Ladders and Snakes

 

It was a sunny day in August. Twins Jack and Hazel, aged 10, were tired of hanging around at home, playing boring games like snakes and ladders, and decided to take a walk on the heath that was a short bus ride away.

“We might see some lizards”, said Jack. “And maybe snakes”.

“Snakes?” said Hazel. “I don’t like snakes, and I don’t just mean the ones that aren’t ladders”.

“Real snakes are fine”, said Jack. “Have you ever seen one?”

“Only on TV”, said Hazel. “Snakes can bite you, and you might die”.

“Only adders can bite you”, said Jack. “And even if one does it won’t kill you”.

“I’m still not all that happy about it”, said Hazel.

The two of them wandered off down a sandy track with heather and gorse all round them. Hazel watched where she put her feet with great care, just in case she trod on an adder.

“So where do you expect to find lizards and snakes?” she asked her brother.

“They like warm, sunny places on days like this”, he said. ”Let’s see if we can find some rocks that have got nice and warm”.

They searched around for a few minutes without success, with Jack being much keener on turning over the few rocks that they found than Hazel was. All of a sudden she stood upright with a worried look on her face.

“I can smell something”, she said. “I think it’s smoke”.

“Smoke?”

“Yes. Something’s burning”.

“Where?”

“Behind us. Over there. Look - I can see a fire”.

“That’s miles away”, said Jack. “Nothing to worry about”.

“If you say so”, said Hazel, but she didn’t sound all that convinced.

They carried on searching for another ten minutes or so, after which Jack gave a shout of triumph as he turned over a rock and saw what was unmistakably an adder with a zig-zag pattern down its back.

“Look”. he shouted, “I’ve found one. Quick, look here before it slides away”.

But Hazel was far more concerned with what she could see behind them, which was the heath fire a lot closer to them than it had been before, now that a breeze was blowing the fire in their direction.

“Jack”, she called out. “Forget the snake, we need to get out of here, fast”.

Jack took one look and had to agree with his sister. The two of them started running, but had a nasty shock when they realised that the smoke from the fire was closing in around them and making it difficult to breathe.

“Jack”, Hazel shouted. “This is awful. We need to get above this smoke. There’s a tree there - let’s climb up it”.

The tree, a solitary pine, looked to be their best hope of escaping the smoke, but it soon became clear that this plan was not going to work. There were no low branches to give them a handhold or foothold, and therefore no way of climbing up it.

“If only we had a ladder”, Jack said, but Hazel was conscious of the fact that a tree was probably not the best bet for safety when a raging fire reached it, whether not a ladder was handy. They had no choice but to keep running, coughing with the smoke as they did so.

Then Jack saw something that made him stop in his tracks.

“What are you doing, Jack?”, said Hazel. “We need to keep going”.

“It’s the snakes”, said Jack. “Look at them.”

“We’ve got no time for that now”, said Hazel. “Forget them, keep running”.

“No”, said Jack. “Those snakes know something. We should follow them”.

Jack had a point. The two adders he could see certainly seemed to have a purpose in mind as they slithered through the heather in the direction of a large rock that was just about visible through the swirling smoke. Jack and Hazel watched as the snakes made for what appeared to be quite a large hollow in the sand underneath the rock. Jack could see that this must be where the snakes knew they would be safe, and that this could be their own best hope for escaping the fire.

“Come on”, he yelled to Hazel, “there’s room for us as well in that hole”.

With the smoke in her throat, Hazel had no breath with which to argue, so she joined her brother in crawling underneath the rock. They found that the smoke was very much less dense down below ground level.

“Where did the snakes go?” she asked.

“I think they found a crevice right at the back”, Jack said. “Besides, would you rather be nipped by an adder and have to go to the doctor or be burned to death?”

Hazel could see Jack’s point, and that following the snakes was clearly the most sensible thing to have done. At least they would both live to tell the tale, knowing that there are times when snakes are more useful than ladders.

© John Welford

 

Gang Aft Agley

 

Rick had most of the plan worked out, but he just needed to think out a few details. As he sat over a coffee at Chieveley Services he reckoned that he was just about there.

He was heading south on the A34 from where he lived near Leicester to his mother’s old home in Southampton, where he was due to meet his sister Pauline, who lived in Bournemouth. Their mother had died some months before at an advanced age and the two siblings were engaged in the long and cumbersome business of sorting out her affairs and selling the property.

Today’s task was deciding what to do with the many possessions that their mother had acquired over the years, both before and after she had been widowed some thirty years before. She had been an avid collector of what she supposed were antiques and works of art, with her purchases being very much at the lower end of the market, mostly at charity shops and car boot sales.

As a result, her house was crammed full of what Rick was happy to call assorted junk, and Pauline agreed with him. Today’s task was to sort out what each of them wanted to keep and what could safely be returned to the charity shops.

However, as far as Rick was concerned, it was not quite as simple as that. This was because of what he had found at the house on a previous visit. When going through piles of papers in a filing cabinet – mostly old bank statements and receipts – he had come across an envelope addressed “To Pauline and Richard”. Pauline had not been there at the time – she had gone to the shop to buy a few things for lunch  - so Rick opened the envelope and read the letter it contained. It was dated only three months before their mother had died, as was apparent from the shaky – but still readable – handwriting.

“Dear Pauline and Richard”, it began, “I know that my time is short and that you will have to deal with everything I have left behind. My will leaves all my possessions to you jointly, and I know that there is almost nothing there that is of particular value, but there is one item that just might be.”

Rick’s eyes lit up when he read that bit.

“This is a sketch that I picked up at a car boot sale many years ago. It is not of a particularly pleasant subject, which is why I never had it framed and mounted on a wall alongside all the other prints and daubs that you can see. Apart from anything else your father hated it, calling it ‘Tarts on the Game’ – I apologise for his language, he could be quite coarse at times – so I put it in the loft, where it has been almost ever since.”

“About six months ago I was reading a book about the artist Picasso, and it had a picture of one of his best-known paintings – so it said, although it was new to me – and I suddenly recognized it as another version of the sketch I had stored in the loft. The painting is called ‘Les Demoiselles d’Avignon’ and it features five semi-clothed women who were apparently prostitutes on a street in Barcelona. It seems that this painting was one of the first Cubist works of art and it is very famous for that reason.”

“But to me it was just like ‘Tarts on the Game’, with a few differences. I got the sketch down from the loft – this was when I felt a lot better than I do now - and compared it with the picture in the book. There was no doubt in my mind that this could have been a preliminary pencil sketch that Picasso made before getting to work on his painting – I could see where shapes had been partly rubbed out and slightly different ones superimposed on top of them.”

“In other words, this could be a genuine work by Picasso and worth a great deal of money. I have no idea how it ended up in a car boot sale, but it is now mine and will soon be yours. I hope this treasure will make up for all the rubbish I am leaving you with.”

Rick’s first thought had been to tell his sister about this letter as soon as she came back. His second thought had been to do nothing of the sort. Pauline knew absolutely nothing about the letter or the Picasso sketch in the loft. If there was a fortune to made here, why split it between two people when there was absolutely no need to do so? He therefore slipped the letter into his pocket when he heard the door open as Pauline returned from the shop.

As Rick sat over his coffee at Chieveley Services he watched as a guy he supposed was a truck driver – going by the huge all-day breakfast he was ploughing into after drowning it in brown sauce – tapped away at his phone in between mouthfuls. It looked as though he was playing a game of some sort and making a fist in triumph as he moved up to the next level.

Rick could have done the same as he put the last pieces of his plan into place. He would offer to clear the loft, knowing that Pauline would never go there due to her horror of spiders, and quietly slip the sketch into one of the boxes of items that he wanted to keep. To be frank, there was unlikely to be much that took his fancy, but he needed to choose a few items in order to hide the sketch from Pauline’s view.

His main problem would be what to do with the sketch after that. How do you sell a genuine Picasso in Leicester? He reckoned that it had probably been stolen at some point and would be on a Police register of sought-after artworks. That was the missing piece of the plan – he needed to find a channel through which the sketch could be fenced without any connection being made to him. As he sat there he suddenly remembered a conversation he had had some weeks before with a work colleague about an acquaintance of his who had recently been released from jail after serving a sentence for art theft. That chap would surely know about how to fence stolen artworks? Maybe Rick could make some discreet enquiries and see where things went?

As he set out back on the road towards Southampton he was a lot happier in his mind about how things would go. He would get the sketch, take it home, and arrange to sell it to some Middle Eastern sheikh or Russian oligarch via a dubious underworld channel.

But there was a huge hole in his plan. This took the form of a massive juggernaut that was coming up behind him, its recently breakfasted driver still playing a game on his smartphone and utterly unaware that the traffic ahead was slowing down to a crawl.

Had he lived, Rick would have been interested to know that the juggernaut driver in question had criminal connections of his own and regularly undertook trips to Europe – as he was due to do now – to smuggle stolen works of art hidden in his cargo.

© John Welford

The Hole

 

It was not long after Okami arrived last year that we became aware of her delight in digging holes. She is a border collie, on the small size for her breed, but very friendly and a bundle of energy.

She had not been with us long before the first hole appeared. This was in a flower bed, nowhere near anything we wanted to continue growing, so we had no problem with it. However, the next hole was in the middle of the lawn, and that was certainly a problem. Not only did it look awful, but it posed the constant threat of turning an ankle if one stepped into it – and that is indeed what happened more than once.

Of course, we tried filling it in, but that did not last long. The next day all the infill would be out again, so we gave up trying. We consoled ourselves with the notion that she would eventually grow out of the habit, but we were wrong on that one.

The fact is, she loved just having a hole in the lawn, apart from the pleasure she gained from the digging of it. She could drop things into the hole and then fetch them out again. She devised a form of doggie golf – nudging a ball towards the hole and then patting it forwards with her nose from increasing distances. She was soon scoring holes in one from up to three feet away.

Oh well, we thought, if it keeps her quiet and we watch where we put our feet, maybe having a hole in the lawn is not such a terrible thing after all.

If only we had known how things would turn out.

It must have been about three months ago when we spotted that the hole was getting bigger. As Okami dug, less and less of her could be seen above the surface. She – like virtually all border collies – has a prominent white tip to her tail, and before long this was all we could see, wagging furiously as she scrabbled away. Then even that disappeared as the hole got both deeper and wider.

It wasn’t just balls and toys that went down the hole. Other things from the garden were dropped in – flowerpots of increasingly larger dimensions, then whole plants – small ones to start with, then quite substantial shrubs and bushes. We knew things were getting serious when the wheelbarrow vanished followed by the garden furniture – a couple of folding chairs then a table and a substantial wooden bench.

It was obvious by now that we no longer had a lawn with a hole it. We had a hole with a fringe of lawn round it.

Things got really bad when the fridge disappeared. We knew at this stage that Okami must have had help of some kind. It had taken two guys with a trolley to get the fridge into the house, so it was just plain impossible for a small border collie to get it out of the kitchen and into the hole all on her own.

We reckon that she must have been planning all this for weeks in advance. We had thought that all those little doggie conversations during her morning walks when other dogs came up to play and exchange sniffs of rear ends were just innocent greetings, but there was clearly much more to it than that.

This became clear when we realized that other dog-owners in the village had reported their dogs to be missing. Not only had Okami vanished from view, but so had every other dog within a half-mile radius. They must have been responsible for carrying our fridge out of the house and depositing it down the hole, then jumping down after it. The fridge contained lots of cold meat, such as chicken, beef and ham – all excellent sustenance for a team of hole-digging dogs. Many of the dogs must have brought other supplies with them, as several losses of Sunday joints and barbecue reserves were reported along with those of the dogs themselves.

The really odd thing was that nobody ever saw any of this activity taking place. Okami and her mates were so clever at hiding their tracks and doing all this when nobody was watching. Clearly we have underestimated the resources of the average dog to an alarming degree.

We knew that the hole must have been getting really deep when the village suddenly became deprived of every ladder that wasn’t securely locked away, and even some that were. Not only that, but the digging dogs must have realized the need for a secure structure to support the ladders. That was why builders were amazed to find, on turning up to work after one weekend, that every roof repair and house extension project in the village had lost all its scaffolding. Not a single pole or board was to be seen – the whole lot had vanished.

Of course, the Police were contacted and we were happy enough to tell them about the huge hole in our garden. They said they would look into it, which they duly did. Like us, all they could see was inky blackness and hear a very distant sound of panting and scrabbling.

We had given up all hope ever seeing our dog – let alone our fridge – again, until one morning when I glanced out of the window just as the top of a ladder appeared out of the hole. A succession of dogs then scrambled out of the hole – dozens of them – with Okami being the last to emerge. They were all filthy dirty but extremely pleased to be back above ground. There was much barking with delight and wagging of tails.

The something else appeared out of the hole. It was a human head, closely followed by the rest of the human. He had a broad grin on his face and was carrying a crate of Foster’s.

“G’day!” he said. “Anyone fancy a tinny?”

 © John Welford