Home life
Organising Alfred
Alice Thomas Ellis
One of the advantages of having grown-up children is that they tend to listen to you and take note of your tan- trums. The eldest son rolled up in the country with some friends the other morn- ing — circa 3 o'clock — and proceeded to make tea and toast and animated conversa- tion immediately below my bedroom. I woke with a start, flew out of bed and screamed a few words down the stairs. They were instantly silent which would not have been the case some years ago. Some years ago they would have been silent for a moment; then there would have been whispers and giggles, growing quite rapidly into another crescendo, and I should have been up all night, roaring at them. These charming and responsible adults quietly gulped their tea and crept off to sleep in the barns.
Alfred came with us to Wales on this last trip and I was reminded of the time when the children persuaded him to go down through the trap door and make clandes- tine Marmite sandwiches in the middle of the night. The plot was that he should pass them up and then the children would haul him up too, but they went back to sleep. I didn't know about it at the time. Alfred only told me recently. He said he stood under the trap door for hours freezing cold, trying to shout under his breath much too frightened to climb up the creaky stairs in case he wakened me. I must have been the most frightful ogress and poor Alfred was possibly the only thoughtful and responsible child that God ever cre- ated. I must remember to make it up to him one day.
Then there was the time we were having trouble with the boiler. It wouldn't boil by day, but each night it became a burning, fiery furnace and heated the water to the point where it threatened to blow the lid off the cistern and the roof off the cottage. I explained to Alfred that if he heard the water seething and surging he must go into the bathroom and turn on all the taps. So he did that. Only I'd heard it too and came along, clad in a white nightdress and carrying a candle, enveloped in clouds of steam. The wretched boy nearly died of fright. He's still frightened of ghosts, sens- ing the blinking things everywhere and such fear is contagious. Now I know that half-seen presences have been chasing Alfred I refuse to go alone to the wood pile in the evening. I make Alfred go.
Janet is only really frightened of spiders and we had a confrontation with one of them on Friday. For some reason there was a pile of socks on the dining-room window- sill; so I picked them up, muttering that they were covered in cobwebs. As I spoke, the author of the cobwebs stirred amongst them, and I must confess that we all screamed, me flinging the socks back on to the window-sill where, as far as I'm con- cerned, they can fester all winter. 'Oh God,' moaned Janet, shuddering, 'you know what it's doing in these socks, don't you? It knows it's getting cold and it's going to wear one on each leg.'
The purpose of our trip was to turn off the water so it wouldn't burst the pipes again, but by some horrid irony the water turned itself off. Its source got clogged up with mountain debris and Alfred had to climb up the stream to clear it. Then with the arrival of the son we realised that we would have to leave the turning-off opera- tion to him because we could hardly abandon him and his friends to a waterless cottage. A totally pointless exercise in fact, although the countryside was beautiful, almost leafless and exposed. The most maddening thing is that I missed Jeff's party. I bet they didn't have any trouble with the water there.
'Waiter, there's a thumb in my pie.'
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