I was walking across a fallow field to the pub with my two grandsons. ‘What’s this?’ said my 11-year-old Oscar, showing me a bone he’d noticed embedded in the footpath and prised out. I rubbed the mud off the delicate, strangely beautiful thing with my thumb. ‘That,’ I said, with more authority than knowledge, ‘is the shoulder blade of a hare. I’ll clean it up when we get back and if you keep it in your pocket it’ll bring you good luck.’ ‘What is luck?’ said Klynton, aged ten. ‘Hard to explain,’ I said. ‘Lucky people have mostly good things happen to them; unlucky people mostly bad. But nobody believes in luck any more. Not really.’
We were walking to the pub for a farewell supper. I’d rung up and booked a table. The grandsons had stayed with me in the borrowed house for three days. Early tomorrow they were leaving for Devon and the day after that I was returning to France. For me it had been a precious time and now it was nearly ended. They were hungry and excited to be going to the pub, said my always unassuming lads.
At the pub a woman from one of the Baltic states wearing comic glasses showed us to a table and gave us each a menu card. She went away and came back a minute later and said: ‘Mr Clarke, can you move to that table over there? I forgot that this table is booked from 6.15 by regulars who, believe me, are very frightening. Please save my life, Mr Clarke, by moving to that one.’
‘That,’ I said, with more authority than knowledge, ‘is the shoulder blade of a hare’
So we gathered up our wet things and moved to the smaller, obscurer table and she thanked us with all of her heart and returned to the kitchen.
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