Free A Postillion Struck by Lightning by Dirk Bogarde Page B

tearing out of the house, cuffed me on the head and pulled Angelica to her.
    â€œWhat’s he been up to, then?” she cried. “What have you been doing to Angelica? I can’t turn my back for a minute without something happens.”
    Angelica stopped snivelling and said it wasn’t my fault and that she was sorry and she’d go in and start her packing before the bus left for Seaford. And so Lally took her away chattering to her like anything and I rubbed my head, it was quite a hard cuff, and went off into the garden to think things over. Just as I was going past the raspberries I heard my sister burst with laughter in the house, and Lally called out something about giving me a good wallop because no doubt I needed it—and then someone rattled a window closed upstairs. And I was alone. And in peace. And ate some raspberries and thought what a rum life it was. Down at the bottom of Great Meadow there were twelve cows all standing with their heads together round the gate in the shade swishing their tails because of the flies, and up on the sideof High and Over the big White Horse shone in the sunlight. It was lovely and peaceful. I was looking forward very much indeed to the bus for Seaford.

    The canary I-didn’t-really-win-at-the-fair wasn’t very well. Although I had made a proper cage for it out of a Lifebuoy soap box and a real cage front, and had put proper perches and a seed and water pot and things, it just seemed frightened all the time. It just jumped from one perch to another all day long, or fluttered up to the top and banged its head and came fluttering down again to he gasping in the sand tray. Also, its feathers were a bit moulty, and where the yellow ones came out brownish ones came back. It looked a bit piebald after a time. Lally said it was a linnet and not a canary at all.
    â€œA poor little linnet, that’s what it is,” she said one evening when we were all sitting round the table trimming the lamp wicks. “I reckon Reg Fluke was right; they just trap them with bird lime and dip them in yellow dye and sell ‘em to the fair people.” She was polishing a big brass lamp vigorously and there was a nice smell of metal polish and paraffin. I was very carefully cutting round the wicks with an old razor blade and my sister was washing the chimneys in a bowl of soapy water and rinsing them at the sink. It was our Lamp Evening. A Wednesday. The middle of the week.
    â€œI should let it go if I were you. How would you like to be cooped up in a little cage like that?” said Lally, giving the lamp an extra, final, wipe round and carrying it over to the others on the top of the copper. “Tell you what,” she said. “If you do, I’ll see if we can’t get a real canary next time we go up to Twickenham to see Mrs Jane. How would that do?” She set the lamp among the others on the copper. There were quite a lot of them altogether. The one from our bedroom, the one from hers, the three from the sitting-room and the big hanging one with honeysuckle and clover on the shade which hung over the dining-room table. While she and my sister were drying the glass chimneys, I was having a good think about the canary. It was no use to agree with Lally immediately, you had to let it simmer along a bit, otherwise if you said “all right”, or even “perhaps” she meant that you had said “Yes”, and things got abit muddly. So I had a bit of a think and trimmed away for a while without saying anything at all.
    It was a lovely warm evening. The kitchen windows were wide open and there was a soft breeze coming over from the downs smelling of cut hay and earth, and bats flitted about in the light from the last of the sun which was slipping away behind the elms of the gully, shilling red through the branches like the fire in the range at Mrs Jane’s house in Twickenham. When I thought of the range and of Twickenham I had a rather