‘Or airily, sir. The words are synonymous.’
‘It’s all very well for her to say glibly or airily “Take this blasted eyesore to Plank,” but how do I find him? I can’t go rapping on every door in Hockley-cum-Meston, saying “Excuse me, are you Plank?” It’d be like looking for a needle in a haystack.’
‘A very colourful image, sir. I appreciate your difficulty. I would suggest tnat you proceed to the local post office and institute inquiries there. Post office officials invariably have information at their disposal as to the whereabouts of dwellers in the vicinity.’
He had not erred. Braking the car in the Hockley-cum-Meston High Street, I found that the post office was one of those shops you get in villages, where in addition to enjoying the postal facilities you can purchase cigarettes, pipe tobacco, wool, lollipops, string, socks, boots, overalls, picture postcards and bottles containing yellow non-alcoholic drinks, probably fizzy. In answer to my query the old lady behind the counter told me I would find Plank up at the big house with the red shutters about half a mile further back along the road. She seemed a bit disappointed that information was all I was after and that I had no intention of buying a pair of socks or a ball of string, but she bore up philosophically, and I toddled back to the car.
I remembered the house she had spoken of, having passed it on my way. Imposing mansion with a lot of land. This Plank, I took it, would be some sort of labourer on the estate. I pictured him as a sturdy, gnarled old fellow whose sailor son had brought home the eyesore from one of his voyages, and neither of them had had the foggiest that it was valuable. Til put it on the mantelpiece, Dad,’ no doubt the son had said. ‘It’ll look well up there,’ to which the old gaffer had replied ‘Aye, lad, gormed if ‘twon’t look gradely on the mantelpiece.’ Or words to that effect. I can’t do the dialect, of course. So they had shoved it on the mantelpiece, and then along had come Sir Watkyn Bassett with his smooth city ways and made suckers out of parent and offspring. Happening all the time, that sort of thing.
I reached the house and was about to knock on the door, when there came bustling up an elderly gentleman with a square face, much tanned as if he had been sitting out in the sun quite a lot without his parasol.
‘Oh, there you are,’ he said. ‘Hope I haven’t kept you waiting. We were having football practice, and I lost track of the time. Come in, my dear fellow, come in.’
I need scarcely say that this exuberant welcome to one who, whatever his merits, was a total stranger warmed my heart quite a good deal.
It was with the feeling that his attitude did credit to Gloucestershire hospitality that I followed him through a hall liberally besprinkled with the heads of lions, leopards, gnus and other fauna into a room with french windows opening on the front garden. Here he left me while he went off to fetch drinks, his first question having been Would I care for one for the tonsils, to which I had replied with considerable enthusiasm that I would. When he returned, he found me examining the photographs on the wall. The one on which my eye was resting at the moment was a school football group, and it was not difficult to spot the identity of the juvenile delinquent holding the ball and sitting in the middle.
‘You?’ I said.
‘That’s me,1 he replied. ‘My last year at school. I skippered the side that season. That’s old Scrubby Willoughby sitting next to me. Fast wing threequarter, but never would learn to give the reverse pass.’
‘He wouldn’t?’ I said, shocked. I hadn’t the remotest what he was talking about, but he had said enough to show me that this Willoughby must have been a pretty dubious character, and when he went on to tell me that poor old Scrubby had died of cirrhosis of the liver in the Federal Malay States, I wasn’t really surprised. I imagine these fellows who won’t learn to give the reverse pass generally come to a fairly sticky end.