In the last chapter Roddy had encountered a beached whale near the village of Longstreet. He went for help to save the whale but after a frustrating time he was finally directed to Rhys, a long-time village resident who was familiar with the tides and fishing in the Channel. Roddy and Rhys returned to the beached whale but it was already too late and the magnificent creature was dead. A plan was hatched to pull the whale carcass out to sea to avoid the terrible smell that would envelope Longstreet if the carcass was left to rot. In the meantime Roddy had to return home to his parents who would be very worried about where he was. He feared a telling off and a row from his worried Mother especially.
Roddy nodded to Rhys and then turned toward the house. He hurried up the steps with barely a look back at Rhys’ van but he could hear it grinding and whining as it pulled away from the curb. The smell of the Sunday lunch cooking wafted over him full of the flavors of cooking lamb and the strong and pungent smell of boiling cabbage. He always disliked that smell, especially when it hung in the air after dinner and seemed to permeate everything. Today though the kitchen windows and the skylight above the stove were open and the cooking smells could escape. He hurried around the back of the house and as he passed the kitchen window he saw his Mother look up and then call out.
“Wherever have you been? We’ve been worried sick about you ever since you didn’t come down to breakfast and your Dad went upstairs to find you and saw that your bed was empty.”
Roddy knew that he was going to be in for a big row, the sort that he hated, full of accusations of being indifferent to the suffering of parents who were stuck at home, worried to death that some awful fate had befallen their child. Certainly the worry that something bad had happened was a large part of it, but underlying it was an anger at his disobedience in staying away and not appearing at the proper times for meals and such things, forcing his Mother to delay the meal or go to extra work to try to keep the meal warm. He really did not want to have to go through a big row and watch his parents, especially his Mother, become more angry as she remembered other lapses that made her even more infuriated about the current one. So he quickly blurted out his story of getting up early to go bird watching and then finding the whale and his attempts to get help and finally the death of the whale and Rhys bringing him back to the Village.
His Mother looked at him suspiciously, while his Father, who had walked into the kitchen during his hasty recounting of his adventures said, “There’s no whales in the Channel. You must have been dreaming!
“But it is a whale. I went for help and two local men from Longstreet saw it with me and they are going to try to tow it off so that it floats back out into the Channel on tonight’s tide. I want to go back to Longstreet to watch if I can. I’ll ride my bike there if you don’t want to come.”
His Father looked at him and seemed to be thinking about all this.
“I’ve never heard of anyone seeing whales in the Channel but I suppose that with a beast being that big it would be hard to mistake it. Who are these fellows you are talking about?”
“I tried to get help at The Bell, but the lady there wouldn’t let me use the telephone and she told me to go to the cottage of this man called Rhys. She was very short with me and seemed to think that I was making the whole story up. Why, I don’t know. Who would make up a story like that, especially early on a Sunday morning?”
At this his Father laughed.
“So, you met ‘ole ‘Picky Vicky’ then. I’ve heard lots of stories about that woman. I think even old Harry is a bit in awe of her. She doesn’t mind giving anyone a piece of her mind if they do something that irritates her.”
At this his Mother nodded and said she thought that the World needed some more women like that.
“So I found this man and he called the police from The Bell, but they were of not much use so he went and fetched his friend Jack and we all went back to look at the whale. Rhys and Jack decided that they would try to tow it back out to the Channel on this evening’s tide. I said that I would be there to watch them do it. I’ve never seen a creature as big as that. It must have been about sixty feet long.”
His Dad whistled at this piece of information.
“Well, I was pretty skeptical when you first mentioned this whale but I can see you are serious. So, all right, we can go out later in the car. Afterwards we can go and have a pint in The Bell. I know Harry who is the landlord there. Knew him when I was in the City Police during the War. We used to have a quiet jar or two together in the back room after closing time. It was easy in those days during the blackout. All the windows had thick curtains and there was no light to give you away. Not that it mattered when you were in the police.”
When his Father started into his reminiscing mood, Roddy knew that everything would be all right and he could even see that his Mother was becoming calmer, though she had shaken her head when his Dad said that he would stop at The Bell for a drink.
“Alright, well at least the Sunday lunch has not been ruined by all this. You had better hurry up and wash your hands and then help your sister lay the table.”
Roddy sighed a silent gasp of relief. He hated it when everyone became angry and started shouting. Whenever he saw his sisters arguing he would always try to intercede and calm everyone down with a joke or a funny face. It didn’t always work but he persisted. His middle sister said that when he grew up he should be a diplomat. Although he wasn’t absolutely sure what a diplomat did, he took it as a compliment. Feeling light-headed after avoiding the usual confrontation over lateness, he went into the living room where he found B going about laying the table for lunch while cocking an ear to the kitchen to find out what trouble her young brother was in now. She seemed disappointed that it all been smoothed out so quickly.
“So, you found a whale then. Was it already dead?”
He went through the story again, but this time with a little more detail as he knew that despite her assumed disinterest, B was not completely taken by the teenage need to be seen as one that had curbed enthusiasm for anything that was not considered acceptable in her circle of friends. Being enthusiastic about birds or fishing was considered to be very childish by B’s friends, yet he knew that beneath the carefully cultivated veneer of early teenagehood was a mind that ranged widely in its interests but she rarely revealed it, except to him and he had to be very careful to never reveal it to anyone else as he knew that she would never forgive him. As he talked he helped to lay out the cutlery, the knives with their bone handles and stainless steel blades. Then the forks and spoons for pudding; he hoped that it was rice pudding today. Rice pudding was not as good as marmalade pudding with its layers of hot marmalade cascading down the sides as the pudding basin was pulled slowly up. That was a winter treat, not something for the warmer weather unfortunately, but what a treat not only because of the taste but the wonderfully volcanic show of slowly flowing hot marmalade that, following the uncapping, rolled like lava down the pudding’s flanks.
Sunday lunch was a much-anticipated meal because they could eat a hot piece of freshly roasted meat. For the rest of the week they had a lot of cold cuts from the Sunday roast, especially on Mondays when his Mother was busy with the clothes washing. It was not nearly as tasty when cold even with lashings of hot pickle sauce layered over it. For most of the time Sunday lunch was silent except for the sounds of contented mastication and the occasional requests for condiments. Today however there were lots of questions for Roddy about the whale and why he had to get up so early in the morning to go and watch birds.
His Mother began to talk about a boy in the next street that had a paper round and was earning his own pocket money. Her meaning was pretty clear but Roddy just mumbled something that was non-committal. It would be nice to have regular pocket money but having to get up every Sunday morning to deliver heavy papers was not very appealing. Perhaps a job delivering the evening newspapers would be worth getting. His parents did not believe in regular doses of pocket money which is what his friends seemed to get, Instead, he had to earn small amounts of money from jobs, such as cleaning his father’s car. Chores did not count as his Mother saw those as being obligations owed by members of the family.
Roddy was stirred from this reverie of self-pity by his Father’s question about the time of the attempt to float the whale’s carcass. It was good that his Father wanted to be a spectator as that would mean that he would be driven to Longstreet and would not have to set out early on his bicycle, which had only one gear and therefore was not very fast. He told him the time of high tide and also passed on the information given by Rhys that he and Jack would launch the refloating attempt before the tide peaked, so they would need to be there a while beforehand. Armed with that information, his Father retreated to the easy chair where he settled for his customary Sunday afternoon nap, leaving the children to clear the table under their Mother’s watchful eye and wash up all of the used crockery, various knives forks and spoons, and of course the dirty pans and pots. This was an example of a chore that went unpaid but was expected and yet not too onerous as long as everyone did their fair share and was efficient about it.
The afternoon passed slowly, its rhythm set by the soft snores of his father, the tick of the mantle clock and the occasional riff on the piano as one of his sisters decided to practice something. While looking through his notebook from the morning he suddenly decided to write up the events around the finding of the stranded whale. He went into the front room where there was a bookshelf with a small and eclectic mixture of books including a dictionary, several of Dicken’s novels and, his favourite, a large red Atlas entitled “Our Empire Atlas”. He loved to look at the maps and get out paper and his Indian ink pens and make copies on tracing paper. It had maps in which there were large white areas that said ‘unmapped ‘and that would thrill him as he thought that there were indeed parts of the world that still needed to be explored.
But today, his focus was on the large set of volumes of Arthur Mees Children’s Encyclopedia. It occupied a large part of their rather meager library; large dark red volumes with gold blocking on the spines and a slightly musty smell, but they were endlessly entertaining and Roddy liked to dip into them and read things at random. Today however, he needed to search for a particular item of information and he had to use the index to find the entry for whales. Unfortunately, the Children’s Encyclopedia was an eclectic publication and did not attempt to cover the entire range of the known that the Britannica did. Roddy did not know anyone who owned a full set of the Encyclopedia Britannica and he had only seen it once and that was in the big library in the City. So, the only references that he had at his disposal were the Children’s Encyclopedia and the dictionary. The dictionary was of course brief and told him little that he did not already know, while the Encyclopedia; while it had more information did not really tell him the things that he was most interested in. He wanted to know what sort of whale it was and which oceans it swam in and what did it eat and, most importantly, why did whales run aground like this one did. He read what there was but it did not assuage his curiosity at all. To make matters worse, it would be tomorrow before he would be able to go to the school library or to the little branch library in the Village and find out more than the meager amount that he had before him.
The door opened and B came in. “What are you doing?”
“I’m trying to find out about whales and work out what species of whale it is and why it ran aground and get stranded anyway. I would have thought that it would have noticed that the water was getting shallower and turned around. Something must have gone wrong in its brain. How do whales know in what direction to go anyway? I can’t find any answers in these books at all.”
He really didn’t expect to get an answer from B either, let alone a sympathetic one, but she came in and sat down on the piano stool and began to ask more questions about the day. Roddy told her everything, including how he felt when he saw the light in the whales eyes fade and finally go out. She didn’t laugh at him at all and seemed to understand how he must have felt.
“So, is Dad going to take you out to Longstreet to see them try to pull in off the mud and into the deeper water? If he is, I want to come and see it too.”
He was surprised at this but also quite glad. Of all of his sisters, B was the one that he felt closest to, despite their threats to tell tales on one another and make trouble. She was the only one that he felt comfortable talking to about trouble with his friends or problems with people or teachers at school. With his older sisters he felt that they were sometimes like small versions of his parents; too disposed to judgment rather than the sympathy or understanding that he was looking for.
“Yes, you can come too. I would like that and you can meet some of the strange characters that I met this morning and with luck you might see Rhys’ van. It must be the oldest and oddest vehicle anywhere. It makes the old van that Dad used to drive look modern in comparison. He drove me home in it and I was just about dying with embarrassment the entire way and then, when we got to the Lane I saw some of the Gang and I thought that they would see me getting out of the old jalopy and laugh. I wanted to be invisible then. I don’t think that they saw me.”
“I did”
Roddy snapped his head up and looked at her in shock. “You did? Why did you keep quiet about it?”
“Because I knew that would cause Mum and Dad to ask endless questions and if Dad knew that you were travelling in such a vehicle with a complete stranger, he would have been going on about safety and strangers for the rest of the day. You know what he is like; his car is in very good condition and the brakes are tested and adjusted regularly. He expects everyone else to be the same and always has a critical word for someone who doesn’t meet his standards. So, I decided to keep quiet, even though it was the funniest looking van that I have ever seen and the way that you darted out and up the driveway doubled over so far that I was expecting you to fall on your head; that took the biscuit. I really wanted to tell someone about it and how it looked but its no fun when all that you get from a little joke is questions and stern warnings.”
At that he smiled broadly and then they looked at one another and began to laugh uncontrollably. Each time that they managed to calm themselves, Roddy would relate some new tidbit about the morning’s strange journey, such as the swiveling heads of the people in cars that were passing them. The fact that Rhys just sat upright looking straight ahead, apparently unaware of the mirth that his van was spreading around him, made them laugh even harder.
The rest of the afternoon was spent telling B about the adventures of the morning. She just listened; asking questions only when she did not understand something or when he left something out. That was the reason why Roddy always felt so comfortable with her; there was no need to explain things or find that your innocent description of some event triggered an adult reprimand over something that had not even crossed your mind.
So the afternoon passed pleasantly and when the conversation lagged and B turned her attention to something else, Roddy found that he was sleepy and he even dozed on the couch for a while. Soon it was time for their trip to Longstreet. His Father was up and looking refreshed after his nap. Roddy however found napping in the daytime left you feeling sluggish, especially after a meal. It happened again today and so he dashed to the bathroom before someone else could get there and occupy it for a long period, and splashed cold water on his face and brushed his teeth carefully. With his mouth refreshed and a wash of face and hands so that he smelled of perfumed soap he was fully revived and ready for the journey.
LAMBY MEMORIES 