Star of Wonder

This evening, at the nativity at St Cassian’s, we were reminded of a modern day twist to the tale of travellers following yonder star.

Unlike the kings and shepherds who left gifts of gold, frankincence and myrrh, those who climbed up onto the nave over the St Nicolas chapel a few weeks ago took the lead and left under cover of darkness.

So as we watched our own dazzling village stars process solemnly around the pews with their flickering lanterns, it was good to know that the retiring collection will boost the lead replacement fund.

Even more uplifting than the voices of the assembled choir and angels, was the wondrous sight of Ken the donkey leading Mary and Joseph down the central aisle.

He may have relieved himself, I hesitate to use the word discreetly, at last night’s production but tonight, unlike those who stole the led, Ken simply stole the show.

A Very Special Legacy

Tonight, as the wind rattles round the chimney pots at Toad’s Mouth, my thoughts are with the family of a fallen soldier and the dog who became his best friend.

Conrad Lewis was on his first tour of duty with the 4^th Battalion The Parachute Regiment in February when he was killed by a sniper in Helmand province.

His extraordinary relationship with Peg, a three year old mongrel, began four months earlier when Conrad had been deployed to Afghanistan with the Fire Support Group attached to A Company, 3 PARA.

In one of his first letters home, he wrote “I’ve got a dog” and described how Peg, who he had named after Pegasus, the winged horse on his regiment’s emblem, went out on patrol with his unit.

Conrad was the lead scout for his section, based at a front line checkpoint from where his unit patrolled to reassure the local population and gather census intelligence.

For Conrad’s mum and dad Tony and Sandi, it was, they told me, a source of comfort to feel their son had a four-legged guardian angel. So when he came home on leave last Christmas and said he planned to bring Peg home at the end of his tour, they were just as determined as he was to make it happen.

When Conrad was killed, friends at his funeral said Peg was still living with the unit in Afghanistan and the international animal charity Nowzad might help to bring her to the UK.

Nowzad was founded by former Marine Pen Farthing to care for stray and abandoned dogs, cats and donkeys in Afghanistan and Iraq and did, indeed, smuggle Peg to safety.

Tonight, after a year in one of Nowzad’s quarantine kennels where the Lewis family have been visiting her, she is beginning a new life with them.

“Like everyone in our family, Conrad was a big dog lover,” Tony Lewis told me. “He thought the world of our bulldog Fergie and had a natural affinity with animals.

“Peg is our link with him and the job that he did. And knowing how much he loved her and had wanted to bring her home, we wanted to complete the task.”

I

RIP Rat

To say we are missing the rat already would be a downright lie.

But it’s true that the house is quieter this week without her despite having a third Labrador to stay. Merriment is here while The Actress recharges her batteries with her family in the States.

The comforting thing is that Rat, photographed shortly after her demise yesterday morning, is unlikely to have known anything about her demise.

Gaylord found her lying at the side of (rather than on) the sprung trap in one of the kitchen cupboards.

And it looked like she must have had a smack on the nose from the metal bar, dropped her dog biscuit and keeled over

She was more than a foot long from nose to the end of her tail – probably all that chocolate cake she scoffed at the Halloween party – so things really were getting out of control.

There are more dog biscuits on the traps but I rather think we’ve seen the last of our furry friends.

Memories of My Favourite Viscount

How gratifying to read in this month’s Country Life that the 12^th Viscount Cobham is courting a new generation of visitors to his magnificent ancestral home in Hagley.

A few years before his death in 2006, John, the 11^th Viscount, told me how keen he was to pass on such a wonderful part of England's national heritage in a viable state.

Even then, he was selling £1m worth of antique furniture to help fund an ambitious £2m repair scheme.

A year earlier, two ancestral paintings had gone under the hammer to pay his £1 million divorce bill from Lady Cobham who left him and went on to marry former cabinet minister David Mellor

One, by the 17th century Italian artist Pietro della Vecchia, was aptly named Christ and the Woman Take in Adultery and sold for £86,250. John genuinely had no idea about the obvious connotation but said his brother laughed like a drain when he phoned to say which paintings had gone to auction.

Unlike his father, John never made decisions without giving any thought to the consequences.

It took some soul-searching to sell off so much of his family’s heritage but he considered himself caretaker rather than owner of Hagley Hall and raising money to keep the place going was a wretched but necessary means to an end.

“The house is made of sandstone,” John told me. “Bits are always falling off. My father was very much a man of the moment so when a chap drove through the gates in a Morris Minor one day and said "Sandblast your house, guv?" he didn’t think twice about giving him the job.

"I think he left about three years later driving a Land Rover and the repair bills are still coming in. Father timed his death to a tee around the same time leaving absolutely no cash and the family facing vast amounts in inheritance tax.

"The only drink we found in the house was a bottle of port - half of which he'd consumed the night before, a case of 1915 wine that I think my grandmother won at a village fete and an undrinkable case of 1878 sherry."

I’m sure dear John is chortling with delight at the way his brother now appears to be turning the tide.

He did think about throwing in the towel and finding solitude in a New Zealand orange grove when Penny took up with old chubb-chops but the Cobhams are made of stern stuff. We have only to look at what the 12^th Viscount has achieved to realise this.

The Devil's Work?

Why anyone should feel the need to wear faux leopard print ear-warmers in bed is completely beyond me.

But I suspect those of you routinely compelled to purchase loosely-termed innovative items of a personal nature from catalogues will know the answer to this baffling question.

Aunt May paid the price with her addiction to the darn things. She'd still be with us today had she not sustained a fatal crack to the temple during a sack-race style stagger to the lavatory in one of those machine-washable snuggle suits.

Without catalogues, no-one would ever have purchased clip-on bra extenders, banana protectors, portable urinals or those creepy headless terriers that one occasionally sees plonked on lawns and garden borders.

I see a great many curious things in my role as a parish pump correspondent. But yesterday’s visit to the Marches to interview an archivist proved to me, once again, that catalogues are the work of the devil.

The SatNav was leading me on yet another merry diversion so I stopped at a farmhouse in the hope of confirming my route.

Without the roll-top galoshes and milking coat, the elderly woman who met me wearing the aforementioned leopard print ear warmers would not have looked out of place at a Daktari actors reunion.

Was Clarence the cross-eyed lion hiding behind the Welsh dresser in the hall-way, I wondered.

“You’ll have to shout,” she said, cheerfully. “I’m deaf as a dodo this morning.”

“It might help if you removed your mufflers," I roared, extricating my new friend’s bobbly white curls from the ear-warmers which were clamped around her head.

“Blow me,” she exclaimed. “My son’s wife ordered them from her catalogue because she knows I won’t wear a hat. I put them on in bed last night and forgot about them.”

The work of the devil, I tell you.

Doe A Rat, A Female Rat

Well now we know. He is a She and She is officially living in the cellar. According to our new friend The Rat Catcher who arrived on the eve of The Annual Halloween Party with his intrepid terrier Maisy, she is looking for somewhere to Have A Litter.

While we pride ourselves on offering guests the highest standards here at Toad’s Mouth, we have never extended the welcome to rats. Especially doe rats with pressing nursery requirements.

And as keen as I am to put this rather unsavoury topic behind us, until I can bring news of our unwelcome resident’s departure – sudden or otherwise, I am afraid I continue to be consumed with rats as a specialist subject.

There are now traps secreted at a number of locations inside and outside the house, baited with dog biscuits and set to fly at the slightest vibration on the wooden tread plate

The Rat Catcher seems to think the last rat met his maker in the talons of an owl who inadvertently dropped him on the trampoline as he took off over the copse.

The new one, he assures me, can expect a somewhat swifter demise beneath a spring-loaded bar of stainless steel.

Having pronounced the white plastic box trap that Gaylord purchased from the local agricultural merchants utterly useless, The Rat Catcher gave Maisy the run of the house and then showed us the route that Doe has been using.

Droppings in an old carpet roll in the cellar, claw marks and tail swipes on the boiler up to the air vent, paw marks in the dust on the cellar shelves and chewed carpet by the skirting board in the hallway.

“Don’t worry,” he told us. “She won’t be troubling you much longer.”

Eye of Newt

Eye of newt and wing of bat and back in the kitchen a resident rat. 

A sizeable youngster this time.  And nimble, despite being bloated on the stale Hovis and pumpkin flesh he dragged out of the plastic sack by the log house.

As irksome as it is to admit, Gaylord really knows his onions when it comes to rats. And what a sight he looked, poking around in the study cupboard with a scarf obscuring his face and parcel string tied around the bottom of his slacks.

“They go for the throat,” he said, shaking out a lurid green wool blanket that looked as though it could have carried bubonic plague to Eyam but, more likely, caught my mother’s eye in the Green Shield Stamp catalogue.

Ice Baby and I stayed on top of the piano. Just to be on the safe side. It proved to be the best possible vantage point because as soon as G had opened the second cupboard door, young rat leapt out, scurried across the parquet and disappeared down a hole at the side of the roll-top.

I have telephoned two rat-catchers this week but neither of them have returned my calls. It’s annoying but strangely comforting to imagine that we are not the only family in the county hosting unwanted vermin

A farmer friend advised setting a steel trap with a chunk of Mars Bar on the spike. In the orangery of all places.  But Nelson, our parrot, is partial to chocolate and enjoys an early morning stroll out there, so it’s out of the question.

We need Professional Help. If only we could get it.

A Most Agreeable Soulmate

My friend The Actress has bought a griffin. A lady griffin. Very regal.  Buffed talons, bright beady eyes, a ruff of gleaming bronze scales and a magnificent spear-tapered tail.

“I can’t begin to tell you how extraordinarily happy she makes me,” The Actress told me as she reclined on the day bed sipping her customary Wolfblass.

I’d make house room for a dragon or a dodo but I’m not a griffin enthusiast as a rule. But there’s something about this one. Perhaps, the way she sits disdainfully on the sill with her tail coiled gracefully around her hind legs.

We both stood there side by side, gazing out through the picture window as we stroked the griffin’s head and traced her scales and talons with our fingers.

I cannot imagine how unfair life as a widow must seem. It is little under two years since my dear friend The Actress lost her husband.

And yes, she’s perky, industrious, infectiously optimistic and terribly glamorous but I suspect she is doing her level best to check her resolve. Resolve that must be needed to deal with the paralysing grief of losing a soul mate.

So on a chill morning when the sky is streaked with the frozen pinks of the north, my dear friend’s griffin seems a most agreeable companion.

Resident Rat

He looked peaceful. Despite the scrunched claws and glistening grey lips pared back from his jutting yellow teeth, he looked like he was asleep.

But how had he ended up dead in the middle of the trampoline? Had a miscalculated star jump followed by a triple pike caused a severed spine? Had he been dropped by a carrion crow?

We have trouble with the crows who live in the neighbour’s copse. They throw toast down all the chimney pots and peer suspiciously in through the top casements.

Had he been thrown over the garden wall by a passing prankster?

It was too tidy a scene for a haphazard late-night lob. His thick grey tail was too neatly laid out, his whiskers too proud for him to have been thrown.

However, whatever, he was no more.

We have enjoyed much sport with our resident rat during the summer months. He’s been sauntering in and out of the open back door since March.

Late night forays in through the stop pipe gap into the kitchen cupboards, gluttonous feasting on the crumbs beneath the toaster, chewing the carpet in the corners of every downstairs room, even gnawing through the fur and gristle of an ancient stuffed fox in the dining room.

He’s had a fine old time. Trotting back to his subterranean gaff most mornings, ignoring the respectful gaze of The Labradors, skirting the shoe-box-sized plastic rat trap.

He has popped, pooped and pattered. And now he’s gone.

I took a photo of him. Lying there in the sunshine. In the middle of the trampoline.

Gaylord wore a latex milking glove to scoop him up.

And then all of us; Ice Baby, Sister P and The Moomster processed solemnly to the wheelie bin, the grey one where our rat had enjoyed so many industrious hours.

And silently watched as G laid him inside next to an empty Chappie tin.

“Where there’s one rat, there’s always a dozen more,” he announced.

“You’re wrong,” I said. “We’re a One Rat family.”

But it’s what I so love about Gaylord. He’s always right on these occasions.

The kettle had barely boiled when I saw a large furry ball attached to a long grey tail scuttle across the garden path.