Tales Of The Country: Steal Magnolias?

The damnedest thing happened last week. Last summer, our friends Linda and Dominic bought us a magnolia tree as a housewarming present, which I planted next to the conservatory. Now, except when I wield a leaky felt-tip to help my four-year-old son Jacob to draw a crocodile, I am not a man with green fingers. My gardening skills are on a par with my DIY skills, and my DIY skills are such that my wife, Jane, hired a chap the other day who advertises in the Hereford Times as Herman the Handy Husband. As I write, Herman is doing something complicated with the stopcock. Turning it off, I think.

Herman seems a lovely man, a delight to have around even on Tuesday morning, after he had had a dreadful night's sleep on account of his children, as an April Fool's caper, strategically planting alarm clocks in his bedroom, timed to go off every hour. He is certainly magnificently handy, though I wish he would give himself a new alliteration, perhaps Herman the Helpful Handyman, as his current one rather underlines my inadequacies. "Hello," I said, when he came over on Friday to give us a quote for some decorating work. "I'm Brian the Hopeless Husband." Herman smiled weakly. I think he may have heard it before.

Anyway, back to the magnolia tree. Despite barely knowing a hydrangea from a hydrofoil, I came over all Monty Don with the magnolia, watering it solicitously in the recent dry spell and generally taking such interest in its splendid growth that the greatest danger it faced was being smothered with love. When, last Tuesday, I went abroad for a couple of days, the last thing I did before setting off was to have an affectionate farewell drink with the magnolia (apple juice for me; water for her).

I got back late on Thursday afternoon. Jane was in the garden, playing Swingball with the children. I kissed them all hello, then strode purposefully over to admire the magnolia. But – I can hardly bring myself to write these words – the magnolia wasn't there! I stood in stupefaction for a second or two, and then, a bit like Basil Fawlty looking for the elusive duck à l'orange, started scraping at the soil where it had so elegantly stood. For there was not even a hole, nor any evidence to suggest that it had ever been there.

The scarcely palatable truth of the matter is that the magnolia has been pinched, though it can hardly have been an opportunistic theft; after all, it was behind the house, and the house stands at the end of a long private drive. When I told my friend Geoff, he pointed out that in all the best mysteries, the least likely perpetrator is the one who did it, and therefore, the finger of suspicion had to point directly at Jane. Which reminded me of the Edgar Allan Poe story in which a man convinces his wife she is mad by hiding all the signs that she has ever existed.

But Jane, of course, was as flummoxed as I was, and when you are flummoxed, your imagination takes flight. Could the crime have been committed by someone who wishes us ill: an enemy, perhaps, of this column? We have been shown much kindness by folk around here, but, on the other hand, Simon Nye based an entire comedy series – the excellent How Do You Want Me? – on the resentment felt by some country folk toward newcomers from the city. It happens.

However, would such a person go to the trouble, presumably in the dead of night, of not only nicking a magnolia but carefully filling in the hole afterwards? Surely not. And the guys who do odd gardening jobs for us are as honest as the day is long, which rules them out... even though the magnolia disappeared before the clocks changed.

So, we are back to square one, but have stopped short of calling in the West Mercia constabulary. Even in a county with crime figures as low as they are in Herefordshire, I don't think we can trouble the police with a case of magnolia-rustling. We'll just have to solve the case ourselves and prevent a recurrence by installing closed-circuit TV in the flowerbeds.

Thanks for the memories

A charming, elderly couple from Birmingham – I'll call them Mr and Mrs Clark – stayed in one of our cottages last week. They had seen our ad in a magazine called Choice and arrived in a state of some excitement, because Mrs Clark's late mother had been the nanny here in the Twenties and early Thirties, in the days when houses such as this had contingents of servants. As the nanny, she even had her own maid.

Mrs Clark's mother left her job in 1931 to get married, and Mrs Clark recalled being brought back a few years later as a young child. She remembered there being a redoubtable old grandmother who sat in the conservatory and took great delight in encouraging visiting children to walk backwards until they fell into the pond.

When we showed her the conservatory now, she became quite emotional. We didn't, just for old times' sake, ask her to walk backwards.

Since we know little about the history of our house, Mrs Clark's recollections were fascinating. And, better still, she had curling, evocative photographs, on which we could see the old stone font in the middle of the lawn, which is still very much there and was somehow carried over from Docklow church, presumably when the elders decided it was time to splash out, as it were, on a new one.

There was also a photo of Mrs Clark's mother and a couple of the maids larking around in finery "borrowed" from the lady of the house while she was in Scotland on a shooting-party. We have sometimes wondered whether this place has spirits. It's nice to know they are high ones.

The way the cliché crumbles

Several builders have been giving us quotes for an outbuilding, and one of them talked in wonderful malapropisms. He told me that he could give me a "ballpoint figure" for the work, and that it would probably involve his having to chopping down some trees, in which case I might just have to "bite the biscuit".

It occurred to me that the English language should find room for this phrase, perhaps as the very opposite of "bite the bullet". "I'm just going to have to bite the biscuit and get on with it," we would say, on contemplating an entirely pleasant – indeed pleasurable – prospect.

Anyway, the builder's malapropisms reminded me of an exchange to which my father-in-law was witness, at a colliery in South Yorkshire, where a mining-equipment salesman was giving the colliery manager a seemingly interminable pitch.

"Reet," said the salesman eventually. "Let me just put all that in a nutcase."

The manager looked daggers at him. "I'm t'bloody nutcase," he said, "standing 'ere listening to thee."