Contract Killing

CONTRACT KILLING

When my new neighbours moved in I warned them. “There’s a fox on the roam and he’s visited my garden and done some damage,” I said.

“Really?” the lady replied, looking quite delighted, her husband showing a mild interest. “Isn’t it lovely to have wild life on one’s doorstep,” she said, smiling.

Later I learned that the family, including a boy of four and a girl of six, were Vegans. They owned a fat cat and two overweight dogs and a tame rabbit. The rabbit lived in a hutch in the garden surrounded by a four-foot wire fence. One night, about three weeks after they’d settled in, the fox jumped over the fence and ate the rabbit. In the morning, when the family discovered only bits of fur and a couple of grisly pieces of flesh, they were all very distressed. The lady reported tearfully that although the children had become very fond of the little rabbit she’d explained that foxes, too, were fully entitled to their natural way of life. It was reasonable and philosophical of her to say so, I thought.

I felt much less benign towards the creature and couldn’t help reflecting on the notion of my neighbours’ tolerance of animal savagery. It appeared not to extend towards humans. I like the idea of vegetarianism but do eat meat, I admit. My own instinct in this case would be to kill the fox, but I didn’t say so. After all, he’d been doing mischief in my own garden for months.

I’d first seen the townie Reynard lollop across my lawn one afternoon in April. He appeared from behind the bushes, advanced a few paces before slowly retracing his steps, condescending to depart only after giving me a most insolent stare. In June and July he returned at night and began to dig up the grass. Every morning, from my bedroom window, I saw gaping wounds across the green sward. His paw marks had made three or four inch indentations into the soil. Each day I filled in the holes with fresh earth and scattered a few grass seeds on top. Every night he returned to dig afresh.  The lawn slowly began to resemble a crossword grid, squares of green here, squares of earth there.

By August, the new neighbours in place and their rabbit devoured, I began to hope that Mr Fox had changed tactics and would leave me alone, but guessed he’d be back. It was no real surprise when once again from the bedroom window I saw that the digging had resumed. I needed advice.

First, I described the situation to a friend, a retired engineer. “Put a mirror in the garden,” he said.

“I beg your pardon?”

“A mirror, you know, a looking glass. He’ll see his own reflection and think it’s another fox and run off. Territorial animals, foxes. They don’t like any competition.”

“Er… yes… I see. Worth a try, I suppose.”  My friend affirming with a vigorous nod of the head, I decided to give his little stratagem a go. For three nights running I crept out into the garden very late, once it had grown dark and not wanting my new neighbours to see me, and propped up an old shaving mirror in the centre of the lawn.  No Narcissus, my fox, so it didn’t work.

The engineer came up with another idea  “You’ll have to set a trap,” he said.

“What sort of a trap?”  I thought of those jungle films I’d seen as a boy, where Tarzan’s enemies dig big pits for him to fall in.  My friend’s plan was simpler.

“You construct a cage with some meat inside and a door that closes once the creature is inside. That way you catch the bugger.”

“Then what do I do?”

“You take the cage down to the Isle of Wight and release the beast.”

My son and his wife live there, as it happens.  I explained to my friend that they and others on the island probably wouldn’t think much of his proposal. “In that case,” he said, “you’ll have to frighten him off.”  How? Loads of electronic devices were available, which pick up anything approaching on four legs and proceed to emit high-pitched ululations. “The noise scares the pants off the animal and he runs away.”

I thought of the various animals I’d seen in my garden during the years I’d inhabited the house, including hedgehogs and squirrels, not to mention a load of cats. Somehow, I didn’t fancy the idea of alarming noises and possibly flashing lights in the middle of the night.

I decided to phone the RSPCA. The first response from one of their officers was to inform me that anybody poisoning a fox straying into his garden could be fined as much as £5000. I had no wish to kill the creature, I explained, but merely to deter it from digging up my lawn and, incidentally, eating my neighbours’ pets. There existed, he told me, a chemical called Reardine, which emits an odour very offensive to foxes. Dig a couple of the pellets into a shallow hole, cover with sand, and when the fox finds them he’ll get a nasty smell and won’t come back.

I tried six garden centres. Not one of them had heard of Reardine.

I popped into the local Veterinary Centre and asked if they’d heard of it. They hadn’t but advised me to get in touch with “Beryl”, a local lady who was an expert on foxy habits. When I phoned her, she was most supportive. The hungry fox was digging in my garden for edible roots, she informed me. If I were to provide an alternative fare, like peanut butter, it would satisfy him and he’d stop stripping the turf. “Peanut butter is very good for a fox’s fur and gives it a lovely gloss,” she said.  Alternatively, his coat might make a good doormat was my own unvoiced opinion.

Possibly, I’d become a little unbalanced myself at this stage for I actually followed Beryl’s advice. For three nights running, I put out slices of bread thickly coated with peanut butter. By morning not a crumb remained, but freshly dug paw holes were still there. I suspected that mice, maybe rats, too, were helping themselves. Also, I imagined the fox lying on his back and roaring with laughter at such imbecilic antics.

Finally and desperately, I asked a local farmer what to do. “Shoot it!” he said at once. I explained that I didn’t possess a gun and wasn’t it illegal, anyhow. At present, the law allowed those with proper gun licences to kill a fox, he told me.  “Reggie’ll do it for you. I’ll send him round and you can have a word.”

The following evening, Reggie arrived on the doorstep. A skinny, ginger-haired youth, he wore a coarse woollen jacket of the kind you see only in Charity Shops.  His eyebrows were so faint and thin they might have been drawn rather than grown. A long bony face with high cheekbones enhanced the ascetic look, thick lips the only evidence of anything sensual. All he said was, “You got a fox wants killing, right?” I assented to that, gainsaying Mr Reynard’s opinion about the matter.

I asked Reggie how old he was – he looked about fifteen. “Twenny,” he replied. Then he asked to look at the lawn. After a brief inspection, he told me he’d sit up all night inside my garden shed, with the door open. When the fox arrived, he’d shoot it.  The deal was I’d pay him fifty pounds. If he missed, I wouldn’t have to pay a penny. But he wouldn’t miss.  “See you later,” he said, leaving quickly.

Once he’d left I felt uneasy about the contract. I’m all for nature and even for foxes, provided they don’t enter my domain. I mean, he was digging up my handsome lawn. I like my lawn and I enjoy it when the grandchildren visit and we all sit out under a shady tree on a summer’s day and enjoy a picnic. The garden leads down to a row of Maple trees that border a disused railway track. It’s where the fox has his lair, miles of bushes and brambles snaking their way through an urban jungle. It is, I suppose, to his credit that Monsieur Reynard has learnt how to survive these modern times.

All the same, my dear friend, if you come into my garden tonight, you’re dead. 

Reggie arrived at eleven o’clock, my usual time for bed. He wore a thick jumper beneath his jacket, a wool beret over his ginger mop. Under his arm, he carried a long parcel. Unwrapped, he showed me the rifle, its long barrel and walnut stock looking quietly lethal. He displayed a single bullets in the palm of his hand, just this one between the eyes would do the trick, he claimed.  Inside the shed, he’d be undetected, little wind about, the fox unlikely to pick up his scent. Comfortably seated in one of my old wicker chairs, he oozed confidence. Alas, it rained and the fox didn’t come. He’d try again the following night.

This time, no clouds about, the sky dark except for myriad bright stars, Reggie waited once more. Around 4 a.m. I was startled from sleep by the sound of gunfire. Three distinct shots I counted. At the window, I observed Reggie standing in the middle of the lawn, the gun held lightly in one hand and pointing to the ground. In my dressing gown, I went downstairs. A warm autumn night, I found him much dejected. He’d fired and missed. Just when he’d come out of the shed to have a pee – had drunk three pints of beer before guard duty began – the fox arrived. He’d let go at the beast but Mr Fox dashed away before he managed to take proper aim. Reggie, not the fox, was mortified. He refused to entertain the idea of trying again.

Although I thanked him for his efforts, it gave little comfort. One solitary shot should have done the job, anything less an utter failure.

Suddenly, I had a thought and said I’d give him twenty-five pounds for his jacket.

“What you wanna if for?” he asked.

“I just fancy it, that’s all.”

He grinned, slipped the jacket from his shoulders and handed it over. After he’d pocketed the money he left, my offer of an early breakfast refused. I returned to bed and managed to doze off for a couple of hours.

In the morning, I went up into the attic to find a polystyrene model of a bust and head left there by the former owners, habersdashers by trade. I took the model into the garden and dressed it in Reggie’s jacket and then planted the assassin’s prototype in exactly the place where I’d seen the lad standing, gripping his rifle. By fixing a pole at the end of the model’s sleeve I made it look as if he were holding a weapon, a rifle just like the one the young man owned. When I looked out from my bedroom window, I felt immensely pleased with the construction.

Monsieur Reynard had already had a bit of a shock, bullets flying in his direction. I felt certain that if he returned and saw that menacing figure on guard, he’d scoot again.

And so it turned out, for the creature has never returned.  Moreover, I find it very reassuring to have a kind of doppelgånger out there to warn off hostile spirits yet be ready to share the secrets of the night with true friends.
 

The Sting of Culture

The Sting of Culture

What is it?

Culture is the distilled truth of organic existence over the whole of time.  In order that this truth is perpetuated it has to be continually renewed through change and development. Culture acts as a kind of yeast in the bread of civilisation. It makes rise those major shifts in human relationships by which we arrange our affairs and hold a view of ourselves. In this respect culture will often cause civilisations to sink and in the process create a crisis for those institutions that govern and regulate the manner in which we act and think. Civilisations are like fertile lands that eventually become arid because the rivers dry up. New springs begin to irrigate the soil as the river of culture runs through them once more. Sometimes the rivers form lakes that turn into fetid swamps but where a powerful current is flowing, the rivers start to flow strongly again until they find an outlet to join the great, eternal oceans of truth.

Civilisations may thrive for a time beyond their sell-by-date but a culture based on the truth of experience will not allow them to last for long. The period between a civilised society’s menopause and the pregnancy of a new one in the making can be very painful, confusing and misleading. Where culture and civilisation go along arm in arm, artists are often content to cohabitate, the best and most mature art flourishing in such circumstances. Where there is uncertainty and conflict about the state of art, the artists become subversive, throwing their critics into disarray. Without art, culture remains primitive, but without a sustaining civilisation artists cannot properly operate.

The poet, T S Eliot, describes culture as “a whole way of life” and that is so.  Art is in the vanguard of culture and particularly of cultural change but I believe it quite wrong to deify the artist or to put him apart as someone different from the rest of us. Artists are like servants in the big house, or palace, of a powerful ruler. They don’t own it, they don’t give the orders and they have no control over the finances that pay their wages but without them the whole edifice would collapse. The creation of original artefact is what the artist does and, therefore, falls within the compass of anyone from the carpenter to the sculptor. Civilisation is a kind of large vat that stores all the cultural ingredients necessary for viable human interaction within the family, the community and any kind of unified society, but is not the same as culture.

What does it do?

Art may be the highest expression of culture but is still its derivative and not the complete thing. The two great creative periods of modern, western history, the Renaissance and The Enlightenment, would not have brought forth beautiful paintings, sculpture, music and literature without huge steps forward in the advances of science and technology. The corresponding factors, i.e. in the economic, social, political and topographical field, accompanying such advances, effect fundamental cultural alterations in the way people work and live, and always involve losses as well as gains.  In this context, the artist presents a creative sensibility of a personal kind that, if it is to be of any worth, will reflect what many others know, think and feel not only in the present but will have done so basically in the past and will be repeated in the future. Indeed, the singular function of culture is to repeat in new forms what has already been created by former civilisations and this inevitably means creating great art. A society and its citizens which claim to celebrate the great art of the past but fail to produce anything comparable, then that society and its people can be said not to have properly understood and absorbed the art of the past.

The paradox that every generation and individual faces is the singular and finite nature of existence, which eventually causes to be addressed three basic questions:
1. Is life worth living?
2. Does it amount to very much?
3. Will it continue?

The artist’s answers, to satisfy himself and others fully, have to be primarily aesthetic insofar as it is his task to produce a beautiful work of art, but his understanding of reality has to extend far beyond that. Although the creative act is essentially an individual one, the true artist loses his individuality in the process (in the past he did this usually by being relatively obscure in his day or by dying young), thus allowing his art to be shared communally. Any attempt to make a culture out of syndicated activity will inevitably fail.  The only animal corporate art can produce is a stuffed one, not a living creature. This is a problem for a democracy as Alexis de Toqueville noted during his sojourn across America in 1831-32. 

In an oligarchy, high culture is largely determined by a few who have most of the wealth and, of course, all the political power. If they lack within their own ranks sufficient numbers of gifted people – they rarely do have enough – they can usually bring on board, through patronage and favour, the best creative minds. In a democracy, Toqueville argued, people can act collectively to improve radically their living conditions but it then become a much harder task for them to maintain the best of culture because the tastes of the majority will often flood the scene, making it difficult for individuals swimming against the tide to stay afloat. It was most perceptive of this French aristocrat to identify so early on and in the USA, the greatest democracy of modern times, the essential problem facing mass civilisation: the conflict between immediate satisfactions and the more enduring values, often demanding sacrifices, which have persisted since time began.  

Moreover, we appear to have become considerably more confused about how to relate the past and the present within a uniform cultural context. Such terms as lowbrow, highbrow, classical and modern, popular art and other kinds of art have been on the go for most of the past two centuries yet were unheard of in earlier periods of history. For example, if we could go back in time and ask a visitor to the Globe Theatre in sixteenth-century London into which of these categories he might cast himself, utter bewilderment would ensue.  In the writings of Chaucer and Shakespeare much folklore and vulgarity have been incorporated, which reflect a culturally organic view of society. Somehow or other, culture later became hijacked by the rising middle classes. In the nineteenth century, the common people are practically lost sight of in the literature of the day, apart from some notable exceptions, like Dickens. In fact, it wasn’t until it began to disappear, that people became conscious that even such a thing as folk art existed.

Who has it?

The cultural dominance of the United States in modern times has fundamentally altered the balance between the tastes of the many and those of the few. In that country, particularly in the twentieth century, not only did the art of the common man flourish but all art, de facto, aspires to be popular art. This has created problems for those wishing to preserve the best of past, elitist cultures, while making them presentable to great numbers. Vast improvements in living conditions, paralleled with a public education system open to all, up to and including university training, not to underestimate the free access to art galleries and museums, have done much to enhance understanding of the achievements in painting, sculpture, music and literature inherited from older and very different civilisations. Possibly more importantly, many American artists have succeeded in bridging the gap between the “classical” and the “popular”. In music, Leonard Bernstein immediately comes to mind while other composers, writers, film directors and painters have made their mark not only in the USA but also world wide. 

Those who had the say so in the more class bound and caste systems, markedly in Europe, were much slower in embracing popular art forms, or what may justly be called the phenomenon of an urban folk culture created within a highly industrialised society and high density living. In Britain, for example, the music of Ira Gershwin, never mind mainstream jazz, took a long time to become accepted as a regular feature of classical music programmes broadcast by the BBC, including the Promenade Concerts. For years, the cultural impact of cinema was simply ignored by both academia and the intelligentsia and like pop music, also hugely enjoyed by many, never became “established” until the 1960s – films favourably reviewed in the posh Sunday papers were nearly always from Europe or what we now call art-house movies. Once bands like The Beatles were accepted right across the USA it became clear that Britain had at last signed up fully to the democratic club. Other landmarks in the 1960s, like the Lady Chatterley Trial at the Old Bailey, were also key occasions in a quite significant cultural re-ordering of values that would have all kinds of implications not only for art but for the general social life as well. 

What is significant in the west, more so in Europe than in America, is the loss of direction and confidence of those established authorities that previously ministered the cultural life of society, cant phrases like multicultural, world music and pluralistic values predominating. Everywhere, in broadcasting, in publishing, in newspapers, there is division, insecurity and uncertainty, epitomised by a failed sense of what is good, worthwhile and valuable to preserve.  Instead there is a constant clamour for success to show its face and reveal its secrets for all to embrace.  Often, the criteria for this success depend primarily on wealth, fame and notoriety. In the USA this has not been quite such a problem as it has for European countries where cultural values have traditionally been determined top down rather than bottom up. In the States, because it is such a rich society, some have managed to buck the trend, individual voices rising above the din of publicity and contributing uniquely to the cultural scene. Very importantly for the creative field, the growing sense of confidence in their living standards and way of life, which characterised America for most of the twentieth century and still persists today, though less strongly, has been utterly crucial for artists. A reversal of fortunes in Europe has had the very opposite affect, often resulting in a vulgarisation of what was once considered to be the best alongside an elevation of the tawdry to absurd levels of esteem.

Who wants it?

The conscious basis of significant art stems from its capacity to be aware of everything that is going on around its creation. In this, the trivial and the inconsequential will inevitably vie with the serious and the solemn, both sides capable of vitality. A viable culture is always broadly comprehensive where it expresses the social variety that constitutes real living experience. In this regard, the emergence of popular art in democratic societies is a healthy thing.  It is less healthy, however, if the scene becomes fragmented so that the idea of excellence is either ignored or becomes hived off into selective areas. To a certain extent, this has already happened in music. For example, in modern classical music many of its outstanding practitioners have their bases in universities and, indeed, find the bulk of their audiences within the same cloisters. Retreat – and that’s essentially what a university represents – might be comforting to those seeking seclusion and rarity but can never replace the world in which most of us are compelled to live. The itemisation of culture as an academic phenomenon has reached out to pop art, a subject for study in many colleges and universities in the USA and Britain.

A culture with a future has to be a unique blend of belonging and survival that can be shared by the great majority. Storytellers, poets and musicians most importantly, are rightly esteemed by those who value and understand the importance of creativity in the life of everyone. At the same time, it behoves everyone to try and speak intelligently about what it is that renders art significantly in establishing enduring human values. A great deal of popular art represents a distraction from what is actually going on in people’s lives and is often sentimental, simplistic, brutally sensational and even meretricious.  Perhaps large segments of popular entertainment, especially television, do little more than make people become somnolent and half comatose.  It is when we are woken up that we should take note and try to explain what pleases us.

I have always loved films in a kind of ambivalent way. It’s story telling I enjoy most but in the end I find literature much more satisfying. It continues to confound me that film appears so far to have failed to produce the masterpieces that can compare, or stand their ground alongside great novels, say.  Even the very best of films will not, in my view, endure for generations to come in the way that we continue to celebrate the works of great dramatists, poets and novelists of the past. Because cinema is very much the quintessential art product of democratic development, in certain respects our judgement of it is tantamount to a judgement of the cultural quality of modern life itself.  Painting and sculpture, for example, attracted the likes of Michelangelo and Leonard da Vinci in Renaissance Italy, dramatists like Shakespeare in sixteenth century England, novelists like Dickens and Tolstoy in the nineteenth century.  Where are their likes in cinema?  The story of popular art is far from over, however, and perhaps it is conceivable that the great artistic achievements of the past will be repeated in the present.  Some terrifically entertaining films have been produced, without doubt. I have chosen to examine one, which I consider to be among the best, the 1970s Hollywood film The Sting.

To view discussion of the film, The Sting and other articles on cinema go to http://www.avventura-press.co.uk/culture.htm

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