Eating Things on Sticks (10 page)

We stood there, shivering, till Uncle Tristram finally dared interrupt Morning Glory's Farewell Lament to her fallen tree by saying, ‘Can we go back inside? I'm soaking. And we really ought to get back to the buckets.'

OWLS v. PIGS

At tea time it was still raining hard, so Uncle Tristram arranged a rota. I emptied for an hour, then Uncle Tristram took a turn. As it began to get dark, Morning Glory took over.

‘I know,' said Uncle Tristram as soon as the two of us were alone. ‘Let's have the battle of the pigs and owls. Cheer ourselves up. Bags I command the pigs.'

‘I wanted to be owls in any case,' I told him.

We had a great time. Pigs were flying everywhere. The owls were vicious. I had them crawling across the curtain rails and up and down chair legs. Now that we knew it wasn't Morning Glory's furniture, we felt a little freer to clamber over sofa arms and climb on the sideboard to fetch a piglet down from where he'd been spying from some light fitting, or shove a pack of owls into formation on top of the nest of stools.

I had my advance force abseiling down the dresser when one of my knitted owls unravelled a little on its descent and fell in a drawer.

‘Man down!' crowed Uncle Tristram.

‘Not so!' I countered, and mounted a rescue. One of my china owlets went down inside the drawer to fetch out her companion in arms.

The knitted owl had got all tangled with some envelope. I brought them up together.

Just at that moment, Morning Glory came back at the end of her shift. ‘Your turn again,' she said to me.

‘Can't stop,' I warned her. ‘Owls on the counterattack.'

‘You
have
to stop,' she said, ‘because I am not carrying on emptying buckets just because you two are mucking about.'

‘We are not “mucking about”,' said Uncle Tristram. ‘We are engaged in a ferocious and deadly duel of skill and cunning. If I am not at my most committed and focused as a commander, his evil owlets may take over the world.'

‘It's still his turn to do the buckets,' Morning Glory said.

I know when to give up. I rose to my feet in front of the dresser. ‘Want this?'

I handed her the envelope.

‘Is it for me?' She snatched it so keenly I knew she must be desperately hoping for some particular letter. But then she saw it was already open, and her face fell. She pulled out the papers inside. ‘Oh, it's just Aunty Audrey's house insurance.'

‘Is it still valid?' asked Uncle Tristram.

She took a closer look. ‘Only until the end of the month.' She sighed. ‘So that's another bill that's winging its way towards me. And I must say, now that the tree's fallen over, I just don't feel I have the same commitment to the place.'

‘If you'd prefer to have the insurance money,' joked Uncle Tristram, ‘just ask young Harry here to set the place on fire. He's good at that.'

I blushed.

Morning Glory looked around. The damp was seeping halfway up the walls now. There was a sort of tidemark around the room.

‘I doubt if anyone could set fire to somewhere as damp as this.'

‘It doesn't matter anyhow,' I told her loftily, ‘because I'm afraid that I only do kitchens.'

HEY! DRESS-UPS!

At nine o'clock the rain stopped. To celebrate, I had a wild mint samosa on a stick. An hour later, the dripping upstairs had slowed its pace enough for us to go to bed. I had a troubled night, dreaming of helicopters circling overhead, the powerful beams of their searchlights sweeping across the panes of my bedroom window.

When I came down in the morning, there was a giant heap of clothes piled on the sofa.

I picked up an old-fashioned corset with so many laces it could have made a whale look trim. ‘So what's all this lot?'

Morning Glory sighed. ‘I've just been round to check on all the buckets, and there was water seeping out of one of the cupboards.'

‘
Upstairs?
'

‘Yes. I think the apple tree must have pulled down some of the guttering as well as the phone wire when it fell over.'

I looked around. The tidemark of rising damp was far, far higher up the wall. I nearly said, ‘All the wet in this house is soon going to meet in the middle,' but Morning Glory looked so defeated, standing there in her tutu and tartan wellingtons, clutching her beaded pashmina round her shoulders. So I tried to distract her by picking up the next thing on the pile – a long black sequinned gown for someone as big as a house – and saying, ‘You must have lost a huge amount of weight since you wore this.'