38
A right old Yorkshire pudding
Sunday, January 15
From a hundred yards across the Skipton-le-Beans village green on a Sunday morning in mid-winter, the Pig in Muck Inn looked its usual small, white, welcoming self, a few seasonally-redundant flower pots in the windows, a few black wooden shutters open, a few closed. You could imagine the wet feather in there mopping last night’s beer-soaked detritus off tables and vacuuming peanuts and cigarette ash off the smelly old carpets in readiness to do it all over again come lunchtime. Only, on this Sunday morning, the substance spilt all over the tables wasn’t beer – it was water, thousands of gallons of it. And even the most powerful industrial vacuum cleaner would be hard pressed to suck up this ash…
What we could see from the far end of the village green – but dared not approach – was a gutted carcass. Around midnight last night, an hour after the last drunken farmer had lurched off back to his wife, an incendiary device had been thrown through the window of the Pig in Muck Inn. The fire had raged unnoticed for ten minutes before a sleeping wet feather smelt smoke.
A mile down the road, Chicken Colditz HQ had faired rather better. Austin’s bedroom was a bit charred, but the fire had failed to take hold.
Ten miles away in Hustwickgate, Lloyds TSB had faired even better. But then the rock hurled through their window had been attached to nothing more inflammatory than a death threat.
And two miles down the hill from Lloyds TSB, the Hustwickgate RFC clubrooms had faired better still. They were, in fact, completely intact. The No 1 rugby field was, however, completely in tacks. Hundreds of them like little grey barbs in the frosty long grass, forcing the cancellation of all Sunday fixtures and forcing the Hustwickgate Seniors left wing – one Simon “Little Lomu” Hogg – into sad and sudden retirement.
Psychologically this set of calculated overnight raids hit the local community hard, occurring as it did just when they thought things were getting back to normal. It had been three-and-a-half tense, yet terrorism-free months since the malevolent mail drop.
It hit me pretty hard too. Particularly the raid on Chicken Colditz, occurring as it did while we had the entire clan conveniently stashed forty miles away. Coincidence? I no longer thought so (and neither did they). This was starting to feel personal and I was starting to feel strangely sick. I was, however, not yet ill.
But then the day was far from over.
