Dubious Deeds Read online

  Pulling the horse off, the baron’s henchman was most apologetic. ‘Are your feet damaged?’ he asked.

  Ethelbert looked down at his trampled tiny three-foot vegetable patch, and sighed. ‘All three feet,’ he said, and the legend of Ethelbert the Funny was born.

  Geddit? Not that there’s much to get. Anyway, that must have been what passed as great humour in the ninth century because, as well as having broken toes, Bert – oh, go on, let’s call him Bert now – got his nickname. But how did he get from being one of three Ethelberts living with his mum and dad in a hovel to founding an order of monks? He had a vision, of course. This was a staunchly Christian country and most people who had visions had Christian ones; the Virgin Mary appearing unto them and that kind of thing.

  For Bert, it was a little bit different. One day a vegetable spoke to him and tried to lead him into temptation, but Bert guessed that the vegetable was actually the Devil in disguise and rejected his advances. At least, that’s how he told it. People were soon flocking from far and wide to come and meet him, and/or to see the vegetable patch. Soon people sought his opinion on everything from the best time to plant runner beans to complicated theological matters.

  On his thirty-third birthday he founded his first Bertian monastery, in Yorkshire. The Bertian monks grew the best vegetables of all the local monasteries and told the funniest jokes (which was a bit of a cheat because some monasteries were silent orders where the monks weren’t permitted to speak). The years passed, Bert died, but Bertian monasteries sprang up in various parts of the British Isles, but never mainland Europe.

  Abbot Grynge chose to follow the Bertian order and built his monastery in Lamberley because he too enjoyed a good vegetable and a good joke and was of the opinion that other orders took life a bit too seriously.

  Over the centuries, efforts were made to shore up Lamberley Monastery, and various buildings were added, knocked down or altered but, whatever its shape or size, the monastery continued its slow descent into the boggy ground.

  Life in a typical medieval monastery was hard, with long hours and lots of chanting. Monks got to live in fine stone buildings rather than peasants’ hovels and the food and drink was usually pretty good, but it was no easy option. Life for monks of the Bertian order was a bit different. Although there were strict rules about wearing scratchy monks’ habits of a particular shade of brown, the wearing of humorous undergarments beneath them was actively encouraged.

  Who knows what brightly coloured garments the most recent abbot, Abbot Po, had on under his habit as he dabbed Eddie’s face with a wet cloth? Whatever they were, I doubt they could have competed with his extraordinary features. I know I’ve already told you that his nose was big and warty … but ‘big’ and ‘warty’ are relative terms. If you’re an ant – and if you really are an ant, by the way, congratulations on your reading skills (or on your listening skills if you’re having this read to you) – then a stag beetle would seem big, but a stag beetle seems tiny if you’re an elephant. (And if you’re an elephant, please don’t sit on me.) By the same token, if you’ve never had a wart, you may consider someone with one or two warts as being warty … but, when all is said and done, Abbot Po’s nose was, by human standards, not only GIGANTIC but also warty beyond the normal terms of the definition. Add his protruding upper peg-like teeth and you will, no doubt, agree that he wasn’t conventionally handsome. (If you like warty big-nosed folk with peg teeth, however, you’d probably have found him a real treat to the eye.)

  What no one who met Abbot Po ever argued about was that he had a beautiful voice. It was soft and gentle and comforting and reassuring and a whole host of other nice and soothing things besides. It sounded like kindness itself.

  ‘What’s your name?’ he asked Eddie when the boy’s eyelids flickered open. ‘Can you tell me your name?’

  ‘I’m … I – er – don’t remember,’ Eddie groaned, craning his neck forward as he tried to sit up.

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ said Abbot Po, still dabbing Eddie’s forehead with the cloth. ‘It’ll come back to you. Now lie still.’

  ‘Where am I?’ asked Eddie.

  ‘Somewhere where you’ll be well looked after,’ the monk assured him.

  ‘The dragon?’ asked Eddie. ‘There really was a dragon, wasn’t there?’

  ‘There was and there wasn’t,’ said Abbot Po. ‘You weren’t imagining things, if that’s what you were wondering. What you saw was Brother Hyams dressed as a dragon.’

  ‘Why …?’

  ‘Why was he dressed as a dragon? Because he’s Welsh, you see,’ said Abbot Po, as though it made sense (which, as you’ll discover, it did).

  ‘Ned,’ said Eddie.

  ‘Ned?’ asked the monk.

  ‘Ned,’ said Eddie. ‘I … I – er – think it’s my name.’

  ‘Oh, Ned,’ nodded Po. ‘Good –’

  ‘Or Neddie,’ added Eddie, suddenly feeling less sure of himself.

  ‘Or Neddie.’ Abbot Po nodded. ‘Well, why don’t we call you Neddie until you remember whether it is Neddie, or Ned or something completely different altogether?’

  Now it doesn’t take a great leap in imagination to see how Eddie ended up thinking his name was Neddie, what with being called Eddie and having recently read a book about Ned Kelly after whom he’d named the baby in the bulrushes. It’s a small step from Eddie to Neddie. If only he or Abbot Po had realised just how close it was to his actual name.

  ‘Well, my name is Po. Abbot Po,’ said the monk.

  ‘You’re a monk?’ asked Eddie.

  ‘A monk,’ agreed Abbot Po.

  ‘So Brother Hyams is the only one in fancy dress?’

  ‘In costume,’ said the monk. ‘We’re taking part in the annual Lamberley Pageant. Brother Hyams always dresses as a red dragon, it being the national symbol of Wales. Other brothers will be wearing other costumes on the day. It’s one of our rare trips into the local community in such numbers.’

  Eddie sat up. ‘I must go … There’s something important I should be doing … I’m sure of it …’

  ‘Where will you go?’ asked Abbot Po. ‘Do you know where you live?’

  ‘I … er … I don’t remember anything,’ said Eddie, which wasn’t strictly true. He’s just had a rather confusing image of a giant wooden cow – yes, a giant wooden cow – with a chimney toppling off the top of it. He decided not to mention this to the monk.

  ‘Your trap was damaged beyond repair, I’m afraid to say,’ said Abbot Po, ‘but, I’m pleased to report that your horse seems fine. He has a nasty cut between his eyes, but no broken bones and Brother Felch will take good care of him. We’ve stabled him with our horses. We didn’t find any belongings in the wreckage of your accident and no clue as to your identity.’

  ‘I wonder if I’ve travelled far?’ said Eddie.

  ‘And whether you were travelling in the direction of your home or away from it,’ added Abbot Po. ‘From the tracks in the mud where your horse and trap left the road, it’s clear that you were coming from the direction of Charlington.

  ‘Charlington?’ said Eddie. ‘The name doesn’t sound familiar.’ He’d had another strange fleeting image; this time of a stoat in a stovepipe hat, spitting like a cobra. That can’t be right! Then he had another thought, and burst out laughing. ‘I’ve just remembered something!’ he said.

  ‘What?’ asked the monk.

  ‘That “po” is another name for a chamber pot!’ said Eddie. Then he fainted again. This was becoming a habit.

  Episode 5

  Getting to Know You

  In which we recall a couple of Greats, and encounter the author dressed as a chicken

  After a remarkably good night’s sleep in a guest cell – he wasn’t a prisoner, all of the single rooms in the monastery were called cells – Eddie (who thought he was a Neddie, remember) was led to the refectory to meet the other monks.

  The refectory was a huge dining hall and, when he and Abbot Po entered, Eddie was faced with
one long table running almost the entire length of the room, with a row of monks on benches on either side. They were all dressed almost identically: in light brown habits with slightly pointy-looking hoods.

  Eddie was amazed by the noise that greeted him; not the talking – there was none – but the clattering of pewter spoons on pewter plates as hundreds of monks guzzled their breakfast porridge.

  ‘Brothers!’ said Abbot Po loudly, attracting their attention. The clattering came to a stop and hundreds of pairs of eyes turned to look at him and the newcomer. ‘This is Neddie. He suffered an accident yesterday and is currently in our care.’

  ‘GREETINGS, NEDDIE!’ said all the monks as one, their faces breaking into a smile. (Don’t forget that the order had been founded by Ethelbert the Funny. As monks go, they were an outwardly cheerful lot.)

  ‘G-Greetings,’ said Eddie, a little weakly. He was quite a sight to behold. As well as all the little puncture marks all over him, from all those gorse bush prickles (which would have looked very unsightly in the illustrations had Mr Roberts bothered to draw any) he was also walking with the aid of a stick, having hurt the knee and ankle of his left leg. The most noticeable result of his accident, however, was the iodine-soaked bandage wrapped around his head. It looked like a yellowish turban. The overall effect was that Eddie resembled a pantomime street beggar: an exotic but sorry sight.

  ‘Have a seat,’ said the nearest monk and all the others on his side of the table shunted down the bench to make room for him. Eddie looked to Po who nodded. The monks on the other side shunted down to make room for him opposite Eddie. They both sat.

  Two monks on breakfast duty – Eddie was to discover later that every brother took it in turns to do most tasks in Lamberley Monastery – gave them a plate and a spoon each, then doled out great splodges of porridge with a huge ladle. A large earthenware jar of clear honey and a bowl of rich brown sugar were passed down the table to them.

  As Eddie sprinkled his porridge with sugar he frowned.

  ‘What is it?’ asked Abbot Po.

  ‘I don’t see how I can remember how to walk and talk and eat porridge and things like that, but not remember things about me … about my past. I know the days of the week, but I don’t know who I am!’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ said Po. ‘It’ll all come back to you in time.’

  ‘And there’s the noise.’

  ‘The noise?’

  ‘I can distinctly remember the noise of a – er – stuffed stoat hitting the knees of a bearded stranger.’

  ‘A stoat?’ said Po.

  ‘A bearded stranger?’ asked the monk on Eddie’s immediate right.

  ‘Y-Yes,’ said Eddie. ‘I know it sounds crazy,’ (he’d got that right) ‘but I’m sure of it … No, hang on, I think the stranger turned out to be the Empress of All China.’

  A look passed between the monks within earshot: a look which seemed to say ‘The poor boy’s rambling. The bonk on the head must have been more serious than you thought’. Those of you familiar with the events outlined in Awful End, however, will probably have realised that he was recalling the noise made when Mad Aunt Maud – for this was back in the days before she’d officially become known as Even Madder Aunt Maud – hit the heavily disguised actor-manager of a group of wandering theatricals named Mr Pumblesnook in the knees with Malcolm (or was it Sally?) her stuffed stoat … the self-same actor-manager who later went on to assume the role of a Chinese Empress.

  So Eddie wasn’t really rambling at all. It was just that he couldn’t fill in the blanks to make sense of it. (Not that the events in Awful End make a great deal of sense anyway.)

  The awful crunching noise of stoat on kneecap was obviously such a remarkable one that it would take more than a serious loss of memory to remove it from young Neddie’s – sorry, that should be young Eddie’s – mind.

  I did once mention in passing that this was a noise which Eddie would remember right up until his sixteenth birthday, and that his finally forgetting it had something to do with a hypnotist called the Great Gretcha, not to be confused with an escapologist called the Great Zucchini. (Well, you can see how the confusion might arise; they’re both ‘-ists’ by profession and both ‘Great’ by name.) The Great Gretcha, whom Eddie was to meet a number of years after this Further Adventure (having met the Great Zucchini a number of years prior to this one), was an American stage hypnotist of German extraction.

  Unfortunately, by the time she’d picked out Eddie from a number of arm-waving would-be volunteers in the audience, and had called him up on to the New York stage halfway through her act, she was past her prime. In truth, the night of their meeting was the very last of her professional career.

  Poor Gretcha suffered from an illness called narcolepsy which meant that she could suddenly fall asleep without warning – even mid-sentence – which she did with increasing regularity. The show in which Eddie was called up on to the stage, and ‘put under’ (as hypnotists describe it when a volunteer is put under their hypnotic influence) was her last because, having put him under, she fell asleep … leaving him hypnotised.

  It was a deep sleep and, once the curtains had been hurriedly lowered and the angry audience promised their money back by the nervous theatre proprietor (a Mr Dundas), they had to awaken the no-longer-so-Great Gretcha in order for her to awaken Eddie. By the time she’d snapped him out of his trance, there were one or two gaps in his memory, and the horrible crunch that greeted his ears the day Malcolm and Mr Pumblesnook had made contact was wiped away.

  When I told this tale to a well-known stage hypnotist, he insisted that such a thing wasn’t possible; that a hypnotist can neither make people do what they don’t want to do, nor forget what they don’t want to forget. I’m simply stating the facts as they came to me. And, anyway, after my conversation with this chap, I found that I was dressed as a chicken and had no recollection as to how or why.

  And, now that you’ve seen what I look like dressed as a chicken (or is it more of a speckledy hen?), my work here is done, so let’s return to Lamberley Monastery, to the refectory, to this end of the table and to Eddie with a fine sprinkling of rich brown sugar on his porridge. He was deep in conversation with a plump jolly-looking monk who reminded him of a picture of Friar Tuck he’d once seen in a book about the adventures of Robin Hood and his Merry Men. But when had he seen it? Why, where and how? Had the book been his or someone else’s? Perhaps it belonged to a brother or sister … if he had brothers or sisters. If only he could remember. It was so frustrating!

  The monk introduced himself as Brother Pugh (like Brother Hyams, a Welshman). ‘P-U-G-H, but pronounced pew, like the benches,’ he said (referring to the name for those wooden seats you find in churches). After breakfast, it was he who took Eddie-he-thought-of-as-Neddie outside to get some fresh air.

  They started off by walking around the cloisters. When first constructed, the cloisters had been a covered walkway built around a quadrangle; a large square area of grass. Over the years, though, most of the cloisters had sunk into the ground, so the stone floor had long since disappeared under the earth and the high vaulted ceiling of the cloister now seemed very low indeed. In fact, in some places, Brother Pugh had to duck to avoid hitting his head.

  There were various doorways off the cloister leading to the abbey, the Chapter House, a private chapel, and the like, but Pugh led Eddie through an open archway into the herb garden.

  A very small elderly monk was making his way along a brick path towards them. He had a large well-worn leather-bound book in his hand which Eddie assumed was either a Bible or a book of herbs. When he got nearer, though, Eddie could read the title in faded embossed gold on the cover: The Bertian Bumper Book Of Funnies. These guys obviously took their jokes very seriously indeed.

  *

  Now I’m sure the more caring amongst you are concerned as to the fate that befell Eddie’s father, Mr Dickens, when Eddie failed to return with a doctor, so let me put your minds at rest. Or, at the very least, furn
ish you with the facts (which is a little like furnishing a room but, instead of using tables and chairs, using bits of information. And there’s no room involved. Or heavy lifting).

  The Dickens household waited and waited and waited and, when neither Eddie nor Dr Humple appeared, and Mr Dickens’s groans grew louder and louder and louder, Even Madder Aunt Maud decided to take matters into her own hands.

  The dear lady knew little about caring for the sick or injured but remembered having heard or read somewhere about a boy called Jack who’d gone up a hill with a girl named Jill in order to fetch a pail of water. As a result, Jack had received a head injury (having then fallen down the hill), and he had been treated with vinegar and brown paper.

  Even Madder Aunt Maud instructed Mrs Dickens to go to the kitchen to find vinegar. (They rarely used it on food or in cooking, but Mrs Dickens was a firm believer in using it as a cleaning agent. She insisted that windows, table-tops and even MUJ’s ex-soldiers were regularly scrubbed down with the stuff.) Even Madder Aunt Maud, meanwhile, went in search of brown paper.

  Brown paper was the kind of paper used to wrap parcels when sending items through the post (usually tied up with hairy string). Mad Uncle Jack was in the habit of paying for items with dried fish, which the local tradespeople then wrapped up in brown paper and sent back to Awful End along with a bill of sale, where Mr Dickens then sent them actual money for their goods and services. He kept the dried fish in a cupboard (for his uncle to re-use) and the brown paper and string in the drawers of the desk in his study.