The Mortdecai Trilogy (Charlie Mortdecai #1-3)(57)

‘And Charlie …’

‘Yes,’ I said, face blank.

‘Do remember, you always have a home here.’

‘Thanks, old chap,’ I replied gruffly.

As Hemingway says somewhere: even when you have learned not to answer letters, families have many ways of being dangerous.

Topheavy with my load of Boy-Scout dunnage, I pedalled erratically to the cemetery, then down Bottom’s Lane, turned left at the Green and skirted Leighton Moss until I came to Crag Foot. I pushed the machine very quietly past the farm for fear of dogs and threaded my way up the broken road to the Crag.

The Crag is a sort of crag-shaped feature of limestone, rich in minerals and seamed with crevasses or ‘grikes’ as they call them hereabouts. It is a mile square on the map (SD 47:49,73) but it seems a great deal larger when you are trying to pick your way over it. Here, two hundred years ago, hoved the dreaded Three Fingered Jack, conning the Marsh with his spy-glass for unprotected travellers whose bones now lie full fathom five, enriching the greedy sands of Morecambe Bay. (Oh Jock – ‘never shake thy gory locks at me!’)

The Crag is riddled and pitted with holes of every sort, the Dog Hole, Fairy Hole, Badger Hole – all of which have given up ancient bones and implements – and forgotten shafts where minerals were dug in the vague past, and the foundations of immeasurably old stone huts and, highest of all, defence works made by the Ancient Britons themselves. It’s a wonderful place for breaking a leg, even the poachers won’t risk it at night. In front are the salt marshes and the sea, behind stands the Gothick beauty of Leighton Hall. To the right you can look down over the reedy haven of Leighton Moss and to your left there is the desolation of Carnforth.

Copper was the great thing to mine for here, long ago, but what I was aiming for was a certain paint mine. A red-oxide working, to be exact. Red-oxide or ruddle-mining was a thriving industry on the Crag once upon a time and the deserted shafts still weep a messy redness, the colour of a really vulgar Swiss sunset. It took me an hour to find the shaft I remembered best; it goes down steeply for ten feet, looking very wet and red, but then flattens out, turns right at an acute angle and becomes quite dry and airy. A friendly bramble now cloaks its entrance, I had the devil of a job fighting my way in.





19





So, I soberly laid my last plan

To extinguish the man.

Round his creep-hole, with never a break

Ran my fires for his sake;

Over-head, did my thunder combine

With my under-ground mine:

Till I looked from my labour content

To enjoy the event.





Instans Tyrannus





Happiness is pear-shaped




‘Playing it pear-shaped’ was a favourite expression of Jock’s; it seemed to mean deftly turning a situation to one’s own advantage; seizing a favorable opportunity: Boxing Clever.

So the new, resourceful, pear-shaped Mortdecai arose at noon and brewed his own tea today over a little butane camping stove. Quite successfully. How about that, Kit Carson? Move over, Jim Bridger!

As I sipped it I tried to think the situation over carefully, examining it for neglected apertures, but to little avail – noon on Sunday has a special significance for some of us, you know; it is the time when the pubs open. The thought of all those happy drinkers bellying up to the bar counters in Silverdale and Warton kept driving all pear-shaped considerations out of my head. True, there was whisky, but noon on the Sabbath is sacred to bottled beer. I wanted some.

There hasn’t been a soul on the Crag all day; I can’t understand how people can frowst in public houses drinking bottled beer when there’s all this splendid fresh air and scenery to be had for nothing. Even the campers, whose lurid tents and tasteful pastel caravans pimple the landscape here and there like dragon’s teeth, are not in evidence: they’re probably leading the simple life in front of their portable tellies, watching a nature programme, bless them. Most of them will be back in Bradford tomorrow, glowing with virtue and comparing mosquito bites.

I have taken the bicycle to pieces and wangled it all down into the cave. I’ve also been down to the icy spring which runs in a miniature canyon between two huge slabs of limestone; I washed myself all over, squeaking with the cold, and even drank a little of the water. It was delicious but I had to drink some Black Label when I got back up here, to take the taste away. It would never do to take up hydropathy at my age. Hydrophobia, yes, perhaps.

There is a most inaccessible spot above the mine where no one can creep up on you and I have built a small, discreet camp fire on which a can of baked beans is warming. From where I sit I can see the long necklace of Morecambe’s lights – ‘the bright boroughs, the circle-citadels there’.





Later




I like the ‘wet and wilderness, weeds’ of this place very much. It is quiet and no one has been near. I have been sleeping very happily, dreaming innocent dreams, listening to the sweet wild call of the redshanks whenever I wake. Now more than ever seems it sweet to die; the grave cannot be darker nor more solitary than this: nor stiller except when the wind, stirring the brambles at the entrance furtively, tries to frighten me. I recall the only really poignant ghost story –



(Sexton: ‘What are you a-sniggering at?’