In my last post I tried to convey something about the ways in which the substrate of consensus in any country gives rise to characters, some of which conform, others, the more interesting, do not. I began in the place of my birth and early growth, South Africa, where consciousness of its universal opprobrium, led to defiance or attempted remedy. It was prompted by the current case against Israel, because that suggested a coming of age, with the reviled South Africa having the confidence, and world standing to launch an appeal to simple humanity. For we, the apologists for our loyalty and affection, it is a great moment.
The ’substrate of consensus’ is a double-edged sword. Growing up in South Africa, adopting postures of apology for everything, tended to make other, older, wiser countries shine bright, and promise a life of standing up straight. For those of us with some claims of British origins, Britain seemed to exemplify all that South Africa had not yet attained. The beams of its beckoning torch held all the colours of the spectrum. Education was cultured, liberal, and offered wide experiences of culture and ideas. Medicine was simply superior, so that any South African doctor wanting to specialise had to accept exile for the duration of his training. Justice was measured, impartial and laced through with the maturity of late refinements by Law Lords, appeals and cases. Politics and administration were conducted under constraints, fair play, and traditions of minimal oppression, never using a sledgehammer, where a tack hammer would suffice. Its renowned Press was about giving plural voices equal volume and equal time. In short Britain was marinated in traditions of integrity.
I first encountered it in the early sixties. So freeze dried and sparkling fresh were my expectations that they melted slowly. Against all improbability I was appointed first to teach at St Pauls Girl's school, and found it exactly as foretold. Mostly Oxbridge spinsters dedicated to the enlargement of perspectives, saw nothing unusual in spending walking holidays with their senior pupils. Tick. A change of Government made no tangible difference to the life that followed. Tick. Sitting as a witness in a trial I watched a bank of expensive Guardian barristers over-ruled by a hoi-polloi jury to acquit a man wrongly accused of planning to kidnap a girl held captive by a cult. He hadn’t and the jury saw through the eloquence of their bogus allegations. ‘Good on yer mate. Best of luck’ as they filed out. Tick.
So captivated was I by every promise delivered, I wept buckets at the funeral of Churchill and forgot he had been responsible for the death of many of my family. I was glued to regimental extravaganzas and the impeccable Royals, the Last Night of the Proms and Trooping the Colour. All buttressed expectations. Just so.
As I said, freeze dried and brightly enhanced cliches of the perfect confidence of this Old World took a long time to splinter before it cracked. Now, supporting genocide in Israel, it is in tatters.
There were a few cliches over-wrought. Christmas with its frenzied consumption, women doing all the cooking AND the washing up, trees standing to attention and snow delivered as though by dump-truck on Christmas Eve was a small niggle that arose. Always like this? Another was a visit to the Middlesex Hospital with a first pregnancy, to hear gauche, insensitive medical students loudly discuss other patients while waiting for the consultant. Superior medical etiquette? Not exactly.
This baby will take me home and be crooned to sleep on a broad black back.
But it took the adventure of building a home to expose the rot in the state of Denmark. Things were not as impartial or equable as I believed. For perplexing reasons, the simplest application for a converted barn, an extension, even a tool shed engendered fierce opposition from the Council. Endless applications were refused, and I went to appeals of each and won. After winning each, the opposition grew, and involved neighbours drowning out classical concerts by banging pots outside, the local private school tearing down posters. All that civilised tolerance had inexplicably evaporated. The cause? Our wealthy neighbouring farmer wanted our property, and would stop at nothing to ensure he got it. After nine years of litigation over a carefully contrived boundary dispute he did stop. At the door of the Court, and following a spread in Private Eye on their platform of Rotten Borough corruption. The Press remained as good as its promise!
But the scales had fallen.
So much so that when I read of another couple fighting the same Council, I went to talk to them. The following story was their story, although their characters are fictionalised.
I hope you enjoy it. It is people that best reveal the climate of consent
Nuisance Value.
Things looked rather better from the outside. Okay the weeping caravan with its soggy belly was not every woman’s dream home, but hey, a table in the sun on a slope of sunlit grass, with not a neighbour in sight, well who would complain? Alex poured another glass. Wine at ten in the morning in a Mexican long-stemmed ice-blue goblet was just her way of celebrating. They had done it, gone for broke.
They had inherited too, feral cats, and a broken-winded pony, right now struggling to extract the last of the hay from the hanging rope bag. Life was going to be good.
Their hillside was bathed in honey, the long grass and the perimeter of trees hid the ugliness that she knew surrounded her, not just the chalet bungalows but the spitting owners that had driven others out for fear of what might happen. Well horses would happen. They would enjoy the thought of horses, surely? Horses had class and the sound of hooves or the odd neigh could hardly offend. Once the grey block stables were smartened with paint and flower baskets, she and Miguel would start on a modest house that would be invisible. They would all relax and she would invite them over for summer barbecues and chat over the post and rail fencing. Yes sir. At last. Maybe Miguel would recover now there were horses to hope for; maybe his heart would strengthen.
He came to the cardboard door and ducked under the frame. ‘I maka the coffee. You want some?’
‘Okay,’ she said, filling her glass and lighting a cigarette. The thin grey cat pawed at her hand, watching the coiling smoke that lingered in the cold air. Miguel removed the cat and sat beside her, stirring his coffee. The punctured oil drum set upon bricks gave little heat. He felt better this morning but wished he could feel his feet.
‘You think it’s gonna be easy? Hmm a lot of work, for sure.’
‘Since when were we frightened of work? I can’t wait to get started.’
‘We need a truck or better a four-wheel . . .’
‘Yeah, that too . . .’ Alex forgave him. He was never at his best early. She drained the glass and stood up.
‘I’m going into town. Want anything?’
‘No. What about your coffee?’
‘Oh Miguel! Give it a rest. You drink it.’
The car only just turned over. Alex swore and got out, pushing it towards the slope and then jumped in. It juddered down the stony path, kicked in, and she slammed the door. Miguel wished, not for the first time, that Alex could take things slowly. She exhausted him; yet he knew deep down that only her ridiculous optimism kept them going. He looked about. It was a lovely place, something gentle in it, in spite of all the spite. No predecessors had survived; all the others had departed after firecrackers had been thrown at their animals and the fences torn down. Yet here it still was, serene and impervious. He supposed Alex was right, they were lucky to have achieved it.
Miguel only wished he was up to it. The thought of gleaming horses, their intoxicating smell, the discipline of their needs, their soft flickering nostrils was a memory, but a memory of his youth when their stamping vitality was matched by his own. Between his wild Camargue with its lavender and thrift and now, a lifetime on the road with the circus and the disintegration of his body had intervened. What Alex needed was the man he could no longer be.
*
Chairman Mao was late; a rare blessing. Terence the Rat Gill perched on the outside bench and lit another cigarette. Menthol was his bow to the new fascism, about the only one he was prepared to make. The others had already gone in to secure their habitual places, take the new coffee, leave him the cold, and finish off the biscuits. He despised the lot of them, so predictable. He could see them obliquely through the windows: Puffball Gibson, already furthering her claims to chair the Committee for Footpaths and Bridleways, chatting up Weasel Haldane. He’d once seen Puffball bouncing about on her benighted horse with a florescent warning ‘Rider Beware’ on her back, and thought how apt is that? She was the cliché of scrubbed country health, ruddy cheeked and as subtle as her foghorn syllables, stretched like her size-twenty jeans. The Vole was trying to escape Ethel the Tank, bent upon getting him to volunteer as first port of call for Community Relations. The Vole had as much skill at relations as any fifty-year-old alcoholic living with his mother.
Here came the Three Monkeys, who had been lassoed like a special offer (buy two get one free) to vote with Mao on every decision. They filed up the path to the Wednesday monthly meeting just as they shuffled in to the Masonic Lodge on a Tuesday, pocketing their keys and jiggling coins. They were so myopic they did not even see to greet him. What on earth was he still doing among these nonentities?
The Rat spent half his life reading the Minutes, and the hours deliberating what he might do instead. Somehow the Minutes always overtook the hours.
Someone had once suggested he should read on the radio. ‘You’ve got the voice of a literary critic.’ After initially feeling flattered he wondered what the man had meant. Was it the sonorous throat alone, the legacy of his lifelong affair with tobacco, or the natural inflexions of erudition? The thought that the latter might be cultivated had sharpened his concentration on brevity, his aptitude for the précis. After the rambling incoherence of what passed for opinion, he would flick on his light and Mao would let him loose on the summaries. Decisions had already been agreed. It was his role to make them both inevitable and palatable. After boredom and exhaustion had softened them up, they voted unanimously and each thought theirs was the considered judgement. Worked a treat.
Except for Martha Ridgeway, who suspected manipulation but couldn’t quite put her finger on it. She was sometimes contrary and voted against the stream, which irritated Mao, who liked unanimous decisions with hospital corners. Martha alone retained her own name, as a Martha would; too busy in the local surgery to give real devotion to the Public Good. She had made little contribution to the Planning Committee’s success in boarding up villages, closing down post offices, and the construction of uniform ‘starter homes’ in dismal cul-de-sacs. The developers went on developing and For Sale signs simply changed their colours as estate agents replaced one another. Mao was the undisputed ringmaster of this revolving circus, but unlike the others, who basked in the sun of self-esteem, the Rat gnawed at the irrelevance of it all. Where was the fun in certainty?
He followed the Monkeys in, and took his time getting coffee. Mao was seated with eager Denise, the new Planning Secretary, who had been drafted in to replace Sharon, summarily sacked for contradicting. Denise kept a straight face, giving Mao dutiful attention, while he rifled through notes. Then Mao sat up and tapped a pencil for silence.
‘Oi’d loike y’all to listen up, afore they public gets admission, on a matter prevailing . . .’ Mao’s new taste for long words was becoming unruly. ‘Tis come to my attention that there’s been laxative on the question of mobile homes. We’s not about to put up with it. Allow one and soon’s they’s all popping up and Enforcement is run off its feet. Oi proposes a new helpline to encourage people to report any new mobile, caravan, shepherd’s hut . . .’
‘Spying?’ said Martha switching on her desk light.
‘Who said nothing about spying Martha? Tis information relative to everybody’s welfare. Travellers drains the public purse and we’s all got to answer to them.’
The Three Monkeys nodded. Of course mobile homes meant people getting away with things, like breathing air and washing lines naked with knickers.
Funding for the new helpline was carried with one abstention. Enforcement would now indeed be run off its feet. The Rat knew that policies claiming to be in the public interest never were. This was up close and personal. Who was Mao after?
The usual planning supplicants were summoned by Mao to ‘Approach the Members’ (he’d have preferred ‘the Bench’) ‘if you please, we’s want to hear what y’ave to say’ and ignored for their allotted three minutes of mumbling, after which ‘the Tank’ retreaded arguments about creating precedents until the slurry of slippery slopes gave no purchase. Solid ground was regained by reaching for the rope and voting ‘No.’ The supplicants were consoled by an invitation to amend (‘think car port not garridge’) and reapply (‘tis a reduced fee if you’s quick with it’) and joined their supporters, pulling faces. In short, a meeting like all the others; nothing unusual except to wait for revelation.
Mao cornered the Rat, who had pretended to be on his way out.
‘A word, Terence, no more’n a word . . .’ Mao led him upstairs to the deserted lobby. ‘Tis said that there’s people bought the Stables . . . not only bought but moved in . . .’ He waited for the Rat, who tapped an unlit cigarette on his fingernail. ‘How did that happen?’ Anything that displeased Mao was the Rat’s fault.
‘Presumably they had the money.’
‘Tis ’relevant how’s they got it. They’s got to be got out.’ Mao was waiting for contrition.
‘If they, whoever they are, hold legal title through purchase, there’s nothing we can do or . . .’ Rat added severely, ‘should do.’ He was going to make Mao spell it out, and crawl, if he could. ‘I assume you’re exercised about a mobile home, but if it’s on their own land, that has consent for the Stables to be used, and for a house to be built. Temporary housing is permitted during building: end of.’
‘Tis only the beginning. Not end of nothing. There’s got to be a legalty we’s can apply. Oi’m asking you to find it. Look through past plannin and find conditions. Then find conditions they hasn’t complied with. Nail them.’
‘Bit hard,’ said the Rat, ‘any conditions should have been complied with years ago. It’s hardly the new owners’ fault. Anyway, why such interest in the old Stables? You going in for horse breeding?’ The Rat’s usual restraint was impaired by his urgent need for a fag.
‘Don’t come that with me,’ said Mao. ‘You know only too well our plans for that site. Tis for the new School but we’s can’t move on that until the Stables are dead in the water. We’s gotta keep them occupied, however we does it, which means enforcement, enforcement, enforcement till they’ll be happy to find someplace else. When plannin’s lapsed we move on cheap compulsory purchase for the school and sell off the present school site for building . . . and balance the books . . . it’s lookin bad for the next lection, you of all people should know that.’
‘I’ll see what I can do,’ said the Rat, moving to the door.
‘Tis sensible and we all know it,’ Mao called after him.
Tis lucrative too, thought the Rat. Mao would no doubt trouser a packet, thought the Rat, gaining the safety of his car.
*
The postman was unsure. A delivery to ‘The Stables’ seemed unlikely, but as it was clearly official and needed a signature, he had no choice but to abandon his bicycle, and slog up the hill. The stable was empty; in the gloom he found nothing but a hanging harness and a mouldy saddle. The manure was so dried and old it would need breaking. From inside the caravan, he heard movement; the door was opened by a woman still crumpled by sleep.
‘Need a signature, recorded delivery,’ he said.
‘Good heavens a letter, already,’ she said, pleased. He proffered a pencil; she initialled his form. ‘Want a coffee?’ she offered . . .
‘No thanks ma’am.’ He shouldered his bag. She watched him for a moment before opening the letter. ‘Oh, jeez the bastards!’ he heard as he mounted and rode away. ‘It’s the bloody Council, already,’ said Alex, taking Miguel his pills and a glass of water.
‘They call?’
‘No, they wrote. Some petty matter to do with the access apparently, a ’splay for visibility’ and something called an ‘upstand’ for drainage. But they are threatening straight off. I’ll show them a fucking upstand. Bet the neighbours have got onto them . . .’
‘Alex please! If we do what they want, they musta shut up,’ said Miguel, re-roping his pyjamas and shuffling to the loo.
‘Sod that,’ said Alex, ‘if it should have been done by Robert, and he used the access for six years without doing it, it doesn’t need to be done. They’re trying to frighten us. I’ll find a reason why it cannot be done,’ she said.
‘If we say okay, they hava no argument.’
‘Except another threat.’ She re-examined the letter, reading with an arm in the Nazi salute. ‘Unless the required conditions of Paras eight a and nine b are satisfactorily completed within four weeks, we will have no alternative but to issue a court summons . . . ‘ Jawöhl . . .’ she clicked her heels. ‘If we say okay to those, what follows? Paras one to five, one at a time. No. We take a stand. If Robert could use the access we can. We’ll ignore it.’
Miguel knew there was no point arguing. He buttoned up a thick plaid shirt, and went out to be consoled by the pony, whose warm breath and sweet smell calmed him. The low morning light rose like smoke from the night grass. Why couldn’t Alex ever surrender, just let it go? How much could an upstand, whatever it was, cost? Curtis from the Builders Merchants would probably spare a Saturday. Even while he thought about it, he knew Alex would refuse. The pony thought so too, stamping his foreleg and running a nose down his shin. Miguel shook out hay and leant over the animal’s back. In the distance on the racecourse a line of figures was pacing between the rails; jockeys probably, walking the course, which must mean a race meeting later.
*
As an ex-yeoman, Chairman Mao believed in the two-prong fork. His farming associates, though slow, often proved useful. When he ran into Freddie Beale in the White Hart another line of attack opened like the Red Sea. Freddie had forty sheep that he’d expected to slaughter. The rumours of foot and mouth had closed the abattoirs, so forty sheep needed grazing. Meanwhile he had a flock in Wales needing his attention.
‘Oi knows jus the place,’ said Mao, ‘could be doing others a favour likewise. They’s got grass growing like no tomorrow on a hill so steep it needs rope and pitons . . . no ways of cutting it. Your sheep’s just what’s needed. Don’t say I said, mind.’ Freddie was grateful and owed Mao one.
Alex could see no reason why not. Miguel thought animals, whatever the species, improved the quality of life. Forty sheep were driven off the back of the truck, and lost themselves on a hillside of bright light, watched by the pony and the cats.
A week later another recorded delivery arrived from Department of Agriculture. Could the Manresas please forward their licence to keep sheep? If no licence was provided the sheep were to be moved within twenty-four hours, failing which a fine of five hundred pounds would be payable. Unfortunately, Freddie Beale was in Wales, not available to produce a licence, or move sheep.
‘I’ll just let the bloody things wander into town,’ said Alex, ‘that way they become a public nuisance and somebody else can round them up.’
‘The nuisance is going to be you,’ said Miguel. ‘You leave message instead. I donta watch sheep run over, not even for you.’
By the time Alex had mastered the small print, and four letters were exchanged with Head Office, which conceded reluctantly that it was the owner not the grazier who needed the licence, the Court summons for the failure to construct an upstand had been served. The illicit keeping of sheep during a health scare would be a useful indicator to the Judge of what kind of socially irresponsible people he was dealing with. Just in case he was minded to be forgiving.
On the day of the Court hearing Miguel could not get out of bed. His shallow breathing made him unable to swallow without choking; he needed support to stagger to the loo. Alex hid her alarm. This had happened before. Having to leave him alone was what frightened her. She telephoned the Court from the call box, and explained that her husband was ill.
‘But you’re not ill yourself?’ asked the Clerk.
‘No.’
‘Well then you must appear, even if only to ask for an adjournment.’
The circuit Judge was not disposed to grant an adjournment, or to believe trumped-up excuses. He would delay the hearing; Miguel would be fetched. The police were dispatched to bring him to Court while Alex sat outside with a paper cup of coffee and a cigarette. Chalfont, the Duty Solicitor, had been telephoned and asked to appear, which he did irritably, leaving his preparation of a brief for later. Really these people who needed a Duty Solicitor were all the same, time wasters. After glancing at the charge, he joined Alex in the sun. You could see by looking at her she had no case.
‘Look,’ he said, ‘when your husband arrives just plead guilty. You’ll get a fine which you can agree to pay off over time . . .’
‘But we’re not guilty.’
‘You haven’t built this upstand, have you? Or am I wrong?’
‘We can’t build it, even if we wanted to,’ she said, lighting another cigarette, which annoyed him.
‘Why not?’
‘Because it’s on the highway verge, and a condition of construction is the insurance. It has to be insured for five million in case someone trips or breaks their neck, we should be so lucky. No insurance company will cover construction on land we do not own. It’s just not doable.’
Chalfont looked at her severely. ‘Mrs Manresa, what you’re telling me is that every condition of this nature, on the public highway, I mean throughout the country, is not doable within the regulations?’
‘That’s right,’ she said.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘forgive me but I find that hard to believe. It would have been challenged long ago.’
‘Perhaps this is your big chance to make legal history,’ she said, standing up. The police car was approaching. She was scanning for sight of Miguel, conspicuously absent. The police got out and entered the Court, followed by Alex and Chalfont. The Clerk took the police aside, and after a few words called the Judge, who emerged brushing biscuit crumbs from his gown. The Judge spoke to the Clerk and then summoned Chalfont to his room. It was from Chalfont that Alex heard that Miguel had been rushed to hospital; he was on life support in intensive care.
‘Look Mrs Manresa, see reason here. Is this worth your husband’s health? The Judge has agreed to waive all charges on your husband in return for a plea of guilty from you. Be reasonable, for his sake.’
Alex was reasonable and pleaded guilty. A fine of two thousand pounds and the payment of the Council’s costs would discharge her obligations. Chalfont, relieved, returned to his brief and the police gave Alex a lift to the hospital.
Miguel was discharged a month later to wait for a heart transplant. Owing to his severe diabetes he was not ranked a priority. Martha in the surgery saw him weekly to dress the sores that had developed on his legs.
Alex attempted to find a solicitor who would challenge a plea made under duress. Some were sympathetic until they discovered where she lived. ‘Oh, those stables! We’ve all been involved with those stables. We would like to help but there’s a problem with conflict of interests . . . unfortunate . . . but there it is. I’d just pay the fine if I were you . . .’
The next letter from Enforcement concerned the illegal presence of a mobile home. The Court summons that followed was like Monopoly; now three charges squatted to extract passing penalties; the failure to produce an upstand, the failure to pay the first fine, and the failure to move the collapsing mobile home. The planning consent for anything at all was close to expiry. A hasty application to extend time was swotted away by Mao. ‘Oi’ll let you explain the imperilments Terence,’ he said to the Rat, who made his plea eloquently sympathetic: the unlikelihood that such people could ever start a viable business, let alone racehorses needing constant care. It was inhumane to let them continue. For everybody’s sake they should be relieved of their illusions.
Martha put in a small protest. ‘But the husband is very ill . . . surely . . .’
The Rat jumped in. ‘My point precisely Martha. He’s ill, she drinks. It’s over. Let’s move on.’ Having stripped the Stables of any value, Mao could leave the rest to the Mortgage Company, whose initial loan legal costs and fines had more than doubled. Repossession would be a quick and painless end for everybody.
Two months later the Bailiffs evicted the Manresas and demolished the mobile home. They were driven off by a social worker who refused Alex’s offer of a glass of Cava and had to ignore her feet waving to pedestrians through the rear window. The pony went to the knackers’ yard, and the cats disappeared to try their luck elsewhere.
Chairman Mao relaxed, and started oiling the pieces that would dovetail together for the new school. He took his time; time he had. Nobody was going to buy a sea of grass that could not be occupied or used, not for the cost of the punitive debt. To Mao the debt was small beer. The Rat, aware of Mao’s impatience, reminded him of the need for self-control.
‘Remember if you move on it while they’re still in the area, they could lay a charge of administrative theft . . . watch yourself.’
‘Get real Terence. They’s got nothing to lay charges with. No lawyer will touch ’em without fees.’
The thought of down-an-outs laying a charge of any kind against his committee made Mao attempt to smile, but he gave some heed to the Rat, who was nothing if not sharp. After a few weeks living in social accommodation Alex and Miguel were homeless on the streets of the local town. They carried their possessions in plastic bags and had established a pitch behind the recycling bins after dark. Days were spent wandering from bench to bench, and rerolling stubs near the church. Over a melamine table in the back of a greasy spoon Alex spotted a TV news report of others like themselves. A group of travellers were being evicted from a farmer’s field. They had fought unsuccessfully to stay and were to be moved on, to the jubilant delight of the locals, whose jeering mouths shouted at the cameraman recording their victory.
Alex had a sudden idea. ‘Can you occupy yourself for awhile?’ she asked Miguel, who was absorbed in squeezing a tea bag between two spoons to strengthen a second cup.
‘God now Alex, what?’ He hardly raised his head.
‘Just an idea,’ she said. ‘See you back at the squat.’
The travellers were suspicious. Anybody approaching was likely to be a trap; reporters were bad enough, do-gooders were worse. ‘What d’you want?’ asked the Headman, whose dreadlocks were tied in a red bandanna. The others huddled within earshot.
‘I’ve got an idea,’ said Alex, facing him down.
‘Yeah, haven’t we all, tell me about it.’ His flint-blue eyes didn’t flicker.
‘I will if you give me a cigarette and a coffee,’ she said, placing her carrier bag on the grass and taking a seat on a log. Children ran off.
‘This isn’t a roadhouse,’ he said, but he was impressed and signalled to a woman, who disappeared. He rolled a cigarette himself, and handed it to Alex. By the time the coffee appeared he was seated with her looking at papers.
‘So why would you want to help us?’ he asked
‘Well, in the report it said you had some money.’
‘Enough to buy a field, not enough for what your sort call property,’ he said, turning over the pages with a dirty thumb.
‘What I now own is a field,’ Alex said. ‘The Council waved a wand and turned a carriage into a pumpkin. If you can pay the debt on it, you can all have it. I’ll make it over to you. You’ll have to pay the conveyancing fees but nothing else, because there is nothing else, no surveys, no stamps, a virgin agricultural field.’
‘How does that help?’ he asked. ‘They’ll move us on, just as they’re going to now.’
‘The difference will be that it’ll be your field.’
‘Not one we can live on, not legally,’ he said.
Alex explained. Months of fighting the Council had marinated her pickled faculties in enough regulations to spice beef. ‘You realise anybody can use anything for twenty-eight days a year without any planning consent?’
‘Yeah,’ he said cautiously.
‘Well, divide up three acres into quarter acre plots. You then have twelve small fields, right? One for each month of the year, like an advent calendar? You put each into different ownership and peg the boundaries.’
Light was beginning to relax his features. His cadaverous missus with a baby on her hip was standing behind him, looking at the map.
‘So, you live on one for twenty-eight days, and then you move to another. They won’t be able to touch you. Every time you’re evicted you move a square across and they have to wait twenty-eight days before they do it again. They’ll have a job finding out who owns what to serve the notices to start with. You just have to shunt a few yards once a month . . . and the merry-goes-round and round for ever.’
He slapped his hands together. ‘Brilliant. Fucking brilliant.’
‘And the other thing,’ said Alex, ‘there’s already a stable, with drainage. Put in loos and showers and they can’t even claim you’re a health hazard. You don’t need planning for internal alterations . . .’
He paused, looking at Alex in silence. ‘What I don’t get is why you’re doing this. Why should you give us the chance?’ We’re nothing to you . . .’
‘On the contrary’ Alex said, ‘you’re our champions, saving us as well. If we have nothing to live on and nowhere to go, they will have to house and feed us forever. My husband is so ill they have to. Either I give it to you and screw the Council, or they’ll have it for nothing. Which would you rather?’
‘When do you need the money?’ he asked.
‘Gotta move sharpish. Tomorrow?’
‘Deal,’ he said.
The arrival of eight caravans, some with horses, spelt the beginning of the end of Chairman Mao, who retired to the seaside, where he kicks down sandcastles before the tide can lick them smooth.
The ill wind blew a number of people good. The Council never did balance the books, so are inviting voluntary redundancies. The Rat was offered the Chairmanship, and since nothing else had occurred to him, he accepted. His photograph is now in every edition of the local paper with his pithy sobriquets candled between quotation marks. Ethel the Tank retired to arrange her precedents in a vase on her windowsill. Now the Rat can make the same decisions, but rather more quickly. Targets on construction of unoccupied housing, sorting out categories of landfill, bollarding the country with signs, and post office closures are being exceeded; the exemplary Council now merits an A star rating.
The travelers have started their own school in a vacant caravan, so nobody needs to be polite to them except the librarian and the swimming pool attendant who watches their towels. Their piebald horses with thick manes and long tails greet children with carrots and find the grass on the agricultural site sweet and plentiful in summer.
As for Alex and Miguel, they have been housed in an adapted bungalow with grab rails and a walk-in shower. What with a free roof, unemployment benefit, plus carer and disabled allowances, they can drink enough Spanish wine to forget most of the time. Their surrender has turned every man-jack taxpayer into charitable donor, so spreading the benefits of their dependency. On the whole they find their elderly neighbours friendly; vegetables from the allotments are often left on their doorstep.
Miguel does still miss the pony, and occasionally Alex mentions the cats.