| I
was approached by a gentleman with moleskin trousers on,
with the crossed pockets, leaning well back on the pelvis.
I'd never seen a bloke lean so far back without falling
on his arse... and it suddenly occured to me... it was these
crossed pockets... he'd obviously had no toys as a child!
"Here, young fella," he said, "I want a word with thee."
I said, "What is your trouble, Master?" (That's how they
are, round our way.)
He said, "It's our septic tank. I've had a very nasty letter
from the Council."
It was about
twice the size of this room, and the top of it was like
one of these horrible meringues gone wrong, with a six-inch
crust on it. I prodded it with a stick, and the swine sneered
at me: "Come any closer and I'll have yer."
My God!... it was my duty to destroy it.
So we got the big five-pound sticks of explosive, tied them
on the end of the cord, and tossed one in.
Plunk, it up-ended, and a big green bubble come up and winked
at me. And we heard the most evil chuckle as the swine swallowed
it.
I'm sure it thought I was feeding it.
There were
four and a half thousand tons of effluent, all of it got
to go. We got all the ends together, bit of wire, bit of
fuse, detonator. Then the man in the moleskins said: "What
about him down there?"
There was a bloke down the field in a bit of hedge, brushing
with a blunt hook.
I said: "He'll have to shift. He'll get the lot."
Twelve seconds later, four and a half thousand tons of effluent
leapt into the air. It climbed into the sky and, at 300
feet, it mushroomed out, and a shaft of sunlight hit it.
You could see all the colours of the starling's wing, the
greens and the golds and the browns, light and dark, and
a lot of bottle-green in it, a lot of pig-muck, very sour
smell, especially when it's been in there for eighty-two
years. Then it turned over like an avenging cumulus, and
he fled down the field, like Sodom and Gomorrah, very like,
and his face went "Ahhh!". And he tried to run.
You can't run at 35 miles an hour, with clogs on, in a ploughed
field.
He'd only made four yards, and he was carrying 25 pounds
on his boots then. Visibly falling, and the second time
he came up he got a face full of shite and a double hernia.
The main flight went hissing on its way, then it went to
a grey fog and this thing wriggled and writhed on the ground
and then rose up like a phoenix arising from the ashes.
The solids had mixed with the liquids and gone into a goo,
so that when he lifted his arms... he had a pair of multi-coloured
gossamer wings... |