Chapter Five

(A Note From The Chronicler: The following is The First of Several Chapters for which The Reader’s indulgence is Craved. Without either Prior Notice or Permission, the Chroniclers is Temporarily Abandoning Rumpus Libbedy Spider to her Own Devices. She is, We Promise, in No Immediate Danger of being Eaten or Impaled During This Period of Benign Neglect, and The Reader Must Remember that Absence Makes The Heart Grow Fonder. Besides which, Libbedy Needs Time Alone to Iron Her New Curtains. The Reader is Requested to Follow The Chronicler’s Narrative us Attentively as Possible. Bearing in Mind that We Shall Shortly Be Spending a Certain Amount of Time In A Lending Library, We [and That includes The Reader] Should Refrain From Speaking or Otherwise Producing Loud Noises. Whether Or Nor The Reader Remembers a Word Of The Forthcoming Information is Up to His or Her Conscience. However, He or She Shall Be Required To Sit An Examination At 4.00 This Afternoon. This is Not Compulsory, but Failure To Complete The Set Questions Satisfactorily Will Result In A Failing Grade and Possibly A Hiding).

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Unfortunate Facts About Cats, A Mention or Two Of Dogs and The Strange Case Of Marquise and Maribel-Bean

***

On the other side of Everywhere, quite beyond the ancient, crumbling and overgrown eastern boundary walls, could be found the outer, unnecessarily large, bloated and self-important world, filled to overflowing with postcard-tidy paddocks of sheep and cows and pigs and chickens (all such inconvenient largish animals, prone to unfortunate appetites and habits) and the strange doings of bipeds and bicycles. There were also, regrettably, dogs to contend with. Dogs: such large, smelly, enthusiastic mammals who’d trample you in a thrice if you didn’t mind your manners; altogether tedious creatures. But even worse than Dogs, worse than anything, in fact, were those evilly malevolent, unnecessary fur balls kept by the farmers to patrol their sheds and barns, and by the farmer’s fat wives (those wearers of black, well-darned woollen stockings) to soak up any surplus warmth from the kitchen fire. ‘Cats’ they were called, and if they were anything at all, they were ill natured, uppity, and (according to those who knew about such things), no better than they ought to be. In other words, cats (and how their very name curdles the blood of small, fuzzy and otherwise carefree and cavorting creatures) were animals of the commonest and most self-righteous sort, animals who believed they had a Duty (although from what authority they never stated, and that alone caused much furious debate among the denizens of the bog) to prowl, investigate and inspect every inch of land within and without the boundary walls. These pointless cats, whose name causes The Chronicler’s teeth to rattle, create no end of havoc, what with their practice of striding through webs and eating beetles and pillaging nests of bird babbies, and also by their habit of randomly sitting on small objects (often leaves, under which dwell entire families of worms).

Traditionally, The Bog’s principal defence against these vile ogres lay in its regiments of ferocious and stalwart Warrior Bees (those Guardians of the Innocent and Small). Armed with infinite courage and specially sharpened stingers, these Heroes ceaselessly searched their homeland for evidence of The Hideous Weapons of Felinimouse Destruction, but try as they might, The Intrepid Bombardiers were no match. The wily, purring, Boiled Puddings With Fangs (which is, after all, what they look like), slaughtered them, ravaging them to a Bee. On any day of the week, from one end of the bog to the other, were erected poignant, floral tributes and memorial tablets - testaments to those brave, doomed Warrior Bees who had met their ends battling against the impossibly furry paws of fury. And having been massacred, weren’t they then crunched into bitty morsels?

From time immemorial, the First Day of Each Month had been set aside for Commemorative Services celebrating the Bravery and Splendid Mien of The Warrior Bees, and the following hymn, composed by a Leading Light of The Bog’s Musical Literati, was sung by all and sundry (and as loudly as possible):

Cats is crool,
Cats is meeen,
Cats is smelly bags of cream.
Cats does love tae crunch us,
A crunchy crunchy crunch.
Cats does always brunch us,
A brunchy brunchy brunch.
Cats grinds us intae porridge,
In spite of all our corridge
A-flumptee diddly-dee-dee-dee.

Oh! Brave Bees wot pátrols frum the skies,
Wiv shining swords to put out catkins’ eyes.
Poor liddle lads, wot have more heart than skill,
They’s baked in pies and served with mint and dill.

Poo-Dee-Poo-Dee-PooPoo,
A flawful in da skies,
Roo-Dee-Roo-Dee RooRoo,
A pocket full of Flies.
(To be repeated as many times as possible, each time with greater exuberance, and accompanied by large drums)

These commemorative ceremonies were nothing short of awe-inspiring, never failing to bring tears to one’s eyes and lumps of half-digested breakfast to one’s throat. In times past, there had been other, equally stirring anniversary banquets and remembrance services, often as many as seven per day. Alas, however, in The Bog, as elsewhere, Tradition had gone out of favour with the unwashed, supplanted by ‘lifestyles’. The Chronicler blames The Invention and Availability of Electricity for this sad decline, and many others (mostly to be found among those who are not sure what a ‘lifestyle’ is) agree. And it should be pointed out that several (at least one or two) of the more enlightened bogs no longer issue planning permission for generators to be built within their precincts. Electricity is known to have a fatal effect on Bog-Faeries. And as everyone knows, if one kills off the Bog-Faeries, one kills off the Bog-Lights. And if one Kills off the Bog-Lights, the world sinks into the Abyss of Decay, Rack and Roon.

However, however, however, one saving grace, as far as The Denizens of Miss Havering’s Bog are concerned, was that in this post-modern, technological age, the most recent generation of stinky, rancid Fur-Ball Puddings have become infested by insidious, festering laziness. Instead of ravaging the countryside and brutalising baby birds from morning to night and from night to morning, they have become increasingly urbanised and upwardly mobile. Increasingly, they spend entire days meowing into their mobile phones, watching television, and downloading tunes on to their listening devices, all from the comfort of the farmers’ hearths and kitchen fires. Obese from endless lashings of Ready-Meals, Hydrogenated Cream and Deep-Fried House Mouse Fingers (of which there was a never-ending supply), their legs have disappeared into their blubber and eventually vanished altogether. And if asked to earn their keep, their favourite response is now, “What-EH-Vah.” So it is that these corpulent tubs of lard and cholesterol purr their purposeless lives away. Their dreams may be, on occasion, saturated with visions of long vanished hunting excursions, replete with blood and gore and the remains of tiny wrens and robins and tit hatchlings and the beautiful dormouselings that dwelled behind the silo, but more and more, such bucolic images have been supplanted by those of brightly hued tins of stewed and artificially flavoured offal and deep-fried Swiss Rolls. Thanks to supermarkets and central heating, felines of the modern generation rarely step out of doors. Even to piddle and poddle, they venture no further than a plastic box under their master’s kitchen table or as far as their mistress’s Laundry Hamper. In recent days, were it not been for the discarded (and unfortunately fecund) feral city cats - those slung from windows of passing automobiles - Miss Havering’s Bog might have become a feline-free zone, with The Warrior Bees happily retired to The Old Soldiers’ Home. And how nice and satisfactory that would have been for everyone.

But enough about The Bog and the possibly satisfactory lives of its denizens. For those unfortunate souls living in Miss Havering’s Havering Hall (namely the wretched Sisters Wellingffomething-ffomething), such utopian bliss ever been unimaginable, and there is but one reason why it is and has been a Hellish place to live and why it is the fountainhead of nasty dispositions.

***

In Havering Hall, that Carbuncled Pile to the east of The Bog, that Crenulated Monstrosity whence spewed black smoke and brimstone vapours and screams from the unconsecrated and entombéd living unwashed in the Second-Best Bedrooms, dwelled a different species of cat. A blind man might have sworn they resembled the snoozing hearthrugs of their imagination. However, these felines were but the most distant cousins to the ordinary common or garden variety, and a species even more ugly and more malevolent than a pustule on an orchid’s bottom, and twice as rare. For in this loathéd sub-genus of the family Felidæ there survived but two members, and these wretched creatures (if that is what they were) spent their days disgorging monstrous fur balls and pasting small animals into their scrapbook, and all the while caged within the Georgian Inglenook Pissoir, a treasured architectural feature discretely concealed behind a gilded bronze cameo of The General’s detested Mother-in-Law, and adjoining the splendid Adam’s fireplace in the family dining room of Miss Havering, The Last Of Her Line (or so it was supposed).

The names of these two unholy daemons were Marquise and Maribel-Bean, and they had been living in their unnatural state since the very day Miss Havering’s Late Grandpapa, The General, emerged squalling and kicking from His Own Mama’s inviolate loins. Between them Marquise and Maribel-Bean were responsible for the present state of feral feline over-population in the next county but one (the kittens having been transported by the bucketful in the ancient horse drawn Omnibus). They were, as was generally suspected, brother and sister, or perhaps the other way round, and they took unseemly pride in their wretched fertility, marking the occasion of each birth (once every seventeen days and two hours) with a notice in the Times.

As has been intimated, Marquise and Maribel-Bean were not what we might call decent cats, if ‘decent’ is a word which can be applied to any of their kind. To look at these two lumps of misery, they were hardly cats at all, not in the proper meaning of the word. From their gnarled faces protruded, like poached eggs on stalks of celery, evil, glaring and yellowed eyes, which in turn were rheumy and rheumatoid, though which was which was hard to say (and none who had taken an undue interest in the subject had lived to tell the tale). Both Marquise and Maribel-Bean had raggedy tattered ears and tails that were chewed off at the root. Foreigners they were, or so it was claimed by Mrs. Beasley, The Cook. Never mind that they had been born in the buttery behind The General’s creamery, in the same box in which their parents and grand-parents had been whelped. If there had been twenty generations of them born in that mouldering tea chest, they still would have been outsiders. Mrs. Beasley and Edders (The Boots) even went so far as to state that “those orful bheasts” should have been tied up in a bag and hurled into the black and foetid loch beyond the greater slurry pit. It would have served them right, it would, they said, as well as saving a whole lot of bother later on, and perhaps more besides.

Unfortunately, as none had found a bag large enough or big enough to accommodate their festering, monstrous bulk, Marquis and Maribel-Bean survived. They were, as they say, “There,” living and breathing and performing the narsty deeds they had perfected at their mother’s knees.

Marquise and Maribel-Bean prided themselves on their extreme unpleasantness of aspect and habit, and Miss Havering stood fast in their defence, but then again, she was not necessarily a prized specimen herself, being (or so they claimed) more of a mountain than a person. According to The Daily Bog Dirt, that lascivious and joyful publication penned by that most observant and salacious of scribes, Mrs. Begonia Throttle, its Editor and Chief, the myths surrounding The Mighty Doyenne of Havering Hall, though not in the least appealing, were as true as bilge water. And since this most scurrilous of Tabloids, whose readership was greater than the Number of Stars in The Heavens (thus proving its veracity) stood fast behind its slurs, all arguments to the contrary were silenced. Miss Havering’s Head (according to The Daily Bog Dirt) was so far away it had never been seen, at least not by anyone not a bird or flying insect or unaccountably huge (such as a cow). Rumour had it the Head (if, indeed, it existed) dwelled in the realms of sulphurous clouds and billowing smoke, and from its hideous orifices there spewed fire and ashes (signs from Hades itself) which burned the surrounding countryside and set fire to orphanages and almshouses. When asked for details and corroboration concerning this most terrible of unseen heads, Mrs. Begonia Throttle’s correspondents responded that, with the Head being so very very huge, would it not be too outsized to possess anything fitting the description of a recognisable detail? Wouldn’t her nose, for example, have been the size of two houses built on top of one another? And as for Hair upon the Head, mightn’t such a thing have been impossible, given that, logistically, not that much hair could be cultivated in the Entire World (not even on The Heads of a Million, Billion, Zillion People, including the bald ones)? And if it were possible, wouldn’t it have needed all the shampoo from all the shampoo factories in all the cities in the world to give it even the most cursory sudsing, and even then mightn’t it be possible only once every ten years or twenty generations? Daff Maud Bunkum, who had been a hairdresser in her fantasy life and knew about such things, thought it more probably that Miss Havering grew lengths of rope atop her head, and many others agreed. “It would be ever so much more practical and wouldn’t be so smelly,” was what they said over cups of tea and scones in Mrs. Begonia Throttle’s Tea Cosy, the local café of choice among the semi-cognoscenti. But, beyond the issue of “was there hair or was there not,” there was also the forever re-occurring question regarding a Head or a Not-a-Head from which the Hair (or Rope) would be suspended. Wouldn’t it have to be an awfully large head, rounder even than the moon? “Perhaps,” mused Ermentrude Pinkley, who was uncommonly wise in all things, “she hasn’t got a head at all. If I were so inconveniently tall, I would not be able to look into a glass to compose my features. I would, therefore, be most unattractive and grizzly to look at, and would frighten all the little children who stopped by of an afternoon for cups of frothy, foaming chocolate and gingernuts.”

“In that case,” interjected Peveral Murkin, sitting on the edge of his seat and panting heavily, “what on earth would you do?”

“Well,” retorted Ermentrude Pinkley, “upon my shoulders I should take to wearing a large pink silk bonnet with beautiful ribbons streaming down the sides like, and where my nose ought to have been I would place a golden snood. That’s what I should do, and no two ways about it!”

“But what about the fearful sparks and smoke and fiery cinders?” squeaked daff Maud Bunkum, who was, by then, practically beside herself and had, as a result, quite fallen off her stool.

“Oh, I should dispense with such dreadful, noisesome nuisances altogether, so we need not discuss them any further,” answered Ermentrude Pinkley resolutely.

“A most wise and intelligent decision,” concurred her friends, oblivious to the fact that a very large cinder had fallen from the sky (possibly originating from Miss Havering’s pipe but, then again, possibly not) and had ignited a dreadful and noisesome fire in one corner of the library, behind the shelves reserved for books that had no memory left in their pages.

“I say!” barked The Librarian in alarm, at once addressing the three friends in a manner reminiscent of a rear admiral, “would you mind awfully emptying your teapot on to that shelf when you have a moment?”

“Not at all,” they whispered in unison, ever mindful of proper etiquette, “but our jug is quite bereft of cream. Would the fire mind very much if its tea was served black, or would he think it rude of us not to send to the creamery for more?”

“Why don’t you ask it yourselves?” interjected a very old beetle from an adjoining table, where he was gnawing on a book of conundra. “And please be quick about it! I find your conversation both perplexing and annoying. I am in the middle of the crossword puzzle and am having a great deal of difficulty with number fifteen down. Would you know any ten-letter words for an owlish sound?

“Hululement”, snapped The Librarian, who simultaneously grabbed the teapot and doused the fire, causing it to cough and sputter. “And what a terrible, thoughtless act it is to even consider such a word,” she added. “Haven’t we enough problems without bringing owls into it?” At which point she adjusted her lorgnette and cruised back to her desk (much like a battleship in full sail).

The fire, no more than a few wisps of smoke and wringing wet, continued to cough. “Couldn’t you at least have asked me to leave? Asked me nicely and said ‘if you please and would I honour our noble request?’” it wheezed. “Why is everyone always flinging water at me? I hate water! It gives me influenza and terrible catarrh. Oh, never mind, what’s the point? No one ever listens to me. I’m going home now. Please don’t follow. I’ve only got enough in my pantry for one. And with that, the fire trudged out the door and disappeared in a puff of smoke.

***

It was rumoured that a distant aunt, or perhaps it was a passing jaunting cart full of dogs, brought the ancestors of Marquise and Maribel-Bean to The General’s demesne and dropped them over the wall beyond the pigsty, but there are none living to say if this is fact or yet more hateful hearsay and not worth the reader’s consideration. What was known was that they very quickly made up their minds to stay, and were most definite about their decision. They were, of course, extremely young that week, practically kittens in fact, and their behaviour, as far as the denizens of the bog were concerned, was highly objectionable. The first day, alone, they consumed no fewer than one hundred forty-seven insects, many from the same family, and a great many tiny mice and birdlings. Had they remained in the bog, they might have decimated the entire population of every living creature. Fortunately, however, it was Miss Havering’s cook’s baking day, and a great many bready, bakey, burny smells were wafting from the kitchen chimney. Marquise and Maribel-Bean, being greedy and of the feline persuasion, were naturally attracted to the kitchen stinks. “That is where we belong,” they growled. “There and nowhere else. We’ve had a lovely snack or two in this untamed swamp, but it is fearfully wet and without a single fire by which to sit and warm our furry feet. We will be back, fear not, whenever the mood might strike us, but only on sunny days when the ground is arm and dry and all the tiny munchies are out to play… Farewell, farewell, our tiny, crunchy friends. Eat well and fatten up and we shall provide the sauces.” After which they departed the bog through a hole in the boundary wall, entered the kitchen garden by way of the gate, and waddled their pudding-like way down the back stairs and into, first, the butchery and then the larder and then the creamery and then the buttery and then the pantry, and finally into the kitchen itself. By that time, they were purring very loudly indeed.

***

A Solution For The Problem Of Cats, As Suggested By A Kindly Soul (Who Was Also A Vegetarian)

(Although The Chronicler included in his narrative one or two effective methods for the disposal of members of the family Felidæ, it has occurred to him that there are those of a tender and sympathetic nature who might rightly take offence. For those more elevated spirits, let us now include a suggestion both tender and humane. Our aim is to amuse and not to offend, and to that end let us append a suggestion put forth by that most noble of personages, Mr. Peveral Murkin).

After years of thought (days, really, given that he was an oddly coloured Ladybug and not eligible for lengthy living), Mr. Peveral Murkin suggested that all kittens be rounded up at birth and placed into the adoptive care of members of the family Ovis Domesticus. Members of said species were, he insisted, extremely polite by nature, not given to impatient urges or carnivorous habits. As parents, they could be trusted to retrain their obstreperous wards, persuading them to adopt kindly dispositions and vegetarian diets. Or, to be more precise, a preference for grass with the odd weed and herbaceous border thrown in. “But not, of course,” added Mr. Peveral Murkin, as quickly as possible, for many of his closest friends were of the floral persuasion, “the flowers.”

It is unfortunate that Mr. Peveral Murkin was not only a ladybug given to great words but little action, but that he and his companions were also too small to do much of anything. For these (and perhaps other) reasons, he was unable to put his plan into action. Very possibly, The World As We Know It is a poorer place for all that.