Ronald was a ferret but could speak fluent English and a school-boy smattering of French and German. Despite being a small woodland creature he was made fully welcome by the community of Upper Oldington. For alongside a quiet conservatism and a disdain for modernity and anything from London, these people were fond of their only Indian takeaway – and one of their three pubs was known to play hip-hop music on Thursday nights, albeit at a moderate volume and not after ten pm. Difference, they had decided, was no bad thing. And it was in this atmosphere of hushed tolerance that Ronald the ferret established himself as a pillar of Upper Oldington, and its foremost voice for progressive integrationist policy.
Early on Ronald secured a seat on the village council, and a reputation as a radical firebrand swiftly blossomed. He stood athwart the weekly meetings, raised up high on a baby-seat borrowed from the nearby tea shop, his neat black eyes staring down the timid protestations of Hugo the vicar and Peter the pub landlord. ‘Upper Oldington must purge itself of its residual chauvinism,’ his shrill tenor would echo the length of the town hall. Despite his small stature – roughly that of the average shrew – his words carried a weight beyond his species; few dared contradict his calls for Inclusion and Respect and better access to public services for creatures of the neighbouring forest. ‘So what if most of them choose to remain silent? They too can shoulder responsibility, they too deserve rights. Their silence is our burden, their wretchedness our shame. Yes we can, Upper Oldington, yes we can.’
And so, under the progressive tutelage of Ronald the ferret, Upper Oldington was transformed from a bastion of rural English tradition to the country’s leading practitioner of inclusive citizenship. The hares and voles were no longer sport for excitable village boys with shotguns and cricket bats, ferret racing was struck from the midsummer village talent contest – reportedly Ronald’s proudest achievement – and the Dusky Swan was forced to stop serving its signature rabbit pie, famous throughout the county and beyond, in favour of a bland beef alternative.
Not a corner of village life was spared the writ of the benign ferret. A small number of formerly respectable villagers were, yes, taken into a forest clearing and variously speared through the chest with pitchforks or shot in the face by Hugo the vicar’s WWII rifle – but these were backwards, reactionary elements that stood obstinately in the path of Progress and Inclusion. ‘Change,’ announced Ronald at the opening ceremony of the midsummer village talent contest, ‘is best achieved through the barrel of a vintage firearm. Or a crude farm implement, if one is to hand.’ It is through such neat surgical strikes alone that Tradition could be brought to its knees and Progress installed in its place.
All the villagers publicly approved this revolutionary logic, as they were brought one by one before Ronald – now styled Our Dear Creature – who sat perched on his (now lavishly decorated) baby-seat, and anointed each subject with a dab of ferret scent to the forehead. Appropriately blessed, they staged a lavish bonfire before Him, in which various relics of the indecent past were thrust: slices of Mrs Bradshaw’s coffee and walnut cake, a stained-glass church window from the thirteenth century, most of the contents of the community library, carved busts of past eminent locals, among many other tools of ancient barbarism. As the flames lapped up the weighted chains of their past, the good gentle people of Upper Oldington, free for the very first time, danced and chanted and lacerated their backs in a grand welcome for this brave new chapter of civilisation. As the flames petered and died they fell to awkward copulation, with a good deal of grunting and heaving and other, indecipherable noises. Thirty minutes later they hobbled homeward, much satiated, for a variety of herbal teas and the evening news on Radio 4. Upper Oldington slept, deeply, peacefully, their dreams haunted by images of a giant bearded ferret riding on a cloud, summoning the dead and dispensing sound justice on mortals below. No one saw Ronald as he stole away into the gloaming, beyond the village fringes and into the forest.
Morning brought a gentle rain. But this didn’t bother Simon the butcher’s son, as the stout, tracksuited fourteen-year-old bicycled form thatched cottage to thatched cottage, delivering the Oldington Herald before the doors of villagers still dozing under patterned duvets. Simon always dreaded the steep, wooded ride up to the manor house, where Sir Oldington-Blithe breakfasted on deviled kidneys, opposite a wife who sipped earl grey and pondered their upcoming summer holiday in Cumbria; just a couple of months off in July, she consoled herself, rapping her teaspoon on a china teacup with a painted vole on one side.
The boy is late, the knighted patriarch thought to himself, and I am without my crossword. Damn that fat, asthmatic turd, on his bloody creaking bicycle that upsets my poultry. Not that I care for my poultry; but anyhow, my wife does – I think. And I should probably show concern for that sort of thing.
Upper Oldington, he mused further, is in grave decline. And it’s all because of that scheming, hissing, squinty-eyed ferret. Ronald, he calls himself. How absurd. That’s not a ferret name. Little shit. How dare he accuse us of chauvinism and reactionaryism, whatever that bastard word actually means. Pfft. The peace of Upper Oldington, the peace that existed for centuries before we let that odious woodland creature into our living rooms, was an achievement, an achievement won through centuries of quiet English common sense and moderation. It did not spring into being through decree, or a resolution passed at our village council. That confederacy of inbred dunces was only ever good for the midsummer village talent contest. No, you can’t legislate fairness or impose toleration. Ronald’s been reading too much of that bloody idiot Rousseau, I know it. The French pansy. Mankind was not born into freedom; just barbarism, that’s all, barbarism and ignorance and grunting. Hobbes had it right. Gosh, I have grown wise in my years. I should probably write a book of some sort, some day. Not a pamphlet, a book. Not that anyone actually reads them in this village. Good thing too. They’d probably read the wrong stuff. Idiot stuff like….
Meanwhile Mrs. Oldington-Blithe debated vigorously the competing merits of Lake Windermere and Wast Water. The former has that particular rolling English prettiness, certainly, but there’s an austere dignity to the latter – the sort of place where you’d expect to find an old stone monastery, somehow spared the sacking of Henry VIII, a lengthy book about whom she had finished that February; a rather disappointing read it had proved to be, but never the matter, she was now re-reading Fanny Hill, her favourite. I should really read more contemporary fiction, she thought, since I have the time. Who’s that J.D. Salinger fellow I keep reading about? Perhaps I should read him. They probably have his books in the community library. But wait, Ronald has seen to that; that poisonous ferret had all its decent volumes burnt as reactionary material. Dreadful, dreadful, perfectly dreadful. What shall ever I bloody do when…
Just then the letterbox fluttered, and a crumpled, sodden Oldington Herald fell onto the welcome matt, which was patterned with two tabby cats, grinning – eerily, Mrs. Oldington-Blithe had always thought (her husband never noticed this sort of thing). Sir dropped his fork on the octagonal plate beneath him, red with kidney juice, and paced out of the dining room, through the hall, past the life-sized portrait of his great-grandfather Keith and an original J.M.W. Turner which he never much cared for, and to the doorway where he bent to grab the newspaper. What a vile welcome matt, he thought; there’s something creepy about those grinning tabbies; had it always been there? He stood back up, shook the moisture off of the pages, and scanned the headline.
Mrs. Oldington-Blithe was deep into imagining the lavish collection of untarnished illuminated manuscripts housed in the monastery above Wast Water, when her husband walked back into the dining room holding aloft the Oldington Herald – something he only ever did when his name was in a headline. Mr. Oldington-Blithe stopped at the head of the table and thrust the paper on top of his used, bloody plate. ‘Wife,’ he said, ‘there’s an open letter from Ronald on the front page. Looks important. I can hardly bear to look at the thing. Bastard ferret. What does he want now?’
‘Why don’t you read it out loud, dear?’ she said. ‘I haven’t my reading spectacles.’
‘They’re on the mantelpiece behind you, next to the framed photograph of our newly dead collie dog. You read it first, then give me the potted version. Shouldn’t take long, I’d imagine. Go on.’
She turned to fetch her glasses, sniffing slightly at the image of her dearly deceased Alfred, smiling at her imploringly through the glass, tongue wagging, tail limp and lustrous, as it had always been. She adjusted herself at the table, breathed long and deep, wiped off the kidney juice from the pages, and started on Ronald’s torturous prose. Minutes passed and her face muscles tightened. She didn’t allow herself to frown. Her husband looked on. Something was amiss, he knew. She reached the end – it was a mere few hundred words – and read it again. Then a third time. Then a fourth. She folded the paper and drank the last from her cup, the tea now cold and over-strong.
‘Well?’ her husband said, growing slowly puce. ‘Out with it, woman. What has that fucking critter said this time?’
Mrs. Oldington-Blithe remained quiet, settled her cup on its saucer with slow deliberation, and looked out through the window beyond her husband’s back. Upper Oldington in its entire idiot multitude was walking up their driveway, slowly, determinately, carrying various objects she couldn’t make out. Before them was Peter the pub landlord, Hugo the vicar and that sweaty fat teenager who had just delivered their newspaper. They grew nearer. She turned to her husband: ‘Nothing, dearest, absolutely nothing. More silly directives, about agricultural reform and the prohibition of chewing gum. Something like that. Nothing that need concern us. Not in the slightest.’
Early on Ronald secured a seat on the village council, and a reputation as a radical firebrand swiftly blossomed. He stood athwart the weekly meetings, raised up high on a baby-seat borrowed from the nearby tea shop, his neat black eyes staring down the timid protestations of Hugo the vicar and Peter the pub landlord. ‘Upper Oldington must purge itself of its residual chauvinism,’ his shrill tenor would echo the length of the town hall. Despite his small stature – roughly that of the average shrew – his words carried a weight beyond his species; few dared contradict his calls for Inclusion and Respect and better access to public services for creatures of the neighbouring forest. ‘So what if most of them choose to remain silent? They too can shoulder responsibility, they too deserve rights. Their silence is our burden, their wretchedness our shame. Yes we can, Upper Oldington, yes we can.’
And so, under the progressive tutelage of Ronald the ferret, Upper Oldington was transformed from a bastion of rural English tradition to the country’s leading practitioner of inclusive citizenship. The hares and voles were no longer sport for excitable village boys with shotguns and cricket bats, ferret racing was struck from the midsummer village talent contest – reportedly Ronald’s proudest achievement – and the Dusky Swan was forced to stop serving its signature rabbit pie, famous throughout the county and beyond, in favour of a bland beef alternative.
Not a corner of village life was spared the writ of the benign ferret. A small number of formerly respectable villagers were, yes, taken into a forest clearing and variously speared through the chest with pitchforks or shot in the face by Hugo the vicar’s WWII rifle – but these were backwards, reactionary elements that stood obstinately in the path of Progress and Inclusion. ‘Change,’ announced Ronald at the opening ceremony of the midsummer village talent contest, ‘is best achieved through the barrel of a vintage firearm. Or a crude farm implement, if one is to hand.’ It is through such neat surgical strikes alone that Tradition could be brought to its knees and Progress installed in its place.
All the villagers publicly approved this revolutionary logic, as they were brought one by one before Ronald – now styled Our Dear Creature – who sat perched on his (now lavishly decorated) baby-seat, and anointed each subject with a dab of ferret scent to the forehead. Appropriately blessed, they staged a lavish bonfire before Him, in which various relics of the indecent past were thrust: slices of Mrs Bradshaw’s coffee and walnut cake, a stained-glass church window from the thirteenth century, most of the contents of the community library, carved busts of past eminent locals, among many other tools of ancient barbarism. As the flames lapped up the weighted chains of their past, the good gentle people of Upper Oldington, free for the very first time, danced and chanted and lacerated their backs in a grand welcome for this brave new chapter of civilisation. As the flames petered and died they fell to awkward copulation, with a good deal of grunting and heaving and other, indecipherable noises. Thirty minutes later they hobbled homeward, much satiated, for a variety of herbal teas and the evening news on Radio 4. Upper Oldington slept, deeply, peacefully, their dreams haunted by images of a giant bearded ferret riding on a cloud, summoning the dead and dispensing sound justice on mortals below. No one saw Ronald as he stole away into the gloaming, beyond the village fringes and into the forest.
Morning brought a gentle rain. But this didn’t bother Simon the butcher’s son, as the stout, tracksuited fourteen-year-old bicycled form thatched cottage to thatched cottage, delivering the Oldington Herald before the doors of villagers still dozing under patterned duvets. Simon always dreaded the steep, wooded ride up to the manor house, where Sir Oldington-Blithe breakfasted on deviled kidneys, opposite a wife who sipped earl grey and pondered their upcoming summer holiday in Cumbria; just a couple of months off in July, she consoled herself, rapping her teaspoon on a china teacup with a painted vole on one side.
The boy is late, the knighted patriarch thought to himself, and I am without my crossword. Damn that fat, asthmatic turd, on his bloody creaking bicycle that upsets my poultry. Not that I care for my poultry; but anyhow, my wife does – I think. And I should probably show concern for that sort of thing.
Upper Oldington, he mused further, is in grave decline. And it’s all because of that scheming, hissing, squinty-eyed ferret. Ronald, he calls himself. How absurd. That’s not a ferret name. Little shit. How dare he accuse us of chauvinism and reactionaryism, whatever that bastard word actually means. Pfft. The peace of Upper Oldington, the peace that existed for centuries before we let that odious woodland creature into our living rooms, was an achievement, an achievement won through centuries of quiet English common sense and moderation. It did not spring into being through decree, or a resolution passed at our village council. That confederacy of inbred dunces was only ever good for the midsummer village talent contest. No, you can’t legislate fairness or impose toleration. Ronald’s been reading too much of that bloody idiot Rousseau, I know it. The French pansy. Mankind was not born into freedom; just barbarism, that’s all, barbarism and ignorance and grunting. Hobbes had it right. Gosh, I have grown wise in my years. I should probably write a book of some sort, some day. Not a pamphlet, a book. Not that anyone actually reads them in this village. Good thing too. They’d probably read the wrong stuff. Idiot stuff like….
Meanwhile Mrs. Oldington-Blithe debated vigorously the competing merits of Lake Windermere and Wast Water. The former has that particular rolling English prettiness, certainly, but there’s an austere dignity to the latter – the sort of place where you’d expect to find an old stone monastery, somehow spared the sacking of Henry VIII, a lengthy book about whom she had finished that February; a rather disappointing read it had proved to be, but never the matter, she was now re-reading Fanny Hill, her favourite. I should really read more contemporary fiction, she thought, since I have the time. Who’s that J.D. Salinger fellow I keep reading about? Perhaps I should read him. They probably have his books in the community library. But wait, Ronald has seen to that; that poisonous ferret had all its decent volumes burnt as reactionary material. Dreadful, dreadful, perfectly dreadful. What shall ever I bloody do when…
Just then the letterbox fluttered, and a crumpled, sodden Oldington Herald fell onto the welcome matt, which was patterned with two tabby cats, grinning – eerily, Mrs. Oldington-Blithe had always thought (her husband never noticed this sort of thing). Sir dropped his fork on the octagonal plate beneath him, red with kidney juice, and paced out of the dining room, through the hall, past the life-sized portrait of his great-grandfather Keith and an original J.M.W. Turner which he never much cared for, and to the doorway where he bent to grab the newspaper. What a vile welcome matt, he thought; there’s something creepy about those grinning tabbies; had it always been there? He stood back up, shook the moisture off of the pages, and scanned the headline.
Mrs. Oldington-Blithe was deep into imagining the lavish collection of untarnished illuminated manuscripts housed in the monastery above Wast Water, when her husband walked back into the dining room holding aloft the Oldington Herald – something he only ever did when his name was in a headline. Mr. Oldington-Blithe stopped at the head of the table and thrust the paper on top of his used, bloody plate. ‘Wife,’ he said, ‘there’s an open letter from Ronald on the front page. Looks important. I can hardly bear to look at the thing. Bastard ferret. What does he want now?’
‘Why don’t you read it out loud, dear?’ she said. ‘I haven’t my reading spectacles.’
‘They’re on the mantelpiece behind you, next to the framed photograph of our newly dead collie dog. You read it first, then give me the potted version. Shouldn’t take long, I’d imagine. Go on.’
She turned to fetch her glasses, sniffing slightly at the image of her dearly deceased Alfred, smiling at her imploringly through the glass, tongue wagging, tail limp and lustrous, as it had always been. She adjusted herself at the table, breathed long and deep, wiped off the kidney juice from the pages, and started on Ronald’s torturous prose. Minutes passed and her face muscles tightened. She didn’t allow herself to frown. Her husband looked on. Something was amiss, he knew. She reached the end – it was a mere few hundred words – and read it again. Then a third time. Then a fourth. She folded the paper and drank the last from her cup, the tea now cold and over-strong.
‘Well?’ her husband said, growing slowly puce. ‘Out with it, woman. What has that fucking critter said this time?’
Mrs. Oldington-Blithe remained quiet, settled her cup on its saucer with slow deliberation, and looked out through the window beyond her husband’s back. Upper Oldington in its entire idiot multitude was walking up their driveway, slowly, determinately, carrying various objects she couldn’t make out. Before them was Peter the pub landlord, Hugo the vicar and that sweaty fat teenager who had just delivered their newspaper. They grew nearer. She turned to her husband: ‘Nothing, dearest, absolutely nothing. More silly directives, about agricultural reform and the prohibition of chewing gum. Something like that. Nothing that need concern us. Not in the slightest.’
*
In the far recesses of the forest, Ronald sat atop a newly fallen tree trunk next to Timothy the badger. Both chewed meditatively on twigs. ‘A responsive bunch, then?’ Timothy said, after spitting out a strip of bark that had gotten lodged in his teeth. Bark, he thought to himself: a hell of a lot of faff but always worth it.
‘You wouldn’t believe,’ Ronald said. ‘Like putty. Are you familiar with putty, Timothy?
‘Nope.’ Timothy scratched his arse with vigour and reached for another twig.
‘A highly malleable synthetic substance, used commonly for the purposes of puerile human entertainment.’ Ronald tossed the remainder of his twig over his shoulder. He never enjoyed the bottom part of twigs anyhow. ‘But I digress. You see, stability in a community is a fragile thing – so very, very fragile. We woodland creatures know that. Humans rarely do – and if so, for the most part only intuitively. It is something they rarely articulate.’
Ronald reached for another twig and found them all gone. Timothy always ate quicker than he did. But no matter; Ronald didn’t feel hungry any more. He continued: ‘Upper Oldington is dead. The residents don’t even know it yet, but sometime soon they will. The truth always dawns. One by one they will perish in their armchairs or move to the cities, to take up insurance jobs and visit the countryside on weekends. They will be happy, for the most part, and they won’t even know what they’ve lost. Which is why they won’t thank me. I will have liberated them, but the lot of the liberator is ever a thankless one. I accept it, for there is such a thing as the Greater Good, I tell you, Timothy. The Greater Good.’
Timothy wasn’t listening, but thought happily about the months of summer ahead. He didn’t much care about the Greater Good, whatever that was. ‘The country is a deathly, hopeless place,’ Ronald pronounced. ‘That’s why I’m off to London on Tuesday – forever. Plenty more opportunities there for a bright animal like me. Do wish me luck, Timothy. I suspect I’ll need it. But don’t you worry, I’ll be back to visit on weekends.’
‘Yeah, good luck and stuff,’ said Timothy. ‘Kind of jealous. But then, dunno, not really. Heard the food’s a bit off. Miserable bastards too, apparently. Perhaps I’ll come visit, at some point, on a weekday. Maybe.’
The sun fell. Ronald walked to the forest edge and gazed over Upper Oldington, his erstwhile home. He scratched his chin and twitched his nose. The trees hummed and rustled. Ronald looked upon his work, and saw that it was good.
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