Heineken and noticed a box of adult diapers, waiting to go out to the trash, no longer needed. In its implications, that sight was just the most heartbreaking thing. The whole story came out of that moment. That, and this climate of intolerance we live in that never really seems to go away.’
Fat Mary
JULIAN RATHBONE
It was, I suppose, a small thatched cottage, but you don’t see them like that any more — a two roomed cabin, made of mediaeval daub — a mixture of cow-dung and fine gravel, terracotta-coloured where the whitewash had peeled off. The thatch was dark brown, covered with blackish moss, roof-tree sagging. There was nothing picturesque about it at all, no briar-roses, no hollyhocks. Thin chickens squabbled over the dusty yard, a white lean rooster with a spare handful of tail feathers racketed amongst them, occasionally fucking them. The hens paid no attention, often just went on desperately pecking at the ground for a grain or seed they might have missed.
There was a shed, a barn and a stable. In the stable, in a stall too small for her, a fat old sow suckled six out of eight piglets. She had eaten the two runts along with all the afterbirths in order to have milk for the others.
There was a pond, shrunk in July, within a saucer of chocolate-coloured cracked mud, sheeted with emerald green algae and beside it a dung-heap which heaved with thin white worms.
It was all set at the top end of a narrow coombe at the end of a chalky track that threaded the three ten-acre fields she had. The steep sides of the downs were filled with beech and birch woods, but the back end was crowned with an ancient yew forest, planted by Henry VIII to provide longbows. Too late someone told him about gunpowder so the trees were never used.
We crouched in hiding on the edge of the beech wood, James and I, watched, waited and speculated. We were pupils at Minster Hill, a boarding school that claimed to be a public school. Minster Hill prided itself on its progressive approach to education so, on Saturday and Sunday afternoons, we were let out to walk around the countryside at will.
We were wearing the summer uniform — grey Vyella shirts with sleeves rolled up, grey corduroy shorts, very baggy and loose, wollen stockings, sandals. The sandals were impractical, but there we were, there was nothing we could do about that. I wore a sheathed SS dagger my uncle had brought back from Germany. The hilt was wound with silver wire and there was a swastika on the centre of the cross-guard. I carried it under my shirt when we left the school buildings, but threaded the sheath on to my belt as soon as we were clear.
It was a hot sultry day. The flies were a bother. We headed into the woods and searched out rotten silver birch trees, which, we had discovered, could be pushed over. Often you had to rock them first, then they would begin to crack, and at last they’d topple. Occasionally they would break in three or four places up the trunk and concertina down around us in a flurry of soft umber shards and dust. When we couldn’t find any more trees that would go, I took out my SS knife and we practised throwing it at the trunks of the beech trees. These were grey and wrinkled and put me in mind of the giant legs of huge elephants. It wasn’t easy to make the point stick in. You could either throw it point first in one sweeping underarm movement, a method which worked over short distances. Or, over five yards or more, we held it by the point and made it turn in the air three times or more, always hoping the point would hit the tree first. Sometimes it did.
After a time, when our throats were dry and prickly and an itchy sweat was building up inside the Vyella shirts, we sat awkwardly on the ground, undid our buttoned flies and pulled our pricks into the warm air. We did it to ourselves, not to each other. There was no passion in this, not even much friendliness. Indeed, back at school James and I were in different forms, different dormitories, kept away from each other, though occasionally we exchanged expressionless, unblinking glances when we met.
James was a dark, saturnine lad, pretty in a sort of Spanish or Levantine way, with olive skin and a mop of black hair. He said little, seemed to live in a world of his own.
When we’d done that we pushed on down the hill, through the trees, to the electric fence that bounded the highest of Fat Mary’s fields. And while we waited for her to appear (something which did not always happen) we rehearsed the myths that surrounded her, adding our own embellishments and speculations, and listened to the five second pulse on her wire — enough to keep her three Jersey cows in and the deer out.
‘She weighs sixteen stone.’
‘More like twenty.’
‘The hair on her chin is bristly.’
‘So is the hair between her legs.’
‘Her bosoms are great fat sacks of pink blancmange.’
‘With giant strawberries for nipples.’
In those days even to say words like ‘bosoms’ and ‘nipples’ was a thrill, a
‘Her bottom is huge. Bigger than the two biggest melons you ever saw. ’
‘Far bigger. And her bum-hole is a black pit.’
‘Her feet are rotting and smell like over-ripe Camembert. ’
But we weren’t that interested in her feet.
‘On very hot days she takes off all her clothes and walks around with nothing on.’
‘On one very very hot day she made Smithson-Haig go into her bedroom and do it to her.’
‘Don’t you believe him?’
‘Not really.’
‘Nor do I.’
I pulled a long succulent stalk of milky barley grass, easing it from its cellulose sheath. I sucked it, then chewed.
‘Would you?’ I asked. ‘Would you go into her house if she asked you?’
‘Yes. If you came too.’
‘And do it to her?’
‘I don’t know about that.’
The distant chug and rattle of a pre-war bull-nosed Morris had us looking back down the track. Changes in the note and speed of the engine and we knew that just out of sight, around the corner of the woods, Fat Mary had got out of the car, opened her five-bar gate, driven through, and closed it behind her. And here she came, driving between the fences, leaving a thin slipstream of chalk dust mingling with the black of her exhaust. A second fence and a second gate, then she half-circled the foetid pond and came to a standstill outside her tumble-down lattice- work porch. Hens and rooster scurried away towards the barn, the cows looked up from their pasture above her, a very large and mangy ginger tom woke up from wherever he had been sleeping and pushed his chin and cheek against the rough lisle of her stockings.
She was huge. And in spite of the July heat she was wearing a tweed suit, the heavy skirt cut long below her knees, the jacket mannish, very sensible shoes on her feet, and a sort of battered felt trilby on her head. She had gingery straw-coloured hair which was probably quite long since it was always bound up in a large bun above her neck, beneath the trilby. Her shoulders were broad and heavy, her back a rounded wall beneath the tweed. Her bosoms, behind a not over-clean white blouse and a structured bra or corset, forced the lapels of the jacket apart above one strained button. Her hands were like dinner plates with pink uncooked sausages for fingers.
Although we could scarcely make out her face, we had seen her in Sherborne on market days and knew that it was broad, once fair, now red with weather, with broken capillaries on the cheeks, small pale blue eyes widely spaced but almost lost beneath heavy lids, a spread stubby nose, a big mouth with rubbery lips and discoloured but otherwise large and healthy teeth. She had a large mole beneath the corner of her mouth, and yes, it did nourish bristly hair. Her voice was deep, as mannish as her jacket and shoes, the accent touched with Dorset, but not incomprehensibly broad.
She got out of the car, went round to the boot and hoisted a sack from it, feed of some sort, perhaps, or
