Mother Was

Mother was standing on the back doorstep, calling me in for supper. I was down the garden, putting out some food for the birds, which at least added a modicum of joy to an otherwise depressing scene in a garden that had never had much in the way of tender loving care.

I looked across to The Patch, which had always mystified me. This was an area of bare soil, about the same size as might have been occupied by a garden shed or a small greenhouse, but there had never been either of these during the 15 years of my existence.

Nothing grew on The Patch, not even weeds. I had tried to brighten things up by planting a few bulbs, but nothing ever came up. My efforts at growing radishes and leeks had all been complete failures. We had no pets, but the cats that came into our garden, and the occasional dog that broke through our apology for a fence, all avoided The Patch, either for digging holes or doing their business.

Even the birds, who were happy to take breadcrumbs off what pretended to be a lawn, never hopped on to The Patch to take any that might fall there.

I had mentioned The Patch to some of my friends at school, who had plenty of ideas about what might account for its strange properties. There was an ancient curse on it, one of them said, the result of terrible crimes that happened centuries ago, when Laburnum Avenue was the site of a grim castle owned by an evil baron whose victims had been burned at the stake on this very spot.

I even went to the library to see if there had ever been a castle here at any time, but it appears that this area had always been farmland before being taken for housing back in the 1920s.

One of my friends reckoned that there was a body buried in The Patch, maybe more than one, and it was ghostly apparitions that made it what it was. Only today this friend had even suggested that I should get a spade and start digging for evidence. I wondered how I was going to explain that to Mother if I actually did so.

There were just the two of us living here, and that had always been the case for as long as I could remember. I had no brothers or sisters, and I had never known my father, who had been lost at sea in a yachting accident very soon after I was born. Mother had never remarried, or shown any sign of wanting another partner.

She could in no sense be regarded as a brilliant mother, although she let me get on with just about everything I wanted to do, which was fine by me. She wasn’t around much – always there to cook my meals and that was about it. She was at work during the day and usually went out in the evenings, only coming home after I had gone to bed. It was a lifestyle that suited both of us.

I sat at the dining table and had just started to eat when there was a knock at the door. Mother went to answer it, and was clearly shocked by the sight of the person who stood outside. I heard her say, “What the Hell are you doing here?” but could not hear the reply.

The dining room door opened and Mother ushered a man towards where I sat. He was tall, gaunt and balding, reminding me strongly of the farmer in Grant Wood’s “American Gothic” painting. When Mother stood next to him I could easily see her as the farmer’s wife. 

The man ignored me, but said to Mother: “We must talk. Now. Alone.”

I had no choice but to leave the room. I reached for a drawer in a chest against the wall, explaining that I wanted to take a radio with me to my room. The man nodded at this, clearly reckoning that if I was listening to music I wouldn’t be eavesdropping on their conversation.

What I actually took with me was one half of my walkie-talkie set. I turned the other half to “on” and left the drawer slightly open, unseen by either of the others. This business sounded important and I saw no point in missing out on anything.

What I heard was a lot more than just important. It was dynamite.

“The Boy suspects something” said the man.

"What do you mean?” said Mother. “We’ve always been so careful.”

“Someone I know down the pub is the father of one of the Boy’s schoolmates. Of course, this man has no idea who I am, but he started telling me that his son had been told by his friend that he was going to buy a spade and start digging for a body in his garden. From the details he gave it could only have been this garden. The guy seemed to think that this was all some huge joke – he was laughing fit to burst, but he had had a few by then.”

“He could have been right”, said Mother. “I saw the Boy looking long and hard at The Patch this evening. I’ll bet that’s what he had in mind.

“We’ve got to stop him”, she said. “We’ll both be in trouble if the body ever comes up”.

“You mean you’ll be in trouble”, said the man. “I’m at the bottom of the English Channel, if you remember, along with your twin sister if I recall. How naughty of me to go sailing away with my wife’s twin, leaving wife and baby son at home. How unfortunate that the yacht was run down in the night by an oil tanker and no trace of it ever found.

“It was quite a neat trick for you to assume her identity ever since and carry on living as a grieving widow. Not even your parents noticed the switch.”

“So what do we do?” Mother asked – or, from what I had just heard, was this my mother at all?”

What came next was even more shocking.

“We’ll have to arrange another little accident”, said the man. “It sounds as though he intends to buy a spade after school tomorrow and start digging when you’re not around. He’ll head off towards town down a main road that he’ll have to cross. I’ll steal a car, run him down at high speed, then drive off and torch the car. I’m dead already, so I can’t be traced. 

“If the Boy dies straight away, all well and good. If not, you’ll be able to visit him in hospital and finish the job if you’ve still got some of the stuff left that you used on your sister.”

“I probably have”, said the woman I should now refer to as my aunt. “It was pretty powerful, which is why The Patch is the way it is to this day.”

I’m sure they had plenty more to say to each other, but I had heard enough. I was in danger, and had to escape. I packed some necessaries in my backpack, intending to head for my grandparents’ house after slipping out my bedroom window and down a drainpipe. I had every intention of visiting the Police Station as my first destination.

I now knew so much more than I had done only a few minutes before. I knew that I had been sold a lie for all my young life, that I had a father after all, although he was an evil scumbag, and – of course – I knew for certain exactly where Mother was.

© John Welford

Where Streams of Living Water Flow

When Jacob Rowley’s rich and childless uncle died in 1718 and left him his entire fortune, gained from highly profitable sugar plantations in the West Indies, he knew that he could at long last do what he had always wanted to do and make a name for himself in the upper echelons of Society in his local town. He had long envied the rich lords and ladies who rode past in their carriages and glanced disdainfully, if at all, at the lesser mortals, such as himself, who could not afford such luxuries as fine clothes and prancing horses.

Jacob knew just how he could use his inheritance to make the change. Many of these upper-class people were on their way to the neighbouring town of Buxton to take the waters at the famous Spa, where the main object of the exercise was to see and be seen and to mingle with other people of their class. Jacob’s ambition had always been to open a spa of his own and attract those same people to his own establishment, where he would be the provider of the same sort of luxury and elegance that Buxton could offer and therefore be accepted into the company of those posh carriage-owning people and become one of their number.

Jacob’s uncle had owned a big house in the town that could easily be converted into a spa resort. It even had a stream of sparkling water that ran through its grounds from the hills behind the town. The source of that water was just like that which supplied the spa at Buxton – mineral-rich springs that bubbled up from deep underground and brought healthy benefits to anyone who drank it, or so they believed. And – of course – there were huge financial benefits for whoever could own it and sell it at a substantial profit.

All Jacob needed to do was build the facilities and ensure a steady supply of spring water so that his spa would never run dry. This meant employing a team of men to dig out a fresh channel behind the house and to bore a tunnel through the rock so that the water would flow faster and not be contaminated by contact with any surface deposits. Jacob knew that this would take time and money, but he was prepared to wait as long as it took, and pay whatever was necessary, in the knowledge that all his investments would be repaid many times over when he was eventually able to open for business.

In the meantime, he was approached with many offers and ideas as to how he could make good use of his newly inherited wealth. There seemed to be dozens of schemes around that guaranteed vast fortunes for hardly any investment. For example, he could buy shares in the South Sea Company, as hundreds of savvy and high-born investors had done in London. Surely they had to be on to something?

However, Jacob preferred to put his money into something more substantial than share certificates, which is why he was prepared to listen to appeals for loans of cash from old friends of his who were going into new enterprises of their own. He therefore ended up putting money into a new school, agricultural improvements, a lead mine, a pottery, and much more besides. It pleased him to think that money that had been made from the labour of slaves in the colonies was finally doing some good.

When all the work was complete and Jacob was ready to open his spa he invited all the great and good of the town to come to the grand opening of his pump room. The idea was that a lever would be pulled that allowed the spring-fed mineral water to pour into a series of basins from which the customers would be able to scoop it out by the cup and drink it at their leisure.

He asked his old friend William, who had been one of the people to benefit from his generosity, to do the honours and pull the lever. As the finely-dressed lords and ladies of the town gathered to watch the ceremony, Jacob felt a warm glow that came from the knowledge that within a few days he would be able to hold his head up in their company and have the respect he had sought for so long.

“I really am very grateful to you, Jacob”, William said as they waited. “Not only have you asked me to open your new spa, but the money you lent me has made all the difference to my new mine”.

“In what way?” Jacob asked.

“Well, one of the problems we had was what to do with the liquid waste from the underground workings. It’s pretty unpleasant stuff, full of nasty chemicals, and you wouldn’t want it going on to farmland or ending up in wells or reservoirs. 

“Fortunately, we came across a brand new tunnel up in the hills. What it was there for is anyone’s guess, but your money just covered the expense of digging a connecting tunnel to it from our lead mine. All the waste can now go straight down it.

“Now – is this the lever you want me to pull?”

© John Welford