What’s Behind You. Paul Finch

      Of course, back in those days South Wales was a long way from Lancashire. To get there we had to catch a train to Manchester, change at Cardiff, change to a bus at Swansea, by which time an entire day would have passed, and even then it was another hour’s journey to Rhossili. As I recall, on the morning in question we were all required to meet at Wigan Wallgate Station at some ungodly hour like six o’clock. Sir James had the furthest to travel to reach the railway station – he lived far out of town, and wasn’t even close to a bus route. So I volunteered to assist. I was still living with my parents, and my father was a colliery deputy. He used to work what we in the north called ‘the back-shift’, which meant that he finished around five o’clock in the morning. As such, it wasn’t too inconvenient for him to give me a lift to the station at that early hour, and he agreed that en route we would divert out of town and collect Sir James from his house.

      It was a glorious July morning, the sun already high and the birds twittering. But it was quite a surprise when we arrived at Sir James’s bungalow, and found the front door closed and no sign of activity. I’d never been there before, and if I’m honest, the whole place was a little bit rundown. Sir James was not a bohemian type; he was quite dapper in public, so I was taken aback to see an untidy and overgrown front garden, with elms and sycamores clumped tightly around the house, their branches literally lying across its roof. My father was more concerned about the state of his undercarriage after negotiating the tricky country lane; he now wondered gruffly why “the old dear” wasn’t ready and waiting. He had no natural liking for the educational course I was pursuing, though thank God he never objected sufficiently to stop it. We waited, the Morris Minor chugging away, and still there was no sign of Sir James. It was very perplexing. My packed rucksack was stowed in the boot, along with my easel, my canvases, my brushes and boxes of paints. At the very least, I’d been expecting Sir James to be waiting at the front of his house with similar accoutrements. At length, my father advised that I’d better go and “wake him up”.

      I climbed out, wandered up the path and knocked on the front door. There was no response; not even a sound from within. I walked around to the rear, which was also badly kept. The lawn had not been mown in some considerable time. There was such heavy underbrush down either side of it that it was difficult to see where the flowerbeds ended and the encroaching hedgerows began. The garden’s far end was a mass of rank, interwoven weeds, which must have come to chest height, and this was where I finally spotted Sir James; he was emerging from these with hoe in hand – as if he’d been doing a spot of early-morning gardening. On seeing me, he approached along the lawn with a puzzled frown on his red, sweaty face. He was fully dressed, but his shirt and trousers were stained with leaf matter. His hair, normally neatly combed, hung in a mop of limp strands.

      “My goodness, is it today?” he said, when I reminded him of our impending departure. “My goodness! I suppose I’d better get a move on.”

      “Is everything alright, Sir James?” I asked.

      He nodded vigorously. “Yes, yes, absolutely. Do forgive me, erm … Mr Pendleton. I knew we were going to Wales this week, but I must have lost track of the time.”

      It was a little bit worrying, I suppose – that a man should lose track of time to such an extent. But I was young. It never occurred to me that he might have some kind of problem. I doubt I’d even heard of words like ‘dementia’ or ‘senility’, and even if I had, I was so excited about going on holiday somewhere other than Blackpool that I gave it no real thought. Anyway, everything was soon resolved. Not five minutes later, Sir James appeared at the front of the house, valise and silver-headed cane in hand, wearing a shoulder-caped greatcoat and hat (he always wore this rather flamboyant fedora, which, he being such a short man, looked ridiculous on him, though we never dared to say anything). He thanked us profusely as I opened the rear passenger door for him. My father nodded and smiled tolerantly. Just before I climbed in, I glanced up and saw Sir James’s wife watching us from an upper window. She was half-concealed by the curtain, which was a good thing as she only appeared to be wearing a wrap of some sort, but she cut a lonely, rather forlorn figure. It struck me, and not for the first time, that marriage to someone significantly older than oneself was always likely to be fraught with problems.

      Not that this lingered in my mind for very long. After all, we were now embarked on our much anticipated holiday, though of course we still had a monumentally long and boring train journey ahead of us. The early stages of this were enlivened by one of the other chaps, by the name of Gibbon, who’d picked up a paperback from a newspaper stand on the station platform. It was the now-famous Pan Book of Horror Stories