The Laughing-Stock of Loamshire
IHARDLY believe that the thing that happened to me the week before last could have happened to anybody else. One of the reasons for my disbelief is that, unlike most people, I, have no sense of smell. Other reasons will suggest themselves as I slice off the tranche de vie.
I was shooting with my friend R. W. in the once fashionable county of Loamshire. (Imaginary counties, like imaginary kingdoms, have rather come down in the world. Ruritania, converted from a romantic duelling ground to an ideological abattoir, retains—like the ruins of a folly upon which solemn masques are staged—a certain functional raison d'etre; but I fear we have heard almost the last of Loamshire.) In front of R. W.'s house there is a large lake, frequented by mallard, widgeon, teal, pochard, shoveller, tufted duck and other wildfowl. When we returned from shooting the coverts he suggested that we should go down to some hides on the shores of the lake and see whether in the last of the December twilight the duck, which had been disturbed that morning, were fighting in again.
My hide, which I shared with my dog. was a small plat- form built out over the shallows and surrounded by boskage; access was by a rickety plank. One of the secrets of fighting duck in a failing light is to watch the sky almost straight above you; for although visibility seems no worse in lower and more normal sectors of your field of vision, it is in fact only when they are almost directly overhead that you will see the black shapes hurtling in the sky.
* For a quarter of an hour I gazed intently upwards. 1 had killed a singleton mallard soon after taking my place in the hide, but although the upper air was occasionally cleft by the whicker of unseen wings, the other guns were getting little shooting and it was clear that not much was going to happen before the dusk yielded to the darkness. From the rising ground above the lake orange rectangles in the windows of the house presaged tea, and warmth.
But I was content with the grey, dank, expectant moment of English time in which I was stationed, and hoped tha our host would not call us in too soon. It was only when 1 became aware of a sort of haze or miasma emanating from the hide that I relaxed my vigilance and ceased to stare vertically upwards into the slate-coloured void. My first thought was my dog's wet coat was steaming. I was still trying to square this idiotic notion with my knowledge that he must be as cold as I was when I realised that, whether cold or not, I was on fire.
Haze or miasma my foot! What had tardily caught my attention (and had, I learnt later, for some minutes past been gravely offending the nostrils of the next gun, two hundred yards away downwind) was dense smoke arising from a con- flagration in the left-hand pocket of my jacket. The fire had been started by dottle from my pipe; a box of safety matches had provided it with fuel; and the fact that I always have the pockets of shooting-jackets lined with rubber, to keep the cartridges dry, explains why the next gun was feeling the need for a respirator. The obvious thing to do was to take the coat off and extinguish the cheery little glow in my pocket; but in order to do this I needed to put my gun down. This was not feasible inside the hide, where there was only about as much roost as there is in a telephone kiosk and where the dog might easily have jolted the gun off the little platform into the water. So I stepped on to the rickety plank and made for the shore.
As soon as I left the shelter of the hide I met the full force of the wind; and although this was only a stiff breeze it naturally caused the fire to burn more briskly than before, When I reached the bank and got the coat off I found that my tweed knickerbockers had also begun to smoulder. I beat out this fresh outbreak with my left hand while with my right hand I lowered the jacket, hissing, into the dark waters of the lake. Though I lost a fountain-pen in the process, the situation was soon restored and I made my way up to the house, shaking with uncontrollable laughter like a character in a novel by Mr. Dornford Yates.
* * Afterwards, thinking it over during a long drive home, it slowly dawned on me that the episode—which, though ridicu- lous, I saw as a perfectly natural occurrence with more than a touch of inevitability about it—might appear to other people in a different light. The other guns had indeed laughed politely when 1 showed them my charred and sodden jacket; but what were they saying now? `. . . And it was a rubber pocket. Rubber, mark you! George was a good two hundred yards away, and he swears he was damn near feeling queasy from the stink. Strix says he hasn't got a sense of smell. But, well, I mean to say, a chap simply can't be on fire and not notice it for all that length of time. He'd burnt a socking great hole in his trousers, too. If you ask me, the poor old boy's pretty well round the bend.'
1 had, sadly, to admit to myself that this would be the world's verdict, that I emerged from the business as a craZY old buffer, like the Absent-Minded Professor in back numbers of Punch but without a scholar's excuse for being in the clouds, However, it was too late now to do anything about it; and I comforted myself with the reflection that, although to be the laughing-stock of Loamshire is not quite on a par with contributing to the gaiety of nations, my life had been enriched by an experience which, however you look at it, is not the sort of thing that happens to people every day. STRIA
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