The first I knew of the mutterings was when I overheard them, being muttered. A door was ajar, and I was in the corridor with my pail and my mop. Through the ajar door I heard the mutterings, but only for a few seconds, because suddenly the door was slammed shut, from within, presumably by one of the mutterers. I stood waiting awhile, in case the door might be opened again, but it was not, so I moved on along the corridor, towards the holy golden slab.

You might wonder what a holy golden slab was doing in the corridor of an otherwise nondescript municipal office building. Somebody once told me that the explanation was only given on a need to know basis. What arrant poppycock! I think that person was trying to intimidate me, or to put me in my place. I would dearly like to know if he was among the mutterers behind the now closed door. Well, I will find out, by hook or by crook. What either a hook or a crook would avail me in the circumstances I do not presume to guess. But there is always a nugget of wisdom to be found in common sayings, so perhaps one of these days I will go down to the basement and rummage around in the storage cupboards to see if a hook or a crook, or both, have been discarded there, at some point, by one of my predecessors. How I will then proceed I do not yet know. Perhaps it will come to me in a dream.

It was in a dream that I learned why the holy golden slab is where it is. It was vouchsafed to me by the night-time goblins that control our dreams that the holy golden slab has always been there, in the same spot, for as long as history. The building was built around it, you see. I think the holy golden slab was meant to be in a room all by itself, a locked room, but somehow the building’s blueprints were misinterpreted, and it ended up being at the end of a corridor. They could have put in some panels and created a room around the holy golden slab, shortening the corridor a little, but money ran out. Imagine that! Not enough money in the coffers for a few panels.

That was a hundred years ago, of course. I expect there is money for panels now, but everybody has got used to the holy golden slab being in the corridor, and it is no longer thought important enough to be hidden away in a room of its own. Funny to think that it was once an object of awe and trembling. I was awestruck and trembling when I saw it in my dream. But in the pitiless light of day, when the goblins loosen their grip on our brains, I, like everybody else, feel neither awe nor trembling. I mop the floor around the holy golden slab as a matter of routine, and once in a while I run a duster over it.

One of my predecessors put a tarpaulin over it, to save on dusting. The very next morning he was found in a dingy alleyway. His throat had been slit.

On my way down the back staircase to the basement, to pop my pail and my mop into a cubby, I began to wonder if the mutterings I had overheard were something to do with the holy golden slab. I had not been able to pick out individual words, in the few seconds of my overhearing, but an inkling nested in my brain and would not be dislodged. I wondered if the goblins of the night might tell me more, when my head was apillow. But they had nothing of relevance to impart. I dreamed of dogs barking in a rowing boat in the middle of a lake, and the crushing of a rebellion.

The next day I noticed that the door in the corridor was ajar again, And yes, as I stepped closer, I heard mutterings. This time I hoped I might be able to make out something of what was being muttered. Then I could rest easy, without having fantastic thoughts about the holy golden slab pinging round and round and round in my poor overheated brain. It needed a bit of mopping itself, were that a possibility. But again the ajar door was slammed shut when I had been loitering for bare seconds. Obviously the mutterers wanted to keep me in the dark. But how did they even know I was there? Mirrors, probably.

This went on for a week. The door was always ajar, and it was always slammed shut before I could hear clearly what was being muttered. As for the holy golden slab, no change there. But then there never had been any change, since the dawn of recorded time, or at least since time immemorial, which legally, as I understand it, is any time before the sixth of July 1189. As for me, I went on toiling up and down the corridor with my pail and my mop, I went on skulking down to the basement, and every night I rested my head on my pillow and bid the goblins start up their frolics in my sleeping brain.

What I did not know, and learned only later, much later, was that one by one the mutterers were found in a dingy alleyway with their throats slit. I found out all the grisly details when they arrested me, and charged me with the killings. Ever since that six in the morning hammering at the door, and the handcuffs and the blanket over my head, the night-time goblins have fallen strangely quiet.

Now, it is as if I have an empty head.

[And the above is the result of determinedly bashing out a thousandish words while in the grip of empty head, or vacancy between the ears, syndrome. Must do better.]

Brrrr! Wrap up warm, because it’s cold outside! Well, it would be, wouldn’t it, this being the Ice Age. There have been other Ages – Stone and Iron, for example, and Bronze – but this one we have dubbed the Ice Age, because it is so chilly. Sitting here next to my oil stove, wearing various furry animal pelts, it is easy to forget just how cold it is outside. I can’t see through the windows, because they are all frosted up, but I suppose if I turned down the volume on the cassette player I would be able to hear the howling winds of the blizzard, and they would serve to remind me of the cold. But I would rather listen to the cassette playing poptones, quite frankly. I am not in the right mood for howling.

The wind howls, and so do wolves. Sometimes it is difficult to distinguish one kind of howling from another. Wolves seem to thrive in the chilly chilly weather of this Ice Age. They have furry coats of course, or at least hairy, bristly coats, au naturelle, as it were. To obtain my furry pelt I have to slaughter apt creatures, or at least pay someone to do so for me, to slaughter and skin and stitch. I am somewhat weedy, and short-sighted, and I would much rather huddle by the oil stove listening to poptones than be out there in the cold, hunting and stalking. In any case, I do not have a pair of snow shoes, so I wouldn’t get very far. Within a few feet of my door I expect I would be up to my waist in snow, and helpless, and I would have to make puny cries, in the hope that a tough wolf-hunter would come to my rescue.

At least you know where you are with wolves. Those rampaging wild boars are another matter entirely. Blimey. I have been woken from a nap by the sound of them battering their tusks against the walls of my hut. I am pretty sure it was a wild boar, covered in hoar frost, that chewed through the wiring of my radio set. I thought the wiring was safe, submerged under snow, stretching out across the tarputa, but those boars are relentless. Now I can only get some of the channels, and none of the music ones, which is why I rely on the cassette player.

Ice Age music is pretty grim, all told, but when the alternative is the howling of wind and wolves and the bashing of boar-tusks against the walls, you have to take what you can get. And it’s not all bad. I grew quite fond of Chepstow’s Icicle Symphony, for example. But the tape was ruined when I left it too close to the oil stove, and it partly melted. So now I make do with poptones, icy poptones, with lots of synthesizer. At top volume, it drowns out the howling.

I used to have a pair of snow shoes. Of course I did, for how else would I have been able to cross the tarputa and make it to my hut? It took me six weeks to get here, plodding slowly. I meant to hang on to them, for emergencies, but the fibre they were made from was highly flammable, and one evening the oil stove spat out a stray spark which ignited them. I acted quickly, putting on a pair of mittens and chucking the burning snow shoes out of the door, into a snowdrift. If I hadn’t, the whole hut would have burned down and I’d have been a goner. But it means that now I have to rely on passing wolf-hunters for certain essentials. They can be a difficult lot.

I got so fed up with the rampaging wild boars battering their tusks against the walls that I thought I’d fashion some kind of boar-trap. I asked one of the wolf-hunters for help. In return for soup, I hoped he would dig a pit outside, a few feet away from the door, into which the boars might topple, and having toppled, perish. The rascal ate my soup but said he was a wolf-only hunter, and couldn’t be distracted in his career by digging a pit for boars. He was huge and violent, so I didn’t argue.

I may no longer have the Icicle Symphony to listen to, but I have plenty of icicles. They hang from the ceiling, in their hundreds, and occasionally I pluck one off, to suck, or to use as a little spear. Sometimes I will use the same icicle for both spearing and sucking, turn and turn about, until my sucking has made it useless for spearing. The icicles are a bit too big to use as pins, and funnily enough I have discovered I have absolutely no need of pins, here in my hut. I have got along quite well without a single pin. That surprised me, but there it is.

Apart from the fiendish cold, the reason I don’t go out much is fear. Call me namby-pamby, but I am terrified of the twin perils of snow-blindness and piblokto. The wolves and the rampaging wild boars I think I could handle, using a combination of mesmerism and gibberish, but neither of those is of much use where the ruination of one’s eyes and one’s mind is at stake. I have noticed that the wolf-hunters all seem to be equipped with very natty sunglasses, which presumably protect them against snow-blindness. Whether they have something similar to guard their brains I do not know. They are not a talkative lot. Oh, they will gobble down the soup you proffer them, but that’s as far as it goes.

On one of the radio stations I am still able to pick up, I heard the other day that the Ice Age might be coming to an end. Some pundit in the studio was wittering on about all the snow melting, across the tarputa, for as far as the eye could see, revealing a buried landscape, a vista of salt flats. It sounded to me as if his vision was little different from the snowbound land of the Ice Age. But I suppose if it does get warmer I might go out from time to time, though I am not sure to what purpose. I don’t put salt in my soup, never have.

We know, or we ought to know, that a frogman is not a hideous abomination of nature, a fusing in one being of frog and man, such as might come crawling out of the sea on to the shore at Innsmouth in a tale by H. P. Lovecraft. If that is what we were told, we were misled, possibly to frighten us. We have absolutely no need to be frightened of frogmen, unless, in the case of naval commando frogmen, we are the enemy, or, in the case of police frogmen, we are malefactors, ones who have perhaps tried to conceal the body of a murder victim in a deep lake. But generally speaking frogmen are to be admired and applauded. Even if we are standing on the shore at Innsmouth, and we see a frogman emerge from the sea, we should not shudder but clap. He will almost certainly have been engaged in some act of subaquatic heroism, such as affixing explosives to the underside of an enemy submarine. If we are lucky, even as we are clapping, we might see a plume of water rising in a tremendous burst from the sea, and hear a muffled bang. That will be the submarine exploding, a decisive blow against the enemy which brings us ever closer to the day of victory.

The frogman is not to be confused with the toadman. Just as some people have difficulty distinguishing a frog from a toad, so we will from time to time come across a person who thinks the frogman and the toadman are synonymous. Nothing could be further from the truth. Indeed they are so different that the only reasonable explanation for such confusion is that we have been taken in by enemy propaganda. It is quite possible that the enemy submarine so heroically blown to smithereens by the frogman was carrying a cargo of teeming thousands of leaflets designed to muddle our heads with lies about frogmen and toadmen, and even about frogs and toads, so we have all the more reason to applaud the frogman who comes padding on to the shore at Innsmouth under cover of darkness, his heroic deed done.

Whereas the frogman is brave and admirable, the toadman is the opposite. So loathsome is the toadman that few of us can bear to utter his name, which is why it is usually shortened to ‘toady’. A toady is a servile parasite, a sycophant, a fawning flatterer. Standing on the shore at Innsmouth, clapping our hands at the frogman as he emerges from the sea upon completion of his heroic action against the enemy submarine, we run the risk of being taken for a toady. For this reason, we should not applaud him too long, nor overegg the pudding of our approbation. A brief flurry of clapping and a manly slap on his shoulder will suffice. Then we should turn away and return to the seafront hotel where we have taken a room, leaving the frogman to report to his superiors at a different seafront hotel which has been commandeered as operational headquarters for the duration of the war.

But not all admirers of our subaquatic commandos show such reserve and restraint. It is a sad fact that the very heroism displayed by frogmen attracts toadies. In Innsmouth alone, one study has shown that for every frogman billeted in the one seafront hotel, there is a corresponding toady renting a room in the other seafront hotel. These toadies are not only servile parasites, sycophants, and fawning flatterers, they are pestiferous and constitute a security risk. By tumbling out of their hotel every morning and thronging around the other hotel, the operational headquarters, which are meant to be top secret, with their cameras and autograph books and bouquets of posies, they draw undue and unwelcome attention to the frogmen. And heroic as they clearly are, it has to be admitted that some frogmen find themselves captivated by the attention of even the most loathsome and slimy of the toadies. They are happy to accept the bouquets, to scribble their autographs, and to pose for pictures, arms slung around the shoulders of the toadies, as if fast friends. Their superiors, hunched over maps in the converted ballroom of the seafront hotel, are too busy planning the next thrust against the enemy to distract themselves by bawling out the frogmen and urging them to shun the toadies. That is why we have taken a room in the other hotel, the one infested with toadies.

We had chanced upon an article in the Innsmouth Bugle in which one particularly heroic frogman, impervious to the fawning of the toadies, complained in the bitterest tones about their attentions. “We frogmen need no toadies,” he was reported as saying, “And they distract us from the important business of preparing ourselves, mind and body, fins and flippers, for the important work of affixing explosives to the underside of enemy submarines under cover of darkness.” Patriotic to a fault, we could not read those words without hurling our teacup across the room, smashing it upon the wainscot, and rushing at once out of the door to the railway station to catch the special train to Innsmouth, where, having identified which seafront hotel was which, we booked in to the one riddled with toadies.

Tonight, after our brief applause and manly slap on the shoulder of the frogman emerging from the sea, we return to the hotel. Clad all in black, and in stockinged feet, we pad from room to room, and in each room, silent and deadly, we smother the toadies with their pillows, one by one. This is our contribution to the war effort. And one by one, at dead of night, we drag the still-warm corpse of each toady to the charabanc we have hired and parked outside, and when all are aboard we put on our chauffeur’s cap and drive away from Innsmouth, through the dark, through the countryside, to a deep deep lake. We drag the bodies of the toadies one by one from the charabanc and weigh them down with stones and pebbles, and we toss them into the lake. And they sink, and are hidden, and will no longer fawn over our heroic frogmen.

Years pass before a new generation of frogmen, some the sons and nephews of the wartime frogmen, working, now in peacetime, for the police, dredge the lake. They are responding to persistent rumours put about by communists. The rumours, of course, are true, and one by one the police frogmen, no less heroic than their commando forebears, bring to the surface the skeletons of toady after toady. We read about their exploits, and see the photographs, in the Innsmouth Bugle, but we are far away from Innsmouth, and aged, and doddery, and nobody would ever guess what we did, in the war, in our own small way, to win victory.

Have I exhausted the topic of the raking of gravel, specifically the raking of gravel by an eerie and enigmatic handyman-gardener? I suspect I probably have. It is high time we moved on to other topics, ones of more import, even perhaps of lesser import, but irrespective of their relative import at the very least different, wildly, vertiginously different, from gravel, and its raking. There is only so much to be said. Indeed, one might be better occupied actually, physically shifting gravel about with a rake than writing about it. Do not for a moment think that that has not occurred to me. Had I a stretch of gravel on a pathway outside my domain, I would certainly have raked it by now, several times, during the past few days. But the pathway outside my domain is covered with flagstones, and I own no rake. Thus I am compelled to write about the raking of gravel rather than to do it.

It is not beyond me, of course, to go sashaying around my bailiwick until I spot a pathway with gravel scattered upon it, and to march up the pathway to the door, and to hammer my fist upon the door and, when it is opened, to greet the person answering and to offer to rake their gravel for them, with the proviso that they would have to supply the rake, a rake which I would of course return to them immediately after I had finished raking the gravel. I would have to put a stress on this last point to avert the possibility that the person might eye me with suspicion as a potential rake-thief, my offer to rake their gravel mere subterfuge. I like to think I do not cut a thief-like figure, do not carry a fishy stink around with me, but some persons are more trusting than others, and if, for example, the person at whose door I come calling has suffered recent theft of garden implements, I could not blame them for smelling a rat, even if there is no rat to be smelled.

That entire paragraph, however, hinges on the idea that I might be desperate to rake gravel, and I am not. Not really. I do not say that I would not spend a happy five or ten minutes raking gravel if the opportunity presented itself. But it is not an opportunity I actively seek. I am content, as I am sure you have twigged, merely to write about it. I wonder, momentarily, whether one might find an equivalence between writing and raking, the writer and the raker, words and gravel, but only momentarily. After a moment, I slap my forehead with the palm of my hand, with some force, and remind myself that I have all but exhausted the topic, and need to move on to fresh pastures, pastures not strewn with gravel.

Before doing so, however, it will be a good idea to mop up any loose ends. Then we can be sure that the raking of gravel has been covered, absolutely, with the guarantee that we need never return to it. Otherwise there will always be that nagging thought, in the brains of both writer (me) and reader (you), that something has been left unsaid, that we will need to return, at some future date not yet allotted, to the subject, to wring from it further insights, and this thought will necessarily distract us from whatever else it is we ought to be concentrating upon. To paraphrase Lord Denning, “this is such an appalling vista that every sensible person in the land would say that it cannot be right that this thought should be allowed to nag at us”. Lord Denning was not talking about the raking of gravel, nor of what we might have neglected to say about it, but his remarks are apposite, which is why I paraphrased them. I could draw upon other paraphrases, and even direct quotations, in my support, were I so minded. But I am not. We do not want to string this business out longer than we have to.

Here, it is nevertheless worth asking “how long might that be?” What if I, or indeed somebody else entirely, were to start a blog entitled The Raking Of Gravel, of which the only subject under discussion was the raking of gravel? Can one imagine daily postages, for years and years, where the topic is ever more thoroughly examined and, as beardy postmodernist fatheads would put it, interrogated? You would have to be mightily interested in the raking of gravel to read such a blog, and to keep reading it, until kingdom come. I am sure there are at least one or two people out there who fit the bill. They will be the ones becoming somewhat tearful and melancholic as we at Hooting Yard now approach the final mopping up.

There may be something to be said about the relationship between mopping and raking, between the duties of a janitor, with a mop, in a corridor, and those of a handyman-gardener, with a rake, on a gravel-strewn pathway. Certainly a janitor can be as eerie and enigmatic as a handyman-gardener, and as given to gnomic utterances. They are cut from the same cloth, generally speaking, though I think it would be a mistake to regard them as interchangeable. Not a serious mistake, with world-shuddering consequences, but a mistake nonetheless.

Note to self : find out the difference, if any, between a janitor and a janissary.

Christ Almighty! I have had it up to here with the raking of gravel by handymen-gardeners! It remains to acknowledge that the original eerie and enigmatic handyman-gardener, Huw Halfbacon, mentioned here explicitly the other day, is a character from Alan Garner’s The Owl Service (1967). It was adapted into a television series in 1969, where Huw Halfbacon was played by Raymond Llewellyn. Here he is, on the right, in a still from the series, many more of which can be seen here.

With my rake and my shovel
I shift around gravel
For I am the handyman-gardener of Hoon
I am weird and uncanny
And I look at you funny
And wolves howl at the full moon

This was, apparently, the song attributed to the handyman-gardener of Hoon, a weird and uncanny fellow with a squint in one eye whose chief occupation was the raking and shovelling of gravel. The song, thought to be broadly autobiographical, was recorded by folk song collector Cecil Flat, to an accompaniment of piccolo, accordion and marimbas. More recently, the argumentative German improv group Weltschmerz devised an argumentative improv version, in which the words are recited in guttural shouts against a backdrop of tuneless tape-recorded shovelling and raking of gravel. Inevitably, this shot to the top of the hit parade and the band appeared on several overexcitable teenage pop television shows. Eagle-eyed viewers noticed, in the heaving throng of the studio mosh pit on one such show, an elderly man, weird and uncanny, with a squint in one eye, holding in one hand a shovel and in the other a rake. He appeared to have gravel sprinkled in his hair. He was only on screen for a few seconds, but those who saw him were convinced they had spotted the handyman-gardener of Hoon. Alas, this was in the days before Het Internet and YouTube, and no copy of the broadcast is known to exist. We have only the letters pages of the following week’s teenage pop press to turn to.

Dear Teenage Pop Press, reads one typical letter, Yesterday evening, as we do every week, my family gathered around the bakelite television set in our ill-starred yet snug hovel to watch The Overexcitable Teenage Pop Television Show. There were some fantastic beat combos playing, including Agnetha and Anni-Frid and Benny and Bjorn, John and Yoko, the Bernard Levin Madrigal Singers, Gordon Sumner’s Gordon Sumner Tribute Band, Level 42, A Flock Of Seagulls, Tony Gubba’s Gubtastic Gubba Gubba Hey Group, and a chap standing on one leg playing the flute. What we were waiting for, of course, was the smash hit Song Of The Handyman-Gardener Of Hoon performed by Weltschmerz. Now here is the intriguing thing. When the argumentative German improv group were making a din with their shouting and their rakes and their shovels, the camera cut away for a few seconds to the studio mosh pit, wherein a teeming throng of overexcited teenage persons were cavorting and cutting capers, as is de rigueuer. In among them, I am sure I spotted an elderly man, weird and uncanny, with a squint in one eye, holding in one hand a shovel and in the other a rake, who appeared to have gravel sprinkled in his hair. Could it be that this was the handyman-gardener of Hoon himself? And if so, why was he in the mosh pit, rather than up on stage with the band, shouting out his own song?

In the following week’s issue came a response:

Dear Teenage Pop Press, it read, Further to the letter in last week’s issue regarding the elderly man, weird and uncanny, with a squint in one eye, holding in one hand a shovel and in the other a rake, who appeared to have gravel sprinkled in his hair and who appeared for a few seconds on screen during Weltschmerz’s deafening performance of the Song Of The Handyman-Gardener Of Hoon on television recently, I think the person your correspondent spotted was me. I am elderly. I have been described, both by strangers and by members of my own family as weird. There is certainly something uncanny to be seen whenever I look in the mirror. On the evening in question I attended the television studio with both a rake and a shovel about my person, for reasons I have been advised by tiptop legal advisers not to bruit about in the popular press. The one point on which I would take issue is that I did not have gravel sprinkled in my hair. I tend my magnificent bouffant with great care, and would never be so neglectful of its preening to allow gravel to become sprinkled in it. There is the possibility that what your correspondent saw was electrical or electronic interference, given the primitive state of transmission on black and white television screens at this point in history, when we have not yet progressed to colour, or high definition, or whatever further wonders the pipe-smoking boffins have up their sleeves. Though it may be thought that I am a tad too elderly to go cavorting and cutting capers in a mosh pit, it has long been my habit to go in search of the hero inside myself, until I find the key to my life. This has led me down some unexpected by-ways. It is not, for example, the only time I have been mistaken for the handyman-gardener of Hoon, even by myself. The day after the television show I was taking a stroll along the canal towpath near fields and a spinney and standing stones and an army firing range surrounded by an electrified fence when I came to a rustic cottage. Its grounds were strewn with gravel. As I had my shovel and my rake with me, for reasons which again I am not minded to divulge, I took it in to my head to do a spot of shovelling and raking of the gravel, on the spur of the moment. After all, it occurred to me that this might be the key to my life. And so it proved. I have been happily shifting about gravel with my rake and my shovel ever since, and I am now waiting for the next full moon, to hear if wolves will howl, as was foretold in the song.

I have studied all available documentation from that time and that place but am so far unable to confirm whether or not wolves did indeed howl at the full moon. The only hint I found was a report in Recordings Of Wolves Howling magazine, in which the member of Weltschmerz with the severest haircut gave an argumentative interview in which he revealed that the band had been making tape-recordings of the howling of wolves. He did not explain why.

The raking of gravel in the grounds of a rented country cottage is usually the lot of the handyman-gardener who comes with the property. You will first meet him when he comes to the railway station to meet you off the train. He will load your luggage on to the brake after the briefest greeting, and drive like the clappers along twisting bosky lanes. When he has debouched you outside the cottage, and unloaded the luggage, he will drive off again to park the brake in a nearby barn. You will not see him again for some hours, until evening, when, looking out of the cottage window, you will spot him raking the gravel.

The next morning, after a slap up breakfast, and it being a sunny day, you will all go for a stroll together. You will explore, in a not too systematic fashion, the countryside surrounding the rented cottage, the fields, the canal, the spinney, the standing stones, the army firing range with its electrified fence. Towards midday, returning to the cottage for a slap up lunch, you will see the handyman-gardener raking the gravel in the grounds. One of you will try to engage him in friendly if condescending conversation, but his only response will be a gnomic utterance which you find baffling. You will discuss your bafflement over lunch. Before your afternoon nap, you will look out of the window, but there will be no sign of the handyman-gardener, though you will see his rake leaning against a low wall next to the fruit beds.

That evening he will appear for about half an hour, raking the gravel.

The next day you will go for a stroll after breakfast again. This is when you will learn that, other than the fields and the canal and the spinney and the standing stones and the army firing range with its electrified fence, there is nothing else of interest to see. On your way back to the rented cottage, you will decide to pick the brains of the handyman-gardener, and devise a series of questions to ask of him. How extensive is the farm to which the fields belong? Where does the canal begin and end? Has any event of local historical significance ever taken place in the spinney? What legends are associated with the standing stones? You will decide not to make any queries regarding the army firing range with its electrified fence, mindful as you are of national security. But when you arrive back at the cottage, the handyman-gardener will not be there. His rake will be leaning against the low wall. After a brief exchange of views, you will decide to walk the short distance to the barn. You will peek inside. There is the brake. Where is the handyman-gardener?

After lunch, and after your afternoon nap, you will gather in the living-room. All those questions about the fields and the canal and the spinney and the standing stones and the army firing range with its electrified fence will seem so much hogwash now. You will have a quite different set of questions, all of which relate to the handyman-gardener. What is his name? Who pays his wages? What does he do, other than rake gravel and collect people from the railway station in the brake? Where does he sleep? You will discard a suggested question about whether he is a deaf mute on the basis of his gnomic utterance the day before. Then your ears will prick up. You will hear, outside the cottage, the raking of gravel. But when you pile outside to approach the handyman-gardener and fire questions at him, he will already be gone.

The following day will pass without any sign of him. The gravel will go unraked.

By Wednesday morning, in the absence of any other focus for your attention, you will be wholly consumed by the handyman-gardener. There will almost be a whoop of joy when, shortly after breakfast, peering out of the window, you see him raking the gravel. The previous evening, in the course of animated discussion around a blazing fire, you will have decided to delegate one of your number to approach the handyman-gardener to put your questions to him. Your thinking will have been that he may open up to one, whereas he may be intimidated by all sixteen of you. Now you will wait in the living room, crowded around the window, while one goes out and strolls nonchalantly up to the handyman-gardener. You will be somewhat surprised that he does not pause in his raking of the gravel during the conversation that ensues. Later, there will be disappointment intermixed with mild outrage when it is reported that, in answer to such questions as your delegate managed to frame, the handyman-gardener responded only with baffling gnomic utterances. You will feel yourselves back at square one.

The next day, trudging disconsolately after breakfast by the fields and the canal and the spinney and the standing stones and the army firing range with its electrified fence, there will be common agreement that the handyman-gardener is a halfwit. It will be decided to pay him no more attention, and to discover other points of rustic interest, though what they might be will tax your ingenuity. This will be the most dangerous time.

For now the handyman-gardener has the measure of you. His patient raking of the gravel, his disappearances, his deliberately baffling utterances, his leaving the brake untouched in the barn, all have served their purpose. He is almost ready to strike.

The following Saturday, as on the Saturday before, the handyman-gardener will drive the brake to the railway station, and collect the people who have rented the cottage for a week. Only he will know, as he nods the briefest of greetings, that there is no chance they will survive that long.

One March morning, Agnetha and Anni-Frid and Benny and Bjorn became hopelessly lost in marshland. They were on their way to a picnic engagement, for which they had been booked to perform a set of cover versions of songs by the Carpenters. This was something of a departure for the Scandinavian foursome, and the circumstances were murky, occasioned it was said by a gambling debt Benny had accrued after a marathon game of blackjack with Richard Carpenter. Hired thugs were involved, and telephone calls in the middle of the night, and packs of wolves. The whole business made Agnetha shudder, and she tried to concentrate on her piccolo practice. She had recently taken up the instrument, and hoped to make her public debut with it at the picnic.

But as the morning wore on, the chances of attending the picnic grew more and more remote. Their map indicated that they would have to cross Scroonhoonpooge Marshes, with which they were unfamiliar. Had they listened to Huw Halfbacon, the handyman-gardener at their rented cottage, perhaps they would have devised a different route, and made a diversion, however lengthy, in order to avoid the marshes altogether. But now, as a mist descended, they were hopelessly lost.

There is a difference we would do well to consider between being lost and being hopelessly lost. To be lost, yet still in possession of hope, suggests that with the application of common sense, or true grit, or luck, one might yet find oneself back on the correct path, or in territory one knows, or even at one’s intended destination. Bjorn, for example, had once got lost in the cemetery where he went to visit the grave of Karen Carpenter. He roamed among the headstones for hour upon hour, becoming thirsty and peckish. Fortunately it was a bright, clear day, warm but not too hot, utterly different to the chill mist hanging over Scroonhoonpooge Marshes on this March morning. Had Bjorn used his noggin, he would have done as I and my sister did when we were once searching fruitlessly, in Saint Patrick’s cemetery in east London, for the grave of the five Franciscan nuns drowned off the Kentish Knock and commemorated by Gerard Manley Hopkins in his poem The Wreck Of The Deutschland (1876). Unable to locate the grave, and with the last light of a winter’s afternoon fading, we knocked on the door of a lodge at the cemetery gates, where a helpful gravedigger named Mario led us directly to the last resting place of “them nuns what drowned”. Had Bjorn determined to find such a gravedigger in such a lodge by the gates of the cemetery wherein Karen Carpenter lies buried, he would no doubt have been able to lay the bouquet of campions and pansies he had brought with him in their proper place. Instead, he wandered haphazardly, and eventually chucked the flowers into a waste bin, in a fit of temper.

For all that, he was never hopelessly lost. One cannot, on a clear day, become hopelessly lost in a cemetery. By its very nature, it will be bounded by walls or railings, and even if one trudges around for hours as Bjorn did, always there is the reassurance that sooner or later one will stumble upon the cemetery limits, at which point one need merely follow the walls or railings until one reaches the gates.

But out here on unfamiliar marshes, in a mist, with little visibility, it is possible indeed to lose hope, and thus to become hopelessly lost. Such were the circumstances as Agnetha and Anni-Frid and Benny and Bjorn stopped by a puddle. Had any of them spoken, they would have said “Where the hell are we?”, in Swedish. But they were too exhausted, and they simply looked at each other, in silence. In spite of the chill, Benny was sweating profusely. He was overdressed. Anni-Frid was on the verge of tears. Agnetha was wondering if she might make a few toots on her piccolo to attract the attention of any wandering marsh-guide, if such a person existed. And Bjorn was about to fly into a temper, just as he had done when failing to find the grave of Karen Carpenter. The mist was so thick it hid the sun, though it was the crack of noon.

There the foursome stood, when of a sudden a figure loomed towards them. It was Huw Halfbacon, the eerie Welsh handyman-gardener. He seemed to have materialised from nowhere. A strange smile played over his lips.

“Would it be the picnic spot you are looking for?” he asked.

Agnetha and Anni-Frid and Benny and Bjorn all gabbled at once, such was their relief. Now there was hope!

“You will not be finding a picnic spot in the middle of Scroonhoonpooge Marshes,” said their saviour. Was there a trace of mocking laughter in his voice, or something more sinister? “Come, follow me,” he added.

And he turned his back on them and his wellington boots splattered through the puddle.

“Quick now!” he called, and they understood the urgency of his words, for though he had taken only a few steps he was already vanishing into the mist. They hurried in his wake, their unwellingtonbooted feet getting soaked as they followed through the puddle.

The eerie silence of the misty marshes was suddenly broken by the roar of a jet aircraft zooming, invisible, across the sky. In the passenger seat, craning to look out of the window with a pair of mist-probing superbinoculars, cackling his head off like a villain in a Victorian melodrama, was Richard Carpenter. In his pocket was a wallet stuffed with cash, the bribe he had ready for Huw Halfbacon. He would meet the handyman-gardener later in the afternoon, at the now empty cottage. In the weeks and months to come, when Swedish detectives came to find traces of the foursome, Huw Halfbacon would assume his most cretinous expression, and mumble enigmatic yet senseless Welsh twaddle, and point them in the direction of Scroonhoonpooge Marshes, upon which the mist had never lifted, and which led nowhere, save to oblivion.

The ventriloquist Claud Plon was out for a spin in his jalopy when he had a prang. He hit a lamppost, the collision with which rent and twisted the bonnet of the jalopy, exposing part of the engine, which belched forth jets of steam.

“Oops!” said his dummy, a puppet called Bonko. Bonko was a sock stuffed with kapok who had a couple of glass beads sewn on to serve as eyes.

“Sorry about that, Bonko, I wasn’t looking where I was going,” said the ventriloquist, “Are you all right?”

“I think I have suffered a whiplash injury,” replied Bonko, who may have been lying, as to the untrained eye he looked perfectly okay.

“Goodness gracious!” said Claud Plon, “We shall have to get you to the doll hospital.”

“Why on earth would we go to a doll hospital?” asked Bonko, “I am not a doll. I am a sock stuffed with kapok with a couple of glass beads sewn on to serve as eyes.”

“Yes, I see your point,” said Plon, “Then what about a puppet clinic?”

“Is there such a place as a puppet clinic?” asked Bonko.

“I have heard tell there is one in Pointy Town,” said the ventriloquist.

“But we are miles and miles away,” said Bonko, “And I fear my whiplash may be fatal, for I can already feel myself succumbing to faintness and a lack of oxygen to the brain, pins and needles, darting pains behind my glass beads, and the gradual oozing of the very life out of me.”

This time Bonko was definitely lying, or at least embroidering the truth. But Claud Plon was both devoted and gullible. It would never occur to him that Bonko might be trying to pull the wool over his eyes, which in the ventriloquist’s case were real, working eyes, not mere sewn-on glass beads. There had been occasions in the past when people suggested that Bonko might be a mendacious fantasist, and Plon had been so inflamed with outrage that he had beaten the accusers about the head with a shovel. Bonko egged him on, urging him to bash and bash and bash until the bashee was dead.

Plon was now in something of a panic. Bonko, who was a fine judge of distance, was absolutely correct that they were very far away from Pointy Town and its puppet clinic. Also, the prang had been severe enough to render the jalopy motionless. Crank it as frantically as he could, it was not going anywhere. Steam continued to hiss from the bonnet.

“What are we going to do?” wailed Plon.

“You had better think of something quickly, because I am fading fast,” said Bonko, “It is as if I am in a long, dark tunnel, and there is an unearthly light towards which I feel impelled to go.”

“Don’t go into the light!” screamed Plon, remembering certain supernatural thriller films he had seen.

“But it is such an attractive light,” said Bonko, “I feel drawn to it.”

Claud Plon could think of nothing but to repeat his shrieked words. At which point the jalopy burst into flames. The ventriloquist and his dummy would surely have been engulfed and burned to a crisp had not a big red fire engine screeched to a halt beside them, bells clanging, and the fire been doused by untold gallons of water spurting from a hose trained upon the jalopy by three heroic firemen. Seconds later, there was further clanging, and an ambulance pulled up, out of which poured three heroic paramedics. They grabbed the ventriloquist and shoved him with skilled gentleness onto a stretcher.

“Never mind about me,” he cried, “Save Bonko!”

But as he cried out a needle was injected into his arm and a fast-acting narcotic coursed through his veins and he lost consciousness.

*

Claud Plon awoke next day, flat on his back in a bed in a ward of the Hattie Jacques Memorial Hospital. His brain was dizzy, he bore a few singe-marks here and there, but was otherwise as fit as a fiddle. He looked wildly around, but there was no sign of Bonko. He pressed a buzzer at his bedside, summoning an angel of mercy. Plon raved; was not understood; and was drugged back into unconsciousness.

*

There is, high on a hill in a rustic backwater some miles from Pointy Town, a big grim crenellated smoke-blackened mansion, once the home of robber barons but now a home for the bewildered and befuddled and frankly bonkers. Claud Plon, the ventriloquist and one-time star of the variety theatre, has lived here for twenty years, having been delivered on a stretcher, manacled, at dead of night. In his room in one of the towers, he raves and mutters. He goes barefoot, for the staff have a standing instruction never to allow him anywhere near socks. His simple tunic and trousers are fastened with zips, for it is thought best not to give him buttons, so easily mistaken for beads of glass. He has no visitors.

*

There is, at the foot of a hill in a rustic backwater some miles from Pointy Town, a rubbish dump. Over the years it has grown as it is piled ever higher with waste, things discarded, things bent and broken, things forgotten and abandoned, big and small, from lollipop sticks to wrecked jalopies. Within this midden, open to the elements, frayed around the edges and still bearing the singe-marks from a fire twenty years ago, there is a sock. It was once stuffed with kapok, much of which has fallen out. It once had two glass beads sewn on, where now there is only one. Sometimes urchins and wastrels and beggars will come trudging through the waste in search of scraps and scantlings. It is said that, when the air is still and the gulls cease shrieking, a voice can be heard, from somewhere in the dump, a peevish, rancorous, cursing voice, spitting with vituperation.

“Let me into the fucking light!” it cries.

There are certain beasts and creatures for which the names we use are inaccurate and misleading. A seahorse is not a horse, nor is a jellyfish a fish. Doubly erroneous is the guinea pig, which does not come from Guinea and is not a pig. It is all very perplexing, never more so than in the case of the rare golden enigmatic tatterdemalion corncrake. Let us take each element of its appellation in turn, and examine just how foolish it is of us to name it so.

Rare. This is not, by a long stretch, a rare beast. There are teeming millions of them, if not billions, though naturalists have yet to arrive at a definitive number. To list their habitats would take us all day, and probably into tomorrow. Suffice to say there is nowhere on earth they will not thrive, from grasslands, heaths, and moors to densely forested woodland, polar wasteland, steaming jungles, and urban hellholes. You will find them both near and far from any sea. I realise I have begun to list their habitats, and will stop now, bearing in mind what I just said about how bloody long it would take. The point is made, that the rare golden enigmatic tatterdemalion corncrake is not at all rare. You might protest that you have never seen one, or at least cannot recall ever seeing one, but that is because they are shy and retiring and extremely skilled at hiding from humankind. Even if you did see one, there is every likelihood you would not recognise it for what it was, as you would be on the lookout for something rare and golden and enigmatic and tatterdemalion and corncrakey, and as I shall demonstrate, it is none of these things.

Golden. Pish! There is no way this creature can be described as “golden”. Red, maybe, or blue, perhaps even orangey-yellowy, but never golden. At blaze of noon, perhaps, you might think it golden, or goldenish, but what you would be seeing is the mighty burning golden rays of the sunlight, not the actual colour of the rare golden enigmatic tatterdemalion corncrake.

Enigmatic. What does that even mean? Let us turn, as always, to the OED, which defines “enigmatic” as Pertaining to, or of the nature of, an enigma, containing or resembling an enigma: ambiguous, obscure, perplexing. Of persons: Mysterious; baffling conjecture as to character, sentiments, identity, or history. An enigma itself, we are told, is A short composition in prose or verse, in which something is described by intentionally obscure metaphors, in order to afford an exercise for the ingenuity of the reader or hearer in guessing what is meant; a riddle. How far does that get us, in considering the rare golden enigmatic tatterdemalion corncrake? If we extend “Of persons” to “Of persons and beasts and creatures and all the birds of the air”, which I think we are justified in doing at this stage of our investigation, then I would aver that the most enigmatic thing about the rare golden enigmatic tatterdemalion corncrake is that we apply the word “enigmatic” to it. That in itself is perplexing and mysterious and baffling, is it not? But if we continue down that road we are going to become horribly entangled in a hall of mirrors. Oops, I am mixing my metaphors. Let me say instead that we are going to become horribly entangled in a thicket of nettles which has unaccountably sprouted in a patch of soil within a hall of mirrors. For that image, I can rely on historical precedent, as it is said that Prince Fulgencio, that black-hearted monster, had such a thicket of nettles within the hall of mirrors within his palace. But that is a topic for another time, tomorrow perhaps. For now, I do not wish to become disorientated in the hall of mirrors suggested by the idea that the only thing remotely enigmatic about the rare golden enigmatic tatterdemalion corncrake is that the word “enigmatic” appears in its name. See, I am already repeating myself, dizzy-brained, my mind in chaos. We had best move on to the next word in the chain.

Tatterdemalion. A person in tattered clothing; a ragged or beggarly fellow; a ragamuffin – the OED again. How indispensable it is! And again we must extend “person” to include beasts and creatures and all the birds of the air. Even minimal familiarity with the pernickety grooming habits of the rare golden enigmatic tatterdemalion corncrake shows us that this is a wildly inaccurate description of the beast. Several tiptop naturalists have written at length on its neat and tidy appearance, achieved through hour upon hour of pernickety grooming. Given the vicissitudes of the natural world, however, it is only to be expected that there will be circumstances every now and then when even the neatest and tidiest of creatures will appear ragged and tattered and bedraggled. In the case of the rare golden enigmatic tatterdemalion corncrake, these might include exposure to gale-force winds, dunking in storm-tossed oceans, and being caught and dragged, by one of its many, many predators, through a thicket of nettles on its way to the predator’s lair or nest. At all other times the word “tatterdemalion” is completely inappropriate.

Corncrake. The rare golden enigmatic tatterdemalion corncrake bears about as much resemblance to a standard corncrake as a seahorse does to a standard horse, a jellyfish to a standard fish, or a guinea pig to a standard pig. We can try to make more sense of this part of its name if we split the word into two, corn and crake. While it is emphatically the case that the creature is to be found in rippling cornfields, we have already stated that there is nowhere on earth it is not found. Thus it is just as likely to be hiding in a field of rippling corn as it is in a field of other rippling crops, or on moorland or heath, or anywhere else you might possibly think of. The question of how it hides itself on open land such as moor and heath is so complicated that I cannot bear the thought of trying to explain it to you in language you would understand. As for the crake, that is merely an approximation of the kind of noise it might make, were you to overhear it and try to write down in letters of the alphabet what you thought you had heard. But please, on no account should you pay any attention to the fathead who claims that “crake” is the noise it makes if you cause it alarm and it flees in fear and terror. On the contrary, it will softly and suddenly vanish away – for the rare golden enigmatic tatterdemalion corncrake is a Boojum, you see.

The world-famous food-splattered Jesuit was one of the best loved and most successful variety acts of the interwar years. It is believed that he appeared at every single seaside resort in the land, the grandiose and the dilapidated, in and out of season, and always to rapturous applause. Key to his appeal was sheer simplicity. The curtains would open and there, on stage, world-famous and splattered with food, stood a Jesuit. He would extend his arms, almost in crucifixion pose, and gaze at a point slightly above the heads of the audience. There were no frills, no “business” with props. After a few minutes, the curtains would close, and – barring the inevitable encore – that was that. It was a winning formula, but one which, alas, could not transfer to radio, where so many of the stars of variety theatre went on to find fame and fortune.

Throughout the years of his greatest popularity, roughly the decade from 1925 to 1935, the world-famous food-splattered Jesuit managed, miraculously, to preserve his anonymity. We still do not know for certain who he was. We do know, in spite of rumours put about to the contrary, that he was a single, particular individual, and not a series of different Jesuits. This charge was first levelled in a scurrilous newspaper story. In the Daily Voodoo Dolly for the sixth of September 1929, a hack named only as “Our Seaside Resort Reporter” claimed that the original world-famous food-splattered Jesuit had been killed in an accident (picnic, lightning) and replaced by at least seven other Jesuits, who took it in turns to appear at the end of piers, splattered with food. This farrago of nonsense was comprehensively demolished by investigative variety theatre reporter John Pilge, a man who knew his onions.

But even Pilge was not perfect, and it seems he was the source of a common misapprehension of the nature of the Jesuit’s performances. Oft repeated by nincompoop wannabe historians of the seaside variety theatre, this is the idea that the Jesuit stood on stage, initially pristine in his soutane, and that he was splattered with food by members of the audience pelting him with eggs, fruit, cuts of meat, soup, ketchup, ad nauseam. So let me be crystal clear – there is not a shred of evidence that this was ever so. More than that, it belies a fundamental misunderstanding of the entire point of the act, and the reason it was so wildly popular, to wit, that the Jesuit simply stood there, stock still, arms outstretched, faintly holy, world-famous, and food-splattered.

There was an art to these performances which we lose sight of in our modern fast-moving age of pap ‘n’ twaddle. It would be a mistake to think that the Jesuit was nothing more than a messy eater with the table manners of Kafka, who simply allowed various stains and spillages to accumulate upon his soutane. Anybody could achieve that, with persistence, determination, slapdash eating habits, and the shunning of laundry. In fact, there was for a time a rival act known as the world-famous bacon-and-egg-besmirched nun. Though a woman of fine manners and terrific personal hygiene, she was bedizened by the lure of the end of the pier limelight, and dedicated herself to allowing much of her fried breakfast to fall upon her habit. It was an effort of will not to send it straight to the laundry, but she gritted her teeth and prayed, and took to the stage. In itself hers was a fairly enchanting act, as she knelt in an attitude of devotion, clutching her rosary beads, displaying her stains of egg yolk and bacon grease. But she was viewed, with justification, as a copycat, and audiences failed to warm to her. She later achieved a measure of success with a completely different act, involving tea-strainers, coat-hangers, and performing monkeys.

The genius of the world-famous food-splattered Jesuit, on the other hand, was that the splattering was carried out, backstage, immediately before each performance. He would remove his soutane, lay it out flat on the floor, and proceed to splatter it with whatever foodstuffs came to hand. He would chuck eggs or fruit at it from across the room, drizzle it with soup and broth and slops and sauces, and shower it with bread- and biscuit-crumbs. Although there is no evidence that Jackson Pollock ever witnessed these preparations, it seems inconceivable to me that he could ever have arrived at his action painting technique without first having watched the world-famous food-splattered Jesuit.

Though there is common agreement that he was, beyond all reasonable doubt, a Jesuit, and food-splattered, several latterday commentators have wondered about that “world-famous” bit. Given that he is not known ever to have performed outside the seaside resorts of his own country, they ask, is there any truth in the claim that he was famed around the world? This was the interwar years, remember, when communications were technologically primitive compared to our own era. How would a variety theatre aficionado in far flung foreign parts ever hear tell of the goings on at the end of a rickety pier in an out of season seaside resort in our blessed land? It is a pertinent question. But it ignores the decisive role played in the world-famous food-splattered Jesuit’s career by his manager.

“Colonel” Tom Emersonlakeandparker was a rogue and a rascal, and an impresario of genius. It was he who first saw the potential of that pristine black soutane, saw it as a blank slate upon which food could be splattered, and then displayed, as in a tableau vivant, to an adoring public. All he had to do, he realised, was to find the perfect Jesuit, first to do the food-splattering, then to stand still with outstretched arms for ten minutes or so upon a seaside stage. By all accounts, he searched for over six years before finding his man – a man whose name still remains a secret. At the first few appearances, billed as the Food-Splattered Jesuit, the act was a flop. But rather than ditch his choice of Jesuit, which he might easily have done, the “Colonel” instead appended “World-Famous” to his stage name. It was a stroke of genius. Crowds thronged to see a figure who was already – they thought – a legend. They were not disappointed, as who could be? Certainly, in today’s entertainment-saturated world, we fail to register just how impoverished we are. In the era of multi-channel television and YouTube and a populace with the attention span of a gnat, we ought to be crying out, in our millions, for a variety act as spiritually enriching as the world-famous food-splattered Jesuit. Perhaps a young tyro Jesuit with a burning desire to entertain the masses is reading this. He will know what to do.

[A slightly shorter version of this piece appeared in June 2006.]

There is, or may have been, an old superstition that every farmyard has its own fiend. It is said that Beelzebub personally allotted each fiend to its farmyard, and ratcheted up the fiendishness of his dastardly plan by making the fiends extremely hard to identify. So, for example, neighbouring farmyards may have very, very different resident fiends – a pig here, an old rusty iron pail there, a one-legged hen in one farmyard and a big bright red tractor belching smoke in another. Exorcising a farmyard of its fiend is thus fraught with difficulty, for the average countryside exorcist, stepping through the gate of a farmyard for the first time, does not know where to begin to look.

There is great disparity in the fiendishness of farmyard fiends, and some diabolists have argued that Beelzebub treated the whole matter with an uncharacteristic lack of diabolic concentration. For every farmyard that is stricken by an energetic fiend, there are many more that can pass for years, even decades, in untroubled bucolic peace. But of course it is the former that gain attention. Who can forget the ruination visited upon Scroonhoonpooge Farmyard in the 1930s, all those crop failures, diseases, fires, murders, contaminations and inexplicable barn collapses, which ceased only when a marauding night-time squirrel was captured in a net by Father Dermot Boggis and subjected to the full rigour of his holy wrath? It took six months for the exorcist to expel every last vestige of fiendishness from the squirrel, leaving the poor bushy-tailed mammal thin and shrivelled and exhausted and close to death. And yet, as it was slowly revived by the coddling of Old Ma Purgative at her verdant squirrel sanctuary, so too did the farmyard flourish anew, with majestic fields of golden wheat, gleaming new buckets replacing the old rusty pails, and happy, happy pigs.

You would be forgiven for thinking that the taxonomy of farmyard fiends is precisely the kind of subject to which Dobson would have devoted a pamphlet or two. Indeed, Marigold Chew often pressed him to tackle the topic, supplying the out of print pamphleteer with a constant stream of newspaper cuttings about hideous devastations of an agricultural kidney. She was a subscriber to the once popular monthly magazine Glimpses Of Farmyard Ruin, and wrote many letters to the editor, some of which were published and one of which (October 1954) was selected as ‘Letter of the Month’, for which Marigold received a prize. Unfortunately, the prize was a very large hog with a brain disease which went on wild rampages through the house. Mischievously, the editor of the magazine, who had his own farmyard, regularly used the monthly prize to rid himself of his farmyard fiends.

Ah yes, note the plural. What happens, you will ask, when a fiend of the farmyard is identified and destroyed, whether by slaughter, exorcism, or being given away as a prize in a raffle, tombola, or by some other means, as happened with Marigold Chew? Did Scroonhoonpooge Farmyard stay fiend-free once its sinister squirrel had its demons cast out? How attentive was Beelzebub to the welfare of those he had sent to wreak havoc in our bosky rural domains? Were new fiends recruited and trained to carry out various infernal farmyard acts of fiendishness? These and other questions were answered by Father Dermot Boggis himself, in his deathbed ravings, carefully transcribed by his wrinkled old helpmeet, the widow Popsicle. Among the thousands of pages she scribbled, we find this startling passage:

Gaaaa… gaaaa… inexplicable torment of the devil’s long poking fork… his ladle… cataclysm of shuddering abasement in the pit… and when did you last see your potatoes?… gaaaa…. have the fields been hoed?…. I see hundreds of cows… thousands of cows… millions of cows… brutes… the flames of the fiery furnace… a crow on the branch of a dead tree… blasts of lightning… no diesel for the tractor… blight!… blight!… worms eating the flesh of resurrected horses… never resurrect a horse… never… pass me that feeble lamp… puddles of sludge and slop and constant rainfall… forty days and forty nights… flooded fields… the wheat ruined… ergot poisoning… a gruesome figure in the shroud of death… find me a lonely cave… remote from human kind… dark as the midnight grave… and dismal as my mind… gaaaa…

And with that last brief flash of lucidity, the remembered words of John Eccles (c.1688-1735), Father Boggis relapsed into inanity, the verbatim record covering four hundred pages’ worth of the widow Popsicle’s palsied pencil-scrawl. The clue to the farmyard fiends’ damnable resilience is, I think, in that reference to the crow perched on the branch of a dead tree. Think about it. But don’t think too hard, for then all you will see in your mind’s eye is the bird and the branch. You need to let the thought of the crow on the branch of a dead tree flit into your brain, like a swooping bat, and then out again. You need to think of it with the mental equivalent of peripheral vision. You need to try not to think about it, just as Gordon Zellaby tries not to think about the bomb he has planted to kill the Midwich Cuckoos in John Wyndham’s novel of 1957, filmed as Village Of The Damned in 1960, directed by Wolf Rilla and starring George Sanders as the heroic, academic, and terminally ill Zellaby. Wyndham’s fiends are not specifically farmyard fiends, but close enough, close enough. Close enough, too, to little Martin Amis, as can be seen by comparing these two pictures, one of little Mart when tiny, the other a still from the film.

But now the dawn is near. The sun will soon be lighting your path to the far flung fields. Go and till and plough and harrow, feed your horses and your cows and your happy, happy pigs. You may spit upon your farmyard fiend. It will pester you no more. It was only ever a superstition, or it might have been.