win had been conveyed by telephone, and later in the morning he raced up the drive in his usual gravel-scattering style to rub salt in the wound. Jack and Zero were lying on the lawn, the former reading a comic, the latter gnawing a bone. Uncle Parker came to a furious halt and poked his head out of the window.
“Morning,” he said. “How’ve they taken it, then?”
“I think you should have waited a bit longer before coming round,” Jack told him. “They haven’t got over it yet.”
“Green as grass, are they?”
“Greener,” Jack told him.
“Your father’s hardest hit, I take it?”
“He’s livid,” Jack said. “He says you can’t string half a dozen words together.”
“Didn’t have to,” said Uncle Parker cheerfully. “Only five words in my slogan.”
“What was it?” enquired Jack with interest. It suddenly occurred to him that he could string five words together, at a pinch.
Uncle Parker cleared his throat.
“Sounds a bit silly in cold blood,” he said, “even to me. But here goes: Get Tough with Sugar Puff.”
There was a silence.
“Is that all?”
“That’s it.”
“Well, I’m bound to say,” said Jack at last, “that it doesn’t sound much. You’re pretty lucky to have won a prize with that. If you don’t mind my saying.”
Jack was endowed with the Bagthorpian honesty but was not so ruthless with it as the rest. He tried to temper it a little.
“You are absolutely right,” agreed Uncle Parker. “I would not have given anyone a bar of chocolate for that slogan. I wouldn’t have given them a handful of peanuts. But in their wisdom, Messrs SUGAR-COATED PUFFBALLS have decided I deserve a Caribbean holiday for it, and who am I to argue?”
“Father’s going to argue,” said Jack. “Come on, Zero.”
He got up and followed the car to the house, to be sure not to miss anything. Uncle Parker was in the kitchen trying to persuade Mrs Fosdyke to give him a cup of coffee. None of the family was yet in evidence though they soon would be. The way Uncle Parker drove, nobody could be unaware of his arrival.
“When Mrs Bagthorpe comes out of her Problems I shall make coffee,” Mrs Fosdyke was saying firmly. (Mrs Bagthorpe did a monthly Agony Column under the name of Stella Bright, and it took a great deal of her time. It also took a great deal out of her.)
Mr Bagthorpe appeared.
“Morning, Henry,” Uncle Parker greeted him. “Script coming along, is it?”
“What was that slogan, then?” demanded Mr Bagthorpe, dispensing with the niceties.
“It was a bad slogan,” Uncle Parker told him, “but the others were evidently worse. The more people ask me to repeat it, the less I enjoy doing so. You tell him, Jack.”
“Get Tough with Sugar Puff,” said Jack.
Mr Bagthorpe sat down. He shook his head long and hard.
“It’s a reflection on the society we live in, of course,” he said at last.
“Oh, it is,” Uncle Parker agreed. “I deplore it.”
“Hullo, Uncle Park!” Rosie ran in now. “You are clever winning that prize. And when you and Aunt Celia are away, can Daisy come and stay with us?”
Rosie was the youngest of the Bagthorpe children, and in the position of having no one to look down on. She looked down on Jack, up to a point, although he was older, but Daisy was only four and three quarters and much more easily impressed.
“If that child comes here,” said Mr Bagthorpe, “it will be up to you, Russell, to pay extra fire cover on the house, and take out policies on all our lives.”
“Including Zero’s,” put in Jack.
Not many months previously Daisy had gone through a Pyromaniac Phase. She had started nine fires in one week, three of them serious. The Bagthorpe dining-room was still only partly restored after Grandma’s disastrous Birthday Party when Daisy had hidden under the table with two boxes of crackers and one of fireworks.
“She doesn’t go in for fires any more,” said Uncle Parker.
“Oh?” Mr Bagthorpe was not comforted. “So what does she do now for kicks? Poisons people, perhaps – something like that?”
“She is in a very interesting Phase at the present,” said Uncle Parker. “She is doing all kinds of things.”
“Can she come, Father?” begged Rosie. “I think she’s really sweet. I’d look after her.”
“I shouldn’t think the question will arise, Rosie,” said Mr Bagthorpe. “I should hardly think your uncle will have the gall to accept this prize.”
“Why’s that?” enquired Uncle Parker, tipping back his chair with the air of careless ease that particularly aggravated Mr Bagthorpe.
“It’s a moral issue,” said Mr Bagthorpe. “You have never eaten a SUGAR-COATED PUFFBALL in your life.”
“I have not,” conceded Uncle Parker.
“There you are then!” Mr Bagthorpe had the air of a man clinching an argument.
“I don’t get your drift,” said Uncle Parker. “Nothing in the small print says anything about eating the wretched stuff. All one had to do was buy a packet and pick up a leaflet. I did both these things. It will, of course, be glorious for Celia and myself, cruising in the Caribbean. I expect, Henry, you wish you had the chance yourself.”
“I wish no such thing!” snapped Mr Bagthorpe. “There is nothing I can think of I would hate more. Given the choice between the salt mines and the Caribbean, I’d plump for the former any time.”
“Someone might be running a competition for the salt mines,” suggested Uncle Parker. “You must keep your eyes open.”
“Luckily,” said Mr Bagthorpe, “I have work to do in life. Luckily, I have a service to give to my fellow men and do not have to fill in my pointless existence wafting round among palm trees drinking gin and tonic by the bucketful.”
“Hallo, Uncle Parker.” William came in. “Jolly good work. What was the slogan?”
“Tell him, Jack,” said Uncle Parker wearily.
Jack told him. Even he was beginning to tire of repeating it, and could see how weak it sounded.
“You’re joking,” said William after a slight pause.
“No,” said Mr Bagthorpe, “he is not, unfortunately, joking. I often wonder whether we should have brought children into a world of such colossal triviality.”
“Well, if you don’t mind my saying,” said William, with true Bagthorpian ruthlessness, “I should think the sales of SUGAR-COATED PUFFBALLS will plummet when that gets out. Go into a fatal nosedive, I should think.”
“SUGAR-COATED PUFFBALLS will be bankrupt within the month,” affirmed Mr Bagthorpe.
“When’re you going?” Jack asked. He was going to miss Uncle Parker. He got on well with him, and could feel equal in his company.
“Next week, we thought,” Uncle Parker replied.
Mr Bagthorpe rose.
“I must get back to work,” he said witheringly, and went.
“I saw that competition, Mr Parker,” said Mrs Fosdyke then. “And d’you know, I nearly went in myself. Worked a slogan out, and all, I did, and never got round to sending it off.”
“What was the slogan?” asked Rosie.
“Well…” Mrs Fosdyke cleared her throat, stood up straight and twitched her overall. “Not very good. Not like Mr Parker’s. What I thought of was: �Puffballs in fields is poisonous but out of packets is delicious.’”
There was a puzzled silence.
“Er – what exactly…?” William groped for an explanation without wishing to appear completely nonplussed.
“There’s these things grow in fields, see, like mushrooms,” explained Mrs Fosdyke, quite pink with the interest she was creating. “Look a bit like mushrooms, but if you was to eat them they’d kill you, you’d die in agony, my ma used to tell me. Fact is, I look at every mushroom I cook, I do, to be on the safe side. So you see I thought my slogan would be quite a good one, to let people know it wasn’t that kind of puffball.”
“Mmmmm. Yes.” William tried to sound enthusiastic but came nowhere near it. “I don’t think that would have got you far, though. Too long, for one thing. And I don’t think the breakfast cereal people would want the word �poisonous’ in their adverts.”
“But they’re not poisonous!” cried Mrs Fosdyke. “That’s the whole point!”
“Anyway, it was a good try,” Jack told her. “I don’t think I could have thought of that.”
“Oh well!” She shrugged and turned back to the sink. “I don’t pretend to be clever.”
She began to rattle dishes, which she could do with the best.
“I’ll go and do my violin practice, I think,” Rosie said.
William followed her, in a drifting kind of way, hands in his pockets. He had had this kind of look about him ever since the Danish au pair, Atlanta, had left the previous week. If his ears had been the drooping kind, like Zero’s, they would have drooped.
“I am glad,” observed Uncle Parker, “that I do not live in this house. Everybody is always doing something. Does anybody ever do nothing?”
“I do,” Jack told him. “And Zero.”
“Of course. Good for you.”
“Not what they say,” said Jack glumly. “Sometimes I wish that being a Prophet and Phenomenon had come off, even if it would’ve been hard work.”
(#ulink_a34ecdec-cb54-5851-b3f2-557d10bb5b23)
“Rubbish!” said Uncle Parker briskly. “It would have made an old man of you. Where’s Grandma?”
He wanted Grandma to know about his prize because she had a very low estimate of him. It had been very low indeed since the day, some five years previously, when he had run over Thomas, a cantankerous ginger tom who had, she declared, been the light of her life. He had been the light of no one else’s, having been given to scratching, biting and attacking from corners, and none of the other Bagthorpes held his extinction against Uncle Parker. Some of them actually thanked him for it.
Uncle Parker had a secret admiration for Grandma and wanted her good opinion, though he would never have admitted this.
“Grandma’s sitting in the dining-room,” Jack told him. “She’s feeling low and talking about Signs again. She’s going on about her Birthday Portrait and all that.”
At Grandma’s Birthday Party the whole table had gone up in flames and burnt out the dining-room before the fire brigade got there. One of the first things to go up had been Rosie’s Birthday Portrait of Grandma, and ever since Grandma had taken this as a Sign, and thought it showed that the Fates, in some indefinable way, had it in for her. Every now and then she would go and sit on her own in the devastated dining-room and brood about this.
“I’ll go and cheer her up,” said Uncle Parker.
“You’ll only go and remind her of Thomas,” said Jack, “and make her worse.”
“It’s my belief,” remarked Mrs Fosdyke, who put her spoke into the wheels of anyone’s conversation if she felt like it, “that Mrs Bagthorpe Senior is too drawn into herself.”
“Drawn into herself, you reckon?” said Uncle Parker.
“All that Breathing, for one thing,” went on Mrs Fosdyke, encouraged by the interest in her diagnosis. “It’s time she stopped Breathing and went in for something else. Something that’d take her out of herself more.”
It occurred to Jack that if Grandma were to stop breathing, she would most certainly be taken out of herself – permanently. He knew, however, that what was being alluded to was not the common or garden kind of breathing that keeps people alive, but the kind of Breathing she had been doing daily since she had read one of Mrs Bagthorpe’s books about Yoga.
“What sort of thing had you in mind, Mrs Fosdyke?” asked Uncle Parker.
Mrs Fosdyke, hugely flattered by the unaccustomed interest being shown in her opinions, turned from the sink and wiped her hands on her pinafore.
“What I think,” she opined, with the gravity of a Harley Street Man delivering a long-awaited diagnosis, “is that Mrs Bagthorpe Senior should take up Bingo.”
“Bingo, by Jove!” Uncle Parker was not easily put off balance, but he was now.
“Should what?” said Jack incredulously.
Grandma was a notorious cheat at anything from Scrabble to Ludo. Sometimes, at the end of a game of Dominoes, for instance, she would say that a domino with five pips on it had six on it, or even three, and would play it accordingly. She also, at Snakes and Ladders, moved her counter up snakes and ladders alike, and never came down anything. At Monopoly, if she saw funds were getting low, she would declare that the Bank had forgotten to pay her ВЈ200 for passing Go on the last five rounds, and would snatch two five-hundred-pound notes out of the Bank before anyone could stop her. She got away with it by being so old and obstinate, and by being able to keep up an argument longer than anyone else. Mostly when the Bagthorpes wanted to play games they went into quiet corners to do it, out of her way.
Mrs Fosdyke had been with the Bagthorpes long enough to know about Grandma’s cheating, but was clearly not unduly perturbed.
“She won’t be allowed to cheat,” she said, shaking her head. “It’s not allowed.”
“She will,” said Jack. “I bet she would.”
“Can’t.” Mrs Fosdyke shook her head firmly. “They check up, see.”
“She’d tell them they’d checked up wrong,” Jack said.
“You can’t argue,” said Mrs Fosdyke. “There’s no arguing allowed. They’re ever so strict.”
“I think that Grandma would like Bingo,” said Uncle Parker. “You’re absolutely right, Mrs Fosdyke. Spot on. The very thing.”
“I could take her along with me.” Mrs Fosdyke was enchanted. “There’s ever such big prizes – there’s money, of course, and then there’s dinner services and blankets and non-sticks and all sorts. My sister at Pinxton won the Jackpot two weeks back on the day when they all have a link-up over the telephone, and she won 400 pound!”
“Crikey!” Jack was impressed. “I wouldn’t mind a go. Though I’m not much good at numbers.”
“Oh, you don’t have to be that,” Mrs Fosdyke assured him. “There’s no skill. No adding up, or anything. But it does take you out of yourself, you see, and that’s why I thought it’d be the very thing for Mrs Bagthorpe Senior.”
“I shall go and tell her this minute,” announced Uncle Parker. “A million thanks, Mrs Fosdyke. An inspired thought.”
Mrs Fosdyke glowed.
“Come on, Zero,” said Jack, and followed Uncle Parker.
Grandma was sitting on one of the new chairs that had been bought following the fire, contemplating the scene before her. The builders had been in and done some replastering and replaced some burned-up window frames and floorboards, but the room still looked like something out of an Alfred Hitchcock film. Everywhere was blacked up and charred-looking, and tatters of curtain still dangled from the buckled brass poles. Grandma looked as if she were reliving her Birthday Party in all its awful detail.
“Hallo, Grandma,” said Uncle Parker cheerily. “Nice day.”
She did not move her gaze.
“I know you by your voice,” she said. “You ran over Thomas, that shining jewel of a cat. You cut him off in his glorious prime.”
“Sorry about that, Grandma.” Uncle Parker apologised for at least the hundredth time. “I’d offer to get you another, but I knew he was irreplaceable.”
“He was irreplaceable,” said Grandma mournfully. “No cat could equal him for beauty, grace and gentleness.”
(This was a statement that needed challenging. Thomas had been ill-favoured to a degree, and inspired hate and terror in all who knew him. It was lucky that Mr Bagthorpe was not there to point all this out.)
“I think a lot about Reincarnation these days,” Grandma went on to herself. “I like to think who I would like to be Reincarnated as. I can’t decide. I am bound to say I would prefer not to be a Bagthorpe again. I should like to think I would be promoted to a Higher Plane.”
“Got a bit of a treat for you, Grandma,” said Uncle Parker, beavering away at the cheerfulness.
“Life is but a dream,” remarked Grandma vaguely. “Like as the waves make to the pebbled shore so do our moments hasten to their ends.’”
Uncle Parker was clearly batting on a sticky wicket.
“Heard about my prize, Grandma?” he asked.
“What prize?” said Grandma. “When you get old, you don’t get prizes.”
“Ah!” Uncle Parker was triumphant. “But you do! There’s a way you could win prizes the whole time.”
“When I was a little child, I once won a bag of macaroons at a party,” said Grandma wistfully. “Those days will never come again.”
“They will, Grandma,” said Jack. “Honestly. That’s what he’s trying to tell you.”
“I love macaroons,” she said. She seemed, marginally, to be coming back from wherever she had been.
“What would you say,” asked Uncle Parker, “to a blanket? Or some non-sticks, whatever they are, or a dinner service? What would you say to four hundred pounds?”
“Four hundred pounds? Where?” She was with them now all right.
“Yours for the winning,” Uncle Parker told her with sublime confidence. “All you do, you play a game.”
“Oh, I like playing games,” Grandma said. “I always win at games.”
Uncle Parker and Jack exchanged glances. Grandma was evidently right back on the ball again now, because she said:
“I have a natural aptitude for games.”
“You certainly have a natural aptitude for winning them,” conceded Uncle Parker. “One way or another. I’m bound to say none of us are any match for you.”
“This game would be a new challenge, though, Grandma,” said Jack. This was a guileful statement. Grandma rarely could resist a challenge.
“Whatever it is,” she replied, “I shall expect to win.”
“That’s the spirit, Grandma!” Uncle Parker told her. “So you’re on, then? Bingo tonight, is it?”
“Bingo?” repeated Grandma. “Is that a game? Why do the Parkinsons call their dog after a game? I thought it was a name for a dog.”
“Because it’s a good game,” Uncle Parker told her. “You’ll find out. And by the way, I might as well just mention it – I’ve just won a cruise for two in the Caribbean. I won it writing a slogan for SUGAR-COATED PUFFBALLS.”
Grandma favoured him with a long stare.
“If it were not for you,” she said at length, “that beautiful, shining Thomas would at this moment be crooning in my lap. The rain rains on the just and the unjust.”
Jack, while himself thinking very little of Uncle Parker’s winning slogan, none the less felt he deserved better than this.
“It was a national competition,” he told her. “The odds against winning are hundreds of thousands to one. It was pretty good going.”
Grandma rose. She reached the door and turned back.
“Do not quote statistics at me,” she said. “The odds against Thomas being killed in his prime in the drive of his own home were hundreds of thousands to one. He –” she pointed straight at Uncle Parker – “was the Fly in the Statistics.”
She swept out of the charred dining-room having had, as always, the last word.
fn1 (#ulink_3ebb64bc-d8eb-56ba-a641-29dfbcecb7e8) See Ordinary Jack.
Chapter Two (#uea92cdb3-8d65-5de3-8084-bd8b93b0f95c)
During the course of that day the pile of recent newspapers and periodicals that lay on a shelf in the sitting-room rapidly and invisibly levelled down to a mere handful of colour supplements.
The Bagthorpes quite often all got the same idea at the same time, and quite often did not say a word to one another, each imagining him or herself to be the sole recipient of the particular inspiration. Tess playing her oboe, Rosie her violin and William his drums, had each been lacking in their usual total concentration. Visions of Caribbean isles and palm trees danced between them and their semiquavers. Each, in turn, began to think along the same lines.
Mrs Bagthorpe was in her room up to her ears in Problems and was not involved. Nor was Jack, who was in the meadow trying to train Zero to Beg, nor Grandma, who was in the kitchen cross-examining Mrs Fosdyke on the finer points of Bingo. Grandpa had gone away for a few days to play bowls. If he had been present he would certainly not have gone in for Competitions. He was a very Non-Competitive Man, and the younger generation of Bagthorpes got all their drive from Grandma’s side of the family.
Mr Bagthorpe was in his study reflecting bitterly on the unfairness of life. That Uncle Parker, who to all appearances did nothing but sit around doing crosswords or else tear about the countryside putting the fear of God into old and young alike, should actually have won a Caribbean Cruise simply by doodling with a form, was something Mr Bagthorpe just could not take. He himself had already been sitting at his desk for nearly two hours and all he had done so far was tear up five false starts to a script he was supposed to be doing. He would not have minded so much if Uncle Parker had won the prize by putting the right famous eyes into famous faces, or guessing where a football ought to be on a photograph, or something of that nature. It would even have been a fruitful source of sarcasm.
But that Uncle Parker should have won a prize by using words, which were the tools of Mr Bagthorpe’s own trade, and which he felt to be more or less his exclusive province, was a bitter blow. Nothing would do, he decided, but that he himself should win an even bigger and better prize with a shorter and better slogan.
He was not a man to sit around playing with ideas. The minute he got one, he acted on it. (The critics often described his scripts as “monumentally single-minded” or “ruthlessly one track”.) Mr Bagthorpe took these as compliments, and they may have been, of course.
“Lear is monumentally single-minded,” he would point out triumphantly. “Othello was ruthlessly one track. So was Macbeth.”
Mr Bagthorpe, then, abandoned his abortive script and went to the sitting-room to find any magazines that might be running Competitions. He had often noticed them in the past but had thought it beneath his dignity to enter them. He had also, like Jack, thought that nobody ever won them anyway. He was not pleased to find that the magazine shelf had already been rifled, and guessed immediately what was afoot. He did not much like the idea that his offspring were intending to win Competitions too. It was, he knew, possible that he would end up by being a runner-up to one of them – Tess in particular, who was very good with words.
He instantly resolved, therefore, to keep his own Competition Entering secret. He was sure he would win every one he entered, if everything was all square and above board, and he was not pipped by a member of his own family. If, however, the Competitions were rigged (as he felt sure some of them must be, viz. Uncle Parker’s success) and he did not win, then he would avoid loss of face. Mr Bagthorpe was very bad at losing face.
He did get ideas, however, and had one now. Competitions did not appear only in newspapers and periodicals, they also appeared on the backs, tops and insides of grocery packages and tins. Uncle Parker’s own success had depended upon the top of a SUGAR-COATED PUFFBALL carton. He determined to raid the larder. This, he realised, depended on sidetracking Mrs Fosdyke, who was not easy to dodge because she darted hither and thither about the house all day with the rapidity and inconsequential tracking of a hedgehog. She could be in the bathroom one minute, a bedroom the next and then back down the hall, following her own obscure method of housekeeping. He had to think of a way of keeping her out of the kitchen for at least ten minutes while he had a quick sort through the pantry.
He pondered this for some time. He hit upon a solution. It was a neat one – it killed two birds with one stone.
In the kitchen he found Mrs Fosdyke serving coffee to his wife, the only member of the family who appeared to be interested in it. The rest, he surmised, were holed up in their rooms hammering out Slogans.
“Mrs Fosdyke has just been telling me how she has kindly offered to take Mother to Bingo tonight,” she greeted him.
“To what?” demanded Mr Bagthorpe incredulously.
“To Bingo, dear. It will take her out of herself. You know how drawn into herself she has become lately.”
“Laura,” said her husband, “if Mother so much as sets foot in a Bingo Hall there will be a riot. You know there will.”
“Nonsense, dear,” said Mrs Bagthorpe firmly. (She gave so much thought and time to other people’s Problems that as far as possible she tried to pretend that those of her own family were not there, in the hope that they would go away.)
“My mother,” said Mr Bagthorpe, “and she is my mother, and I think I know her as well as anyone ever could, is a congenital cheater at games. No –” he held up a hand – “don’t bother to deny it. You were present, I believe, last week, when she concealed the Q in her handbag because all the Us had already gone, at Scrabble?”
“Oh, she won’t be able to cheat at Bingo, Mr Bagthorpe,” said Mrs Fosdyke positively. “It’s impossible. It’s all done ever so fair and square and businesslike.”
“Is it?” Mr Bagthorpe threw himself into a chair and reached for his coffee. “Think they’ve got it organised, do they?”
“Oh, they have,” she assured him. “They’d never keep going, otherwise. It’s got to be fair.”
“In that case,” he said, “I prophesy – if you will excuse the expression – that whatever Bingo Hall you frequent will be closed down within the week. I also think it possible the police will become involved, and that there will be adverse publicity in the local papers. Probably –” pausing for a gulp of coffee – “in the Nationals.”
“Oh, go on, Mr Bagthorpe!” said Mrs Fosdyke skittishly.
“Henry, dear, you do exaggerate,” his wife told him. “I think it will be the healthiest thing possible for Mother to do.”
“Oh, it’ll be healthy for her, all right,” he agreed. “There’s nothing sets Mother up like an all-out row.”
“Well, let’s just wait and see, shall we,” said Mrs Bagthorpe sensibly. “And thank you so much, Mrs Fosdyke, for your kind offer. We’re most grateful.”
“Ah, and that reminds me, Mrs T – Fosdyke,” said Mr Bagthorpe. He had been about to say “Mrs Tiggywinkle” but stopped himself just in time. “There’s a little favour you might do for me, if you will.”
“Really?” She looked startled. Mr Bagthorpe hardly ever spoke to her at all, and had never in memory asked a favour. He looked at her quite a lot, and she did not much like the way he looked, but he almost never actually said anything.
“If you’ll excuse Mrs Fosdyke, dear,” he said to his wife, “I’d like her to pop down to the village shop for me. I’m in the middle of a very difficult patch with my script, you see, and there’s some material I must have if I’m to get on.”
“Well… certainly I’ve no objection,” said his wife, “if –?”
She looked enquiringly at Mrs Fosdyke who was already wiping her hands on her overall preparatory to taking it off. She was going to enjoy telling them in the shop that she was there on an urgent errand to get something for one of Mr Bagthorpe’s TV scripts.
“What is it you’re wanting?” she enquired.
“It may sound strange,” replied Mr Bagthorpe, “but what I require are current copies of the following magazines: Woman’s Monthly, Mother and Home, Happy Families…”
He rattled off half a dozen more magazines that he felt sure would be rich in Competitions. These he had selected a few minutes earlier from The Writer’s and Artist’s Year Book. They were none of them publications that were usually to be found at Unicorn House.
Mrs Fosdyke looked surprised by this but Mrs Bagthorpe did not.
“I need,” explained Mr Bagthorpe shamelessly, “to get right inside the mind of the woman in the home. Into the mind of a woman such as yourself, for instance, Mrs Fosdyke.”
Mrs Fosdyke positively scooted for her coat and hat on receiving this gratifying intelligence. She told her cronies about it later in the Fiddler’s Arms.
“He’s doing one of his scripts about me,” she boasted. “Said he wanted to get right inside my mind. Researching up on it at the moment.”
On being jealously reminded by one of her friends that she had always pronounced Mr Bagthorpe to be mad, she replied:
“It goes in patches, does madness. He’s in one of his sane spells” – which covered the present situation nicely, and also gave her a loophole whereby she could revert to her former assessment of Mr Bagthorpe if necessary.
Mrs Bagthorpe finished her coffee and went back to her Problems. Mrs Fosdyke, armed with a five-pound note and strong bag, was scuttling towards the village, and the coast was clear.
Mr Bagthorpe took a pair of scissors and went into the pantry. The haul was rich beyond his wildest expectations. There seemed hardly a packet or tin that did not offer the possibility of desirable rewards from motor cars to thousands of pounds, from holiday bungalows to trips to the Greek Islands. (Mr Bagthorpe was particularly bent on winning this latter, because it had a lot more tone than a trip to the Caribbean.) There were eight tins whose wrappers carried entry forms for this particular prize, and he swiftly removed them all and stowed them in his pocket. The very next batch of tins promised a motor car and also some very attractive runners-up prizes, ranging from stereo equipment to typewriters. These, too, were divested of their wrappers.
All in all Mr Bagthorpe was in the pantry for a full quarter of an hour. He returned to his study a happy man, every pocket stuffed with wrappers and box lids, and hours of enjoyable Slogan Slogging before him. He sorted his pickings into businesslike piles, fetched out a new notebook and prepared a record-keeping system. He made notes of how many bottle tops of certain products he would have to collect and send along with his entries. He wrote the closing date of each Competition in red, and by lunchtime the ground was prepared. All that now remained was the actual solving and Slogan-making – the least part of the thing, it seemed to Mr Bagthorpe, who was not a modest man.
The house was full of Bagthorpes similarly engaged. Rosie was sucking her pencil over a Slogan for After Shave (made difficult by her uncertainty as to what this product was actually supposed to do). In the end she settled for “You may be no saint, but X will make you feel good.” William was writing a letter in not more than five hundred words explaining why he would like a motor caravan, and Tess had already thought of three surefire Slogans for a shampoo, and was now deciding that the best was probably: “You may be no saint, but you will have a halo” (which, given Rosie’s effort, suggested a strong telepathic link between Bagthorpes simultaneously generating ideas).
Jack, meanwhile, was slack and happy in the meadow with his dog. Zero did not really seem to want to sit up and Beg, even when Jack dangled his favourite biscuits above him. The reason Jack wanted him to learn was to increase his standing among the other Bagthorpes. Even now that he could fetch sticks, none of them really thought much of him. It was Mr Bagthorpe who had given him his name. “If there was anything less than Zero, that hound would be it,” he had said. It was not a good name to have to go through life with, and Jack sometimes wondered if it affected Zero, and gave him an inferiority complex. He spent a lot of time trying to build up Zero’s confidence, because he could tell by the way his ears drooped when he was getting sad and undermined.
This morning, for instance, after each unsuccessful attempt by Zero to beg, Jack had hurled a stick and shouted “Fetch!” and each time Zero had brought it back he was patted and praised and given a biscuit.
At present Jack was having a rest and wondering how best to tackle the problem. He felt sure that Zero could sit up and Beg if only he, Jack, found the key to how his mind worked.
He’s got quite thick legs and a very square-shaped sort of bottom, he thought, so there’s no physical reason why he can’t Beg. It must be all in the mind.
There was, of course, one obvious method Jack could use for getting through to Zero. He had been keeping it as a last resort, because the only other occasion he had used it was one of his most painful memories. It was the most embarrassing moment of his life. Jack had been trying to get through to Zero how to fetch sticks, and in the end had himself dropped down on all fours, crawled after the stick and picked it up in his own teeth. Mr Bagthorpe had caught him in the act. It had been terrible. The only thing was, it had worked.
And it could work again now, he thought. In fact, it’s probably the only way.
Unfortunately the thing was not so simple as it seemed. He would need, he realised, an accomplice. Someone would have to hold up a biscuit for Jack to sit up and Beg for. It would, he was convinced, be no use his holding up a biscuit for himself. This would only confuse Zero more than ever.
Jack slumped back into the grass.
That’s it, then, he thought. He knew for a fact that none of his family was going to hold up a biscuit for Jack to Beg for. He also knew that he would never ask them. They were all genii, and he was ordinary. To ask them to hold up biscuits would be to invite the fate of being sub-ordinary. He half shut his eyes and squinted through the long, seeding grass and saw the light running like wires. He heard Zero’s steady panting by his ear, and was content. It was a shock to hear Uncle Parker’s voice.
“Hallo, there. Having a kip?”
Jack shot up and shaded his eyes against the low autumn sun to stare up at his uncle, six foot four above ground level, and looking amused in the friendly way he had. Jack and Uncle Parker were old conspirators. They understood one another.
“Not kipping,” Jack told him. “Just having a bit of a think.”
“Ah.” Uncle Parker sat down himself and pulled a grass to chew.
Jack explained the problem.
“Well,” said Uncle Parker when he had finished, “here’s your third party.”
“You? Would you?”
“No trouble. Nothing much to holding up biscuits. Got some handy?”
Jack indicated the bag containing the remainder.
“There’s just one thing you might do for me,” Uncle Parker said.
“What?”
“Go to the Bingo place with Grandma and Fozzy. I’ll give you a sub. Can’t let that pair loose on their own.”
Jack saw his point. He knew that Grandma was going to cheat, and that when she was found out she would need protecting. Mrs Fosdyke was not the protecting type. She would probably scuttle, like a rat off a sinking ship the minute the police arrived. (Jack, like Mr Bagthorpe, felt sure that the kind of cheating Grandma would go in for would eventually involve the police.)
“I’ll do it,” he said. “I’ll go. Might even win.”
“Could easily,” agreed Uncle Parker. “Pure chance. No skill. No offence.”
“Come on, then,” Jack said. “Let’s start the training. Here.”
He handed up the bag of biscuits. He himself then crouched on all fours beside Zero, who was dozing.
“Hey, Zero!”
Zero opened his eyes and his ears pricked up slightly.
“Now – watch me!”
Zero yawned hugely and moved to a sitting position. He looked dazed.
“Now,” whispered Jack to Uncle Parker, “you say �Up!’ and I’ll sit up and Beg. If I do it and he doesn’t, you say �Good boy!’ and pat my head, and give me the biscuit.”
Uncle Parker nodded. He delved in the bag and came up with a chocolate digestive which he broke in half.
“Right.”
He held the biscuit aloft halfway between Jack and Zero.
“Up. Sit up. Beg. Good boy – boys, rather.”
Jack accordingly crouched on his legs and held his hands drooping forward in imitation of front paws.
“Good boy!” exclaimed Uncle Parker. He patted Jack on the head and held out the biscuit. Jack opened his mouth and Uncle Parker pushed the half digestive into it. It nearly choked him. He looked sideways to see that Zero was looking distinctly interested. For one thing, his eyes were fixed soulfully on the piece of biscuit still protruding from Jack’s mouth, and for another, he was doing a kind of stamping movement with his front paws alternately, like a racehorse impatient to be loosed.
“Look!” The exclamation came out with a shower of crumbs. “Look at his paws!”
Uncle Parker nodded.
“We’re on the right track. All we’ve got to do now is keep on reinforcing the message. How hungry are you?”
“Not terribly,” Jack told him. “You could break the biscuits in quarters instead of halves. They’ll last longer that way.”
The training session continued. It was going well. Uncle Parker and Jack became increasingly pleased with themselves and increasingly entertained by Zero’s efforts to raise himself with his front paws up. He had very big, furry paws – pudding-footed, Mr Bagthorpe called him – and he did not seem to have much control over them. Once or twice he toppled over sideways within an ace of success and rolled about growling with annoyance.
“I wish we’d got a camera,” Jack said. “I’ve never seen anything so funny.” He then added immediately, for the benefit of Zero’s ears, “And it’s jolly good the way he’s catching on. You’re nearly there, old chap. Good old boy. Good boy.”
He was the only Bagthorpe who ever praised Zero and he had to do a lot of it to keep his confidence and his ears up.
Had Jack known it, a camera was in the offing. It was going to be used at any moment, just as soon as Rosie could stop stuffing her fists into her mouth to keep herself from giggling out loud, and use her hands to operate the camera instead.
Rosie was behind a hawthorn bush not six feet from where the training was taking place. The reason why she was there was because she was out to get some shots for a Competition entitled “Me and My Pet”. At first she had passed it over, because she did not have a pet. She was too busy with her maths and violin and Portraits and swimming (which were the four main Strings to her Bow) to have time for a pet. She had then, however, thought of Jack and Zero. She turned back to the Competition and discovered that what was really wanted was something unusual.
One of the most unusual things Rosie had ever heard of (she had, to her intense annoyance, missed actually seeing it) was Jack on all fours with a stick in his mouth to show Zero how to Fetch. She had afterwards begged him to repeat the performance so that she could photograph it with her new camera. Rosie had a passion for keeping records of things so strong that it could almost have been classed as a fifth String to her Bow. She had even offered Jack her spare pocket calculator to pose like this, but he always refused point-blank.
“You do it,” he told her, “and I’ll photograph you doing it.”
“No,” she said. “I’d look silly.”
“There you are, then. Anyway, it wasn’t silly, even if it looked it. It was a Serious Scientific Experiment, and it worked.”
Rosie was now poised ready to take a shot – more than one, if possible – of the present Serious Scientific Experiment, which was funnier, definitely, than the first could possibly have been. A 16mm movie camera complete with tripod, screen and projector, were as good as in the bag.
“Hold up half a digestive this time,” she heard Jack tell Uncle Parker. “He’s about there. I’m sure he is. They’re one of his favourites.”
Uncle Parker took the biscuit and poised it between the pair of them.
“Up!” he commanded. “Sit up! Beg!”
Jack went through his usual motions, turned his head sideways and saw that Zero too, though rocking alarmingly, was up, tongue dangling, eyes fixed on the digestive.
No one heard the click of Rosie’s shutter because of Zero’s panting. Solemnly Uncle Parker placed the biscuit in Zero’s jaws.
“Good boy,” he said, and Jack scrambled up and began patting Zero so vigorously that he spluttered crumbs. Behind her bush, Rosie secretly thanked them all.
“Oh, it worked, it worked!” Jack cried. “Oh thanks, Uncle Parker! I’d never’ve done it without you. Oh, wait till the rest of them see!”
Uncle Parker was looking more thoughtful than jubilant.
“Interesting…” he murmured.
He was thinking of Daisy, who needed training as much as Zero did – probably more. He was wondering whether he could adopt this kind of technique to deal with her and make her less of a public nuisance. It was true that she did not light fires any more, but Mr Bagthorpe had not been far short of the mark when he had suggested that she was now poisoning people. She was, among other things, going into the pantry and mixing all kinds of things together, like cocoa and gravy salt, for instance, and salt and sugar, and marmalade and chutney. The Parkers and their friends had been getting some truly horrible gastronomic shocks of late.
Aunt Celia did not take this very seriously, partly because she was a vegetarian and lived mainly on lettuce, carrots, wheatgerm and fresh orange juice. She said that it showed signs of creativity, Daisy’s mixing ingredients together.
“It is one of the early signs of creative genius,” she said, in an unusually long sentence for her, “to Reconcile the Seemingly Disparate.”
Uncle Parker did not dispute this. For one thing, he never argued with his wife because he thought she was perfect. Also, she had a very highly strung temperament and must not be crossed. He had put a padlock on the pantry door, however, saying that if Daisy were as creative as all that, she would find other Disparate objects to Reconcile.
The trouble was, she had. Daisy had embarked on a career of Reconciling the Seemingly Disparate that was shortly to drive the Bagthorpe household to the edge of their endurance while the Parkers were in the Caribbean. Anybody else would have gone right over the edge.
Meanwhile, Uncle Parker made a mental note to try the Zero technique on his daughter on his return, and dismissed the matter from his mind.
“I think we ought to do it again, once or twice,” Jack said. “Just to make absolutely sure he’s got it.”
Rosie, behind her hawthorn, hugged herself and wound her film on. All in all, she got five shots of the repeat beggings. As it turned out, her film and the supply of biscuits ran out together. She remained under cover while Uncle Parker and Jack sauntered over the meadow back towards the house.
Zero followed, his ears at an unusually jaunty angle. Perhaps he had a deep, canine intuition that before long he was going to be the most famous, most photographed, most sought-after dog in England, if not indeed the world.
Better still, he was about to show Mr Bagthorpe who was Zero and who was not.
Chapter Three (#uea92cdb3-8d65-5de3-8084-bd8b93b0f95c)
The natural misgivings about Grandma setting off to Bingo with Mrs Fosdyke that evening were not so deeply felt as they might ordinarily have been. The Bagthorpes had something else to think about. They had nearly all added Competition Entering as an Extra String to their respective Bows, and were involved in it as obsessively and single-mindedly as only the Bagthorpes knew how to be. At this stage, each of them suspected what the others were up to but no one could be sure exactly what, so that there was a strong air of guerrilla warfare about the place too.
It was unlucky for Jack and Zero that the rest of the family were so preoccupied, because it meant that Zero’s new feat did not receive due recognition and applause.
“What? Oh, he can do that, can he?” was all Mr Bagthorpe had said at lunchtime. “Well, he needn’t do it at me.”
“I don’t think we want that at table, dear,” was Mrs Bagthorpe’s only contribution.
The only member of the family who seemed unstintedly happy and admiring was Rosie, gleeful in the knowledge that her camera held film of what must surely be the most unusual �Me and My Pet’ shots ever taken. So warm was she in her admiration, so many pieces of meat did she hold up for Zero to take, that Jack, had he been of a suspicious nature, must surely have been suspicious. The Bagthorpes respected one another’s achievements but did not usually wax lyrical about them. They saved the lyricism for their personal successes.
The one good thing about the lukewarm reception of Zero’s latest String to his Bow was that no one bothered to ask Jack how it had been achieved. He did not really want to describe how it had been done, and felt certain Uncle Parker would not want this information bandied about either.
Grandma had gone to have lunch and spend the afternoon at Mrs Fosdyke’s, whose half-day it was. The pair of them had gone off looking uncommonly pleased with themselves. They had never been friends before, and it seemed odd to see them trotting down the drive together, Mrs Fosdyke with her black plastic carrier and Grandma wearing her fur coat (though it was unseasonably warm for October) and carrying an umbrella. Mr Bagthorpe had his misgivings about the latter accessory.
“If she doesn’t win,” he said, “and she won’t, she’ll end up laying about her with that umbrella. You mark my words.”
None of the others had said anything in reply because it occurred to them that Mr Bagthorpe could be right about this.
“The only safe game for her to play,” he went on, “is Patience.” (Grandma did play Patience, for hours on end sometimes, and it came out every time.)
Jack was due to meet the two ladies at the bus stop at a quarter past six to escort them to the Bingo Hall in Aysham. Mrs Fosdyke did not usually play there, and was nervous at the prospect. She usually played at a small hall in the next village of Maythorpe. But there were games there only on Wednesdays and Saturdays. Today was Tuesday, and Grandma, once fired by an idea, did not care to be held up by even twenty-four hours.
On the bus Mrs Fosdyke confided in them that what was really worrying about the hall in Aysham was that it was so big.
“Used to be an old theatre, you see,” she told them. “Holds hundreds. What I’m afraid is, that if I shout �Bingo!’ they won’t hear.”
“I shall shout with you,” Grandma told her. “I shall shout and attract attention by waving my umbrella.”
Jack winced. Uncle Parker had given him a pound to play with, but he was now beginning to feel that even if he won the Jackpot it was going to be a high price to pay for sitting next to Grandma at a game she would almost certainly lose.
“Another thing, of course,” went on Mrs Fosdyke, “there’s a lot more people. Makes the prizes better, of course, but you don’t stand the same chance of winning.”
“I shall win,” said Grandma with decision.
The hall was certainly very big and had a lot of gilt moulding and red plush about it. Grandma approved of this decor. She said it “took her back”. They arrived five minutes before the start of play and the hall was already three-quarters full. Mrs Fosdyke spent the time giving Grandma last-minute coaching on how to mark her card.
“And remember,” she told her, “there’s a small prize for getting a line, up, down or across, or all four corners. But to get the big prize, you have to get the whole lot.”
“I see,” said Grandma happily. “Is he going to begin?”
Now Grandma had had it explained a hundred times during the course of the day that this was one game she could not hope to win every time. She had been told it tactfully and tactlessly, gently and rudely. She had been told that it was quite possible that she would not win a single game during the course of the evening. She had not replied to any of this, but she had worn a certain look on her face. It was the look that meant that whatever was being said to her was like water off a duck’s back.
None the less, Jack had expected Grandma to stay the course longer than the first game. He knew she would not stand for losing many games, but he had expected her to stand for losing one.
He was wrong. Grandma came nowhere near winning the first game because for one thing she said the microphone was too loud for her to hear clearly. She was also confused by the “legs eleven” and “two little ducks” and “sixty-six clickety click” aspect of things. Mrs Fosdyke had told her some of them, but not all, and it really did hold her back.
Everyone else there seemed to be an old hand. They were poised over their boards, some of them playing two or more at a time and flashing their hands about with the speed of light. Grandma was seventy-five and sometimes she got rheumatism in her hands, and even when she did get a number it took her so long to deal with it that she missed the next one.
She then poked Mrs Fosdyke and hissed “What – what was that? Clickety what?” with the result that both she and Mrs Fosdyke missed the next number after that as well. Jack himself was doing quite well, and was only one number short when the first line was called.
The woman who won it was on the row in front, further along, and Grandma glowered at her innocent back.
“Ridiculous!” she snapped. “I’ve only five numbers on my whole card yet. Isn’t he going to do something about it?”
“Sometimes they do win quick,” said Mrs Fosdyke, whispering in the hope that Grandma would lower her voice too.
“I thought you said there was no cheating allowed?” Grandma said loudly and distinctly.
“There isn’t!” hissed poor Mrs Fosdyke. People were beginning to look at them. “Sshh – he’s starting again – you might win the whole game yet.”
Grandma did not win the whole game, though it was not for want of trying. She adopted the tactic, whenever she did not hear a number properly, of marking off one of her numbers at random anyway. She probably thought this was fair. There was no vice in Grandma. It was simply that she couldn’t stand losing.
The second game was about to get under way when Grandma rose in her seat. Jack shrivelled inside his skin.
“Young man!” she called. “Young man!”
The caller, a balding man wearing a cream jacket and red-spotted bow tie, glanced about looking puzzled. Grandma picked up her umbrella and waved it.
“Here!” she called. “Here, young man!”
He placed her, and said into his microphone:
“What’s up, then, Madam?”
“Would you mind not talking into that loudspeaker thing,” called Grandma. “I can hear you much better without it.”
A murmuring broke out in the hall, and it was getting increasingly difficult for anyone to hear anything.
“Ssshh!” hissed the caller into his microphone, and his clients immediately stopped their chatter.
“I simply want to say,” Grandma told him, in her clear, ringing tones, “that I am not likely to win this game the way it is being played at present.”
A deathly hush settled on the hall. Nothing like this had ever happened before, nothing remotely like it. Sometimes the odd drunk would get up and start shouting and have to be hustled out, but Grandma obviously did not fall into this category.
“To begin with,” she said, “I would rather you did not use that loudspeaker. If you just call the numbers loudly and distinctly in your normal voice, as I am speaking now, it will be quite sufficient.”
The bald man’s mouth was slightly ajar now.
“The next thing is,” she resumed, “that I would like you, please, to refrain from adding these peculiar �clickety clacks’ and �doctor’s orders’ to the numbers you call. We were not taught our numbers like this when I was at school. Also, I am only a learner, and I am not familiar with them. I am perfectly familiar with the numbers up to a hundred, however, and if you would kindly call them in an undecorated form, I think I shall do very well.”
She paused. The caller looked as if he thought he was having a nightmare, aghast and astounded at the same time, and when his mouth started to move, at first no sound came out. At last he managed, very faintly:
“Is that all?”
“I think so,” said Grandma. “Oh – there is one more small point. I am, as I have told you, a beginner. Until I have had a little more practice I would appreciate it if you could call the numbers more slowly. I think you are going too fast. Possibly others here feel the same?”
She looked enquiringly about her and met with total non-confirmation. The regulars gaped back at her with blank, stunned faces.
“Perhaps those who do feel the same, would like to raise their right hands?” she suggested. No one moved. Jack noticed that two large men in uniforms had appeared at either end of the row where they were sitting. They would, he realised with horror, bundle Grandma out at a nod from the caller.
Over my dead body, he thought, and tried not to imagine the details.
On the rostrum there were signs that the caller was beginning to collect himself.
“I must apologise for this interruption, ladies and gentlemen,” he said into the microphone.
“Oh, and do accept my own apologies too,” chipped in Grandma. “I think I have said all that I wanted to say. Thank you.”
She sat down. She looked almost as if she expected a round of applause. She was the only person in the whole hall who looked pleased with herself. The regulars were beginning to murmur again.
“If we are all ready, then,” said the caller, “we’ll start the next game. Eyes down for the lucky winner of another sensational prize. And the first number – wait for it – all the fives, fifty-five.”
Jack numbly crossed this off his own card and waited for the inevitable. The caller, he realised, was going to carry on as if the interruption had never occurred. He was going to pretend Grandma had never spoken. And Jack knew that when Grandma was anywhere, people knew she was. She was not ignorable. To a point he could sympathise with the man. He was probably not, he reflected, very bright. He certainly had not been able to think of a single word to say in reply to Grandma. But then, if he spent every day of his life calling out numbers, perhaps he was not very good with words any more. Perhaps he had lost his conversation.
What Grandma did next was the worst thing she could possibly have done. Her big mistake was not realising that every single person in that hall took this game at least as seriously as she herself. They were all obviously better losers (they could not be worse) but they were all playing to win. Tension builds up very high in a Bingo Hall after even the first few numbers have been called. If only Grandma had sat and sulked till the game was over, and then stood up and said her piece, the worst that could have happened was that she would have been asked to leave. She might even have got her money back at the door.
As it was, she came very near getting lynched. She, Mrs Fosdyke and Jack could all have got lynched. She stood up, right in the middle of a call of “Lucky for some – thirteen!” and shouted “Stop!” at the top of her considerable voice.
“Sit down!” and “Shut up!” – these, and other less politely phrased requests and exclamations came from all parts of the hall. Several of the players themselves stood up and waved their arms while making their protests and thus set other people off doing the same thing and within thirty seconds flat everyone in there had, with the exception of the halt and the lame, got on his or her feet yelling. The caller was yelling too, into his microphone, but yelling must have affected its vibrations because you couldn’t hear the words at all, only a kind of booming. It was probably as well.
From then on, everything happened more or less as Mr Bagthorpe had predicted it would. A riot broke out. The interesting thing was, and Jack could not help noticing this at the time, that although people started hurling abuse and even hitting one another, nobody did this to Grandma herself. Standing there with her umbrella aloft in the manner of the Statue of Liberty, she seemed in some curious way to be above it all, even though it was she who had set the whole thing off.
Somebody obviously panicked and rang the police, and they arrived quickly, about ten of them, and gradually quietened people down. The bald-headed caller was still booming into his microphone and making gestures with his hands as if tearing at the hair he had once had. When everyone else had sat down quietly under the watchful eyes of the police he sounded suddenly very silly, booming like that, and stopped abruptly.
In the ensuing silence the people on Grandma’s row stood up quite politely and let the trio pass to the gangway, and they were escorted out of the hall by two policemen. In the foyer one of them, a sergeant, took out a notebook.
“Now then,” he said, “what’s it all about?”
“It wasn’t Grandma’s fault,” said Jack instantly.
“Oh, I don’t know, officer, I really don’t know!” Mrs Fosdyke, incredibly, was close to tears. “I shouldn’t never have brought her.”
“I think perhaps we’d better go along to the station,” said the sergeant.
He gave certain orders to the constable, who went back into the hall. Grandma, Mrs Fosdyke and Jack walked in silence to the swing doors. Several police cars were standing out there, one with its blue light flashing.
Grandma had gone very quiet and dignified. Mrs Fosdyke kept sniffing all the way to the station. Jack was torn between enjoyment of being in the novel situation of riding as an apprehended criminal in a police car, and a sinking feeling that he had let Uncle Parker and everybody else down.
At the station Grandma kept up her silent dignity for a while, but after a cup of tea seemed to thaw and consented to give her version of what had transpired. She stood up.
“I solemnly swear that all I shall say will be the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, so help me God,” she began. “Shouldn’t I have a Bible to hold while I say that?”
“Oh, there’s no call for that at all, Madam,” the sergeant told her. “Not at this stage.”
“I think I have seen enough television films about policemen and criminals,” Grandma told him, “to know something of procedure. I suppose I should not be surprised that the Bible is no longer required. It is yet another sign of the times.”
In the end she gave a very good account, Jack thought. And when she told what she had said to the Bingo man, and the requests she had made, they all sounded very reasonable, and nothing like riot-raising speeches. Jack could tell from the policemen’s faces that they were thinking this too.
“First time you’d played, then, was it, Mrs Bagthorpe?” asked one of them. “I can see how it must have been confusing.”
“Precisely,” she nodded. “I simply thought that some consideration should be shown to a beginner. And I thought that young man very rude indeed when he just carried on as if I had never spoken.”
All in all, the interview went very well. At the end of the day, it was clear that the only word Grandma had spoken which could be even loosely interpreted as riot-raising and provocative, was the single word “Stop!”, and even Jack could see that this would not stand up very well in Court.
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