Devon occupation
Jeremy Clarke
Of the 35 wedding guests, one other person, I noticed, was wearing a suit. On the strength of our being the only men in suits, I went over as the cake was being cut and introduced myself. He was an elderly man with ascetic features under a gigantic pair of spectacles. He lived in the house opposite, he said. He was an exslave. Ukrainian by birth, he was enslaved by the Nazis for three years during the second world war.
I was green with envy. At least you knew where you stood in those days. ‘Of course, I was terribly homesick,’ he said. ‘But apart from that it wasn’t too bad. In the Ukraine we were more terrified of the Russians than we were of the Germans. I was sent to France, to work in food production.’ More worrying for him these days than the advance of the Red Army or the Wehrmacht, however, is the occupation of this part of Devon by the newly enriched. They join the Art club, of which he has been secretary for 25 years, and lecture him about what makes good art. ‘They preach their opinions about art with the zeal of missionaries,’ he said sadly. Then, brightening considerably, he said, ‘Doesn’t she look lovely?’ He was referring to the bride, my boy’s mother, who was passing among us and doling out lumps of wedding cake. It was true. She looked really lovely in the low-cut peach-coloured gown she’d lost nine stone in six months to get into.
Not yet ready for wedding cake, I went outside and queued at the barbeque for another burger in a bun. The man flipping the burgers had one of those increasingly rare rich Devon accents. ‘How be you then, my buck?’ he said, as I presented him with my halved bun. ‘Clinging to the wreckage. Yourself?’ His leg was hurting, he said. He’d been kicked in the shin by a bull. He bent down and rolled up one leg of his chequered blue chef’s trousers to show me the blackening hoof-shaped bruise. ‘The bastard,’ he said, reminding me again how these amiable Devonians are no less affronted by a kick from a domesticated beast than they would be by one from a fellow human being.
My boy’s mother had earlier been joined in marriage under a polythene gazebo in the back garden. Afterwards it was too cold in the northerly wind for anybody to remain in the garden, and those guests who were too polite to smoke inside the house congregated in the narrow alleyway outside the back door.
I stopped here, beside a plastic bucket half-filled with tar-coloured water that served as an ashtray, to eat my burger. Among the convivial smokers, I encountered an old friend from my days as a council worker, Jim Green. Jim is a hardworking, suggestible man, who once set fire to the courthouse, a delightfully elegant 18th-century building in an otherwise ugly town, simply because his wife at the time had told him he ought to. The courthouse was gutted, Jim confessed immediately, and a court, uncomfortably convened in a Portakabin, sent him down for five years. ‘Got a light, Jim?’ I said.
Jim was slumped against the wall and staring at the ground, in desolation as I thought. He was studying the drains, however. ‘See that drain there, Jer?’ he said, motioning towards it with his beer can. ‘And see that manhole cover there?’ (The rectangular cover was about nine inches from the drain.) ‘Do you think they’re connected?’ It was an interesting question. Years ago Jim and I worked on the council sewer gang. Much of our time was spent considering which drain led to which manhole. The fantastically illogical nature of the local sewerage pipe system taught us humility and gave us a paradigm for living. All things considered, however, I’m not sorry I’ve moved on.
Standing upright in a nearby flowerbed was a garden fork. ‘There’s only one way to find out, Jim,’ I said, prising up the manhole cover with a prong. Jim and I got down on all fours, as of old, and peered up the clay channel. Half a dozen other guests clustered round and looked over our shoulders. There was a connection to the nearby drain, which was for rainwater, but it was only a secondary connection. The main channel, into which my unruly tie fell, was a sewage outfall pipe.
And as we looked, a lavatory flushed upstairs in the house. Five seconds later, water surged along the clay channel bearing lengths of sodden tissue paper and then other unmentionables. A squealing window made us all look up. A sleeved hand pushed open a small ventilation window but failed to secure it. At the third attempt the hand succeeded. I recognised the sleeve. It belonged to the only other suit. We’d all just witnessed Ukrainian unmentionables beginning their epic journey down to the sea. I replaced the manhole cover and went to get another burger before they ran out.
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