Fillets of Plaice, by Gerald Durrell (12 page)

“Sorry to rush you,” he panted. “But I've got a pie in the oven and I don't want it to get burnt.”

He rushed over to the oven, opened it and peered inside.

“Ah, no, that's alright,” he said. “Good… good.”

He straightened up and looked at me.

“Do you like steak and kidney pie?” he inquired.

“Eh, yes,” I said, “I'm very fond of it.”

“Good,” he said. “It'll be ready in a moment or two. Now, come and sit down and have a drink.”

He led me back into the living-room.

“Sit you down, sit you down,” he said. “What'll you drink? Sherry? Whisky? Gin?”

“You, er…, haven't got any wine, have you?” I said.

“Wine?” he said. “Yes, of course, of course.” He got out a bottle, uncorked it, and poured me a glass full of ruby red wine which was crisp and dry. We sat chatting, mainly about terrapins, for ten minutes or so and then the Colonel glanced at his watch.

“Should be ready now,” he said, “should be ready. You don't mind eating in the kitchen, do you? It saves a lot of mucking about.”

“No, I don't mind at all,” I said.

We went into the kitchen and the Colonel laid the table; then he mashed some potatoes and heaped a great mound of steak and kidney pie onto them and put the plate in front of me.

“Have some more wine,” he said.

The steak and kidney was excellent. I inquired whether the Colonel had made it himself.

“Yes,” he said. “Had to learn to cook when my wife died. Quite simple, really, if you put your mind to it. It's a wonder what you can do with a pinch of herbs here and there, and that sort of thing. Do you cook?”

“Well, in a rather vague sort of way,” I said. “My mother has taught me various things, but I've never done it very seriously. I like it.”

“So do I,” he said. “So do I. Relaxes the mind.”

After we had finished off the steak and kidney pie he got some ice-cream out of the fridge and we ate that.

“Ah,” said the Colonel, leaning back in his chair and patting his stomach, “that's better. That's better. I only have one meal a day and I like to make it a solid one. Now, how about a glass of port? I've got some rather good stuff here.”

We had a couple of glasses of port and the Colonel lit up a fine thin cheroot. When we had finished the port and he had stubbed his cheroot out, he screwed his monocle more firmly in. his eye and looked at me.

“What about going upstairs for a little game?” he asked.

“Um…, what sort of game?” I inquired cautiously, feeling that this was the moment when, if he was going to, he would start making advances.

“Power game,” said the Colonel. “Battle of wits. Models. You like that sort of thing, don't you?”

“Um…, yes,” I said.

“Come on, then,” he said. “Come on.”

He led me out into the hall again and then up a staircase, through a small room which was obviously a sort of workshop; there was a bench along one side with shelves upon which there were pots of paint, soldering irons, and various other mysterious things. Obviously the Colonel was a do-it-yourselfer in his spare time, I thought. Then he threw open a door and a most amazing sight met my gaze. The room I looked into ran the whole length of the house and was some seventy to eighty feet long. It was, in fact, all the top rooms knocked into one of the four mews houses that the Colonel owned. The floor was neatly parqueted. But it was not so much the size of die room that astonished me as what it contained. At each end of the room was a large fort made out of papier mâché. They must have been some three or four feet high and some four or five feet across. Ranged round them were hundreds upon hundreds of tin soldiers, glittering and gleaming in their bright uniforms, and amongst them there were tanks, armoured trucks, anti-aircraft guns and similar things. There, spread out before me, was the full panoply of war.

“Ah,” said the Colonel, rubbing his hands in glee, “surprised you!”

“Good Lord, yes!” I said. “I don't think I've ever seen so many toy soldiers.”

“It's taken me years to amass them,” he said, “years. I get 'em from a factory, you know. I get 'em unpainted and paint 'em myself. Much better that way, Get a smoother, cleaner job… More realistic, too.”

I bent down and picked up one of the tiny soldiers. It was quite true, what the Colonel had said. Normally a tin soldier is a fairly botchy job of painting, but these were meticulously done. Even the faces appeared to have expression on them.

“Now,” said the Colonel. “Now. We'll have a quick game — just a sort of run-through. Once you get the hang of it we can make it more complicated, of course. Now, I'll explain the rules to you.”

The rules of the game, as explained by the Colonel, were fairly straightforward. You each had an army. You threw two dice and the one who got the highest score was the aggressor and it was his turn to start first. He threw his dice and from the number that came up he could move a battalion of his men in any direction that he pleased, and he was allowed to fire off a barrage from his field guns or anti-aircraft guns. These worked on a spring mechanism and you loaded them with matchsticks. The springs in these guns were surprisingly strong and projected the matchsticks with incredible velocity down the room. Where every matchstick landed, in a radius of some four inches around it, was taken to be destroyed. So if you could gain a direct hit on a column of troops you could do savage damage to the enemy. Each player had a little spring tape measure in his pocket for measuring the distance round the matchstick.

I was enchanted by the whole idea, but principally because it reminded me very much of a game that we had invented when we were in Greece. My brother Leslie, whose interest in guns and boats is insatiable, had collected a whole navy of toy battleships and cruisers and submarines. We used to range them out on the floor and play a game very similar to the Colonel's, only we used to use marbles in order to score direct hits on the ships. Rolling a marble accurately over a bumpy floor in order to hit a destroyer an inch and a half long took a keen eye. It turned out, after we had thrown the first dice, that I was to be the aggressor.

“Hah!” said the Colonel. “Filthy Hun!”

I could see that he was working himself into a warlike mood.

“Is the object of the exercise to try and capture your fort?” I inquired.

“Well, you can do that,” he said. “Or you can knock it out, if you can.”

I soon discovered that the way to play the Colonel's game was to distract his attention from one flank so that you could do some quick manoeuvring while he was not aware of it, so I kept up a constant barrage on his troops, the matches whistling down the room, and while doing this I moved a couple of battalions up close to his lines.

“Swine!” the Colonel would roar every time a matchstick fell and he had to measure the distance. “Dirty swine! Bloody Hun!” His face grew quite pink and his eyes watered copiously so that he had to keep removing his monocle and polishing it.

“You're too bloody accurate,” he shouted.

“Well, it's your fault,” I shouted back, “you're keeping all your troops bunched together. They make an ideal target.”

“It's part of me strategy. Don't question me strategy. I'm older than you, and superior in rank.”

“How can you be superior in rank, when I'm in command of an army?”

“No lip out of you, you whippersnapper,” he roared.

So the game went on for about two hours, by which time I had successfully knocked out most of the Colonel's troops and got a foothold at the bottom of his fort.

“Do you surrender?” I shouted.

“Never!” said the Colonel. “Never! Surrender to a bloody Hun? Never!”

“Well, in that case I'm going to bring my sappers in,” I said.

“What are you going to do with your sappers?”

“Blow up your fort,” I said.

“You can't do that,” he said. “Against the articles of war.”

“Nonsense!” I said. “The Germans don't care about articles of war, anyway.”

“That's a filthy trick to play!” he roared, as I successfully detonated his fort.

“Now do you surrender?”

“No. I'll fight you every inch of the way, you Hun!” he shouted, crawling rapidly across the floor on his hands and knees and moving his troops frantically. But all his efforts were of no avail; I had him pinned in a corner and I shot him to pieces.

“By George!” said the Colonel when it was all over, mopping his brow, “I've never seen anybody play that game like that. How did you manage to get so damned accurate when you haven't played it before?”

“Well, I've played a similar game, only we used marbles for that,” I said. “But I think once you've got your eye in… it helps.”

“Gad!” said the Colonel, looking at the destruction of his army. “Still, it was a good game and a good fight. Shall we have another one?”

So we played on and on, the Colonel getting more and more excited, until at last I glanced at my watch and saw to my horror that it was one o'clock in the morning. We were in the middle of a game and so we left the troops where they were and on the following night I went back and finished it. After that I would spend two or three evenings a week with the Colonel, fighting battles up and down the long room, and it gave him tremendous pleasure — almost as much pleasure as it gave me.

Not long after that, my mother announced that she had finally found a house and that we could move out of London. I was bitterly disappointed. It meant that I would have to give up my job and lose contact with my friend Mr Bellow and Colonel Anstruther. Mr Romilly was heart-broken.

“I shall never find anybody to replace you,” he said. “Never.”

“Oh, there'll be somebody along,” I said.

“Ah, but not with your ability to decorate cages and things,” said Mr Romilly. “I don't know what I'm going to do without you.”

When the day finally came for me to leave, with tears in his eyes, he presented me with a leather wallet. On the inside it had embossed in gold “To Gerald Durrell from his fellow workers”. I was a bit puzzled since there had been only Mr Romilly and myself, but I suppose that he thought it looked better like that. I thanked him very much and then I made my way for the last time down Potts Lane to Mr Bellow's establishment.

“Sorry to see you go, boy,” he said. “Very sorry indeed. Here… I've got this for you — a little parting present.”

He put a small square cage in my hands and sitting inside it was the bird that I most coveted in his collection, the Red Cardinal. I was overwhelmed.

“Are you sure you want me to have it?” I said.

“Course I am, boy. Course I am.”

“But, is it the right time of year for giving a present like this?” I inquired.

Mr Bellow guffawed.

“Yes, of course it is,” he said. “Of course it is.”

I took my leave of him and then I went round that evening to play a last game with the Colonel. When it was over — I had let him win — he led me downstairs.

“Shall miss you, you know, my boy. Shall miss you greatly. However, keep in touch, won't you? Keep in touch. I've got a little, um…, a little souvenir here for you.”

He handed me a slim silver cigarette ease. On it had been written “With love from Margery”. I was a bit puzzled by this.

“Oh, take no notice of the inscription,” he said. “You can have it removed… Present from a woman… I knew once. Thought you'd like it. Memento, hmmm?”

“It's very, very kind of you, sir,” I said.

“Not at all, not at all,” he said, and blew his nose and polished his monocle and held out his hand. “Well, good luck, my boy. And I hope I'll see you again one day.”

I never did see him again. He died shortly afterwards.

MAMFE is not the most salubrious of places, perched as it is on a promontory above the curve of a great, brown river and surrounded by dense rain forest. It is as hot and moist as a Turkish bath for most of the year, only deviating from this monotony during the rainy season when it becomes hotter and moister.

At that time it had a resident population of five white men, one white woman, and some ten thousand vociferous Africans. I, in a moment of mental aberration, had made this my headquarters for an animal collection expedition and was occupying a large marquee full of assorted wild animals on the banks of the brown, hippo-reverberating river. In the course of my work I had, of course, come to know the white population fairly well and a vast quantity of the African population. The Africans acted as my hunters, guides and carriers, for when you went into that forest you were transported back into the days of Stanley and Livingstone and all your worldly possessions had to be carried on the heads of a line of stalwart carriers.

Collecting wild animals is a full-time occupation and one does not have much time for the social graces, but it was curiously enough in this unlikely spot that I had the opportunity of helping what was then known as the Colonial Office.

I was busy one morning with the task of giving milk to five un-weaned baby squirrels, none of whom, it appeared, had any brain or desire to live. At that time no feeding bottle with a small enough teat to fit the minute mouth of a baby squirrel had been invented, so the process was that you wrapped cotton wool round the end of a matchstick, dipped it into the milk mixture, and put it into their mouths for them to suck. This was a prolonged and extremely irritating job, for you had to be careful not to put too much milk on the cotton wool, otherwise they would choke, and you had to slip the cotton wool into their mouths sideways, otherwise it would catch on their teeth, whereupon they would promptly swallow it and die of an impacted bowel.

It was ten o'clock in the morning and already the heat was so intense that I had to keep wiping my hands on a towel so that I did not drench the baby squirrels with my sweat and thus give them a chill. I was not in the best of tempers but while I was trying to get some sustenance into my protégés (who were not collaborating), my steward, Pious, suddenly materialised at my side in the silent, unnerving way that Africans have.

“Please, sah,” he said.

“Yes, whatee?” I inquired irritably, trying to push some milk-drenched cotton wool into a squirrel's mouth.