The White Porcupine

By Jonathan Falla

THE WHITE PORCUPINE is a virtuoso novel by a critically acclaimed British author. It is a mystery, and a profound exploration of loyalties: father and daughter, lovers and friends, soldiers and nations. Set in Java in the 1940s and the Netherlands in the 1970s, it tells the peculiar story of Ben Pinksterbloem, a military radio expert caught up in a post-colonial drama. Ben is brave, cunning, and ruthless, but in Java he commits the soldier's ultimate betrayal.
Thirty years later, loyalties are tested again. The children of Ben's former comrades launch a despairing act of terrorism, hijacking a train and a school, demanding the righting of past wrongs. Ben attempts to intercede - but the tragi-comedy may be beyond his control...
THE WHITE PORCUPINE is Jonathan Falla's fifth novel and displays all his skills in dramatic storytelling, with strange landscapes, powerful characters, and bizarre humour. The critics have said of his previous work: "A very witty writer with a gift for gallows humour." (Observer, London). "An outstanding novel." (Sunday Times, London). "An original, unflinching work on a subject of great importance. The strength of the writing and the subject carry all before them." (New York Times). "Compelling and tragically relevant." (BBC Radio 4).

• Language: English
• Publisher: Jonathan Falla
• Release date: Jan 9, 2015
• ISBN: 9780951059654

Jonathan Falla

Jonathan Falla is an English writer long resident in Scotland, UK. He is the acclaimed author of more than a dozen books from publishers such as Longman, Cambridge University Press, Aurora Metro, and Polygon. These include five novels, a study of Burmese rebels, poetry translations, military memoirs and drama. Born in Jamaica, Falla was educated at Cambridge. He trained as a specialist nurse and for many years he worked for international aid agencies in Java, Burma, Sudan, Nepal and Uganda. He is now Director of the St Andrews University creative writing summer school, and also teaches arts subjects for the Open University. He is the winner of several prizes including a PEN fiction award, the 2007 Creative Scotland Award and a senior Fulbright fellowship at the University of Southern California.

Book preview

The White Porcupine

A novel by Jonathan Falla

Smashwords Edition

2015

The author acknowledges the generous support of the Scottish Arts Council (now Creative Scotland) towards the completion of this work.

In memory of my friends

Lou Michels

and

Tatang Benjamin Koswara

The author: Jonathan Falla was born in Jamaica and now lives in Scotland. His writing has included novels (Blue Poppies, Poor Mercy, Glenfarron, The Physician of Sanlucar), drama for stage and film, and work on ethnography, international affairs and music. He worked for aid agencies in Indonesia, Uganda, Burma, Sudan and Nepal. He has held a scholarship at Cambridge University, a Fulbright Senior Fellowship at the University of Southern California, and a writing fellowship of the Royal Literary Fund, while in 2007 he was a Creative Scotland Award winner. He teaches for the Open University and the University of St Andrews, and is Director of the Creative Writing summer school at St Andrews.

Please visit: http://www.jonathanfalla.co.uk/

The Designer: Will Hill is Deputy Head of Cambridge School of Art, Anglia Ruskin College, where he heads the MA in Graphic Design and Typography.

Copyright © Jonathan Falla 2015

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or distributed in any form without the prior permission of the author and publisher. Please see the author's website for contact details.

First published 2015

Stupor Mundi (Fife) KY14 6JF

This edition: Smashwords 2015

ISBN 978-0-9510596-3-0

This book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This e-book may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another son, please purchase another copy for each person. Please always purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the work and time of the author.

Also by Jonathan Falla in print and e-books

Fiction:

Blue Poppies (11:9 Books)

Poor Mercy (Polygon)

Glenfarron (Two Ravens)

The Physician of Sanlúcar (Aurora Metro)

Non-fiction:

True Love & Bartholomew - Rebels on the Burmese Border (Cambridge UP)

The Craft of Fiction (Aber Publishing)

21 Poems by Ramon Luiz Velarde (Bakehouse Publications)

Luck of the Devil (Pen & Sword Books)

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Part One - Austin Connacher

Chapter 1. Iron-eaters in Java

Chapter 2. How I met my wife

Chapter 3. Radio in the hills

Chapter 4. The pagoda

Chapter 5. Tulloch ard!

Part Two - Ellie Duyvendak

Chapter 6. In the bishop's garden

Chapter 7. Hallo Holland, Bandung calling!

Chapter 8. In a dark wood

Chapter 9. On a tin boat

Chapter 10. Sur l'eau

Part Three - Michiel Solisa

Chapter 11. The angel of wrath

Chapter 12. The apostate

Chapter 13. Closely observed trains

Chapter 14. Traitor on a curb

Chapter 15. So shooting him was a mistake. So?

Part Four - Triandi

Chapter 16. Sekaten

Chapter 17. The two ton witch

Chapter 18. Red dew on the long grass

Chapter 19. Like a lion

Chapter 20. The house of lac

Chapter 21. The white porcupine

THE WHITE PORCUPINE

When the idea first came to me of compiling a record of the Pinksterbloem affair, I felt a hesitancy that surprised me. I possessed many of the facts; there was no legal reason why I should not divulge them. The story was bizarre, was of extraordinary interest – yet I hesitated. This was not the innate docility of a public servant wishing to close a file, nor yet the mental arthritis of age; it occurred because I had never dreamed of so many species of betrayal, nor so many complications to patriotism. It seemed that every party in the tale had betrayed someone or something, and I found this disturbing. Ben Pinksterbloem was by no means the only traitor.

Yet his was undoubtedly a most complex case. What was it that could drive such a man to treason at such personal loss, and then to change his mind more than once? There are many who have never forgiven him, but he cared little for them; it was his own self-doubts that tortured him.

The affair spread its tentacles around the world. There is, in particular, a mountain city called Bandung; it is on the island of Java, once the proudest possession of the Dutch. Before the Netherlanders came, there was a cluster of native villages on marshy ground set in a ring of volcanoes. The Dutch turned Bandung into a military headquarters and into an industrial centre, relishing the mountain air and the superb coffee. Bandung will be one of our principal locations for this tale.

I identified four witnesses to the Pinksterbloem story, and tracked them down just in time. I found our British source, Austin Connacher, in an Amsterdam hospital. The old soldier’s life was failing fast, but he was more than willing to share his account. Major Connacher was keen to set records straight, not least concerning the role of the British Army in Indonesia’s War of Independence.

It is a story almost forgotten in Great Britain, although it concerns a pitched battle, thousands of casualties, and the last occasion on which Indian troops fought on behalf of the British empire. I made several visits to the hospital before Major Connacher passed away. We begin with a transcript of those interviews.

Part One

Austin Connacher

1st Battalion, Seaforth Highlanders (retd.)

Academic Medical Centre, Amsterdam

Chapter 1. Iron-Eaters on Java

I’d like you, please, to set down my version of the Pinksterbloem business, and the shooting at Schiphol Airport, because I do know the background to all this. Lying here, wired up and in a cat’s cradle of tubing, I’ve been getting things clear as best a fuddled and bedridden old soldier can. Shootings at airports always make people uncomfortable. They fear that a bullet might hit one of the aeroplanes; they imagine a little hole punched through the skin of a stationary 300-ton Boeing sitting out on the apron such that, when it takes off, its oxygen will seep away unnoticed until everyone’s woozy and the pilot slumps over the joystick. But also, of course, because one thinks of the innocents who’d be hurt, the children.

Guns, and little girls, and Ben Pinksterbloem. That’s the story.

Would you give that nurse a shout? I need a drink. Actually, I’m not at all comfortable, could you... Oh, there he goes, little prig, he doesn’t like me. I can’t get used to being being nursed by a man. His hands get everywhere. In fact, it takes a jolly lot of getting used to, Holland, especially after a spell in the tropics, and you may ask: why am I here? I came for my wife’s sake. In ’49, on leaving the East, I’d mooted settling in Inverness. Schotland?! Ursula protested at the mere notion. I’d have thought we’d plenty in common, Holland and Scotland: a robust climate, economical food, soccer and strong spirits, the smell of winter garments in dank bars, quite a discouraging climate actually. Anyway, Ursula wasn’t having it. She wanted home, and so we came to Zwinderdam.

It’s the small differences; little things, but they add up. I don’t like not drawing the curtains at night, but Ursula says the neighbours would ask what we were concealing. I don’t argue, so in winter we sit with sheets of glistening black glass for company, shut tight as a clam and running with wet. I can’t get used to the lavabo in the porch and to washing my hands every time I come into my own home. She says:

‘Well, Austin, God alone knows what’s on your hands but I don’t want it in my house.’

I’d have thought it was our house really, but I don’t argue. There’s no end of cleaning.

‘Don’t stand about, Austin,’ she says. ‘There’s bins to empty. And I won’t have you jingling coins in your pocket, an unpleasant British thing.’

In the Army I never jingled coins. One felt sure of oneself in the Army. Nowadays, apart from cleaning, I have not enough to do. I am overly fond of donker beer, a dark brown swill greatly preferable to the blond piss, and I am growing heavy on it. (Or would do, if I could get donker in this cheerless morgue. You couldn’t nip out for a bottle, could you? Sneak it in? My purse is in my locker there... Hang on, Nursy’s watching, vindictive little sod.)

Anyway, the house: it’s not a bad house. It’s just rather dark, lugubrious red brick and steel windows. The lounge has a turkey rug on the parquet floor, and is full of furniture: two complete suites, one scarlet leather, one golden velveteen. Over the arms, Ursula puts those ashtrays with weighted straps, and then glowers at anyone who dares smoke. There’s an electric fire with flame effect and a bookcase for my Neville Shutes. (Ursula is not a reader; she has the shopping and so on.) On one wall there’s the regimental crest of the Seaforth Highlanders in hand-painted plaster. I stand on the turkey rug with a glass of donker in my paw, and I shout our old Seaforth battle shout:

‘Tulloch ard!’

― whatever that means. I only shout this when Ursula is out shopping or she’d say I was moping. Otherwise we’re very quiet. There’s the radiogram with my Russ Conway LPs, and Ursula’s piano. She plays less these days. Lots of letter writing, mind; she has an escritoire in the lounge. Ursula’s a great correspondent, mostly complaints to the mail-order firms.

But the story! It concerns a letter from Ben Pinksterbloem, someone I’d hardly thought about in three decades. Through the letterbox comes this letter from Ben, addressed to his daughter, c/o me, in Zwinderdam, Holland. With a covering note: My dear Austin, could you get the enclosed to Anneliese? I know of no one else who might find...etc.

Yes, I could pass it on. I could find Anneliese. I could, of course, have sent it through the proper channels. I could have contacted the adoption agency to whom, at Ben’s request, I had long ago entrusted Baby Anneliese Pinksterbloem, for a new life in a new country. That’s what I should have done. But I didn’t because I’d kept tabs on Anneliese. I knew exactly where she lived.

I didn’t tell my wife about Ben’s letter. They’ve always loathed each other, and Ursula is not one to forgive and forget. She’d have shredded the letter with her teeth. I kept quiet, and dreamed up an escape to Groningen, to deliver it myself. That was something – a letter from Ben. That took me back.

The very day I received this, a great rumpus began. It started in Parliament, venue for so much flatulence. A deputy from the Far Right stood up: young fogey, demi-fascist, with a flaking scalp and a three-piece suit with flared trousers the colour of pale dog-do. Was it true (he demanded) that the Interior Ministry had approved a visitor’s visa for one Benjamin Pinksterbloem, the most infamous traitor ever to sully a pretty flower’s name? Would the Minister give assurances that Pinksterbloem would be garrotted, minced and fed to the porkers if he ever set foot etc. etc. At which the Minister puffed and prevaricated in the regulation manner, but not enough to head off a flanking move from the Far Left: would the Minister give an undertaking, in view of Mr Pinksterbloem’s international repute as a man of honour and a witness to the iniquities of Colonialism, that he be welcomed with open... etc. etc.

The hacks had a party:

Traitor At The Gates!

screamed De Telegraaf.

Holland’s Conscience Comes Home.

corrected De Volkskrant, soberly.

And this was my old chum Ben Pinksterbloem – Pinksterbloem meaning Cuckoo-flower, or Lady’s Smock. Anyone less of a little wild flower. I met him in a battle.

September 1945. The war was over, was finished; Japan had surrendered. But all was not quiet. The Dutch were clamouring to get back into Java, their prize colony; the natives were roaring to keep them out, sharpening up the bamboo spears. We Brits in Malaya were told: Quick! Hotfoot it down there, keep the peace! So the regiment puttered in landing craft all the way south from Malaya to Java – six days at sea in flat-bottomed landing craft – bobbing about like ducks in the surf, packed in like cattle, sick as dogs. The Dutch, in the fond belief that we’d restore their colony to them, called us ‘Ijzervreters op Java,’ iron-eaters, crack troops, but we came into harbour unshaven and stinking, green about the gills.

The reception was chilly. None of your flags and bunting, none of your kisses from the girls. Silent native crowds, watching these boatloads of armed scruffs disembarking at the docks. Everyone on edge. There were nasty incidents. Major Mackay was killed shortly after we landed, hacked by a mob while chasing looters, and just two days before his sister’s wedding.

We were told: Go out, find the prisoners, bring them to safety.

Camp after camp we found. Whole suburbs surrounded by Japanese wire. Single Dutch houses now held sixty or seventy, sleeping in the garage, the wash-house, even the cupboards. No men: always just women and children. For four years they’d rotted, scrapping over spoonfuls of tapioca, wasted by tropical sprue, legs covered in stinking ulcers. At last the Jap guards had melted away, or were still there but sitting on their hands, leaderless and lost.

One morning, Sergeant Grieve brought word of several hundred European women and children holed up in a sugar warehouse near the docks. We set off in three jeeps, and my lord, that town’s a casserole when the sun’s turned on. I’d bought a white parasol with a nice lace fringe and sat in the lead jeep under its shade, but Private Reith my driver objected that I was poking him in the eye while Sergeant Grieve remarked that it looked less than military. While we were debating brollies, we were nudging our way through the crowded, filthy streets among the urchins and cripples and mud and rotting palm leaves that choked the storm drains, when without warning we came to the internment camp: just a big old warehouse surrounded by a wall topped with barbed wire, an office building, and a yard cluttered with the remains of wooden barrows being steadily broken up for cooking fires. A number of Jap guards were hanging about, still with rifles slung over their shoulders, and they opened the gate for us without so much as asking who we were.

‘Shitty death,’ muttered Reith. ‘What a pong.’

The place reeked with an acrid, sour stink that made one gag. I came to know that pong all too well: it was dysentery.

As we got down from the jeeps and looked about, we saw a small knot of women: Europeans of some sort, in the raggedy remnants of flower print cottons, and all their hair thin and red. They were muttering darkly and eyeing the Japs, one guard in particular, a squat fellow with a cruel face and a thick neck who sat on a wooden box by the office door, cleaning his fingernails with a splinter. The group of women drifted apart and seemed to be going their various ways, but they were actually picking up bits of wood or iron piping. Before we’d noticed anything odd, they’d all wandered closer to Thick Neck who was engrossed in the state of his cuticles – and without warning, they set about him. At the shrieks, we looked round, and saw Thick Neck trying stand under a torrent of blows.

‘Jesus wept!’ we cried. ‘Sodding hell!’

After an instant of disbelief we ran forward to stop this – only to see and hear an iron pipe crack Thick Neck’s skull like a wet coconut. He sprawled at the women’s feet, his brains plopping down a nearby drain in gobbets. The women, in their flowery dresses, stared down at him. One prodded him with her foot. They didn’t look at us; they didn’t seem to register that we were there. Their faces were empty. Around the yard, other Japanese guards had stood up, but had made no move to intervene.

Beyond the wire the natives watched us, fingering their choppers.

We sweated it out, awaiting orders. The Java coast is the anus of the Orient, humid and savoury. There were some small compensations. The Other Ranks discovered local brews which kept them amused and hydrated. I took the opportunity to take stock of the local avians, including what I swear was Macronous ptilosus, the fluffy-backed tit-babbler, well out of its normal range. We’d found billets in an old clubhouse and the garden was alive with birds, including curious long-beaked jobs that must have been spider-hunters (my batman, the insufferable Private Reith, had left my bird book in Malaya; I was livid). Squadrons of jolly little weavers were busying themselves with their pretty hanging nests. I daresay there was water nearby, reeds in an old clay pit or some such, where they...

‘Connacher!’

How well I knew those tones.

‘Connacher! Where the buggery are you?’

Colonel Lawson. He’d made me Captain of Signals, saying I was ‘about fit to run a talking shop’. Decent chap.

‘Round up your people, Connacher. We’re to show the flag with exercises.’

Exercises: righti-ho. Private Reith was frankly incredulous, thought it was siesta time, but I soon had the lads jogging, doing press-ups, swinging bottles of beer in lieu of clubs and vaulting over a fallen banana tree. It was a tall order in the afternoon heat but I could sniff the passing wind. General Christison was counting on us, and I was charmed to see some local urchins arrive to cheer us on. I was just going across to make friends, when –

‘Connacher, what in God’s name do you think...’

Bang!

‘Take cove... ouch!’ yelled the Colonel.

He clapped a hand to his bloodied ear, throwing himself flat on the mud of the clubhouse garden.

‘Down, Connacher! Snipers, you bloody fool!’

But I was glaring at Private Reith who peered at the foam-draped remains of a beer bottle which he’d been swinging vigorously, and with which he’d inadvertently smacked a tree.

Colonel Lawson addressed certain remarks to me which I shan’t repeat as I thought them a tad unnecessary. They were of a derogatory nature and concerned my recently earned rank of captain, awarded (belatedly, I feel) after long years of service. I put his momentary unkindness down to the strain of our situation, the red mud on his uniform and the obvious discomfort of his ear, to which Sergeant Grieve was now applying a dressing.

And then: Surabaya. The final battle of the British Empire, the last time Indian troops fought for Britannia. And my first meeting with Ben Pinksterbloem.

Dutch bravos in Surabaya had run up a Netherlands flag – and for their efforts had had their throats cut by the locals. A British division was heading there along the coast to calm matters, and Colonel Lawson offered my signals unit, saying he was keen for us to go.

‘And take Private Reith with you, for pity’s sake.’

We landed with 6,000 Indian troops, Mahrattas of 43 Brigade, splendid fellows, much the sturdiest johnnies in a tight hole.

Surabaya: one inch above sea level, teeming, sweltering, rich with that seaport stink of iodine plus other, more sweetly nefarious odours. Squat boxy buildings in streaky cream and pink cement. A slimy green river and canals seething with gases. Rusting rickshaws in the rain, the riders’ skin greasy with sweat and drizzle. The harbour water prickled with the masts and funnels of scuttled shipping, as though there were a ghost navy on the bottom, ready to pop up and fight. We crept towards the quay expecting our transport to tear its hull open on something ragged below the surface.

Our Mahrattas crouched on the crowded decks, watching. There was silence apart from a low engine throb and a swish of bow wave. Desperately hot; you could smell the fish poaching in the harbour water.

As the ship came in ever so gingerly, I glanced round and noticed a fellow perched a step or two up a companionway and peering at the docks with a peculiarly intense eye, as though memorising every detail. He wasn’t much to look at, but there was something strong about him. Younger than me, mid-thirties. Not tall: quite stocky, with a mop of hair hanging off his head like ragged yellow flax. He had muscular shoulders, arms that looked powerful, and big, heavy hands. I learned later that he could do delicate things with those hands. He glanced at me a moment, the sort of glance that takes in everything. But he looked swiftly back towards the shore, and I heard him murmur to his neighbour:

‘Geen tanken.’

No tanks.

He was Dutch.

He lifted binoculars to his eyes. I followed his look. There was no reception committee on the wharf, but knots of Javans were milling between the warehouses, watching us as intently as we watched them. Some of these chaps were in uniform of sorts. We saw amateurish machine-gun nests thrown together with sacks of rice, and a few confiscated Japanese machine-guns which equally amateurish-looking gunners were fiddling with. We drew closer, wondering if they would open up and rake the men on deck. Some of the Javans looked awfully young. I didn’t like to see children dragged into this; that’s not what children are for.

But nothing happened. There was no firing, no opposition. As we came alongside and nudged the wharf, hooters woofed, warps and wefts were hefted oot – and some rather surprised Javans meekly took them and popped them over bollards. The Mahrattas streamed ashore.

We couldn’t find anyone in charge, just scores of local boys looking stern enough but doing bugger all. Some had armbands, or red neckerchiefs like scouts. Some had Japanese rifles; most held nothing more than bamboo staves. Eventually a thin fellow with a very sweaty pockmarked face and horrendous teeth, pistol in hand, a black velvet cap on his noddle and chums at his back came marching along the quay. An Indian sergeant with a Thompson sub-machine gun motioned him to put the pistol into its holster. For a moment the fellow hesitated, looking at the sergeant who was twice his size. The sergeant lifted his chin, narrowed his eyes and fingered the Thompson speculatively – at which the Javan complied, and was taken to Brigadier Mallaby.

‘We’re the People’s Security Army,’ announced the Javan. ‘You will wait for orders from our leaders.’

‘Whoever your leaders may be,’ the Brigadier replied, ‘you can tell them that I take orders from no one here. But say also that I’ll be happy to meet with any person in authority.’

To begin with, relations were cordial; Brigadier Mallaby assured the locals that we’d be out as soon as humanly possible; we were just here to evacuate internees. The Javans sent us crates of lemonade, sweet and warm. The Brigadier asked for help in locating the camps of internees; they promised fifty cars to assist.

So again we began to seek them out, those poor, emaciated, terrified souls. There were thousands of them – mostly Dutch and Eurasian women and kiddies – crouching in old prisons or derelict factory compounds ringed with wire. All their men had died on the Burma railway or in Jap shipyards. Every night in Surabaya the women heard the native mobs prowling in the hot sticky darkness past the camp perimeters, saw and felt the stones lobbed in the black night, and heard the shots. They were starving, but if they crept out in search of rice they’d not been seen again until they floated by in the canal. They could only wait with pounding hearts and rumbling tums.

We had little spare food, so we put out foraging parties to find Japanese stores and deliver these to the camps. Meanwhile, fiery Javan boys paced the streets shouting Merdeka! Freedom! and flapping red-and-white flags. From time to time I would catch sight of that stocky, flaxen-haired Dutchman from the boat, moving about with some shifty-looking companions, doing his own thing.

I quizzed Grieve.

‘Who’s that, Sergeant?’

‘Pinksterbloem, sir. Don’t know his first name. Attached to the Brigadier’s staff. Bit of a free agent, sir. Those Moluccans are his bodyguards.’

I remember thinking: A free agent in a war zone – dear me.

That same afternoon, things took a turn for the nasty.

(Before we go into that, things in this bed are going to turn nasty if I don’t get a pan. Call Nursy, there’s a chum, look.... quickly now... Oh God, not again...

...I’m frightfully sorry about that. Good of you to stick with me. Back to the tale, eh?)

I was saying: things turned nasty. It began with a leaflet.

I’d installed my wireless unit in a harbour office perched over the perimeter wall, up a flight of cement stairs. It was an utter bake house: one cramped room with a floor of cracked red tiles. The plaster bulged with damp; if you passed within six inches, a mucky white powder leaped onto your uniform; static electricity, I expect. Bare wires dangled where once the ceiling fan had hung; I daresay that had been looted. Being raised up, we could catch the breeze through the windows – one over the docks, one over the street – but we got the diesel fumes too. And here, one morning, I arrived to find that same stocky Dutchman now questioning my staff.

‘Morgen,’ he nodded to me genially, before turning back to his conversation with our Sparks. Before I could object, a corporal stood to attention and addressed me:

‘Brigadier’s compliments, sir, and please to give Mr Pinksterbloem here any assistance he requires.’

The Dutchman gave me a friendly grin, waving around the room.

‘Very good radios.’

‘Glad to meet with your approbation,’ I scowled. ‘Can we do anything for you?’

‘No, no,’ he beamed. ‘Just carry on, please.’

He left, and we carried on.

Private Reith (my wretched batman) acted as my runner to the Brigadier. About lunchtime, we received a signal from Java HQ to report that a flight of RAF Mosquitoes was available for leafleting; we had only to ask, and the leaflets could be run off in a matter of hours and flown over. I sent Reith to relay this to Brigadier Mallaby.

Some while later, he returned to the stifling radio room. Sparks was tinkering with the receiver; I was standing at the window over the street, gazing out across the rooftops through my binoculars. There was a patch of scrubby ground and a splendid fellow sitting in a tree with long streamers attached to his bottom. I’d have lain odds it was a racket-tailed drongo (Dicrurus paradiseus, I supposed, but bloody Reith had lost my bird book). And then a little band of mischievous brown scallywags came skipping out onto the waste ground, kicking at a punctured leather football with merry cries, oblivious to the peril all about. Musing on the pleasant scene, with the glasses pressed to my eyes, I missed what was going on right under my feet – until there was a fearsome crashing and tinkling. A brick had sailed in through the window.

‘Fuck a duck!’ squeaked a furious Reith (which was about the limits of his