The Hour of the Donkey

'I'll eat it later,' he mumbled thickly, stuffing the bar into the breast-pocket of his mud-encrusted battledress as he plunged down the shaded tunnel of the ditch again, unable to decide which of them daunted him more, the live Wimpy cramming chocolate fragments into his mouth with muddy dummy4

fingers, or the dead German with his bloody hands and face.

But now, at least, he was able to leave Wimpy behind, first because Wimpy was too busy finishing his revolting meal and then because the ditch became so deep that he didn't have to crawl, but could squelch along upright, screened by the nettles, while Wimpy still laboured on hands and knees behind him. Indeed, he was just beginning to wonder, as the distance widened, if he hadn't been perhaps a teeny bit too quick to discount the liability of that damaged ankle against the advantage of the undamaged wit that went with it... when the end of the ditch came in view.

Or not the end, but here it vanished into a drain-pipe, and the drain-pipe carried the bridge which connected the road with the driveway of the house Wimpy had selected as their destination.

On the bridge, canted up at a steep angle with its handles sticking in the air and its pathetic bundles mostly tipped out, was a crude hand-cart which looked as though it had been knocked together out of orange boxes and a pair of old bicycle wheels.

Bastable raised himself cautiously, and saw that one of the bundles wasn't a bundle at all: beside the hand- cart, stretched out in the dust, lay a little old Frenchwoman in a black coat with an imitation fur collar, black woollen stockings and brown carpet slippers.

Bastable frowned at the carpet slippers, and the frown released a rivulet of sweat which ran down between his dummy4

eyebrows into his right eye, the salt stinging it sharply.

Carpet slippers really weren't the sensible thing to wear. He had seen women in the poorer part of Eastbourne wearing carpet slippers just like these, down along Seaside.

Now the sweat had got into his other eye. He blinked at it in an attempt to dislodge it.

He wasn't sure whether the old women down along Seaside wore slippers in the street because slippers were more comfortable, or simply because slippers were cheap: he'd just never thought about it before.

Blinking didn't shift the sweat. He raised his arm and wiped his face carefully with the inner part of his sleeve.

Someone ought to have told the old Frenchwoman not to set out in carpet slippers. It was one thing just walking round the corner to the shops in them, but when it came to walking any distance they'd be worse than useless. She wouldn't have got far in a silly damn pair of carpet slippers—

'What's that you said?' Wimpy's voice came from behind and below. 'Carpet slippers, did you say?'

'I didn't say anything,' said Bastable.

'Yes, you did. You said ...' Wimpy trailed off doubtfully as he began to pull himself up beside Bastable, ' something about carpet slippers, it sounded—' He stopped abruptly.

Bastable shook his head angrily and transferred his attention to the house. It was a typical French house, ugly and foreign and quite out of proportion. In his observation, detached dummy4

houses in France, other than the more substantial better-class ones, were either squat cabins, more like dilapidated stables with their shutters and half-doors, or fussy boxes with one storey too many and no taste in design. This was one of the boxes, only it was no longer fussy, but half-ruined by bomb-blast, every tile shaken loose and every window blown in. Even as he stared at it, a small avalanche of displaced tiles slithered and scraped down the roof, to fall with a crash into the garden below.

'It must have been the bombs just now,' said Wimpy softly.

'The shock, most likely—she doesn't look as though she's got a mark on her, poor old thing.'

'Yes,' agreed Bastable automatically.

Eat up your brown Windsor soup before it gets cold, now.

'All right, then—let's get inside, and see what we can find—

help me out, old man, there's a good chap—'

The inside of the house was like every other half-bombed house, full of broken things and fallen plaster which crunched underfoot.

Brown Windsor soup.

He leaned Wimpy against the nearest bit of open wall, between a barometer and a tall mahogany hat-stand which had a mirror in the centre of it. The mirror was blemished and pock-marked with age, where its silvering had peeled away, and he resisted the temptation to look at himself in it: dummy4

whatever Wimpy looked like, he, with his blue jowl, must inevitably look worse, and there was no point in confirming that image.

'Find the kitchen,' commanded Wimpy, pointing down the hallway, 'Don't wait for me, man.'

There were two doors opposite each other at the end of the hall, both ajar, and Bastable took the right hand one, putting his shoulder to it when it grated and stuck on debris beneath it.

It wasn't the kitchen, it was a parlour of some kind, and it was almost filled with an immense table covered with a biege moquette cloth on which a bowl of artificial fruit was the centre-piece. Both were covered with fallen plaster.

In the corner of the room, by the window, an old man with white hair and a bushy white moustache sat staring at him from the depths of an armchair. A gold watch on a chain hung down from the centre button of his waist-coat. Like the moquette table-cloth and the bowl of artificial fruit, he was covered with dust and fallen plaster.

Bastable pushed back out of the room so hurriedly that he ran into Wimpy in the passage.