Free The Fowler Family Business by Jonathan Meades Page A

jars, telescopic keepnets, alarm clocks, rods on rests. A flotilla of tethered brown boats bobbed on the wind-chopped water. Tiro arms jerked oars from their rowlocks, causing them to dig deep in the dark water, fishermen looked up from their intense absorption in newspaper reports of the disgusting sex acts performed on footballers by unwitting dancers in hotel rooms and screamed at the boat hirers not to disturb the fish.
    ‘You never want to swim in there,’ Mr Fowler told Ben, ‘on account of the Weil’s Disease, from rats. I’ve seen a few taken with that.’
    ‘Can’t swim,’ said Ben, ‘yet.’
    ‘Course you can’t. I was forgetting. You get to forgetting when you get old.’
    ‘And you get to remembering,’ said Naөmi putting an arm round him and kissing his cheek.
    ‘Oh yes – what memories.’
    ‘He’s off,’ said Henry to his mother. He’d bet himself that Mr Fowler would start before they reached the Irish elks.
    ‘You’re so, oh I don’t know,’ said Curly with Lennie’s hands over his eyes, ‘exacting.’
    ‘Kettle pot black,’ Henry was quick off the mark. Curly grinned. Henry heard the echo.
    Henry took his mother’s arm.
    Mr Fowler began: ‘It was a fellow called Frizzel and you know I’d never have remembered his name otherwise but we put him to rest and then because Grandma was out that evening I went and had a drink with – oh, blimeycrikes whatever were he called …’
    ‘Ridley – from Strathleven Avenue,’ said Mrs Fowler who’d reminded him so many times before.
    ‘Ridley. Thassit. Ridley. Goshowcaniforget?’
    ‘There’re the Irish elks.’ Henry pointed to the multiplicity of tines and bezels proud of the araucaria, high above the boating lake.
    ‘Rishells!’ proclaimed Lennie, her chin on Curly’s crown.
    ‘Rissoles,’ repeated Curly, then: ‘Irish elks – they lived on the Isle of Man.’
    ‘I didn’t go there,’ said Lennie.
    ‘And you don’t want to go. They beat people with sticks called birches.’
    ‘When they’re naughty,’ confirmed Lennie.
    ‘No. No – just because they don’t like them.’
    Naomi smiled a little smile to herself and tried to catch Henry’s eye.
    ‘So then this Ridley chap …’
    ‘He died in the war,’ said Mrs Fowler, ‘the Japs got him. His sister married one of those Pook boys.’
    ‘That’s right Mother. We went to the new road-house they called it, on the corner of Beulah Hill and Spa Hill – opposite the lodges there. They’d hardly finished building it. Brand new. Very snazzy. Well we hadn’t been in there more than about ten minutes when we hear all these fire engines … They had ’em coming from Streatham and Norbury and Croydon. Then some chap come in the bar and say the Crystal Palace is in flames. That was one way of putting it. I never seen anything like it. The whole sky. Like Vesuvius erupting – all orange and yellow, colours you’d never have thought of, pink and blue and green. Armageddon it was and, ooh, what’s the other one, what’s the other one?’
    ‘Apocalypse,’ said Mrs Fowler.
    ‘That’s the one. Oh yes. If I hadn’t known it was the Crystal Palace I’d have said it was the Day of Judgement come.’
    They passed the children’s zoo with its sad menagerie of guinea fowl, Aleppo cockerels, fancy ewes, lop-eared rabbits, hamsters. Ben began to run. Mr Fowler and Naomi hurried to keep pace with him.
    ‘Careful of the bridge, Ben!’ shouted Naomi.
    Ben stopped on the middle of the bridge.
    ‘Monsters,’ he yelled triumphantly.
    Monsters. At the core of the heart of Mr Fowler’s London and Henry’s London and, now, evidently, Ben’s London were the monsters. Triceratops, megalosaurus, megatherium, ichthyosaurus, pterodactyls, palaeotherium – three generations of the Fowler family were bound together by their excitement at the full-scale painted metal models of these antediluvian beasts whó stood on hillocks and swam in ponds. It was an hallucination of