Home life
Hotfoot into spring
Alice Thomas Ellis
Birds in the bedroom, bunnies burrow- ing under the barn: spring is here. I watched with approval the swooping of the swallows until two of them — first-time home-buyers — swept into my room to check out the possibilities and were ejected with some difficulty. Beryl was particularly taken with the rabbits since about ten of them are very small and they lollop appealingly in and out of the old ty bach the outside lavatory — sitting up to wash their faces and flinging up their heels to display their little white scuts. It might, of course, have been made for them: a tunnel from a stronghold leading down to the field, and I don't begrudge them posses- sion of it now we have facilities indoors. What does annoy me is that, not content with their castle, they have been attemp- ting to modernise not only the barn but the house. I don't think it can fall over because the walls are too thick, but if they keep up their tunnelling for long enough the bot- tom of the place could fall out.
Spring is not an unmixed blessing here. The crab-apple is in bloom, the primroses are out in force, but after a few misleading days of glorious sunshine the rains have returned and the spring freshets have silted up the pipe which bears our water from the stream. People have to struggle up the mountainside through the encroaching firs to deal with the emergency. I can't go myself because the tops of my feet are burnt and despite the sudden cold I have to go round with no shoes on. This is myste- rious. I merely sat one day on the house steps with my feet on the outside while I read a book, and somehow got scorched. Naturally my thoughts flew straight to the question of the ozone layer — especially after Beryl made a trip to the village where she loitered over a toasted tea-cake. At an adjacent table sat a lady whose conversa- tion she could not help overhearing. Underneath this lady's left eye was an unpleasant-looking patch of angry skin which had happened, as the lady said, when she had wound down the car window for half an hour to enjoy the benefits of the sun. When she visited her doctor he said she had a third-degree burn. I think I've got that too. What are we to make of it?
Then there's the radon which a man recently told me I should open all the windows to let out. This invisible substance builds up, it seems, in houses built on hard rock and is not good for you. Hard rock, whether musical or mineral, appears to be a health hazard, so it is now not safe inside or outside. Also, even when the water comes through, Janet suspects it is har- bouring all manner of undesirable things whatever they spray the conifers with (and they're bound to squirt them with some- thing), lead, dead sheep, broken spores, grouse pee — anything. It looks crystal clear and quite as pure as the sort you buy in bottles, but Janet has peered into the small tank where it collects before begin- ning its journey down the pipe, and she didn't like what she saw.
Perhaps one is suffering from paranoia. Often when people complain that they are being menaced by unseen influences other people lock them up in institutions; and indeed if a stranger came and found us flapping the air to get rid of the radon, boiling the water and complaining that there were things trying to get underneath the house he might well back rapidly away• However, I am not imagining any of it. I have caught the crows in the act of trying to eat the window-frames, I have seen the craters dug by the rabbits, Janet's eye- brows are still up in her hairline after her glance at the water tank and the tops of my feet look most strange. I would ask some- body to drive me to the doctor but the car has just refused to start — for no reason at all. Ssshh . . . I think it's a plot.
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