The Day Gone By Read Free Page B

rhododendrons and begonias) and hadn’t much time for Canterbury Bells, gladioli (they were all pink in those days) or forget-me-nots. It was wallflowers for me, night-scented stock, lilac, viburnum, chrysanthemums, blue lupins on a hot afternoon: and above all, the scent of the Siberian crab-apple in bloom. It is the literal truth that I am half-afraid to smell one now, for it turns my heart over and makes me want to weep for Bull Banks. Bull Banks is gone, for ever. After the war, and long after we had sold the house, the house was pulled down. The whole place was built over. The former garden - even the great oak trees were felled - is now the site of twenty-two small dwellings.
    The other insects that got killed were wasps; and this was serious stuff. By August they had nearly always become a nasty nuisance. The lesser part of the campaign consisted of the cook - no, I must say ‘Cook’, for she was never called anything else and to this day I don’t know her name - resorting to the traditional wasp-trap of jam and diluted beer in glass jars hung up outside the back door. Into these the wasps fell, struggled and drowned. I thought it cruel then and I think so now; the wasps swam a long time. Anyway, I believe the traps attracted more wasps than would otherwise have come to the kitchen. ‘But what else you goin’ to do, Mas’ Richard?’
    There was a lot. My father was a nailer at tracking down wasps’ nests. In the evening he would wander round the garden, or stand quietly about until he had detected the general flight-line of passing, homeward-bound wasps. This he would patiently follow up. Or he would stroll in the lane beyond the paddock, observing the verges and banks, with occasional forays into the great harvest-field opposite. I have known him find six nests in an evening.
    The crunch came later, after sunset and at a time when I was always in bed. My father, accompanied by the gardener, Thorn, would set out again for his quarry. Being a doctor, he had access to poisons, and the poison he used was the deadly potassium cyanide. One sniff kills you in a second, or so I’ve always understood. The jar was kept locked up. I never even saw it: the idea alone frightened me. Arrived at the nest, Thorn would clear away round the entrance, and then my father would put in the cyanide with a teaspoon lashed to a longish stick. On these raids they quite often got stung, and for this the palliative was bicarbonate of soda. (Milton hadn’t yet been invented. It’s enormously effective: on the aforementioned trip to Martock in 1962, four-year-old Juliet was stung by a bee in the churchyard. Elizabeth, my wife, applied Milton at once and Juliet didn’t even cry.) I recall being taken to see a poisoned nest the morning after. Each wasp, as it flew over the cyanide, dropped dead instantly.
    We always had plenty of apples, and stored them through the winter in a special room in the stable, equipped with what I can only describe as big chests of drawers, made of plain, unvarnished wood, each drawer slatted and open to the air. Every few days you inspected them and took out any gone-rotten ones. Stewed apple and custard was pudding every day throughout the winter. It must have saved a lot of money. I never got tired of it: it was delicious with cream.
    My father must have spent more than he could afford on the conservatory, which was quite big and opened off the drawing-room by glass double-doors. It was heated by a coke stove and hot-water pipes, and all winter was as warm as in summer. Always, there was a melange of fragrances in the air. In those days, cyclamen had a characteristic, singular scent which went all up your nose. Its pungency made you jerk back your head. They’ve lost it now, for some reason. There were brilliant purple cinerarias, pink primulas and mop-headed chrysanthemums taller than I was, crisply viscid and smelling like pine and cedar-oil.
    During the winter