SUSAN HILL
Sky like the inside of a saucepan and a mean little drizzle stinging your face, garden sunk deep in midwinter gloom, except for the winter-flowering cherry trees with small, sugar-pink blossoms prinking from bare branches to lift the heart. I look for the first snowdrop, then the first aconite, then crocus, but forget about these cherries. The slender twigs last for weeks in a cool room. We have planted 1,000 snowdrop bulbs every autumn since coming to this North Cotswold farmhouse 15 years ago, and now there are great drifts of them. I always pick the first one I find and sniff. It smells very faintly of honey.
Talking of punting, which I like to do, the 2006 Cheltenham Gold Cup looks like being a poor affair, with Best Mate dead and the best of the rest out following injuries. This is the Great Race, never mind all those smart Guineas and Arcs for the carriage folk, but if they can’t produce better than the bunch of handicappers lined up for this year, it will be less significant than the ordinary fare at Towcester on a wet Wednesday. I started my betting career as a child, when it was illegal and my grandfather regularly put some of my pocket money on the Grand National, continued it with visits to a small bookie’s on the corner, full of smoke and plumbers taking the afternoon off, the air crackling with the noise from the Tannoy — no television screens and SIS then — and the shouts of ‘Come on, my son.’ I put a borrowed £2 on Red Rum and shocked my new husband by betting £5 on L’Escargot. Both won. So did Desert Orchid, and although I do not especially long for grandchildren, I cannot wait to tell them the story of how ‘I was there’ for his last great Gold Cup win, when the roar that greeted him was like the sound of the sky falling in. The only better one is the roar of 10,000 Irishmen cheering home one of their own. But there is plenty of good racing to get stuck into before we arrive at Cheltenham in March, and for those of you who are interested I recommend you keep a close eye on whatever the talented Christian Williams is riding. Now there is a champion jockey in the making.
On 25 November last, our younger, smaller Border terrier, Maudie, slipped out of the door after a rabbit and was never seen again; and only those who love dogs and have ever lost one in similar circumstances will understand the tears I wept and continue to weep for her disappearance. It is, as everyone agrees, the ‘not knowing’. Did she get down a hole, as was her wont, encounter a ferocious badger coming the other way, as had happened before, and lose the fight this last time? Did she stray on to the pheasant-shooting estate next door to our farm and meet with a trigger-happy gamekeeper? I am certain she did not get run over by a car in the village, as everyone knows our escapologist Borders and would have let us know. The other explanation is that she was stolen. It happens. A friend’s Staffordshire bull terrier was taken from their garden in broad daylight and sold down the pub for 50 quid. Our dogs, being Houdinis, are microchipped, so if Maudie was found and taken to any vet, dog warden or rescue centre, she would have been scanned and returned to us. We put posters out everywhere offering a £1,000 reward, which is more than anyone would get for her down any pub, so worth their while returning her, no questions asked. There is a wonderful service, run free on the internet, called doglost.com. They put up details and a photograph and have many successful and heart-warming stories of lost dogs and owners reunited. Not Maudie. I have even given a page of my author website up to her details and received much comfort and sympathy but, alas, no small Border terrier. She is friendly, loving, ferocious only to rats and rabbits, and we love her. Hope has been slowly fading. But one of the reunited stories involved a Norfolk terrier missing for 18 whole months but eventually found after patient, unremitting searches — alone, miserable and wandering very many miles from home. So perhaps we should keep hope alive for a while longer.
My mother regarded turning out cupboards as a Lenten task but I do it in January, since I am often cheered by what I find — long-lost toys that induce nostalgia, old school photographs provoking mirth, and favourite jumpers one had given up hope of ever finding. But the contents of our medicine cabinet were rather scary. Why did I buy a new bottle of nasal decongestant for every cold suffered by any of us in the past ten years? How many packets of throat lozenges does one household need? I found iron tablets prescribed for me when I was last pregnant (in 1985), a vial of something left over from my flirtation with homeopathy and labelled Arsenicum, and a packet of soluble aspirin with a use-by date of 1994. Honestly, anyone here could have got away with murder if they hadn’t poisoned themselves first.
Alot of work gets done between now and Easter, both on the writing front and in the tiny publishing company I run. This is a busy year for Long Barn Books. So far it has published only non-fiction, but in May comes a first novel, chosen out of 3,741 submissions, a richly funny book, and moving too. Please look out for The Extra Large Medium by Helen Slavin. After that we publish John Betjeman’s only children’s book, Archie and the Strict Baptists, in a facsimile of his own handwritten manuscript, done for his two children, Paul and Candida, and illustrated with his own watercolours. It is a children’s book for grown-ups, really — and, I imagine, Strict Baptists. I don’t see how anyone will be able to resist the beautiful facsimile edition. Which, after all, is the way a publisher ought to talk.
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