'Makes you feel sorry for those poor children,' said the Major. 'What they must be going through doesn't bear thinking about.'
Chapter 14
But for once his sympathy was wasted. The quads were having a wonderful time. After the initial excitement of windows being shattered by bullets and the terrorists firing from the kitchen and the front hall, they had been bundled down into the cellar with Mrs de Frackas. Since the old lady refused to be flustered and seemed to regard the events upstairs as perfectly normal, the quads had taken the same attitude. Besides the cellar was usually forbidden territory, Wilt objecting to their visiting it on the ostensible grounds that the Organic Toilet was insanitary and dangerously explosive, while Eva barred the quads because she kept her stock of preserved fruit down there and the chest freezer was filled with homemade ice cream. The quads had made a bee-line for the ice cream and had finished a large carton before Mrs de Frackas' eyes had got accustomed to the dim light. By then the quads had found other interesting things to occupy their attention. A large coal bunker and a pile of logs gave them the opportunity to get thoroughly filthy. Eva's store of organically grown apples provided them with a second course after the ice cream, and they would undoubtedly have drunk themselves into a stupor on Wilt's homebrew if Mrs de Frackas hadn't put her foot down on a broken bottle first.
'You're not to go into that part of the cellar,' she said looking severely at the evidence of Wilt's inexpert brewing in the shape of several exploded bottles. 'It isn't safe.'
Then why does Daddy drink it?' asked Penelope.
'When you get a little older you'll learn that men do a great many things that aren't very sensible or safe,' said Mrs de Frackas.
'Like wearing a bag on the end of their wigwags?' asked Josephine.
'Well I wouldn't quite know about that, dear,' said Mrs de Frackas evidently torn between curiosity and a desire not to enquire too closely into the Wilts' private life.
'Mummy said the doctor made him wear it,' continued Josephine adding an unmentionable disease to the old lady's dossier of Wilt's faults.
'And I stepped on it and Daddy screamed,' said Emmeline proudly. 'He screamed ever so loudly.'
'I'm sure he did, dear,' said Mrs de Frackas, trying to imagine the reaction of her late and liverish husband had any child been so unwise as to step on his penis. 'Now let's talk about something nice.'
The distinction was wasted on the quads. 'When daddy comes home from the doctor mummy says his wigwag will be better and he won't say 'Fuck' when he goes weewee.'
'Say what, dear? asked Mrs de Frackas, adjusting her hearing aid in the hope that it rather than Samantha had been at fault. The quads in unison disillusioned her.
'Fuck, fuck, fuck,' they squealed. Mrs de Frackas turned her hearing aid down.
'Well, really,' she said, 'I don't think you should use that word.'
'Mummy says we mustn't too but Michael's daddy told him...'
'I don't want to hear,' said Mrs de Frackas hastily. 'In my young days children didn't talk about such things.'
'How did babies get born then?' asked Penelope.
'In the usual way, dear, only we were brought up not to mention such things.'
'What things?' demanded Penelope.
Mrs de Frackas regarded her dubiously. It was beginning to dawn on her that the Wilt quads were not quite such nice children as she had supposed In fact they were distinctly unnerving. 'Just things,' she said finally.
'Like cocks and cunts?' asked Emmeline.
Mrs de Frackas eyed her with disgust. 'You could put it like that, I suppose,' she said
