The Day Aberystwyth Stood Still Read Online Free PDF

was a martini glass. I turned the card over; on the back someone had scribbled in biro, ‘Ask for Miaow.’
    A voice interrupted our thoughts and we looked up. An old lady, bent at the waist and carrying a basket, hobbled down the hillside towards us. ‘Haven’t seen any Bishop’s Trumpet have you, dears?’ she asked. The curvature of her spine forced her thorax forward and she looked sideways and up at us. Strands of silvery hair, pinned in a bun, slipped out and veiled her face, which was ruddy and kindly. Her back was alive with the agitated flapping of some birds trapped in a net slung across her shoulders.
    ‘What’s Bishop’s Trumpet?’ asked Calamity.
    ‘What indeed! You’re from the town, I can see.’ The woman pushed her basket, laden with freshly plucked roots and leaves, towards us. ‘I’ve got me Foxbright and Marly, me Blue-Dog, Purple Trolls-foot, Night-feather, Trollop-me-Bright, Bog-Grail, Prim Willow, My Lady’s Hymen, Fan-white, Silver Milchgrüssel and a pinch of Satanicus, but I’m blessed if I can find any Bishop’s Trumpet.’
    ‘We can help you look, if you like,’ said Calamity.
    ‘That’s very kind of you, but we won’t find any today; the spirit of the mountain is being grumpy. But you could help me carry my basket back to my cottage, it’s just over the hill. Would you do that?’
    I took the basket and we followed her up the hill and then down the other side to a small cottage on the edge of the Forestry Commission plantation. We went through a garden gate and waited while she took the net over to an aviary in which birds of all descriptions fluttered about. The woman released the new birds and took us into her kitchen, where she put the kettle on without asking. ‘You will stay for tea, now.’
    ‘We wouldn’t want to be any trouble,’ I said.
    She looked at me in wonder. ‘Trouble? To make a little cup of tea for the next mayor of Aberystwyth? How strangely you talk!’
    I stifled a startled look and said, ‘I think you must be mistaken there. The next mayor of Aberystwyth will probably be Ercwleff.’
    ‘That’s what you think, is it?’
    ‘That’s what everybody thinks.’
    ‘It’s not what my cat thinks.’ She sat down with a groan, her rheumatic limbs clearly aching.
    ‘I think you must be feeding her too many kippers.’
    ‘Eightball doesn’t eat fish, and she’s never wrong about the mayoral elections.’
    ‘What do you do with the birds?’ Calamity asked.
    ‘Lots of things. I use the feathers for me cardigans, the feet to scratch me back, but mostly I use the croaks to black me hats.’
    ‘What sort of hats?’ asked Calamity.
    ‘Stoveys, of course. Best stovepipe-hat blacker in all of Wales I am. You ask them, they’ll tell you, get Auntie Pebim to black your stovey if you want it to stay black.’
    ‘Is it hard to black them?’ asked Calamity.
    Auntie Pebim scoffed politely and rolled her eyes as she recalled the magnitude of the task. ‘It is if you do it properly. The hardest part is not the herbs, of course. If the spirit of the mountain wants to give them to you he will, or if he’s being a pest like today, he won’t. You also need a Bible that’s been used as a pillow on the deathbed of someone who died of meanness, but they are getting harder to find these days. People are turning away from God.’
    ‘What about the croaks?’ I asked. ‘How do you collect them.’
    Auntie Pebim poured the boiling water into the teapot. ‘First you get the birds to build a nest and lay an egg; you can’t hurry that, you just have to make the circumstances right and wait for nature to take its course. Then, when the chick is about to hatch you put a bell jar over mother and egg and wait. Soon the chick hatches and the hen fills the bell jar with croaks of love, caw, caw, caw. Then you remove them and fill the jar with oil and from this you can distil out the caws. That’s not easy. Eventually you end up with a little drop like quicksilver.’ A