Country life
Siblings and cycles
Leanda de Lisle
My eight-year-old son, Christian, seems to have shrunk since I last saw him. When we collected him from boarding school for his exeat weekend, he looked tiny. But then it has always been easy to forget how little Christian is. His elder and younger brothers have wide eyes, whereas his burn like coals. Their humour is still in the stone age, but Christian has wit. They chatter about Batman, while he lectures us on mediaeval architecture.
There's not a lot we don't know about alms-houses and church buttresses after driving through the villages of Suffolk with Christian. He is soul mates with our week- end host, who gave us an extensive tour of his house, including the requiem room (Country life, 4 May). Thankfully, none of us was sleeping in it. Besides the human skull and the black ceiling, there was a rather distressing print of a Catholic martyr with a knife in his chest.
That night, in a wonderful room but oppressed by ancient beams, Christian lay terrified alongside his untroubled five-year- old brother. I tried to steer Christian's thoughts away from hanging, drawing and quartering, but his younger brother didn't help matters by telling him, 'I had this hor- rible, horrible dream about you last night, Chrischun, and I was sad.' His big, brown eyes misted over as he pondered on the terrible, but unspoken fate that Christian had suffered, `Reeely sad.' Christian turned ashen. They didn't get much sleep that night, but Tyburn was forgotten by the time we set off for the Hadleigh Agricultural show the next day.
It was freezing cold. Still, the parade of Suffolk Punches and rare breeds of cattle distracted us for a while. There were goats and donkeys too — and ponies that tossed their heads like Arab stallions. With the
'Here — swallow one of these.'
parade over we toured the ground. Then disaster struck: I missed the stand where the East Anglian Times was handing out gigantic free balloons. The children howled, 'You promised,' but I had no intention of doubling back in what was now driving rain. My ears hurt in the wind, and my mood grew blacker as the children whined on.
I couldn't summon up any enthusiasm for the holly walking-stick with the toad on it that my husband found in the craft tent. 'It's an unusual stick, tha',' said the crafts- man who was selling it, 'one of a koind.' Thrilled, Peter handed him a bundle of notes. Turning away with his prize, he over- heard the craftsman confiding to a col- league, `Oi'll 'ave to make another 'un now.' Oh, well.
There was no time to dwell on that as our host whisked us off to the President's tent for tea. By this stage I resembled an East European crone, with a woolly scarf tied around my head. I felt too self-con- scious to talk to anyone so I concentrated on the performance of the motorcycle dis- play team instead.
What is it about motorcycles and agricul- tural shows? I expect to see the sheep, the combines, the bottles of home-made rasp- berry liqueur. I'm not surprised by flower arrangements in Wellington boots (of which there are many), or policemen invit- ing my small boys into the back of their car. But motorcycles? Is it a macho thing? Agri- cultural shows display a mixture of the butch and the pinkly feminine: tractors and fairy cakes, bullocks and hand-crocheted doilies. However, macho is not how I would, for example, describe the man in biking leathers who danced for Harley Davidson at the Royal last year. It was like getting a flashback to the men in funny clothes who sang 'YMCA'. You may remember that there was a construc- tion worker, a chap in leathers and various other gay icons. They did not include a farmer wearing steel-capped Wellingtons and a boiler suit. Perhaps the motorbike industry is taking it upon itself to rectify this omission. I don't know. Their ubiqui- tous presence at agricultural shows is a mystery to me. Still, the boys were greatly entertained by the display team riding their bikes side-sad- dle, and they went to bed happily dreaming of bikes rather than martyrs.
Previous page
