Mr Ape, page 3
‘Don’t mind,’ Ape said.
‘How many would you like?’ asked the man and, for the third time, Ape said, ‘We’ll have the lot.’
‘But, Mr Ape,’ said Jake for the third time, while the man was putting the animals into boxes, ‘you haven’t asked him how much the rabbits and the guinea-pigs are. Surely you want to know.’
‘I’m not bothered,’ said Ape.
‘How will you manage, sir?’ the man asked, looking at the sixteen cardboard carrying-boxes.
‘We’ll stick ’em in the car,’ said Ape. ‘Back in five minutes,’ and in five minutes’ time the owner of the pet shop, for the first and only time in his life, found himself loading four rabbits and twelve guinea-pigs into a Rolls-Royce Silver Ghost.
Back home at Penny Royal, Joe helped to carry the boxes in. On Ape’s instructions he had already spread a good layer of sawdust all over the dining-room floor and put food ready, and now the three of them stood and watched as the rabbits hopped, silently, and the guinea-pigs ran, squeaking, about the place. Despite Columbine’s best efforts there were still masses of vegetables in the kitchen garden, and soon the new arrivals settled down to feast on a heap of cabbage and carrots. The jackdaw was already much stronger and greeted them with loud squawks.
‘Lovely, aren’t they, Joe, don’t you think?’ said Ape.
The gypsy shook his head, smiling. ‘Hens in your drawing room, now rabbits and guinea-pigs and a jackdaw in your dining room! Whatever next, Mr Ape?’
‘To tell the truth, Joe,’ said Ape, ‘I’m thinking about using the music room next. It would be the proper place, it seems to me.’
‘The music room? What for?’
‘You heard them in the pet shop, didn’t you, Jake?’ said Ape. ‘Singing beautifully, they were. I always fancied keeping some canaries.’
CHAPTER 5
Ape Has a Birthday
Ape and Joe and Jake stood in the music room, looking around. It was a small room by the standards of Penny Royal, at one corner of the house. Thus it had two large windows, one at each side of the right angle, and was very light.
‘Why’s it called the music room, Mr Ape?’ Jake asked. ‘Was there a piano in here?’
‘No,’ said Ape. ‘The piano was in the drawing room.’
‘Oh,’ said Jake. ‘Well, if they made music in the drawing room, what did they do in the music room – draw?’
Ape laughed. ‘Actually,’ he said, ‘my wife fancied herself as a harpist. She used to play her harp in here.’
‘Like the angels do, in Heaven?’
‘Don’t know about that,’ said Ape. ‘I thought she made a devilish noise. Canaries will sound much sweeter.’
Joe looked round the bare room. ‘They’ll need somewhere to perch, Mr Ape,’ he said.
‘So they will. Pity that old harp’s gone. We could have rigged it up on its side and then they could have perched on the strings.’
‘Begging your pardon, Mr Ape,’ said Joe, ‘but that would never have done. My father always had a canary in his caravan, and I remember him telling me about perches. People give them much too narrow ones, he said, no thicker than a pencil, and that leads to cramp and sore feet and sometimes even broken joints. A canary’s perch, he said, must never be less than a centimetre wide.’
‘Let’s go up into the attics,’ Ape said, ‘and see what we can find. When I sold the contents of the house, I never bothered with all the junk that’s up there.’
In the attics Jake’s sharp eyes caught sight of something in amongst the rolls of old carpet and oddments of furniture. It was a bag of golf-clubs, and stencilled on the pocket were the initials ‘A.P.E.S-R.’ A narrow old-fashioned bag it was, and in it was a set of nine wooden-shafted clubs.
‘These would do for perches, wouldn’t they, Mr Ape?’ Jake said.
‘Golly whiskers!’ cried Ape. ‘My first clubs that I had when I was a boy!’
He pulled them out one by one, naming them as he did so by the old names by which they had been known in his young days: ‘Driver, brassie, baffy, mid-iron, mashie, mashie-niblick, jigger, niblick and putter,’ he said.
He gauged the width of a shaft between finger and thumb. ‘One centimetre!’ he said.
So it was that by the time, that afternoon, that Ape and Jake returned from a second expedition to the pet shop, Joe had the music room ready.
He had fixed several lengths of strong twine across the room from one picture-rail to the opposite one. From these each of the golf-clubs was suspended by a long string fastened to either end of it, like a trapeze. Each club had been hung at a slightly different height, and each made a perfect perch for the six canaries which Ape had bought.
Ferreting about in the attics, Joe had found a box full of old kitchen junk and had taken from it saucers and bowls – for seed and for water. He had also filled an empty biscuit-tin to act as a bath – ‘I remember,’ he said, ‘that father’s canaries used to love to have a bath.’
Round and round the music room the six birds flew, chirruping to each other with joy at this newfound freedom, and before long two of them actually pitched on one of the golf-clubs (the putter, it was). They perched there, side by side, their little feet gripping the hickory shaft comfortably. Their combined weight, tiny though it was, was just enough to set the trapeze swinging gently.
‘Perfect!’ said Ape. ‘Wizard idea of yours, Jake; and Joe, you’ve fixed it all up beautifully. Fancy those old clubs coming in so useful. I was given them for my twelfth birthday, I remember.’
‘When is your birthday, Mr Ape?’ asked Jake. ‘The twenty-sixth of August.’
‘That’s tomorrow!’ said Joe.
‘Is it?’ said Ape. ‘Is it really? Well, well! I tend to forget about birthdays at my time of life. My family never seemed to remember mine anyway. But I’ll tell you what. This year I feel like celebrating it. Come to tea, both of you.’
‘You come to us, Mr Ape,’ said Joe. ‘Come and have your birthday party in the caravan.’
‘Oh, yes, thanks. What fun!’ said Ape. ‘But only if you’ll let me bring all the grub.’
Early next morning Ape went to the door in dressing gown and slippers to answer the postman’s knock.
‘Morning, Mr Spring-Russell,’ the postman said. ‘And a beautiful morning it is too.’
‘It is, by Jove!’ said Ape.
He did not say it was his birthday, though later he did examine the post more carefully than usual. But no-one had sent him so much as a card. However, it seemed to him that his canaries were singing even more tunefully than ever in the music room, that in the dining room his rabbits were hopping more happily, his guinea-pigs chattering more cheerfully and the jackdaw squawking more raucously, and what’s more, as though to celebrate the occasion, every single one of his twelve hens in the drawing room had already laid him a beautiful brown birthday egg.
After scrambling some for his breakfast in bed, he dressed in his usual clothes, and drove into town in the Rolls to buy what he needed for the party.
‘There ought to be a birthday cake, I suppose,’ he said as he drove along (never exceeding thirty m.p.h. – he did not approve of speeding). ‘But I shan’t bother with candles – I’d need too many. And I’ll jolly well have my favourite sort – a great big lardy-cake, all lovely and greasy and full of sultanas and currants.’
Once in the supermarket, Ape filled his trolley with exactly the things that small children like best (because they happened to be the things he liked best too).
To drink, he bought Coke and 7-Up and Lilt, and to eat, he bought Jammy Dodgers and Wagon Wheels and Penguins and Jaffa Cakes and Twix and Chocolate Fingers, and, of course, the lardy-cake.
At teatime Ape drove the Rolls up to the common and they all carried the food into the caravan.
Inside, Ape heard little squeaking noises coming from the basket in which Swift was lying. He looked at Joe and Jake, his eyebrows raised questioningly.
‘Yes,’ said Joe. ‘She whelped this morning.’
‘Look, Mr Ape,’ said Jake, and there beside the lurcher bitch were four tiny puppies.
When at last he could eat no more, Ape sat back and patted his tummy. ‘That was good!’ he said.
He saw Joe look at Jake and nod, and then Jake said, ‘We’ve got a present for you, Mr Ape, but you can’t have it yet.’
‘Oh lawks!’ said Ape. ‘I didn’t expect a present.’
‘You’ll have to wait a good few weeks,’ said Joe.
Ape frowned, puzzled.
‘It has to stay with its mother for now,’ said Jake.
The penny dropped. Ape’s frown turned into a huge grin and he pointed at the basket in the corner of the caravan. ‘D’you mean …?’ he began.
‘We’d like you to have the pick of the litter, Mr Ape,’ said Joe.
CHAPTER 6
Ape Gets Nice Surprises
That night Ape found it hard to get to sleep in the big four-poster bed in the kitchen. He was so excited.
When young, he had never had a dog of his own, and once Mrs Spring-Russell came on the scene, there was no chance of his having one. Now – or at any rate in a couple of weeks – he would be the proud owner of the pick of Swift’s litter!
‘I wonder which one I’ll choose,’ he said. ‘And what shall I call it? Depends whether I have a dog or a bitch, I suppose. Which shall I have? By Jove, what fun it all is!’
When at last he stopped talking to himself, his last thought before he fell asleep was that of all his seventy-five birthdays, this one had been the nicest.
Ten days or so later, something else happened that took his mind off the puppies.
It was Jake who noticed it first. Because he was so good with the animals, Ape let him help with the care of the hens, and the rabbits and guinea-pigs, and the canaries.
One morning a few days before he was due to start at the village school, Jake came out of the dining room and ran across the hall and down the passage to the kitchen. ‘Mr Ape! Mr Ape!’ he called excitedly. ‘The spotty one’s plucking!’
Ape turned round from the sink, where he was washing up the breakfast things (he’d had fish-fingers and baked beans and cheese-and-onion flavoured crisps, a mixture of which he was very fond). ‘Plucking?’ he said. ‘Spotty one? What on earth are you talking about, Jake?’
‘The rabbit!’ Jake said. ‘The spotty doe. She’s plucking the fur from under her chin and off her chest, to make a nest. She’s going to have babies soon.’
‘Golly whiskers!’ said Ape. ‘She would be, wouldn’t she? They must have been here nearly a month now.’
‘You’ll have to move her, Mr Ape,’ said Jake, ‘and the other two does as well. They can’t stay in there with the buck and all the guinea-pigs and the jackdaw, and anyway there’s nowhere for them to make their nests. They can’t just have their babies in the middle of the dining-room floor. Where can we put them?’
Ape thought. ‘Got it!’ he said. ‘In the butler’s pantry. That’s the place! Not too big, nice and snug, and there’s a row of cupboards all along one wall at floor level – where the silver was kept. Open the doors of those, and they can each choose one.’
‘They’ll need some stuff to make their nests with,’ said Jake. ‘As well as their own fur, I mean. Some nice soft hay.’
‘Of course, of course,’ said Ape. ‘Come on, let’s move them straight away.’
So they did.
In the butler’s pantry the three does, the spotty, the grey and the black, hopped curiously about, noses working, and before long the spotty doe picked up a mouthful of hay and carried it into one of the open cupboards.
‘We shall have lots of rabbits soon, shan’t we, Mr Ape?’ said Jake.
‘Yes,’ said Ape, ‘and lots of guinea-pigs too. I suppose we’d better start thinking about them.’
‘No hurry,’ said Jake. ‘Rabbits take thirty-one days to have babies, but I expect you remember that guinea-pigs take more like seventy. Because their babies are born with their fur on and their eyes open and they start eating almost straight away. We needn’t worry about the guinea-pigs yet.’
‘Of course,’ said Ape. ‘I remember now. Gosh, Jake, I don’t know what I’d do without you.’
A couple of days later the rabbit population of Penny Royal trebled, as the spotty doe gave birth to eight babies in the butler’s pantry, and by then both the black and the grey doe had each chosen a cupboard and were plucking.
All this excitement kept Ape from going to see the puppies, and then, just when he had determined he would go up to the common the very next day, something else happened.
It had become the custom for Joe and Jake, at the end of each working day, to come into the kitchen for tea and biscuits.
‘Well, Jake,’ said Ape as he dunked a biscuit (RichTea – six seconds), ‘it’s a special day for you tomorrow, eh? Starting school, aren’t you?’
Jake nodded.
‘It might be a special day for someone else too, Mr Ape,’ said Joe.
‘Who?’
‘Columbine. Looks like she might foal tonight. If it’s all right by you, I’ll bring her into the stables, and Jake and I will stay with her. She might need help.’
‘Of course, of course,’ said Ape. ‘I’ll come down later to see how it’s going.’
When Ape came back again, he found that Joe had bedded Columbine down in a loose-box. ‘Anything happening?’ he asked.
‘She’ll be a while yet, Mr Ape,’ said the gypsy. ‘I’ll wait up with you.’
‘No need. I’ll come and tell you when she foals.’
‘No, no, I wouldn’t miss this for the world,’ said Ape. ‘Tell you what, I’ll go and make us a thermos of cocoa and some sandwiches. Spam all right?’
The cocoa drunk, the sandwiches eaten, the three of them sat side by side on a bale of straw, their backs against the wall, waiting and watching.
Try as he would, Jake could not keep his eyes open. He fell asleep leaning against his father. The hours passed, and the old man, like the boy, could not stay awake and his chin dropped upon his chest. When he woke again, it was to see Joe and Jake kneeling beside something that lay in the bedding of the box, something small and blackish and wet that was making little snorting gasping noises as its mother licked it.
As Ape levered himself to his feet, the gypsy looked up, smiling. ‘A filly foal!’ he said.
Awkwardly, for his old joints were stiff, Ape lowered himself to his knees beside the newborn child. ‘Shall you keep her, Joe?’ he asked softly.
‘No, Mr Ape. When she’s old enough, I shall sell her.’
‘To me?’
‘If you like.’
CHAPTER 7
Ape Does a Deal
Not until the donkey foal had managed – after several unsuccessful attempts – to get to its feet could Ape drag himself away from the sight of this new arrival at Penny Royal, so that dawn was breaking as he walked up from the stables to the house.
As he crossed the hall on his way to the kitchen, a hen in the drawing room announced the laying of an early egg, while in the music room a canary sang its first song of the day. Hearing his footsteps on the great tiled floor of the hall, all the guinea-pigs in the dining room began a squealing that said plainly, ‘Bring us breakfast!’ but Ape was too tired to do more than take off his jacket and pull off his boots before dropping onto his bed.
It was past eleven when he woke again, he saw by the kitchen clock, and his first thought was that he had fed none of his animals. ‘Ah, but Jake will have seen to them all!’ he said with relief.
Only then did he remember that Jake was now at school.
When at last he had tended to his livestock (increased yet again, for the grey doe had produced six babies in the butler’s pantry), Ape set about getting himself some lunchtime breakfast. Because it was so late, he did not have it in bed but sat at the kitchen table, eating rice crispies and squashed-up banana and raspberry yoghurt, all stirred together.
‘How I shall miss that boy when the Harts move on,’ he said with his mouth full. ‘I hadn’t realized how much he has to do each day; and now there’ll be more to do – another lot of little rabbits from the black doe soon, and masses of baby guinea-pigs before long. At least the hens can’t produce anything because I haven’t got a cockerel, but the canaries probably will. And before you can say Jack Robinson, the puppy will be here. And, of course, there’s the baby donkey – I must be sure and give Joe a good price for her when the time comes. Don’t know what I’ll do without him either. Still, thank goodness Jake has gone to school – that should keep them here.’
Later that afternoon Ape was standing in the loose-box, feeding an apple to Columbine and telling her how beautiful her daughter was, when Joe and Jake came in.
‘I took a few hours off to get some sleep, Mr Ape,’ Joe said. ‘After I’d seen to Billy.’
‘Quite right,’ said Ape. ‘What d’you think of the foal, Jake?’
‘She’s beautiful,’ said Jake.
‘Just what I was telling Columbine. How did you like your first day at a new school?’
‘It was all right, Mr Ape,’ Jake said.
‘He got into a fight,’ said his father, ‘with one of the big boys.’
‘Really?’ said Ape. He took Jake by the shoulders and turned him round to look at him. ‘Can’t see any cuts or bruises,’ he said.
‘No,’ said Joe, ‘but the other boy’s got a lovely black eye, a proper shiner.’
‘He called me names, Mr Ape,’ said Jake.
‘What like?’
‘He said we were dirty gyppos.’
‘I bet he won’t say that again in a hurry,’ said Ape.
Quietly, while the boy was talking to the donkey, Joe said to Ape, ‘It’s the best thing that could have happened really. They’re a nice lot of kids at that school – there’s just this one that’s a bit of a bully. I don’t think he’ll mess with Jake any more. The headteacher was very good about it all, pleased in fact, if you ask me. This other boy has quite a name for throwing his weight about.’
