16th June 2021.
Guernsey’s paddled in to summer with rainbows and ongoing claustrophobia. Further discouraging ‘The Germ’ our borders remain shut and us sea rock dwellers get by as best we can. Jabbed veterans mutter it’s like the war.
Pandemic angst seemed a lesser woe this arvo, however. Suffering my cussing about the duality of municipal leaf blowers and baling tractor din outside the window the missus had bright ideas. “Go find yourself a coffee somewhere, love. Or go see the Swig-Vixen. She’s decluttering. I told her you loved cooking. Says she’s got something she wants to give you. Sun’s out so wear something on your head.”
“Got a battle helmet?” I replied.
Argh, the Swig-Vixen. She, a catering give upperer, who nowadays scatters food on her patio for wild mallard, takes pot-shots by use of a scope mounted hunting rifle at the enticed rats, and whose ornamental garden buddha bears the scars of ricochets. Of course I succumbed to Swig-Vixen beneficence. A fluffy duckling could have put up a better fight.
On the Café Victoria table bang in front of my nose – I’m talking the Victoria, St Peter Port and not the Aussie state, formerly my home, nor Victoria, Johannesburg – sat a large cappuccino, my Big Bash, bright green ‘Melbourne Stars’ supporters cap and my ‘new toy’. Around me, Candie Gardens. Distant, the harbour lighthouse.
White-bellied swifts boomeranged and skimmed not knowing whether to stick or twist. Their indecision the fault, in part, of my neighbour Sooty Sid. Whose spring reno of his gutters and soffits had totalled the unforgotten nests. A pretty rubbish discovery after five thousand kays. In five to six days. From West Africa. Directed by an amazeballs apus sat-nav. Only to be puzzled.
And the birds weren’t alone in their sense of homelessness. The gurt statue near the café terrace only stood in the gardens because of it.
The dramatic monument to the scribbler of ‘The Hunchback of Notre Dame’ and ‘Les Misérables’ had been earmarked for a spot in Lisbon. But the Portuguese had changed their minds. Well, their king did. So, in order that the hard work of Brittany blacksmith turned sculptor Jean Boucher wouldn’t go unappreciated, the French, in 1914, gifted ‘Victor Hugo in Exile’ to Guernsey. I mean, he did loll about here for fifteen years.
Blast it, though, I never seem able to say ‘no’. Having had a good fiddle I shoved the great lump of a whatsit foisted upon me under my chair.
A Swig-Vixen kitchen darling for a half century, the spätzle maker – a trad hole-stippled gadget to squeeze eggy pasta dough into noodles – had provenance. Swabian made (in Stuttgart or Heidelberg probably) it’d travelled to ‘Joburg’. Then to Humberside. Before finally pitching up in the Bailiwick.
The Swig-Vixen’s vintage car obsessed, engine oil and grease slathered hubby now risked using it as a piston. Or so she’d said. She’d did say something else. Which had quite slipped my mind.
Contemplative, I wiped cappuccino froth from off my top lip and wished I hadn’t.
There came the sort of exaggerated laugh that can make a chap feel self-conscious. Sat at the adjacent table, a trim lady of a certain age. Long neck. Long legs. Long lashes. Definitely camelid-ish. A vicuña! Wearing a wide brimmed sun hat. Leashed to her chair leg, a cute, butter-woundn’t-melt dachshund ignored the stay-put sparrows.
“You’ve made your mouth all grey!” giggled the vicuña.
On top of my hand already suffering a bit of a rash, my fingers, I noticed with alarm, were coated in metallic dust.
Ah, I remembered! The Swig-Vixen had advised: “Soak the thing in salt water before using it and it’ll be fine.” My instant response, “Best chuck in the Little Russel to amuse the oysters of Herm”, didn’t deign make it from brain to gob.
Fact was her hubby had stuffed the gadget in the dishwasher too many times. How he loved his dishwasher! Or to put it in ‘boffinesque’: atomic hydrogen particles meant flaky metal. A pH thing. Soapy alkalinity plus alkaline water equalled corrosive oxidation and hence smudgy, grey fingers.
It was as if I’d been messing in the bowels of Les Vardes, Guernsey’s last working quarry.
I mean, sheesh, during what islanders call their ‘Stone Age’ – that’s to say Victorian and Edwardian times – as many as 250 quarries were slogged upon. An insane number. From above, the island would have looked akin to Swiss cheese. The plinth giving Victor extra prominence was hewn from Guernsey granite. The dressed finery of London’s Strand and the Thames Embankment too. Monster stone walls here got built for blooming fun.
And modern times offer proper playtime technology to tinker with. Les Vardes blast sites are laser profiled. A swanky drill rig makes neat holes for the explosives. And the detonation’s proper push button IT. Just the bonzer ‘whoomph’ remains old school. The result: 125,000 granite tonnes a year for domestic use and loads and loads of aggregate.
Yet Les Vardes days, too, are numbered. This I learned a couple of evenings ago whilst ambling the quarry’s rim. Apart from the bunnies, the gulls and a bumblebee I’d thought myself alone. Not so.
Headed my way along the winding path came a flash of colour, bright as a kingfisher, that briefly disappeared amongst alder, gorse and foxgloves to emerge again as a vision of a bloke. To-heel, ancient and unrestrained, a white, black-blotched terrier padded along gamely.
Entering my shadow the dog rolled on on its back, four legs in the air. The back left all-a-twitch. The full expiring cockroach.
“She likes you,” observed master. His epidermis face to feet a palate of yellow, green, turquoise and orange, a failed tattoo apprentice’s portfolio.
“Bane of my life dogs,” I muttered.
“Wha’? Go on. Tickle her tummy.”
I showed willing, alarm bells ringing.
“I love coming up here,” said the kingfisher. “I enjoy the birds. Pity the gulls drown them out.”
In the belief the mutt was about to orgasm I withdrew my hand. “Gulls are birds,” I dead-panned.
“Hrr-hrr, you got me there!”
My hand began to itch.
“Lots of rabbits out this evening,” I said, prolonging conversation, not wanting to appear rude. “They’re denying responsibility for that big hole.” I pointed past an official ‘Keep Dogs On Lead’ sign to the humungous amphitheatre of rocky ledges, grime and echoing gull screams. He was so right about the gulls. I couldn’t even hear a sparrow.
“She loves her rabbits,” enthused the kingfisher. “Caught one last week. Beggars belief. She’s still got it.”
“The rabbit? Quarry of the quarry?”
“Nah, nah, the nimbleness… Pity the quarry’s closing. Been here two hundred years. Be worked out in another twelve month, they say. I dunno what they’re going to do with it.”
I wondered who ‘they’ was. But there you had it: local knowledge. Closure was afoot. A blast too many and the blessed sea might flood in…
“He was brought to Guernsey on ‘The Giraffe’.” The vicuña, again.
I rubbed my good ear with a forefinger. Ushering in more regret. “Pardon?” I said.
“You were staring at Hugo.”
“Was I? What giraffe?” Certainly an alternative to vicuña, I thought. I braved a glance at the dachshund. It wagged a tail.
“Name of the boat that brought Hugo’s statue over from France. A steamroller towed it up here on gun carriage from the harbour. Masses and masses of people celebrated the arrival.” A locally knowledgeable vicuña-giraffe, then.
“Good to know,” I said. “The good old days, eh?”
“I didn’t know they made garlic crushers that big.” said the vicuña-giraffe, pointing. “Is it just for elephant garlic?”
“It’s not a garlic crusher. It’s a spätzle squeezer.” I tried to sound authoritative. “Very German. Also does pretty mashed potato, I’m told. You can have it if you like. Give it a good home?”
“Nah. Ta, anyway.”
Pfft! So easily said! Bully for her, I mused, a swift departure occurring. Both for me and for the wee feathered boomerangs. Settling on twist they headed away toward Sark. Or Alderney… Or, heaven forbid, the forgotten world. I, instead, navigated the steep, Stone Age pavements back to my Stone Age ‘home’. Where the missus shared my delight of the kitchen darling.
But what is it with my absolute inability to say ‘no’? Least with dogs my cure’s an antihistamine.
Illustrations & text © 2021 Zum Beamer/Charles Wood.
Zum Beamer 