Metroland by Julian Barnes Read Free Book Online

inaccessible lug to let the sump-oil out of his car (‘ Do mind your clothes, lad’), or clearing patches of nettles (‘Sorry about the gloves, lad, they seem to have rather a lot of holes in them’), or nipping down to catch the post (‘You’ll have to run there in order to catch it-tell you what, I’ll time you.’ This was a mistake: I got my own back by walking there, missing the post, and running back). This time it was an enormous fugging tree-stump. Arthur had grazed a shallow trench round it, laid bare a few thin, unimportant rootlets, and deliberately piled some loose earth over a huge root as thick as a thigh.
    ‘Shouldn’t give you much trouble, lad. Not unless there’s a tap down deep, of course.’
    ‘There’s that big one you’ve covered up as well,’ I said. When we were alone together we came close to owning up. I liked him.
    ‘Covered up, whaddya mean, son? That? Is there a root under there? My, my. You’d never think a stump like that would need so many roots, would you? Still, I’m sure an intellectual young chappie like yourself will be able to puzzleit out. By the way, the head does tend to fly off the pick every now and then. See you for tea. My, it is getting chilly.’ And he wandered off.
    There were various incompetence ploys open to me. There was throwing-the-earth-all-over-the-place- (like on to the lettuce cloches) -in-a-fit-of-enthusiasm. There was breaking-the-tools; though this led to trouble with my father. The best one I thought of – though had to abandon as I couldn’t find a bow-saw – was cutting the stump off at ground level and covering the whole thing up with earth (‘Oh, sorry, Uncle, you didn’t say you wanted me to dig the whole area up – I thought you just wanted to avoid tripping over it in the dark’).
    Finally, as a compromise, I decided on delaying tactics. I dug in a wide circle of radius four feet or so, all round the stump, occasionally cutting off the odd spindly, unimportant root, but never remotely threatening the solidity of the thing. I worked parodically, with a maniac zest, ignoring four o’clock and finally drawing my uncle out into the garden again.
    ‘Don’t catch cold,’ I shouted as he approached, ‘it’s chilly out here if you’re not working.’
    ‘Just come to see if you’ve finished. Christ Albloodymighty, what d’you think you’re doing, you berk?’ I had by this time sunk a trench a foot wide and nearly three spits deep all round the stump.
    ‘Sapping it, Uncle,’ I explained in a professional tone. ‘After what you said about the tap-root, I thought I’d better dig wide and deep to start with. I’ve got those out so far,’ I said proudly, pointing to a tiny pile of twig-like roots.
    ‘Bloody Ruskin,’ my uncle shouted at me, ‘bloody little intellectual wanker. Give you a pig’s arse you wouldn’t know what to do with it, would you, son?’
    ‘Is tea ready, Uncle?’ I asked politely.
    After tea, which I used to spend watching hopefully for Arthur’s over-dunked ginger-nut to cascade down his cardigan, I got down to some quiet erectile browsing in the garage. In those days, you didn’t just dream about sex almost all the time,you also got hard at the slightest provocation. Travelling to school, I’d often have to pull my satchel over my thighs and frenziedly conjugate something to myself in an attempt to get the tumour down by Baker Street. Small-ads for ex-WRAC bloomers, pseudo-histories of Roman circuses, even the Demoiselles d’ Avignon for Christ’s sake: they all worked, all had me digging in my trouser pocket to make readjustments.
    The attraction of Arthur’s garage was his neatly strung bundles of the Daily Express . Arthur Saved Things. I expect it started during the war and was justified by his usual dog-leg logic. He probably thought tying up your newspapers was a slightly less tiring form of digging for victory. Still, I didn’t complain. While the grown-ups got down to discussing mortgages