were no toads, frogs or newts, since the garden pond had been filled in. And as for bears – fierce, unfriendly, foul-breathed and not very bright (when transfixed by the spear of the plucky Finn, they would grasp the shaft in their long-clawed paws and, rather than attempt to wrench it out, push it further into their black ursine heart) – it was inconceivable that a bear should venture within a thousand miles of Innstead. Yet in every house in the Close there were effigies, icons and books of tales about all these animals; china statues of moles and toads in bonnets and shawls; watercolours of mice up cornstalks and rabbits and frogs in rings with fairies. Each resident had kept his own or his children’s teddy bear and the children’s classics which had sustained their youth. One year the toy manufacturers had intro -duced a new line of teddies bearing the facial similitude of the Poet Laureate (himself a teddy-bear fancier), and a number of children had been badly frightened.
The totem of the English was a small animal – furry, stuffed and articulate. Winnie the Pooh vied with the Queen (God trailing in the distance) for the forefront of the mind of the English middle class. An English diplomat imprisoned in a foreign country, kept for month upon month in solitary confinement, thrown into spiritual confrontation with himself, emerged from captivity and wrote a book about a baby seal who preferred T-bone steak to fish. Even the leaders of the political parties had come to resemble little animals. On the left an old teddy; his stuffing, his credibility, leaking a little now. On the right a mouse – a shop mouse, her head stuck in a yellowed meringue, a mean little mouse bred on cheese rind and broken biscuit and the nutrition-less, platitudinous parings of a grocer’s mind. The erstwhile leader of the middle party was a fox – rather tired now – his fine brush matted and drooping, his cunning mask despondent. Did any other people, Mary wondered, apart from Red Indians, make such a fuss of creatures which in reality they were in the habit of chasing, shooting, poisoning, trapping or beating to death with sticks? Mrs Marsh had bought Kate a book about rabbits, ‘suitable for the older child’ but widely read by supposedly normal adults.
Barbara’s car must be quite near now. It would probably be inching down the crowded derelict road that led out of the metropolis, past boarded shop windows, car-hire firms, Chinese take-aways, shops selling saris, pram and bicycle shops, stretches of Georgian houses ruined and blackened by despair, municipal offices neat and well lit, small factories, the baths, very low churches (theologically speaking) with very large notices of warning and exhortation aimed principally at the godfearing immigrant community. Then it would follow a stretch of road lined with huge pubs, small houses and car dumps. This was a route that missed the best of Innstead – the private schools, discreet hospitals, well-tended gardens and the old village street, so carefully restored and maintained. It merely cut across a small section of the downs and came out again into a wilderness of intersecting highways mad with cars speeding through the dead common, asphyxiated bushes and bleached grass that shrank away from the roadside. Stained paper drifted about these bushes. Under them lay old petrol cans and – mysteriously – the rusting discarded organs of motor cars. This was dangerous country, where no one walked save for the occasional amateur botanist in search of the elusive winter aconite, or young couples driven from the comfort of the three-piece suite by men and boys intent on Match of the Day. The walkers would be as likely to stumble upon the tights-strangled bodies of young women thrust into plastic bags and bound with electrical flex as find the aconite or peace with each other. It was always bad ground, ill-used and perilous, that lay between town and country. Even the piglets that
The totem of the English was a small animal – furry, stuffed and articulate. Winnie the Pooh vied with the Queen (God trailing in the distance) for the forefront of the mind of the English middle class. An English diplomat imprisoned in a foreign country, kept for month upon month in solitary confinement, thrown into spiritual confrontation with himself, emerged from captivity and wrote a book about a baby seal who preferred T-bone steak to fish. Even the leaders of the political parties had come to resemble little animals. On the left an old teddy; his stuffing, his credibility, leaking a little now. On the right a mouse – a shop mouse, her head stuck in a yellowed meringue, a mean little mouse bred on cheese rind and broken biscuit and the nutrition-less, platitudinous parings of a grocer’s mind. The erstwhile leader of the middle party was a fox – rather tired now – his fine brush matted and drooping, his cunning mask despondent. Did any other people, Mary wondered, apart from Red Indians, make such a fuss of creatures which in reality they were in the habit of chasing, shooting, poisoning, trapping or beating to death with sticks? Mrs Marsh had bought Kate a book about rabbits, ‘suitable for the older child’ but widely read by supposedly normal adults.
Barbara’s car must be quite near now. It would probably be inching down the crowded derelict road that led out of the metropolis, past boarded shop windows, car-hire firms, Chinese take-aways, shops selling saris, pram and bicycle shops, stretches of Georgian houses ruined and blackened by despair, municipal offices neat and well lit, small factories, the baths, very low churches (theologically speaking) with very large notices of warning and exhortation aimed principally at the godfearing immigrant community. Then it would follow a stretch of road lined with huge pubs, small houses and car dumps. This was a route that missed the best of Innstead – the private schools, discreet hospitals, well-tended gardens and the old village street, so carefully restored and maintained. It merely cut across a small section of the downs and came out again into a wilderness of intersecting highways mad with cars speeding through the dead common, asphyxiated bushes and bleached grass that shrank away from the roadside. Stained paper drifted about these bushes. Under them lay old petrol cans and – mysteriously – the rusting discarded organs of motor cars. This was dangerous country, where no one walked save for the occasional amateur botanist in search of the elusive winter aconite, or young couples driven from the comfort of the three-piece suite by men and boys intent on Match of the Day. The walkers would be as likely to stumble upon the tights-strangled bodies of young women thrust into plastic bags and bound with electrical flex as find the aconite or peace with each other. It was always bad ground, ill-used and perilous, that lay between town and country. Even the piglets that
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