Kaiser Bill

Peggy does not like this man in her kitchen, this totem of the zeitgeist - or as her daughter puts it - the shitegeist. Here is a man who dismisses the great train of history with a vicious contempt, because clearly nothing noteworthy happened before he was born. Her old and brittle bones harbour a resentment so profound that she is reminded of a super-power she wished to own as a child: the ability to kill people on sight.

Of course, the only thing Peggy has ever murdered is a good meal. The man in her kitchen carries the vague scent of exotic spices. He is perhaps a part of the later influx, but that is not the cause of her distress. Almost all young people these days, regardless of their native sky, harbour this brimstone whiff of narcissism. It is the internet, she supposes. Warhol’s idea of fifteen minutes of fame seems far too generous now.

No, where he comes from is of no matter to her. It is where the entire world is going that troubles her.

‘Of course,’ he said, ‘We’ll strip all this old crap out.’

He waved a bejewelled hand at her old-fashioned kitchen, and in the passing of a second, that same hand appeared to encompass the entire house. The intricate webs of the spiders in the pantry quivered in distress, like a gossamer call-to-arms.

‘We’re gonna knock through, we’re gonna extend, and we’re gonna make this place fit for the 21st-century. You won’t recognise it.’

And there it went again; that casual insolence before an old woman. He would not, and Peggy was certain of this, have spoken to his own grandmother in such terms. Nobody ever does that. The pungency of mothballs is always overcome by the sweeter scent of an approaching inheritance.

She had not yet signed off on the sale of her home. At this moment, in her old-fashioned kitchen, smelling as it did of biscuit crumbs and stale cake, this man was merely another punter. But there was something about his manner which inclined herself towards accepting his offer. Not as a sop to his ambitions, which she deplored, but as a nod to her imagined childhood super-powers. He was by no means the only wide-boy she had met on this journey towards selling her home, but he was offering the most money for it, and he was at the heaven’s gate of rudeness.

Perhaps he would pay for it.

Still, she must tell him what she needs to tell him. It is her duty as a decent human being, although this disguise has been known to slip before, and is in danger of doing so again.

She will tell him, in the full understanding that he won’t listen: that he is entirely the wrong person to tell.

‘My family have been the only people to live in this house,’ she offered, ‘since 1874.’

‘Weird,’ he says. ‘And this garden,’ (here he looks at the long, narrow strip), ‘is way too much maintenance. I’m going to deck it. Better for parties. I’ll have men working on the house but I’ll do the outside work myself.’

She must have raised an eyebrow at that, and he laughed expansively, a sound which grated on her nerves. ‘It’s not that difficult, love. Kill the grass, lay the decking, job done.’

‘But the shrubs and the fruit trees —’

‘Wasps and leaves. Wasps and fucking leaves, Doris.’

‘Peggy.’

‘Soz.’

Peggy thinks of the birds and the bees, but the prospective buyer now demands to know what is beyond the wooden fence, which is surely part of the property he is about to purchase.

‘A quince tree and an unexploded WWI bomb,’ she replies.

‘Cool’ he says, scrolling his phone.

‘It’s full of shrapnel and probably degraded,’ she further supplied. ‘We call him Kaiser Bill —’

‘Whatever.’

‘My family considered it a good luck symbol. So many people died in 1917 when the Gotha bombers —’

He looks at the old woman in her dated kitchen and says, ‘Yeah, like what was built over a hundred years ago is gonna fucking work now!’

Peggy felt the blood rise in her narrowing veins.

'He is buried upright,’ she persisted, ‘exactly where he landed. I strongly advise you to call in the army if you’re going to buy. We’ve always looked after him, but I can’t guarantee your safety at all.’

‘The army? Murderous fuckers. No way.’

Peggy looked at his affluent, plump features and wondered how useful he would be in an emergency. This is not a man I would follow into the jungle, she thinks.

‘But you won’t have a survey done!’ she continued. ‘If you did, they would tell you to remove it immediately. If you’re going to mess with the garden it needs defusing —’

‘Like I say,’ he interrupted, ‘I want a quick purchase at the least possible expense to me. I don’t give a stuff about your bomb, Dor - Bett - Peggy. C'mon, face it! It didn’t blow then so it ain't gonna blow now! Sorry about your garden, love, but I’m aiming for Party-Central and fuck the neighbours.’

‘On your own head,’ she said.

*****

It was an unusual way to conduct business these days. No estate agents. Peggy, who was much wiser than the slightly bemused and vacant set of her features suggested, shuffled along the degraded flagstone path in the long garden and stopped half way. Lowering herself into the slackened structure of an ancient deckchair, she turned her apple cheeks to the sun. The weather was warm but not uncomfortable. There were bees in the shrubs, and the wasps, still nascent at this time of year, only came out in individual forays of precocious bravery. The rest would wait for the beer gardens and the over-ripened fruits of later summer. On an old cast-iron table was a bottle of brandy and a glass, where the rime of previous brandies gave a sweet coating. Just one a day, at this time of day. It was her grandfather’s trick to a long life.

Half the town was wiped out in 1917, and so Kaiser Bill went unobserved. People were too busy with their own ruination to notice the dud. To her returning grandfather, broken but unbowed after four years of fighting, it was a symbol of deliverance. Both he and his family had somehow managed to survive the Germans. He likened the bomb to the ravens at the Tower of London - if they leave the monarchy will fall, and if Kaiser Bill left, his family would fall.

It was a 50Kg high explosive bomb in gunmetal grey, and the aerodynamic flutes still bore a little red paint on their surface and the imperial crest of the German Army Air Service. It had landed squarely into the slightly boggy soil at that end of the garden, and there it had stayed for a century and more.

At the end of the garden there was once a low wall, beyond which an ‘entry’ lay: a footpath people, and tradesmen, walked along to reach the back of the properties. When Peggy’s grandfather returned from the war, he raised that back wall so no one could look over it. He also placed a high fence, with a lockable door, at such a height that neighbours would struggle to notice the bomb if they looked down from their bedroom windows. If anyone did notice it, the family would always pretend that it was an art installation - like a memorial to the town’s dead.

There is no amount of bullshit that some people won’t buy if delivered with a straight enough face.

Peggy’s father was born in 1912, one of those blessed boys who were too young to fight in the Great War - although just the right age, of course, for the second round.

If you ever see a photograph of boys born in the late 1880s, you should weep for them, because those smudged faces were the truly doomed generation. When their corseted mothers and their moustachioed fathers proudly posed for photographs, those uncomfortable children in their serge suits were doomed to a worse hell than a scratchy outfit and an interminable exposure time.

Peggy’s grandfather survived it all knowing that back in Blighty there was a proud brick house and a loving wife waiting for him. Within this garden, those bricks, and that old-fashioned kitchen, her grandparents forged a life away from the horror. At night Peggy would hear him scream and Grandma would tell that that under no circumstances should she try to wake him. She said her grandfather just needed the daylight to come and all would be well.

Peggy, in the twilight years, asked for nothing more than for people to honour their history, and to that of others. To not dismiss it, as this buyer of her family home had so provocatively done. And certainly not to dismiss a bomb which had been manufactured during one of the greatest eras of human industrial endeavour.

Nowadays, nothing works. In those days, everything did.

She struggled further up the path and unlocked the wooden door which led to this strange secret grove. There was an underground spring running through this row of gardens which made the ground beneath her feet rough and uncertain. Kaiser Bill was where he had always been, nose-deep in the soft ground, with the bare skeleton of the quince tree as his only companion. It no longer bore fruit and there were just five leaves clinging to its limbs, but the shape of it was as familiar to her as her own body.

She was not bothered about the lack of fruit. Peggy had always hated quince jam.

The quince tree had borne witness to this letter from the enemy. They don’t live long, quinces. Just about as long as Route 66. Fifty years and not much more. The quince and the bomb, side by side in a silent measure of the years - and only one of them is dead.

She patted Kaiser Bill before locking the gate again.

Well, she had told him about it, this buyer whose name she could not remember. It was the correct message, and she had been very clear about it. If it had fallen on the wrong ears, it was hardly a matter for her.

Of course, if the bomb had been discharged a split second earlier, her entire family would have taken a direct hit and Peggy would never have been born. Far from viewing Kaiser Bill as a threat to her safety, she viewed him as a talisman. She would miss him.

And she also believed that somewhere within that casing there was a mechanism just waiting to tick and tock. After all, there is no one in the world who doubts the prowess of German engineering.

Except, perhaps, for the man who bought her house.

*****

Several months later, with Peggy comfortably ensconced in her daughter’s granny flat, wistfully imagining her own garden fruit falling, she heard a loud and tumultuous explosion coming from the direction of her former home. She put down her crossword and slid her glasses down her nose. From her daughter’s garden she could see a plume of smoke rising in a tea-tinted column of mud and debris. She would have to compose her features, of course. She would need to arrange them into something more appropriate, but in that blessed moment, when the sirens approached her ears with reassuring speed, she had only herself for company.

I guess HE’s not going to fucking work now either, she thought, although her greatest concern was for the quince.