Bigot Hall

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Even in the slaughterhouse of boyhood I was dimly aware that I should have some jolly, wink-eyed uncle or gramp with whom to share private jokes and hatch terrorist outrages against the state. But all I recall is Uncle Snapper, who liked to go shooting in the woods and had a theory about squirrels. ‘They always run round the other side of the tree from where I am,’ he declared one evening, at which I in my innocence said I wasn’t surprised seeing as he went into the woods for the exclusive purpose of killing anything larger than his brain.

At this Uncle Snapper stood in a shuddering, grill-mouthed rage.

‘Dad!’ I shouted down the hallway. ‘Uncle Snap’s changing colour!’

‘Right you are,’ called Father from his study, but did not emerge to look.

Snapper convulsed his stiffened arms.

‘Dad!’ I shouted down the hallway. ‘It’s a seizure — grand mal or I’m a rat!’

‘Offer him water,’ called Father, preoccupied. He was by nature so calm he once sketched an oncoming bullet train before stepping unhurriedly aside. This despite his supposed descendence from an Irish berserker famous for having beaten off the rigid head of a goat. It was Snap who seemed determined to inherit the legend’s ancient umbrage and who wasted no time in breaking a bull’s nose with his left fist. But it was a cause for the odd explosive guffaw that this had been the outer and extreme extent of his effect upon the animal kingdom.

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