Chapter Three: A Gentleman of the Fancy
As they walk back to Patrick’s house, Peter notices they’re being trailed by Jukie. “Don’t look now,” he tells Lawrie, “who immediately did, in all directions”. Oh, Lawrie. But they get back safely and Patrick fusses around with Regina. Peter sensibly points out that Regina was released for a reason, but Patrick says it’s all sorted now – he’ll just write to the British Falconry Society and find a full-time falconer to keep her during term-time in London. Yet somehow Patrick couldn’t have done this six months ago. Antonia Forest is just making this up as she goes along, isn’t she?
Patrick also realises he needs Regina’s bells, which he gave to Nicola, but Lawrie is scandalised by the idea that anyone should take them from Nicola’s special private box without Nicola’s permission:
“Patrick saw he was up against one of those family taboos which, as an only child, struck him as both infantile and incomprehensible.”
But I’m with Lawrie. If you come from a family with eight siblings, the small bits of privacy you possess have to be respected by everyone. Patrick has never had to share anything, so he doesn’t understand this. But Peter, “who should have known better”, says he’ll take the bells from Nicola’s box and take the blame. However, Peter has something more important on his mind. He asks to see the dead pigeon Regina is still gnawing on, looks at the ring on its leg, is about to say something … when Jukie struts in.
(Before I go on with the plot, I have to say I love the vivid little bits of descriptions, such as Bucket “comfortably spatchcocked under the table”! Can’t you see that image exactly in your mind?)
Anyway, Jukie demands to see the dead pigeon, Peter tosses it at him, Jukie fumbles and misses, and there’s a bit of macho posturing between the three boys while Lawrie is ignored, to her resentment. Jukie retrieves the pigeon’s leg ring and claims it’s from Red Rocket, a champion flyer, so Patrick’s “daddy-o” will have to pay lots of compensation. This is disputed by Peter, who says the pigeon was a blue chequer, and Patrick, also sceptical, makes sure he reminds Jukie that it’s Miss Culver’s pigeon, not Jukie’s. Jukie walks off, not quite as comfortably as he entered, and Peter drops his bombshell. There was another dead pigeon which he scooped up in his mackintosh and “this one’s the one with the message”!
Dramatic chapter end there. Also, I assume the title of this chapter is making fun of the notion that a boy like Jukie could ever be a gentleman. There’s a bit where Lawrie is wondering about his accent and realising he’s “true north country” and “sham Yankee” with a bit of imitating Miss Culver.
Chapter Four: “…Poor Airy Post”
The poor dead pigeon is wearing a little leather harness attached to a capsule. They discuss whether they should take it straight to the police or MI5 and Patrick is surprised that “spies should be the very first thing you think of” and even more surprised when he sees the meaningful looks the Marlows exchange. Interesting. Because only a couple of months ago, Peter had apparently repressed all memory of the time he was kidnapped by a spy. Patrick also points out that it’s extremely unlikely Maudie Culver is passing information to the Communists because she’s such a “blot-blue Tory” and what information would she have anyway?
Unfortunately, while they’re debating this, Jukie sneaks back in. (Bucket is too busy being a spatchcock to be much of a guard dog.) Jukie tries to scam them into paying him, not Miss Culver. He’ll swap the leg rings for an ‘inferior’ pigeon in the loft, Patrick’s daddy-o won’t have to pay hundreds of pounds compensation and Patrick can give Jukie some money in return. This doesn’t work because firstly, Patrick has no motivation to lie to his father (and Patrick doesn’t even have to say out loud that a hundred pounds is nothing to a rich MP). Secondly, Peter is unexpectedly knowledgeable about pigeons and explains you can’t swap pigeon rings on grown birds.
But then Jukie sees the pigeon with the harness:
“Plainly, he knew only too well what it was: plainly also, this was an attempt to get bird and harness into his hands: only, if he were to preserve the fiction that it wasn’t a Culver bird, he couldn’t be too insistent.”
As Patrick refuses to hand the pigeon over, Jukie is forced to retreat without it, but he leaves with the threat that if they go to the police, his thugs will come round and dig Regina’s eyes out. Peter and Lawrie are suitably intimidated but “Patrick’s face could have been used as a model for a mask labelled murder”. Jukie gives Patrick a look of “surprised respect” and scoots off.
Now, I know Patrick’s confidence comes from his class and wealth, but I’m on Patrick’s side here. Anyone who threatens to mutilate an animal deserves murderous looks and more.
Patrick obviously can’t leave Regina in the hawk-house so he takes her into the house and hides her in a very cool secret room that was used to hide priests in the “penal times”. Peter is a bit annoyed that Patrick had always denied any “Secret of the Moated Pile”, but Patrick explains that when they were young, he really did believe that Catholics were under siege and that Protestant Marlows couldn’t be trusted. Even though a priest was turning up at their house every Sunday to say Mass:
“Every Sunday I thought this would be the day for the brutal soldiery to burst in the front door.”
Honestly, where did he get this from? I can’t imagine his father would have encouraged this sort of thinking. Maybe Mrs Merrick? She doesn’t seem super-Catholic, though.
The children then decide to open the pigeon’s capsule, even though Patrick is sure it’ll just say something like “Dear Jukie Meet Me At The Palais 7:30 Saturday Your Ever-Loving Chick Sandra.” This leads to an exchange about their own love lives.
Patrick asks Peter, “And what do you make do with? A half-hitch in every port?”
WHAT does this mean? The Navy’s famous for male homosexuality, but I’m not sure that fits here and surely they wouldn’t talk about that in front of Lawrie? Peter denies he has any social life and says Patrick, at day school in London, has “more chances than the rest of us … Surely you date the chicks?”
Lawrie and Peter are teasing him, thinking this is unlikely. Why? He’s fifteen (or sixteen now?) and supposed to be good-looking, although admittedly, his social skills aren’t very good. I don’t know what dating norms were for public school boys in London then. Do we know which school he attends? I am imagining Westminster, but maybe he goes to a Catholic school. Anyway, Patrick blushes, thinking of Ginty, then flippantly says, “A different chick every night of the week, actually” and changes the subject to the capsule.
Which turns out to contain a mysterious white powder! It’s bicarb of soda, which the pigeons carry about in case they have a sudden stomach upset! (Okay, that bit made me laugh out loud.) No, maybe it’s arsenic or strychnine or a secret Kremlin explosive or … or cocaine! Which Lawrie actually tastes, because she’s an idiot. Peter is reluctant to go to the police because they “mustn’t sneak”, but Patrick says drug-smuggling is “worse than most murders”:
“Really, it is a kind of physical blackmail, isn’t it? You chat people into taking the stuff, you make them so dependent on it they have the heebie jeebies if they can’t get it and then you make them pay the earth to keep getting it.”
I think he’s got most of his information from reading Dorothy Sayers and Agatha Christie. Then he has another revelation – Jukie’s name doesn’t come from “jukebox”, as they’d thought, but “junkie”. As Patrick solemnly explains to the others, “Junkie – in their language – means drug addict.” Okay, I laughed out loud at that bit, too. So far most of the slang has been barely recognisable to me, but the one word that I do know – because it’s now part of everyday language – is the word that Patrick and Antonia Forest carefully explain to us.
By the way, Patrick understands Ted-speak because he regularly visits a London coffee-bar which is always “crammed with the kiddoes and the chicks yapping away and being with it like mad.” The image of Patrick trying to look like a cool cat in a café is also pretty funny to me.
Anyway, they decide to take the capsule to their local policeman, Tom Catchpole, in order to be nice to him and also because his young wife is “dishy” and a “smasher”. Way to go with the sexual objectification of women, Peter and Patrick.
Next: A Brush with the Enemy