Country life
Unspilled blood
Leanda de Lisle
`Why are they being so horrid to Piggy? He's, a lad!' my 11-year-old eldest asked in the early stages of the story. Peter and I looked at each other. Children are so much nicer these days, we agreed silently. `They're being nasty because he's fat and wears glasses,' I answered. My son looked baffled, as did his youngest brother, but I couldn't see my middle son's expression as he held his face in his hands. We arrived in Courchevel as the story ended. The chil- dren poured out of the car. The eldest and youngest were merrily chanting 'Kill the pig! Spill his blood!' Peter and I looked at each other and shuddered. We begged them to stop, but the chants went on as we took the suitcases up to our little flat, made the beds and went out to the supermarket. `Spill his blood! Cut his throat!'
Piggy-in-the-middle looked depressed, `I'm going to have nightmares,' he whined. He was as good as his word and woke us six times that night, though his dreams appeared to centre on fears about the gov- ernment, rather than Golding's book. Like the unlucky fat boy in The Lord of the Flies he's a thoughtful rather than a sporty child, but he enjoys skiing. Faster and faster he likes to go. He has no fear, no style and no control. In short, a typical Englishman on the slopes. He was the second person in the space of a day to cut in front of me and bring me crashing to the ground. But at least he stopped to see how I was. The other guy, the one in the orange jacket, just did a hit and run. Every tooth in my head rattled as I hit the snow. Every muscle in my head and neck seized up.
Tearfully, I made my way to the smartest bar on the slopes and ordered a large Genepi — a digestif that smells like Chanel Cristal and tastes like sugared firewater. 'I think this is what they call the "unexpected Chanel",' I gasped as it burned my throat. But it brought things back into focus. 'If I have another accident like that, you're to ignore my broken body and ski after the bastard,' 1 ordered my husband. 'You're mad,' he said. Retribution was swift. That afternoon a real mad person pushed his way into our four-man ski lift. He sat with his back to us, growling and gibbering Now, I'm a great deal more comfortable with nutters than Peter is. He has an almost superstitious horror of them while I was brought up to be quite accepting of their little ways. But I was still in a bad mood and as we rose 100 ft into the air it struck me that these tiny bubbles of plexi- glass are not the sort of places you want to share with a homicidal maniac. There was plenty of room for the loony to swing a knife and no escape for us.
I looked for a potential weapon. Our ski- poles were too long to manoeuvre in the cramped space, but I was also carrying my youngest son's poles. I reversed one of them and held it in both hands. One wrong move from the loony and I'd have speared him. Fortunately, he lumbered out at the second stop. 'Did Death ever really exist?' our seven-year-old asked when I returned his unblooded poles. 'He's not a historical figure like Henry VIII, if that's what you mean,' I replied, and after a pause, 'I think we'll listen to nice jolly pop music on the way home.' If Chris Smith says Bob Dylan is as good as Keats then Puff Daddy must be as worthy of study as William Golding. Besides, music soothes the savage beast while literature seems to have another effect entirely.
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